Chapter 1
Appendix A—Blog Post
What Am I Doing with My Life; or, Right Off Target
By: Emmett Truesdale
Call me crazy, but I never imagined that I’d be using my master’s degree in education to teach people the benefits of signing up for a Target RedCard.
Like many of my millennial generation, I was raised to believe that having done all the “right things” according to society—applied myself in school, gotten my degree, worked hard throughout my twenties—I would eventually be released from this poverty-wage, essential-worker purgatory to the celestial climes of financial competence.
Okay, boomer.
Last month I turned twenty-eight—that’s TWO.
EIGHT.—and I’m no closer to being able to afford my own apartment than to convincing Harry Styles to run away with me to a remote island off the coast of Ireland to share a quiet life raising miniature horses and obliterating each other’s buttholes nightly.
My clothes are rags. My 2008 Ford Taurus is practically in hospice.
The check-engine light has been on so long that the little icon has seared into my retinas.
Every time my car makes a weird noise, I’m convinced it’s muttering judgments on my poor life choices.
“Another seven-dollar iced latte?” it says.
“I don’t have air-conditioning, you fat son of a bitch! ”
Not that I ever expected to be rich. For the longest time my dream was to be a teacher.
Helping people expand their view of the world and themselves through education is something I’ve always been passionate about.
So after majoring in social science at San Diego State University, I ended up going back for my MA with the goal of teaching middle school social studies. What was I thinking?
Denied financial assistance because of my family income—to which I of course had no access, my parents having decided they’d “done enough” by throwing a few thousand dollars a year toward my undergraduate studies—I took out another loan, and even then I only survived by taking up residence in the tiny second bedroom of my mom’s condo in Little Italy.
The property, purchased with the settlement from Mom’s second divorce, was a kooky homage to her proud Sicilian heritage, stuffed with antique furniture, framed paintings of mustached chefs in white jackets, and a daily influx of artisan olive oils, breads, and pastas.
The woman kept so much food in the house that it burst out of the kitchen cabinets, spilling luxuriantly over the faux-granite counters.
I could barely turn around without sending a baguette flying into the dog’s water bowl.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my mom—seriously, she’s the best. Loving and caring and always the first person to help. We’ve always had a special relationship. Even when the whole world seems to think I’m a pile of crap, Mom is always there with unconditional love and support.
She often tells the story of how after I was born she took me to meet my uncle Gene and aunt Laura, and after ten minutes in my company, Uncle Gene delivered, in his cartoonish New York accent, the now-iconic line “There’s somethin’ special about that boy!
” It’s since become a kind of shorthand between Mom and me.
Whenever she’s feeling particularly proud or sentimental, she’ll do her Uncle Gene voice and it never fails to cheer me up.
Still, living with her in my twenties wasn’t the life I’d imagined.
The apartment was overstuffed with furniture and pets.
Mom’s lifestyle was chaotic, borderline nomadic, with her constantly leaving town to visit her sisters and long-distance boyfriend, Hal.
But more than anything I longed for the day I could detach from her obligatory generosity, strike out from the suffocating muchness of her small life, and carve out a space in the world all my own.
In some ways, it felt like a pipe dream. The housing crisis only seemed to be getting worse. I would struggle to afford rent on even the cheapest apartment.
And yet I was forced to do just that when, in typical Mom style, she announced that she was selling the condo and moving to Las Vegas to marry Hal, whom my siblings and I had barely met.
I flew into a panic, not knowing where I was going to live.
I couldn’t stay with my dad, who’d retired to Cabo San Lucas during Covid (nice for him ), and no offers of assistance were forthcoming from my older siblings, despite both of them having plenty of space .
With nowhere to go, I’d have to scrape together an extra $1,250 a month to sublet a room in a stranger’s dump of an apartment, which meant I’d need to get a job.
I know, I know, I should’ve already had one—because in this country it’s not enough to get an education; apparently one has to suffer for it too .
In a moment of desperation I applied for a job as a part-time “customer advocate” at Target (cue torrential barfing). The store was close by, it paid above minimum wage, and, like of course, Target was my happy place (note the use of the past tense there ).
Anyway, I got the job and promised myself I’d be out of there as soon as I secured a full-time teaching position. Six months tops.
**Slams head repeatedly on the desk**
Suffice it to say, that day hasn’t come.
I’m going to tell you what happened, but honestly part of me is dreading it. The last thing I want to do is reinforce the stereotype that fat people are “quitters” who don’t work hard or see things through. But on this occasion, I did give up, and I’m still wondering if it was the right choice.
All right, here goes.
In order to earn a California teaching credential, you have to complete five years of higher education and six hundred hours of unpaid student teaching—one of the highest requirements for teachers in the country.
My student-teaching schedule was eight to four, five days a week, but I still had to pay my way, so I fit it in around a full-time load of evening and weekend shifts at the store.
My first semester, at a high school on the southside, wasn’t so bad. Though I looked and lived differently than most of the sophomores in my class, the kids were great and my cooperating teacher even better, providing a ton of resources and guidance, and helping to manage the students who acted up.
The trouble started on my second assignment, teaching social studies at an upper-crust middle school in La Jolla.
Joining a class in the second semester is always harder, because you’re interrupting the class’s established routine.
In my case, I had the added disadvantage of following Mr. Jeffries, a hunky former college football star with a sizable TikTok following, which blew up even more after he started posting funny videos inspired by his student-teaching experience.
He was beloved, and I could tell from day one—in fact, the moment those kids laid eyes on me—that I was like a bag of Taco Bell Cinnamon Twists at the end of a Michelin-star meal.
(For the record, I fucking love those Twists.)
“You look kind of like Mr. Jeffries, but like the before in a before-and-after picture,” one kid blurted out, and the whole class laughed.
I brushed it off. If you want to do this job, I told myself, you’re gonna have to learn to take a joke.
These random outbursts of mockery, I soon realized, were relatively harmless.
Those students—in many cases, the less academically inclined of the class—were just saying stuff as it occurred to them rather than being intentionally malicious.
It was the more intelligent kids who got under my skin, because I could tell they were going out of their way to hurt me.
There was one boy in particular—for the sake of this story let’s call him Tentacruel (that one’s for all you Pokémon fans ).
Tentacruel would sit at the back of the class, often with his feet on the desk.
He wasn’t a hard worker but was naturally gifted, doing no work and acing every test and quiz.
He had a certain talent for pinpointing my shortcomings and insecurities and calling them out in front of the class—making fun of my Target-brand clothes and how they fit, humiliating me when I accidentally misspelled a word on the whiteboard.
“What, does San Diego State not teach spelling?” he jeered.
What made it harder was that my cooperating teacher this time around just sat back.
No guidance or support, never helped keep Tentacruel or his friends in check, and if I tried to kick them out of class and they refused, she’d just shrug at me as if to say, What do you want me to do about it? I just work here.
Fortunately, not all the kids were that bad.
In fact, some were pretty great. For example, there was one kid—let’s call him Oddish—whom I liked a lot.
He was smart, quiet, and had this dark sense of humor I loved.
Carrying a few extra pounds himself, he reminded me so much of myself at that age, and I couldn’t help but be fond of him.
Once in a while he’d stay in at lunchtime and we’d talk until the bell rang.
About his home life, school, the life he wanted to have one day.
Funny as he was, there was a sadness about him that I understood all too well.
I opened up about how in sixth grade Sean Davis and Reece Papadatos used to terrorize me about my weight, pelting me with French fries as I ate lunch, convincing half the class to call me Titty Truesdale.
Knowing who his classmates were, I thought Oddish might’ve been bullied himself and it might help him to know he wasn’t alone, that there was at least one adult in his life who understood.