The American Dream:

                I think everyone needs second start. I’ve always dreamed of the perfect fresh start. My mother reminisced wistfully that my Budapest laden Grandfather said she had ‘gypsy feet’ claiming that she could never stay in the same place too long. I always thought I had the same disease.  I am unlike my mother. I’ve become more stubborn and more set than my Piscean nature would typically allow. But secretly (or not to secretly) I wanted to bounce from place to place because I’ve always worked best on my toes. Or it could be that we, as a family, never stayed in one place long enough to enjoy the feel as fresh laid roots. 

                But I moved to America 2003, attempted to lay some roots down to in good old Iowa but as fate would have it, nothing went as planned.

The plan:

Get a job

Get married

Have lots of friends

Go to school and get my Ph. D in literature or forensics

While working my husband through school while I work on school

Get hired

Go traveling

Have beautiful children

Lose weight

Enjoy the fruits that life has to offer

                Sounds good right? Sounds like a simple enough plan? Well, not so much. As I look back at my elder counter parts I think to myself, “Wow you fuckers had NO idea what you were doing and you didn’t warn me!? What the flying fuck!?” 

What actually happened:

Got (stuck in) the job

Got married

Getting divorced

Lost the friends (in hindsight I should have specified the word “GOOD” in the description)

Went to school, attained a mediocre degree and screwed up my school thanks to my old pal Cancer (more on that… eventually).

Work my Husband through school as much as I could and dropped out

Did a little traveling

Miscarried

Lost job

Gained weight

Surviving.

                So to me, the American dream seemed to die inside me along with any hope of the future. I kept praying the future to turn up. As of recent, I have been contemplating carrying my pathetic ass to Canada and/or Hungary. I have been pounding the pavement looking for the perfect job trying to find a reason not to throw in the towel. Was the American dream dead? The one I came here for, endured for, bleed and gave chunks of my soul dead and buried in some ditch? For the last year, I had thought the American dream died with all of mine.

                Part of me felt guilty for leaving my family behind. Something I haven’t felt ever. Regret was also a feeling I wasn’t familiar with but alas the last year had been laden with it. I needed hope, a hero but this isn’t a comic book and I sure as hell wasn’t Batman.

I got a last minute interview with a company that is outside of the corporate realm.  I debated in my head whether I should go to this interview or not. After all I would be walking in completely cold but it was an interview and I thought why not?

                When I first entered the office, I felt a pang of anxiety as if I was transported back in time to high school and hauled into the principal’s office. The man before me had steely ice cold eyes, a strong hand shake and thick silver strands gracing his head.  I felt the comfort of the fact that he was wearing jeans and for the most part the area was casual. However this was not your typical interview. 

                Usually it turns into the same manufactured questions over and over again but this guy ACTUALLY looked at my resume. He asked me questions about how it was layered. Not only that, he asked me about my computer knowledge. I told him what I was familiar with and expanded on that. I however woefully mentioned my lacking of a certificate and explained my experience. He told me that it was just a piece of paper. It made me feel something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I felt somehow validated, as if I wasn’t as dumb as I felt I was.

                I really hope I get this job. It isn’t your standard receptionist job. I’d be walking around talking to people and doing other things either than just staying stapled to a chair. In this hour interview, he talked about the company and things that embody the American dream. Precedence, chances, the ideals of the self made man. It comforted me to hear someone that wasn’t sitting in TV land somewhere telling me about what I should think; it was a living, breathing person. I saw a clear and unwavering belief in his eyes. It was something that gave me a shred of hope to ask,

What is the American Dream….. Really?