career counselor

In which we plan completely plausible and responsible changes of career! And by “career,” we mostly mean “ways to somehow acquire loads of money without doing much in the way of actual work.”

A Lady: Okay, let’s dream up alternative career plans: run away to England, star in a hilarious Beeb sitcom about two American grad students at the University of Edinburgh. Go!

D: YES.
Alternatively: I move to NYC, and we are scouted by a fabulous-but-not-obnoxious gallery + bar to program their events and create custom drinks. And there is a clothing budget in addition to salary, as our appearance reflects on the gallery/bar's success, naturally.

A Lady: We move to Tuscany, where your inability to speak Italian and my inability to do anything service-related wreak comic havoc on our social lives and ability to run a B&B.
OR we are anonymously nominated to be anonymous members of the anonymous board of nominators for the MacArthur grants. Which, amazingly/conveniently, is actually a high-paying gig!

D: While we are en route to a symposium on Best Practices in Shoe-Blogging, our plane is forced to make an unscheduled landing in Paris. There is a mysterious car waiting to pick us up at the baggage claim, and it whisks us to a Left Bank apartment, where Daphne Guinness announces that she is adopting us! It's France, I'm sure their adoption laws are flexible like that.

A Lady: Oh god, can she? Because then we would be heiresses and Without A Care In The World.

D: OR it turns out that my scathing grad-school takedown of Robert Brustein has attracted the attention of conservative arts lobbyists (a shadowy evil group, obvs) and I am forced to flee the country!; due to the volume of email correspondence exchanged between us, the Evil Conservative Arts Lobbyists or sundry assorted literary critics begin threatening you as well, and you, too, must make your escape! But thankfully, there is a safe haven in Monaco for persecuted brains, funded by the Princess Grace Foundation!

A Lady: I think all this grant-writing has given you a delusional complex about the availability of funds for entirely Unworthy activities.

D: Hush, let's work on getting the MacArthur Genius Grants. That's a life plan, right?

A Lady: Bugger, bugger, bugger. I have been reading all about the MacArthur fellows, little things like “Richard Powers trained in music and got his degree in physics, got bored and quit with his MS. One day he saw a picture and then wrote a novel about the people in it. Then he was a genius.”

D: Let's see... MacArthur likes people who are crafty! Check.
MacArthur likes minorities! Check. (Well, we count for like 3 minority points, anyway.)
MacArthur likes collaborations! Check.
Somehow we can work biking into this, and perhaps facilitate a tiny bit of bribery into the process by making MacArthur people a custom eponymous cocktail buffet. Or we could write a middling-but-Oprah-approved novel and just sell the movie rights, perhaps?

A Lady: Really, I think that’s all we need: a mediocre novel with a heart of gold. The Jean Harlow of novels. Based on pictures like this one!


D: "Consumptives dining on ferry boat" leads to a novel titled...
Um...
"Appetite Adrift"?
"Deadly, Hungry, and Unwanted"?

A Lady: “Paddling Toward the Sanatorium”?
“Wasting Away”?
“The Scarlet Dinner Napkin”?

D: Ooh, "Wasting Away" ftw! And then we will get critical acclaim because people will say "oh my god, women were able to write a novel with these fully-realized and compelling male characters, amazing!"
...oh wait, no, that only works in reverse.