1. Power Job

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Do You Speak Georgian? is a narrative podcast and serial memoir set in the Republic of Georgia. Join your host, Alicia Michelle, on a whirlwind adventure in the South Caucasus, where you’ll hear about the dark side of international travel – the side mainstream travel bloggers don’t share on Instagram.

Do You Speak Georgian? reflects the author’s recollection of events. Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted. Dialogue has been recreated from memory.

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A jet engine’s roar served as my alarm clock.

I wasn’t on the plane.

I was on the ground, with no flight to catch in my third story apartment.

It was July 2014. The ink, still wet on my master’s degree. The grace period on the debt I owed for it, lingering over the back of my neck like a guillotine.

I had gone to sleep at my usual bedtime, after midnight, with a mind still racing. Did the novel I planned to self-publish have any chance of selling once it was finished? Did taking out student loans for graduate school mean my life was over before it even began? Did my application to teach English abroad get accepted?

My real alarm clock buzzed at 6:30 AM. I hit snooze once before forcing my head to roll out of bed at 6:40. The rest of my body, reluctantly, followed.

It was mid-week. Wednesday. I lived in Northern Virginia. I worked in Washington, DC.

A commute – a power commute – by bus, rail, and foot awaited me. It was part of the life I had always dreamed of since moving to the area from central Virginia to start undergraduate studies in 2008. To work in Washington meant brushing shoulders with the powerful. By association, it meant I was powerful too.

Being powerful meant I had to be in control of every aspect of my life. It meant establishing routines – power routines – that couldn’t be broken. First, I brushed my teeth and prepped my skin for power makeup; liquid foundation, powder blush, and a wash of brown eyeshadow. Second, I donned a power uniform; unscented deodorant, black slacks, and a government-contractor-blue top. Last, I filled my gut with what I had eaten every day since childhood. A power breakfast; a bowl of granola crumbs from the bottom of a cereal bag, topped with milk and chased with orange juice, consumed in ten minutes flat.

I accessorized my powerful ensemble with a powerful day bag, into which I stuffed a journal, my wallet, and an apple before stepping out for the day.

A commute from Fairfax to my workplace in DC proper became a mandatory part of my daily routine in February of 2014. For a time, I was excited to be part of the human tide that poured in from Maryland and Virginia. It meant I had made it, that I was finally part of the real world.

Five months later, I was already feeling burnt out.

Fairfax was only 25 miles away from DC, but my reliance on several modes of public transportation turned the 25 miles into one and a half hours.

One and a half hours – if DC’s aging Metro wasn’t running on single tracking, experiencing tunnel water leaks, or on fire.

Being part of the real world meant having to deal with commuting headaches like everyone else. It meant my eyes glazed over like everyone else’s on my apartment complex’s complimentary commuter shuttle ride to the nearest Metro station. It meant silently agonizing over yet another Metro fare increase, like everyone else as I scanned my fare card against a turnstile. It meant wondering if I’d be stuck, doing the same commute, living with the same burnout, with the same worries, for the rest of my life.

Round white lights blinked on the platform as a new train approached. As was DC tradition, passengers tried to predict where the train’s doors would end up by shuffling to and fro on the edge of the platform until the carriages squealed to a halt.

“Doors opening,” a female voice prompt announced.

Doors on the brown and beige carriages gave way to a carpeted interior, its matching beige color scheme broken up by rows of blue and orange leather seats.

The commuters flooded the cars in a restrained mad dash for their preferred spot. My spot was anywhere beside a window. Some cushions were splitting at the seams, but everyone knew a busted seat was a preferred alternative to standing for an entire ride.

The second leg of my commute began, and more thoughts – power thoughts – raced through my mind.

Was this it? This couldn’t be it. If this was it, I wanted my money back. If this wasn’t, then I didn’t want to know what was.

My ears popped as the train dove into the Rosslyn tunnel at the edge of the Virginian border. There, in the middle of the tunnel, it slowed to a stop.

“Bad news,” the velvet-voiced conductor, said into the crackling intercom. “Another train is in front of us. Ten-minute delay.”

A collective grumble filled the car in response. It was July, meaning peak tourist and summer internship season, in addition to the already million-strong waves of daily commuters. Peak season meant increased ridership demands on the Metro system. And increased ridership demands meant delays, delays, delays, especially for the lucky commuters who had to pass through notorious Metro choke points, such as Rosslyn station.

I propped my head against the window and sighed. The man across from me did the same, only his head rested against a glossy poster for Turkish Airlines. A passenger jet hovered over a turquoise sea, somewhere in the Maldives or South Pacific. “Widen Your World”, its slogan read in slick, san serif font.

Harbored within the most intimate layers of my being, was a deeply spiritual part of me. A part of me that, in the face of hopelessness, searched for meaning when meaninglessness was all I could see. Yes, the cynical part of me argued that the Turkish Airlines sign was just an advertisement. But the spiritual part of me asked to take a moment. Read between the lines…a message from something that worked in mysterious ways, delivered exactly when I needed to see it?

Maybe.

During my final year of graduate school, I gave myself an extracurricular assignment. To burnish my resume with the experience required to qualify for a teaching contract.

A special contract, as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in a little country named Georgia. I had interviewed with Georgian administrators just months prior and the status of my application, still unknown, loomed in my mind. If I was accepted, I’d be notified by email and the plane tickets would be purchased on my behalf soon afterwards. If I wasn’t accepted, I’d also be notified by email…

Maybe not.

The train lurched forward again, collecting more passengers at every subsequent station. So many, that the world outside, let alone the advertisement, disappeared behind a wall of bodies.

Away we went, racing through the Orange Line stops.

Power stops.

Foggy Bottom, its name harkening to DC’s swamp beginnings and land of scandal and state at the Watergate Hotel and State Department. Smithsonian, beckoning tourists with its name alone and containing signage directing the confused to monuments and museums. Federal Triangle, scaring away the tourists, with signage directing those who didn’t need directing to the IRS, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Justice. And finally, my stop, L’Enfant Plaza, the connecting point of five of Metro’s six lines, named after DC’s 18th century architect, Pierre Charles L’Enfant.

Visitors to DC readily acquaint themselves with the National Mall, but few acquaint themselves with the areas beyond it. And for good reason. East of the Mall contained a veritable wasteland of government buildings. Power buildings, where the nation’s human machinery cranked away, behind uniform rows of tinted windows and Brutalist concrete facades as far as the eye could see.

I strolled past them all, down the wide, treeless L’Enfant Promenade. My power walk.

To my job.

My power job.

Photo by Bradley Weber on Flickr

As a customer service representative at a bike rental shop for tourists.

Why did I work at a bike shop? Three words – the Great Recession.

Like many students who arrived in the DC area for the first time, I arrived bright-eyed and bubbling over with dreams of changing the world. Assured, I was, that I’d end up in a glamorous, globe-trotting State Department career after graduation. Assured, was everyone else in my degree program, that they’d also end up in a glamorous, globe-trotting State Department career after graduation.

The Great Recession gave my dreams a reality check. Things didn’t start out that way, however.

I had no reason for concern when the foreshocks began in 2006, with the sudden collapse of the American housing market and the mortgage crisis that followed. I lost no sleep when the bank bailouts went out in 2008, as I believed four years of college would insulate me from the worst effects of the financial crisis. Congress passed President Obama’s Stimulus Package in February 2009, and I was assured things would improve by the time I graduated.

Sweat finally broke out on my forehead when the horror stories, told by classmates, arrived.

There were no jobs. Those who already had a job stayed put. What few jobs available paid peanuts, demanded outrageous qualifications, or were swarmed by hundreds of desperate applicants. Those who graduated in 2009 eventually found work, in 2012, as part-time baristas.

“What are your plans after graduation?” was the most horrifying question you could possibly ask a millennial after the Great Recession. An apathetic, collective trauma-induced shrug was my generation’s response, because no one had any idea.

Move back home with your parents? Probably. Default on your student loans? Maybe. Use graduate school to delay having to deal with all of the above? Definitely. Move back in with your parents and default on your student loans anyway after a graduate degree makes you overqualified for the job market? Absolutely!

I completed six years of higher education, in hopes the American exceptionalism we studied time and time again would apply to me as well. All I had to do was work harder. When an internship never materialized, I gained career experience through student leadership positions on campus.

When the economy still hadn’t recovered in 2012, I figured all I had to do was work smarter. Get a master’s degree; that was the key to obtaining adequately paid, full-time work. I was wrong. A master’s degree made no difference in the outcome of every job application I sent out. All it earned was a slew of unanswered cover letters and a worsening outlook on my future.

Photo by washingtonydc on Flickr

A horde of tourists, garbed in matching American flag t-shirts and fanny packs, had already descended upon the front doors of the bike shop. My shift, until 6:30 PM, started at 8:30 AM.

I checked my phone. It was 8:32.

“You’re late. Again,” my shift supervisor, a fellow millennial sporting flannels and a wispy blonde mustache, said between chomps of a cold pizza slice. “Hurry up and answer the phones.”

“There were Metro delays,” I replied.

“I don’t care!” he shot back, turning to plaster on a smile as the tourists waddled through the unlocked doors.

The phone at my cluttered desk rattled in its cradle. I checked the display. Three current callers. Four on hold. 12 new voice messages.

I glued myself to the office chair and woke up the computer. 30 unanswered emails awaited in the business inbox, three of which were angry, all of which were time sensitive.

The phone continued to ring. I pressed the receiver to my ear. “Thank you for calling National Bikes, how may I help you?” I tried to put on my cheeriest tone, but burnout had already metastasized in my voice.

“What are you doing?” my manager said. “Help size the customers for their bikes!”

“Please hold,” I sighed into the receiver.

I checked my personal phone again.

It was 8:38. I had also just received a new email. A sneak preview was all I could glean before my supervisor’s fury would descend once more.

The sender? The Georgian Ministry of Education and Science.

The subject line? Congratulations.