I'm Adely Mone and this is The Slowdown.

In the early 2000s, my best friends and I used to hang out at this bar called the Turkeysnest

in Williamsburg and try to dream up what our lives would be like in the future.

We all worked multiple temp jobs or full-time jobs where we buried who we really were under

cheap office clothes and pasted on smiles. We took orders and showed up on time and tried

our best to feel lucky for whatever paycheck we got at the end of the week. Tried our best

to be grateful for free internet at work and the ability to pay our rent.

In my temp job, someone cried in the empty office behind me so often that the publisher

made a rule that the empty office should always remain unlocked so people could cry in

it. We officially had an office for crying in. Meanwhile, I worked in a cubicle shoved

next to the printer. And so we'd meet at the bar after work, grab a slice of pizza on

the way, call it dinner, and meet up to breathe and feel like ourselves again. We drink

cheap beer or cheap gin and tonics and plastic cups with little red straws, play the jukebox,

and plan our lives. One night, we got a stack of cocktail napkins and started to make lists

like top five places you want to live or top five people you want to date or top five

careers. T and I were both trying to be writers. She was a playwright and I was a poet.

We also both had degrees in theater and had met in the drama department at the University

of Washington in Seattle. We both put down writing as our number one career, poet and

playwright respectively. And then we both put down acting as our second. To this day,

we still laugh that there was a time acting was our fall back career. I mean, how unbound

to reality do you have to be to list acting as a fall back career? But we loved each other's

dreams. And we also knew enough actors to know how impossible acting was and is. We just

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