[Originally posted to the Other INTP List]

I have been thinking about money a lot lately. I'm 22 and I've never had a job. I actually have a perfectly good excuse for this: I've been living away from my native country (Chile) since I was 13. I couldn't work in the US because of my visa, and later, in Argentina, I wasn't old enough. When I did reach the legal working age for the country, I moved back to the US on a student visa. This, however, seems like just an excuse and not really a reason. I could have worked after my first year as a student, part time, had I managed to be lucky enough to snag one of the part-time, on-campus jobs (these were gone quickly to the many other students, international and US-born). But, of course, I didn't.

I should receive a work authorization from INS any day now. I'd like to think that, so far, I haven't held a job (an every-day, all-day job), because I couldn't, not because I was just lazy. I couldn't legally work. I couldn't physically get out of bed (arthritis). I was too busy plotting ways of killing myself. I dread the day I get the authorization. It could be that I am, after all, just that lazy.

I recently did a website for my chastity belt friend. He owns a company that runs one of the more visited sites on the subject. A job offer has been dangled on and off, seriously and jokingly, for a while. Just think, I could tell my parents that I work for the adult industry.

I was browsing through the UW jobs page the other night, and saw an opening for 'Animal Technician.' It involved taking care of 'nonhuman primates'--shuffling cages about, feeding, monitoring, etc. It sounded interesting—I’d get to water monkeys for a living!

In reality, my first real job will probably be dismal office or computer stuff. When I was a young kid, I made money by drawing pictures of whichever anime characters were popular at the moment and selling them to my classmates. When we moved to the US, my mother printed out some flyers at Kinko's and started cleaning houses, a deeply humiliating experience for her. My dad, after finishing his MBA, got a cushy job with that great evil corporation, Wal-Mart, that moved us to a whole-floor, five-bathroom, $3000+/mo apartment in an upper class neighborhood in Buenos Aires. My dad quickly became disenchanted with the company, and now works for the LDS Church in Chile, training people, helping small business owners, and organizing workers into unions. Chile's unemployment rate is anywhere from 15 to 20 percent.

One sultry summer night, I took the service elevator (Heaven forbid The Help use the same elevator as The Rest Of Us) up as far as it would go, and then took the stairs, hoping to get to the rooftop to watch the stars. At the top, I found two small rooms, smaller than a third of our living room, door open, one, perhaps two windows. This was where our doorman and his family lived.

The poorest person I've ever met was the man who worked at the dump in the quaint, tourist-friendly, largely German town I lived in in the south of Chile when I was eight years old. He lived at the dump with his two daughters, in a shack of plastic, cardboard, and plywood, in the neverending stench of our rotting waste and the sticky black smoke of burning trash.

If I had to work to survive, if my next meal didn't magically appear or my bank account didn't quietly fill up with the loan money I get at the beginning of the month, I might be too tired to feel guilty one night and forget about it the next.

I spent a ridiculous amount today, without a second thought, on a wind chime.