The year is 2013 and the location of our story is New York City, but it may as well be the year 1837 in a grimy section of industrial London. The rich get richer as the poor get poorer, and everywhere one walks, it is increasingly evident that in a city where the streets were once-upon-a-time said to be 'paved in gold,' poverty and filth have reached a modern-day high. There are vagrants of all ages; old veterans missing legs beg for money in broken-down wheelchairs on street corners, and young, twenty-somethings addicted to heroin sit in the doorways of empty storefronts with cardboard signs begging for help. Even in borough neighborhoods where there is new wealth and gentrification has wiped out the indigent populations and places of business that are being replaced with major names like "Whole Foods," "Starbucks," and "Urban Outfitters," homeless people and drug addicts have made there way out of Manhattan and into these neighborhoods to beg for money from the nouveau-riche.
There are mothers addicted to crack and dads dealing weed toting around their 18-month old child with them on late night drug runs. People who live on welfare and food stamps producing more babies that they cannot afford to take care of because they lack the education to make good decisions regarding birth control and their own bodies. There are educated people with college degrees who were promised that if they did everything correctly (ex. graduate high school, go to college, get a degree, and get a decent job upon graduation), they'd make it just fine in the "real" world. These are now the majority of people who are not employed and find themselves not only looking for work, but also lacking health insurance. These are people from decent families, who did everything that they were "supposed to" do, and now cannot afford to go to the doctor for something as simple as a case of strep throat because they don't have health insurance. Without insurance, a person is fucked. People without health and dental insurance go untreated and get sick since a doctor's visit is around $300 out of pocket. Health insurance is hard to come by too, since it is only offered through a full-time job with benefits, and those types of jobs are few and far between.
Despite the fact that it is the year 2013, and modern technology has eliminated the open sewers of the 1800s and half of the diseases that once addled the population, dirt and germs are rife. Antibiotics have made certain strains of bacteria resistant and cancer and heart disease are on the rise. Foods are sprayed in pesticides, genetically modified, and packaged in plastics. Preservatives and manufactured additives cause disease and obesity. The streets are lined with rotting, festering garbage bags where disease carrying flies breed and swarm. There is litter all over the sidewalks and streets despite there being a garbage bin on almost every city corner. Sewer stench rises from the grates on every street corner, and the metro is one of the filthiest and most unreliable in the world- a dark, underground world of filthy, crumbling tunnels where legally insane vagrants accost the riders of the metro, perverts masturbate publicly on late night trains, and a young women is not safe after the hours of 12am, unless she is armed with pepper spray or a switch blade.
It is also a day and age where jobs are few and far between, let alone the types of jobs that can lead to actual, lifetime careers. An entire generation of young people freshly out of college are unemployed, underemployed, or employed at jobs where they cannot possibly make ends meet. Many of these young people are forced to move back into their parents homes because there is no way they could survive on their own given the state of the economy. A loaf of bread costs $3.40, a gallon of milk is $4.00, a gallon of gas is $3.80, a one-way ride on the metro is $2.75. The average cost of a shitty, studio apartment is $1,500 a month. The only way that these young people can make it on their own is if they went to school for medicine or law. They will also be fine if they were born into a wealthy family where they inherited money, were passed down a lucrative family business, or were able to afford a top school like Yale or Harvard, or if their family has connections to people in the industry of their pursuit, or if they one the genetic lottery and therefore make a living modelling. If you were one of the unlucky ones that was born into the working class, went to a state school, studied a field in the creative arts, or has no business connections upon which to get you started, then you're fucked unless you have good luck or the drive or Bill Gates. Simple jobs that anyone could land in the 1980s are now highly competitive. In New York City, a restaurant service job usually requires an applicant to submit a headshot in addition to their actual resume.
Yes, this is the setting of our story, and the heroine is a young women named Clarissa. Clarissa works three jobs just to make ends meet. She pays for rent, transportation, basic food and occasionally some entertainment... just so she doesn't kill herself from living such an exhaustive and mundane existence. She was forced to put her student loans on hold... the student loans she took out to go to college, in order to get the degree she thought would help land her a decent job. She is now $30,000 in debt for seemingly nothing. Clarissa is one of the many twenty somethings that did everything by the book: she had a top GPA in high school, belonged to several extracirricular clubs, did sports, went to a decent college, maintained her top GPA throughout college, graduated with honors, and found herself FUCKED. She was lied to by parents, teachers, and mentors who promised her that if she worked hard and received good grades and involved herself, life would pan out just fine after college.
Since graduating, she has worked a series of dead end jobs just to pay her basic bills. None of these were jobs that were particularly relevant to her career in fine arts, or jobs that allowed her any creative freedom at all. In fact, they were jobs that had no benefits, paid a less-than-livable hourly wage, and made her want to commit suicide behind a desk or at a check out counter in a retail store. She has applied for upwards of 500 jobs since graduating college 2.5 years ago. She had a handful of internships while she was still an undergrad, however, since graduating, half of the "jobs" she comes across are unpaid internships in art galleries. She would love to work in an art gallery, however, she cannot work another unpaid job when she has to eat and pay rent. She works in a popular retail store, where she is stripped of her identity and instructed what to say, what to wear, and how to do her hair and make up on a daily basis. She works weekends as a bartender, where she is hit on by all sorts of douche bags and made to feel like someone's bitch as she pours drink after drink for all of the lucky ones that get to party on Saturday nights. She also submits weekly articles on modern art for an online art publication...however, she doesn't get paid for that, it is merely for personal gratification and so she can continue doing something that is creative and relevant to the field she wants to end up in.
Clarissa is constantly financially stressed and always considering a lucrative career as a stripper in the back of her mind when everything else seems like a waste of time and energy for hardly enough money.
Now for Clarissa's happy ending:
Clarissa goes to Wallstreet to apply for a new job as day time bartender. She gets hired and works two days a week at said bar. She meets a rich investment banker on his lunch break one day who is smitten with her naivety and innocence and her mind. She goes out on several dates with him and she is smitten with his money and his charm. He buys her breast implants and proposes marriage. She also realizes he is an unstable, emotionally abusive asshole with a serious coke problem and he is never home since he's always working (aka... fucking his secretary). Clarissa is able to quit her shitty jobs and do art, however she hates her life more than ever.
Clarissa has a seemingly perfect life to friends and family back home- she is beautiful, gets to work from home doing what she once loved, and is provided for by her intelligent and hard-working husband. They have a sick apartment, a sick car, and take vacations around the world. However, behind closed doors, Clarissa is in a state of turmoil. She sold out on finding real love just because she new that by marrying him, she would be taken care of in this uncertain world. He belittles her everytime they fight because he went to Yale and she went to a state school. He reminds her of how she looked before her nose job, lip injections, $600 hair treatments and breast implants.... and how she was working as a day time bartender. He goes out and fucks 18 year old models and club-coke-whores while she sits at home on saturday nights crying over a bottle of wine with her paintbrush in hand and a blank canvas before her.
Clarissa looks in the mirror and wonders what happened to the sweet, naive, hopeful dreamer she once was. When did she become a materialistic, plastic bitch who sucks dick for Chanel bags and champagne dinners? Poor Clarissa.
Clarissa goes in for liposuction after she finds nude photos from an 18 year old Russian model on her husband's iphone and dies while under anesthesia.
The end.
