The Fox and the Phoenix
The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom
In the spring of 2015, I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to take a job as an IT support technician at a small investment firm. At the time I was just finishing up my degree at a technical school in Madison, two hours away from the small town I grew up in and the furthest I had ever lived from home. When you’re in college, you’re certain that the most important thing in your life is landing a job after graduation, preferably in the field you studied, and since I had not even graduated yet and had managed to secure such a position, I had already pulled up most of the roots I’d sewn in the Capitol before I made it home from my last interview.
|
It was as visceral a ‘coming-of-age’ emotion as I’ve ever felt all at once. Many practical aspects of adulthood - finding yourself in a regular commute, being mindful of your spending, planning out your long-term relationships - these things just sort of sneak up on you and for the most part blend into who you’ve always been. You grow up without realizing it, mellow out and mature naturally. That move, though, for me, was a sock to the psyche: ‘here you are, out of college, in the real world, just like you’ve always wanted… have at ‘er’.
|
When I touched down in Milwaukee for the first night, I dropped the last moving box onto the floor of a one-bedroom efficiency apartment looking out over the Lower East Side neighborhood, facing south and just tall enough to catch a glimpse of Lake Michigan less than a mile away. The cost of the move and the security deposit left me with ~$200 in my checking account, and it was a full two weeks before my first paycheck would arrive. I’d starting seeing a girl about two months prior to accepting the offer, and we’d decided to continue our long-distance relationship until she finished the last year of her classes back in Madison.
|