The Renaissance Man Project. Intro: Pt 3.

The Renaissance Man Project is an original non-fiction book by Nathaniel Kostar, occasionally known as Nate Lost.

Read Part 1
Read Part 2

After the road trip, I transferred to Rutgers and switched my major from business to English—a decision my bank account never quite recovered from, but one I wouldn’t take back.

It’s funny, I think I became a writer the moment I quite basketball. I dropped an impossible dream and picked a difficult one up, like changing socks. It happened quickly, but at the time it felt like a long and natural transition. It probably would have been healthier to have lived for a while with less ambition, less intensity to mold and shape the future, to do something difficult, to become something—What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do with that English major?—and just chilled, the way after a serious relationship ends it’s usually best to be alone before finding another partner. But no—I dove right in.

At Rutgers, I wrote and memorized my poems and performed around campus at open mics and competitions. I was a “slam” poet. A performance poet. I took regular New Jersey transit rides from New Brunswick to Penn Station to compete at the Nuyorican Poets Café and the Bowery Poetry Club. I hooked up with a talented group of poets called the Justus League and started to feature at events around campus and the state. I took writing workshops and read as much as I could. I even wrote two plays, one of which won a one-act contest and was produced by the college theatre. It was about a dude who finds out he’s going balled and feels he needs to do everything on his bucket list before the day comes. It was a comedy called Losing It, and seeing it produced by a talented cast of actors and presented to an audience made me feel like, well, maybe I really I could do this writing thing.

And then I graduated.

It was January of 2009, and the economy had just given out. Between Roanoke and Rutgers, I’d accumulated over $50,000 in student loan debt. And most challenging of all, I was determined to become a writer.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I moved back in with my parents and grudgingly looked for work.

I wasn’t sure what to do during the year and a half I lived with my parents. The only job I was qualified for (or so I thought) was to teach English. But the lifestyle of an English teacher would leave me little time to write and it would ground me in one place. Besides, I was 23 years-old—what the fuck did I have to teach anybody?

I watched as friends and acquaintances fell into careers that seemed to have little meaning to them beyond a paycheck. A bright philosophy student found work as a salesman for an insurance company. A political science major became a manager at Bank of America. A friend who was a double English and Spanish major could hardly articulate what it was he did for Dow Jones—it involved 60 hours a week sitting behind a desk monitoring numbers on a screen. And these were the lucky ones. The “smart” ones. The ones society applauded. During the recession, many could find no work at all, or graduated and returned home to work at Target or TGI Fridays or the neighborhood bar, sometimes doing the same jobs they had done in high school, for more or less the same pay.

I applied for one “real job” at a theater doing administrative work. It wasn’t a creative job, but they wanted a writing sample, so I sent them part of Losing It. They called me and told me to come in. I put on slacks and a tie and jacket and sat in a swivel chair in an office below the theater with my hands in my lap and the best posture I could muster. The first lady who interviewed me was quite nice. She thought my writing sample showed creativity and wit, and that though the job wasn’t a creative job, it was working for a theater, and so there would be ample opportunities to use different skills.
I made it to the final round of interviews, and then the last guy I talked to, square-headed and gruff, said—

“You know, we need someone who can organize and get things done. This isn’t a job to write plays…”

“I know,” I said. “That’s fine…”

I wasn’t hired. And that was fine too.

Instead, I found work in a call center for a policy research company in Princeton that paid $9.50 an hour. I couldn’t pay back loans on $9.50 an hour, but since I was living with my parents and didn’t have many expenses, I could save a chunk of change while I came up with a plan.

On car rides back from work, I imagined being a poet, novelist, playwright—of falling in love in Paris and wandering through the sun burnt streets of foreign cities past strange foods and exotic smells.

Sometimes, I daydreamed I was a fisherman in Cuba. Why Cuba? I don’t know. I liked how it was unknown, mysterious, off-limits to Americans. I also liked how it sounded, especially in Spanish—Coooo-ba.

I imagined myself bronzed by the Caribbean sun, made strong and wiry from hauling fishing nets (which I had woven myself with the help of an older fisherman who communicated with me only in Spanish, of course), rising early to take my little skiff out into the ocean as the morning’s light opened night with pink fingers and spread over the sea’s soft ripples.

I caught all sorts of fish in my daydreams. Long, silver fish with Spanish names that flashed like blades in the sun as they flapped on the bottom of my boat. I brought them home to my pretty girlfriend to filet, and fry in a pan of butter.

We would chat and cook and eat the fish with fried plantains and rice and beans. We would drink cold cervezas on an old porch that faced the ocean, make love, and in the afternoon, I’d swing in my hammock under a palm tree and read the Hemingway novels and short stories I didn’t get a chance to read in college.

Of course, this was a naïve and cliché take on Cuba and the life of a fisherman. And it’s not like I really knew how to fucking fish. But the idea itself seemed reasonable. Just as reasonable as working for Chase Bank, or Google, or the GAP, or even teaching somewhere. I could learn Spanish. I could read. I could become strong and healthy. And when I got bored of this, as I knew I would, I could do something else.
 

Thanks for reading!

Read Part 4

The Renaissance Man Project has been in the works for many years and I'm excited to release pieces of it on Steemit. If you want to support the book please hit me w/ an Upvote & Follow, if you're on Steemit. And if you're not on Steemit, you should consider checking it out, especially if you're a content creator.

You can also support the Renaissance Man Project and The Lost Podcast by visiting my Patreon page.

My first album, Love 'n' Travel, is available on Spotify and Bandcamp.

Twitter @NateLostWords
Facebook @ NateLostArt
or just visit NateLost.com and shoot me a message.

Muchisimas gracias for reading and supporting ART.

MAD Love.

#GETLOST
#Loventravel
#sinfronteras