Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton—the costume designer who clothed Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, among many, many other things—doing what everyone wishes they could do this weekend.
I’m So Happy, It’s Getting a Little Tiresome For Other People
It’s usually about this time every year that I get so melancholy that I break down, and visit my family’s psychiatrist. “I am very depressed,” I say to him, lip trembling, upon arrival at his office.
“Sorry ‘bout your luck,” he tells me. “Here’s a bill for $400.”
And then he sends me home.
This summer, however, I am happier than I have been since 2003, when I decided that I would rather kill myself than suffer through another resume building internship in an office building in Manhattan. So I spent my days out by my parent’s pool, reading Robert Jordan, and my nights waitressing at a local restaurant. By the end of the summer, I had made $15,000 in cash. I was free, and I was happy, and I was richer than I’d ever be again. “This is one way I can live that is unexpected,” I realized.
But the next summer, I graduated, and took a prestigious job. In the years that followed, I martyred myself in a string of offices. I filled my calendar with networking events, and dinners with useful people whom I secretly hated. I endured it for all of the fall and winter months. It was what I was supposed to do, and it made me feel successful.
