I was still in good spirits at eight the next morning when I clocked in at work, despite getting home to fretting parents who refused to acknowledge that their college graduate son could make his own bad decisions and stay up past curfew, thank you very much.
My parents worried constantly. They wanted their son to have a better life than they had, so here I was making thirteen bucks an hour as a data entry clerk. As far as my parents were concerned, this was the pinnacle of success. I wasn’t a janitor or a cashier or a fast food employee or a pizza delivery guy or any of the odd jobs my parents had worked during my life, and I hadn’t run off to become a full-time Shakespearean actor, carnie, nudist, hippie, or slam poet. A data entry job where I got my own cubicle? Where I dressed in busi
