I fell in love this weekend… again.

I took my visiting parents to McCall on Saturday, the requisite drive to “show-and-tell” purty Idaho to out-of-staters.
McCall is one of those places in the world that makes a girl want to get rich. Quick.

Big-ass lake homes. Shiny luxury cars. Well-behaved children, rugged men, cool dogs, wooded lots. Clean, crisp, pine-scented air.

It was love all afternoon and the wheels were spinning inside until I cracked open the McCall Homes magazine I swiped from the Chamber of Commerce. Nothing’s cheap in McCall.

Now it’s a sunny Monday in Moscow and I’m pacing around my house, not doing any of my homework, eating pretzels out of the bag in my underwear and I have $83 in my checking account.

Only $83. What a bitch. How the heck am I supposed to land that lake house in a few years?

In life, especially as young people, we are seldom deterred from paths of mile-high ambition. We are told that we throw the dice; we drive; we can take any path we choose. The power is in all of us to have lake houses in McCall, if that’s what we want. It’s the American credo: Be What You Want. Blind ambition is the norm. So is an inflated sense of ability.

But there’s a disconnect. Those $83 speak for themselves. I wish I could carry around a sense of entitlement or make a realistic oath to myself for one of those palatial estates, but I can’t. My parents propelled themselves through this world; I’m expected to do the same. It’s not that I didn’t get the chance: I’m looking at my degree — a wimpy PR thing that has taught me little other than to appreciate the concept of an unpaid internship. In fact, I’m a moron by most standards. I have an earning capacity only slightly higher than that of a gibbon. Oh the curses of consciousness!

Up until recently, I looked at my parents with a shade of contempt. I interpreted what they have accumulated over the years as a direct indicator of their abilities at life. I mean come on, we have the dice right? Why doesn’t my family have more?

Only now has it occurred to me that there is a level of work involved in the way my parental units built their lives. While my parents are about as lively as American cheese, they’re comfortable. They have a lot more than $83. They think it’s funny and appropriate that I live below the poverty line of Mali. They laugh at me and then drive away in their Subaru. It’s a princess-and-the-pea thing. They refuse to let me be too comfortable at 21, like I’m supposed to have a fire under my ass or something.
Twenty-one years and it’s finally starting to click. I’m going to have to get from where I stand to where I want to be, independent of anyone else. Marrying for money isn’t really an option, as delightful a thought as it sometimes is. In-marrying spouses, I’ve been told, earn every cent in such situations.

Back to Saturday. We ate burgers and took pictures and left dreamy McCall high in the clouds and started on the arduous journey back to the ‘Scow. I’m perched in the back of the rental car with my parents grilling me with questions. I wanted to barf, I wanted to die.

To shut them up and to hear my own voice for a while, I babbled on about cedar-shingled lake homes, sailboats, SUVs that run on vegetable oil. Trips to Honduras, Birkin bags, precocious children, cool dogs.

As expected, they nailed my ass for being materialistic, unrealistic, idealistic and otherwise young.

But like most fathers can, my dad has a way of setting me straight.

“You know, Tec, you don’t have to be obscenely rich to be happy.”

He’s right, happiness has nothing to do with money. But my notion of a lake house in McCall has less to do with being obscenely rich as it does with setting a goal. Right now, knee-deep in my Mali existence, the only thing I can do to eventually get what I want is to show up to class, put the damn pretzels down, wade through my coursework, get my degree and learn something about finances, cedar shingles, mechanical engineering and sailing. It’s not about money or frappucinos everyday; it’s not about being obscenely rich or a capitalist asshole. It’s about seeing something you want and running like hell after it.

–Originally printed in the University of Idaho Argonaut, 10 April 2007