In computing, NaN is an acronym for “Not a Number… introduced by the IEEE 754 floating-point standard in 1985.” Look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t believe me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN.

Math can beat the odds; why can’t we?

I am here to take you on a journey through the eyes and ears of unemployed “twenty-something” New Yorkers living off our landlord’s penchant to cash our rent checks on the 15^th of each month rather than the first; off gracious donations from friends and family (in the form of money, stamps, phone bills, Netflix passwords, Powerbooks, therapy sessions, health insurance, socks, and gifts cards); off the random freelance checks habitually sent a few days after bills are due; off Duane Reade’s five-dollars-back-for-every-one-hundred-you-spend-on-Ramon-Noodles coupon (may it rest in peace); off Adderal, Klonopin, Xanax. We are directly correlated with the economic cycle, which peaked in the 90’s with a bubble and a zero deficit and crumbled as we made our way into the workforce. We have been rewarded for our brilliance, our school work, not our after-school jobs; we have been pushed to pursue the study of Liberal Arts rather than the development of our professional skill-sets; we have the ability to write the most concise cover letters, to semantically battle any interview question, to get any job; we complain, forget. We are your over-educated, sophomoric children; your over-privileged, irritating siblings; your esoteric, ditsy employees. We are artists, writers, designers, and we are unemployed. Our struggles seem trite; our complaints seem to have no “real” basis. I am here to inform you that it has not been our decision, that it is not our fault, that we have been formed by liberal ideologies and pursuits and shocked by social construction and inherent social structure.