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Here are some details of art history that may or may not be true:   In 2008 I was working at the Whitney Museum of American Art It was my first job out of college – I know, I know Except the problem was that the Whitney is on the Upper East Side and I’m a downtown girl at heart, born and raised in the bowels of the East Village Working on the Upper East Side has a certain effect on a person like myself – a person who grew up in a studio apartment on Saint Mark’s Place with two bohemian parents who suggested activities like ‘drawing to music quietly’ in Middle School in lieu of going to see R-rated movies with boys that would inevitably try to put their hands up my skirt, and who regularly gifted me copies of everything from Karl Marx to Sun-Tzu with meaningful handwritten notes inside (‘You are the future’; ‘Save this planet from itself’; ‘Revolt! Be mutinous!’) even when I explicitly requested gift certificates to shitty stores that weren’t age appropriate like Victoria’s Secret (to buy bras I didn’t have the tits for), or Joyce Leslie (to buy club clothes for clubs I was too young to get into) Bottom line: I was a fish out of water And the Upper East Side sucks, man Having just spent four years in Middle America grinding out college at Macalester, I was expecting to come back to New York and slay the art world I mean, I really wanted to fuck shit up But as the quiet irony of post-college work goes, that which is most coveted – a job, to cure the cancer that is student loan debt in America – is often the same thing that makes your soul feel as if it’s been run through the inferno   Turned out the super competitive position I had landed at the Whitney was also super stifling Though the goal was to do programming for young audiences, which promised to be exciting, there was some sort of force-field that seemed to always be separating the art on