You can travel the world

But nothing comes close to the golden coast.”

- Katy Perry, “California Gurls.”

I was sitting in the passenger seat of a Ford truck being driven by a man I met less than 15 minutes ago. On a reporting assignment, I needed an interview with this guy and decided to go along for the ride hoping to ask him questions on the way as we sped down the 5. After we were driving for ten minutes it occurred to me that I had left my car in the Universal City parking lot and had no way of getting back.

When I mentioned this problem to my interviewee he said, “Oh, you can just take the metro.”

… The metro? What metro? LA has a metro?

I couldn’t believe that after living in LA for 15 years, I had never once even thought about riding the subway line that ran under our streets. And yet in my four-month-stay in Milan I spent hours on the metro everyday, walked the seven blocks from the end of the yellow line to my dingy Milanese apartment. I rode the metros all over Europe. The one in Paris, the one in London, the one in Prague — learning how to read the maps crisscrossed with colored lines and numbers and listening for the foreign street names I had to stop at.

It was interesting. Riding LA’s subway. The maps were the same. The stops were said in English. I watched the people that got on and got off, those who didn’t drive Lexuses and absentmindedly left them in parking lots. I realized that our city is not as homogenous as I thought it to be. There were black people, Spanish people, gay people, white people.

There are still so many countries I want to visit, so many subways left to ride; but I realized in the 20 minutes it took for me to get from Downtown to Universal City that I wasn’t done with LA or California just yet.

I’m a Creative Professional

Aren’t you afraid you’re never going to have any success? Aren’t you afraid the humiliation of rejection is going to kill you?
Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing is ever going to come of it and you’re going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with the bitter ash of failure?”

- Elizabeth Gilbert, author of bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, on TED

Every aspiring creative arts professional asks him/herself the same questions. And the little voice in the back of his head that answers “yes” renders the individual mentally – and consequently – emotionally unstable. The human psyche is too fragile and limited to pressure it to produce something brilliant. Even the idea of there being a God-given purpose in life is too risky. It’s similar to believing in soul mates. If soul mates do exist and the fates have predetermined the perfect person for you, then the risk of not finding yours is much too great and the odds of having found the soul mate as opposed to just a nice guy is a hundred billion to one and those numbers are enough to spontaneously create a hernia.

Thus, any self-acclaimed creative professional is compelled to surrender to the powers of mental instability just by the mere thought that it is exceedingly likely that their greatest success may go duly noted or un-noted at all.

I may die having spent my entire life waitressing at Fuddrucker’s with my bedroom full of manuscripts read by no one outside of my dog.

The police would note that the victim was jogging late at night in the park with her dog when the assailant attacked. They would say that they found the woman with a pink notebook. Later investigations into her bedroom would find that her laptop’s windows were opened to an LATimes article, “How to Sell Your Dog” on eHow.com, Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED speech and The Imp of The Perverse by Edgar Allan Poe along with, as irony would have it, “99 Things to Eat in LA Before You Die.” The article would talk about how tragic the young woman’s life was who at the age of 22 was at the crux of possibly achieving greatness. She would be noted as a writer and an aspiring journalist. Then the article would end on the note that, sadly, Yi had only tried five of the 99 before she died.

Hopefully the only thing that will die at a premature age are my psychotic anxiety fits and as I lay them to rest, I enter the life of adulthood as after two months of unemployment Sharon Yi, 22 years old, just got hired.

I’ve become a maybe

From The Associated Press, February 10, 2010 – 09:39 AM

Latest storm dumps rain, hail, snow on Southern California

I felt like banging my head against my laptop and crying.

But I didn’t. Because I am sitting in another posh cafe in the middle of Hipsville, Silverlake and I cannot start crying when I am alone and sitting one table away from the owner of the place who will probably throw me out the back door if I dared to sniffle.

After scanning the brief email from the Executive Editor of the Gazette papers, I looked up at the title and wanted to slam my face into the screen.

“Reporter Position for The Gazette Newspapers. maybe”

I’ve become a maybe.

The initial instinct was to wallow in self-pity and cry over a cocktail to a sympathetic ear. Preferably somebody who wholeheartedly believed in my unproven potential and talent.

Too dejected to be productive any longer, I left the cafe to go home. An hour later I checked my email again, because alas being unemployed has made me a gmail addict.

This time I got an email from an LA community paper, which I have been spamming with my resume and appeals to call me back.

I got an interview.

Indeed I realized that while I was asking for it to snow in California, it actually did. On the same day as my last depressing post when I asked dear God to let it snow (a career into my life), a blizzard actually swept the states. Out of our 50 states only Hawaii escaped snowfall.

So, dreams do come true. Maybe that white picket fence is in view after all.

Soul searching on the corner of Wilcox and Unemployed

I’m sitting at Solar de Cahuenga, one of those hip, earthy cafes that tell customers that they’re helping the trees out by drinking in with mugs. There’s Lido Cleaners across the street and the Kodak Theater is a freeway exit away. I’m at the edge of Hollywood and at the edge of a career waiting to never happen.

My name is Sharon Yi. I’m 22, a graduate from UCSD with a 3.47 GPA and a resume packed with internships and “experience.” But I’m not working. I’m not getting hired. I’m just sitting here on the corner of Wilcox and Unemployed, rethinking my life on the offchance that maybe I won’t make it.

It’s 11:07 AM and the cafe’s posh seats are occupied – most are single latte drinkers accompanied with just their thoughts and a laptop. I bet they are just like me. Waiting to be discovered. If somebody would just come along and give them a chance, then they could change the world.

Perhaps I haven’t introduced myself. I’m the Y2K generation that grew up alongside the Internet and with the boom of the online world a belief was instilled in us that we too will boom and by the age of 25 we’ll all become millionaires, because if a girl from Laguna Beach can become a celebrity by having a reality show, then surely I can make it by having actual talent.

Instead we graduate from college only to realize that the last four years of education was prepping us for a system that had collapsed and was in the process of spitting out its remains onto a poo poo platter of laid off, paycheck-inflated veterans.

I realized that at my age of 22, I wanted the 70′s American Dream. I wanted a consistent paycheck with a stable job that had the opportunity of upgrading to a career while managing a husband, kids, and a house with a picket fence and a car in the driveway.

Asking for stability right now is like asking for snow in Southern California.

And while soul searching I realized another thing. That I could either mope about how life sucks and my generation got the bitter end of a bad deal, or do something amazing now and come out on top when the world is right again.

I just need to figure out the amazing part.

Don’t ask me the question.

Jobs report is worse than expected; U.S. rate remains at 10%

Hope for a strong economic rebound is fading

Job market worsens for recent college graduates

Unemployment among young adults is worse than the U.S. average. Little relief is in sight.

So, I’m back in LA and coming home to a tornado-swept room with mounds of books and clothes and europe postcards that I never sent is only further complimented by the fact that the only mail I get now are from Wachovia asking me to pay back my loans because alas, I have graduated.

The LA Times isn’t helping me feel any better, and if anything, is only making me feel rejected even before I started. As I slowly met up some old friends I haven’t seen for half a year or more, I realized that the biggest change in all of their lives was the fact that they had a job or that they didn’t. Some are throwing in the towel and going to Korea for a teaching gig, some are partying it up on the weekends only to spend what they made in last night’s tip, and some are working for their parents.

Me? I’m home. In my pajamas. All day long. My excuse is that I have yet to finish unpacking, which is true because it was only a couple hours ago that I reclaimed my chair for sitting.

For 20- to 24-year-olds, the jobless rate rose four-tenths of a percent to 16% in November. Greaaaat. I’m right in the middle of that demographic.

With the traveling chapter of my life now closed, the j.o.b. chapter is demanding to be written. The people that I stress to about my unemployed status keep telling me to relax, enjoy your time, you’ll hate it when you get it, don’t worry, etc. Although looking back I realize all of those people have jobs.