During this time back in Brooklyn, I was working at a sneaker store staffed with a number of nearly starving artists-cum-amateur athletes. We were all poor, mad at Bush, and better versed on running shoes than your average Olympian. It was a fun job, and I looked forward to work every morning. But I knew I didn’t want to sell sneakers forever.
One day, just as we were getting ready to open the store, my phone rang. It was Saratoga Springs calling. They wanted me back. Specifically, it was a daily newspaper where I had interned during my senior year. They had an opening for a reporter and wanted me to start immediately.
I swallowed and thought about it. I had always entertained a vague notion that I wanted to be a journalist. I felt a much stronger draw toward long-form journalism, at a magazine perhaps; but this was a start, and I had nothing else going. Taking the job seemed like the right thing to do.
Two weeks later, my girlfriend and I moved into a small apartment not far from my former college. On our first night back in town, friends still waiting to graduate piled into our place and looked around; then we went out for Mexican food and beers at our favorite watering hole. It felt great to back in the town, which retained so many positive associations for me.
But then I started work. I quickly realized that while campus was just a few blocks up the street, the city and college had strikingly different attitudes. The bastion of liberalism from which I had graduated might as well have been in Texas.
Though all very nice people, my coworkers at the newspaper are almost all Republicans. Not only are they fiscally and socially conservative, but one or two of them are even backward to the extent of using decidedly non-PC terms to describe black and gay people, in the relative privacy of the office. Almost all of them thought the government was too large, that they paid too much in taxes, and that we were doing a great things in Iraq.
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