i was done interviewed
Posted on | March 23, 2009 | 1 Comment
Read the whole interview here: http://amutualrespect.org/words/2009/02/13/friend-of-a-friend-joe-yoga
JY: Maine was huge for me no doubt… and it was a turning point in the sense that the whole experience was just so different than anything else I’d ever done. I don’t consider myself a very conservative person, but I have been known for making safe decisions and holding to a routine (for good or bad). Maine was just tossing all my shit into the wind. Is that coherent enough to be a mixed metaphor?
Anyway, I was broke, out of patience, had lost my girlfriend and my roommates and I knew we couldn’t be more than more than a month or two away from getting an eviction notice. So at some point in the winter of 2000 a friend of mine that I knew from Barnes and Noble came down from her college in Maine with a friend of hers on break and stayed with us. We were telling them our plight and my friend’s friend says, “well you could live with us in Maine if you wanted.” We were desperate and tuned in enough to take her at her word so when things started really hitting the fan we decided to take her up on it.
No money and desperation makes you make decisions that you wouldn’t normally make. In retrospect it was ridiculous, but it has totally shaped me. I would not have made it as long as I have in NYC without those months in Maine. For one, I realized that I belonged in NYC, not in Maine. I realized I would have to fight for it, I realized that I could not do it alone, I realized that I would have to learn to be more responsible with money… a lot of this came from seeing people do the opposite. I entered Maine a boy and left a man, I entered Maine a writer and left a musician. How does this happen exactly? In many ways the whole experience is like a blur… but Maine is where I stopped running.
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March 25th, 2009 @ 1:56 am
and i just spent all night reformatting the AMR CSS, so the interview should be hyper-readable now! who knew websites could be so damn hard.