a night at the anchor

Pat D. and I met up at The Anchor last night, and we drank coffee and enjoyed dinner and caught up on each others’ lives. Dewenter and I go way back, meeting my freshman year of high school. We’ve been friends for a solid ten years, and though we don’t get to see each other as much as we’d like—we’re both working full-time, and he’s going to school full-time as well—those moments we do get to reconnect are treasured. 

We talked about how things at Tazza Mia are going, all the craziness and frustrations, the conflicts that come up when you have two store managers running one store and both having differing ideas about how that running should be accomplished. He asked when I’d be getting another job, and I didn’t know how to answer him. I’m 25 years old and working as a barista at a coffee shop. I haven’t gotten a raise and nor have I gotten an (official) promotion (despite running shifts, getting paid a shift’s wage, taking on extra responsibilities, etc.). He told me that when I get “a real job”, he’s going to throw a party for me. As for what “real job” means, I don’t really know what he means. I get paid, I pay my bills, I’m not going in debt. But the unfortunate reality is that most people my age have steady and (comparatively) high-paying jobs. All my friends from high school—including Patrick, who’s still in college—were wise enough not to dedicate their lives to God’s service, perhaps seeing (with excellent foresight) that spending four years of their life learning about the bible, going thousands of dollars in debt and then getting a job that would never be able to pay off that debt, probably wouldn’t be the best of ideas. If God were the type to reimburse wasted money, perhaps things would be different. But as it is, those left swimming in debt are left swimming alone. I really don’t have it bad: though I do seem to have wasted four years of my life getting a bachelor’s in something I could’ve learned on my own from the library (or, if we were optimistic, in church), I’m not up to my neck in debt. And though I may not want to go into ministry again, I do have a bachelor’s degree, and Pat D. says that’s essentially a business degree. He says I should try to get a different job, just search around Cincinnati for something where having a bachelor’s can be profitable. I think I’m going to do that, just to see what’s out there, and to see if Pat D. knows what he’s talking about. I’ve also been thinking about getting my Master’s in Business: a friend of mine recently got his, and it took him only 1 ½ year going to school for four hours a night each Monday. That’s definitely something doable for me, I just need to look into the financial aspects.