As per Jessie‘s advice, it’s time to pop the cap off of this new job and take it for a spin in the blogosphere before the dichotomy of my situation leaves me as two-faced as a Batman villain.

It’s been a month now since I began work at the Goldsboro News-Argus, and I love the job.

I’ve interviewed the governor, flown in an Air Force tanker and written several other stories that I will never speak of again. (Two words: Puppy Puppets).

But working at the News-Argus has one caveat. It lies in the paper’s name.

When the Goldsboro News merged with the Goldsboro Argus in the 1920s, they hyphenated the name to News-Argus (Argus comes from this, and the paper’s motto/mantra makes the newspaper seem pretty badass:

“This Argus o’er the people’s rights doth an eternal vigil keep.
No soothing strains o’Maia’s son can lull its hundred eyes to sleep.”

But I have no beef with Argus. Or News. Or the hypen. It’s Goldsboro that bothers me.

And that’s because the Goldsboro News-Argus was my hometown paper. I clipped articles from the Argus in 5th grade for current events. I looked for my name in the sports digest throughout high school. Now I sit over the left shoulder of the journalist who reported I won second place in Business Law in 10th grade and right in front of the door where the sports editor who covered my senior tennis run to the conference championship sits.

I have no problem with the paper, and, to be honest, my local roots likely helped me to earn the job over the other 75 applicants. When the editor sends me to Mount Olive, I know three different ways to get there and I lived four blocks from Goldsboro’s City Hall for the first four years of my life, so I guess I have to be grateful for being a Goldsboro native.

But, then there’s the issue of being BACK in Goldsboro. I now hate this song, which reminds me that if I die in Wayne County, I would have lived and died in a small town. (Note: If I die, scatter my ashes into the Caribbean. Or flush them down a toilet in Raleigh…just don’t let me end up in this place eternally).

And living in Goldsboro means having to find a place to live in Goldsboro, meaning I’m hitting the snooze button before work in the same bedroom where I once hit the snooze button before school.

I’m still paying rent in Raleigh through July, but my parents are giving me rent-free housing in Rosewood, and I’m decaying from the inside-out. My parents have actually been way cooler about the situation than I thought they would and haven’t suffocated me, but to go to Raleigh, run a paper, graduate and get a full-time job only to end up back where it all started just eats away at me. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t use any family connections or favors to get the job, I still feel like a comebacker.

And it wouldn’t be so bad if I just had someone to drink with!

I haven’t hung out with anyone I graduated with (aside from Jeff) since Fall 2006, so it’s almost like I’m a lonely stranger in my own hometown. I was so desperate, I went to church to find drinking buddies a few weeks ago. (I also just realized that the part of that that I find so strange isn’t that I went to church for drinking, but that I went to church).

So I’ve shuttled between Raleigh and Goldsboro at least twice a week and have done a lot of solo drinking behind closed doors to stay sane, but I’m still struggling.

I managed to find a full-time job in a dying industry during the worst recession since the Great Depression less than four months after graduation, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve taken a step back.