Married, Crazy or Gay.

I got to talking with a friend of mine the other day...

This is a woman I’ve known for almost 20 years now; we met and became friends while working at an ad agency. At the time, I was in my early thirties and she was in her late thirties. I was single and she had come out of a failed marriage. There wasn’t and never has been any kind of romantic entanglement between us, we’re just friends. It’s an odd pairing but, I’ve always enjoyed her slightly sarcastic sense of humor and have truly marveled at her creative ability.

Advertising or any branches of the creative fields have changed just as the world around us has changed. What I mean by that is the focus of our society seems to have progressed where we place more and more emphasis on youth.

I’m not bitter or anything either about that... I’m kind of in a happy place and wouldn’t want to revisit the emotional state of my 20s. Certainly having the physique of my 20s wouldn’t be anything to complain about but, if it came at the expense of the emotional makeup I have today it wouldn’t be worth the trade off.

My friend, she was a real powerhouse. She did TV campaigns, print campaigns... hell; she could even turn out some good lines of copy when called upon. She got to certain level in the field and she lived a comfortable life for a while.

Then something happened...

The world, the industry she was in changed around her. Jobs changed, responsibilities changed, the whole dynamic of the creative field metamorphosed around her.

I’ve seen it happen a few times now.

Just how business gets done has changed so radically from the way it was conducted in the early 90s it’s amazing and what is more amazing still is how little people are willing to acknowledge how much things have changed in such a short span of time.

So, what happened was my friend began to find it harder and harder to get work.

She was getting older and since this is a ‘young’ business, getting older only diminished her appeal somehow. I’m making an observation here, not a determination about the justness of the situation.

What came next was a series of moves...

Over the course of five or so years, she moved to smaller and smaller apartments. She started out in the West Village and the moved to Williamsburg. The next move was into a smaller place in Williamsburg and from there she moved further out into Park Slope. Her funds dwindled; she was out of work for a long time and had trouble getting hired for even the most mundane of jobs. Family helped out but eventually that had to stop too. She moved down to North Carolina finally getting her own place with some help and then she got a job in a Wal-Mart.

She got fired from Wal-Mart a few days ago, she doesn’t know what’s next but there is a certain relief along with the dread of not having a job.

The relief for her comes from not being subject to the insane whims of Wally-World anymore. The stories she regaled me with over the two plus years she spent there were amazing, it sounded like the Wally-World employee manual must have been written by Kafka - everyone on their backs with their legs twitching in the air like bugs. The nightmare you find yourself in not knowing how you arrived there.

She had met someone recently and when we talked previously was anticipating her first date. It didn’t come off; he wound up being missing in action. She didn’t know what happened but it was one more slight in a series of frustrating slights that have weighed down on her these past years.

And while she was lamenting, she relayed to me what a friend said to her about people who make it to this point in life. Her friend said, ‘Anyone out there now (being at or around this age) is either married, crazy or gay.’

I thought about that for a second and realized she may well be right.

Call me crazy. (2335 Views pre transfer)