Ode to minimum wage

I nearly killed my mother earlier this year. All I had to say was “I don’t really think I care how much I earn when I start working”. If black women could turn pale, she would have been as white as a polar bear.

She did, however, get as vicious as one. “What do you mean you don’t care how much you earn? Why am I putting you through university if it’s not for you to earn a substantial amount of money?”. Imagine those words coming out of a Xhosa mother’s mouth in a burst of passion. That was how it happened.

Granted, those were not her exact words but you can form an idea of the heated monologue that I was subjected to after my minor confession. It was a rather long monologue too, if memory serves me well. Simply said, she was anything but happy. Mother’s are scary entities, but Xhosa mothers are like any other angry mother on steroids.

Needless to say, I never dared to say anything like that in front of her again. I value my existence. My silence on the subject did not mean that I had changed the way I felt though. In all reality, I know that I am studying to be poor. Working towards a degree in Journalism and Drama, I have no hopes of being anything more than a thousand-naire. A hundred thousand-naire if I get lucky.

The fact is that I love both Journalism and Drama with a ridiculous fervour. With Journalism I want to be able to reflect the world to itself and, consequently, educate the masses on the extremities and consequences of their actions. With Drama, I simply want to be able to escape the confines of my own mind and be somebody else even if for an hour.

I did not gravitate towards my career choices because I was informed on the salary that I would ultimately earn. Do not get me wrong, I am not against a salary that will ensure that I have a comfortable lifestyle and maybe some change that will help me to do something more than merely significant for my mother.

Be that as it may, if we were all to choose jobs that simply paid well then there would be an excess of Astronomers and not enough educators. Art would be dead and we would have no sanctuary from the harsh realities that life hurls at us.

So as much as my mother hates to hear it, I do not (necessarily) care how much I earn when I go out into the world. I already know that a Journalists salary is half a bag of peanuts, but somebody has to do the job –and who better to do it than somebody who really wants to?