Article by Asta Sjogren-Uyehara Art by Eden Miller
— Christmas, 2023
I’ve spent every Christmas morning I can remember in the Portland airport (PDX, to those in the know). And that’s not sad to me at all — lots of people with big families and siblings and still-married parents find that shocking, but it’s what I’ve always done. The few times I’ve had a “classic Christmas morning” (during Covid) I’ve been thrown off by the normalcy of it. Waking up midmorning, meandering upstairs for presents and stockings…that’s not Christmas to me. It helps that my Swedish family, on my mom’s side, celebrates Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. This morning, for example, I woke up at 6:30, packed my bag full of clothes from college and presents I had opened the night before, got in our rental car, and headed to the airport. Right now I’m on a plane to Chicago, and then I’ll transfer over to Raleigh, since that’s where my dad lives now.
This part is new. I always used to fly home with my mom, and get picked up by my dad at the Oakland airport. People now, who don’t know Sean, seem concerned that I have this absent father. “He lives where?” They must think he’s lived there forever and that I’ve only seen him on holidays and summers my whole life. I correct them when appropriate, but sometimes it doesn’t make sense to. I always have this weird disconnect with those people, as I’ve rarely had a bad thing to say about my dad.
— October, 2024
This new schedule makes it near impossible to make any money over winter break. Bouncing between my home in Northern California, Portland, and North Carolina I obviously can’t hold down anything substantial, so I work for my mom. Britta is a filmmaker and she needs me to transcribe some interviews for her. This is listed on my resume as “Transcribist, Dire Wolf Productions.”
The rest of my resume is scattered, generally unimpressive. This past August, I used one of those weird scammy services to organize it and forgot to cancel my trial before it charged me $20. I describe myself on my resume as a “motivated student seeking to maintain a part-time position that offers professional development with excellent customer service, communication, organization, and problem-solving skills,” but someone like that wouldn’t forget to cancel their AI-resume-organizing trial. If I was being honest, I’d say “distractible writer seeking to make a steady paycheck in a job that allows me to chat and look at my phone,” but if I was honest no one would hire me. And the dishonesty on my resume got me the summer job I’ve had for the past two years: Operations Coordinator (Bay Area Community Services, Oakland, CA).
Operations Coordinator, in my case, is a really fancy name for a receptionist. I answered phones, sent out faxes, and greeted clients. And by clients I mean homeless people living in the Bay. Mostly, I sat at my desk and waited for the phone to ring. No air-conditioning, in heels, on a stool with no back. For eight hours a day.
Every workday, during the year of the cicadas, I thought about how I have never cared about cicadas — we don’t get them in Berkeley — and how I had started wearing gold jewelry and how that seemed like a metaphor for entering adulthood. I turned twenty-one and started going to happy hour with my best friend and waiting for my train with sweat dripping down my back in my work sweater. I wrote poetry about the same boys who I always wrote poetry about and told myself that it was different now, mature. I beat myself up for always writing about myself; self-centered, narcissistic. And for never being able to close the page. I have this obsession with the word and — no idea stands alone, it must be accompanied by a second thought, another phrase.
I’ve never been any good at ending things — friendships, relationships, stories, anything I write. It always feels like there’s something left unsaid, some kind of closure needed.