We got comfortable with the fact that we were being paid to do whatever we wanted -- so long as it took place at our workdesk  -- eight hours a day. Still... we never got so fat and entitled to the point where we began expecting it to last forever.

Each of us had our own thing. There was an urban, ethnic kid who watched movies all day. At first it was exclusively action and comedy, typical guy taste, things like Fast and the Furious and movies with

Ice Cube

and

Vin Diesel

. But as the summer progressed his repertoire kept expanding until I once caught him watching a

Wes Anderson

film by the end. Many of the kids were taking summer classes at this university. With this job they essentially got to spend the whole day on lectures and homework.

"Yeah I had expected this summer to be really busy," Mari said. "I figured I'd be going to this job and then running home for dinner and then I'd be spending the every evening working on my biology class."

The girl sitting across from me was pre-nursing, and spent her mornings studying for her nursing school exam. And then she spent her afternoons looking on

Pinterest

or watching movies. She joked that she would probably ace her exam and this job would be responsible since it provided her so much free time.

That got me thinking. Maybe if I were to become a writer one day I'd owe it to this job as well. Because all I did was read read read read read read read.

With this job I could read for hours a day with no guilt. Before, when I was unemployed, I had all the free time in the world, but I incessantly found myself in unproductive situations. All I used to ever do was skim the internet -- low focus things like

reddit

surfing a topic I had already researched endlessly -- or... it's not even worth thinking about. I basically was unemployed for over a year and I did nothing with that time. I did have all the time in the world. I could've read and wrote all day but instead I had just distracted myself in the same way a salaryman did during slivers of free time, only I didn't get to eat warm meals everyday. 

No I had had the worst of both worlds. Credit card debt, empty bank account and belly, and endless days that should've looked like endless potential but felt like endless emptiness. 

Everything felt empty. That version of me didn't even resemble the version of me working at that phone bank. They weren't the same person. And yet the same soul operated them. How did that work? I know the answer to that today, but back then I didn't. Let me not distract you too much away from that summer though. When I found more than just myself. When I found 

The Red Notebook

of 

GabrielGreco

.