A stand against clutter.

After getting off work at midnight, I walked half a mile in the snow (welcome to the tundra!) to my friends’ house.  Friday nights mean I have usually been trapped behind a desk since 8AM (first organizing layouts then dealing with ungrateful residents).  I was a bit restless and looking forward to gathering with a few friends I had not seen in months.

I arrived a few hours late to the party, so everyone was already sloshed (pardon my college slang).  Talking with the ‘hammered folk’ is not much fun when you are stone cold sober.  Any time you make a clever comment you must repeat yourself until the timing is ruined and the humor is drained away. 

I grabbed a beer – watching my friends play beer pong all night was not going to be entertaining without a little buzz.  One of my guy friends joined me on the windowsill.  We had not spoken since I left for London in the summer, so we started with the usual, yet pointless “how was your semester?” chatter. 

As I was telling him about my new job as a layout designer, he interrupted me.  “Oh my god, you’re Peggy Olsen.” 

I admit to fitting the straightedge, overly involved, extremely driven student stereotype.  I work two jobs, I am an advertising executive for a university magazine, and I am an account planner for a student-run campus agency.  Not to mention my 18-credit course load and my in-progress honors thesis.  (Side note: Anyone looking for a summer intern?) 

But, ‘Peggy Olsen!?’  Please do not compare me to her.

For those of you who have yet to be inducted to the advertising cult, Peggy Olsen is Mad Men’s famous ugly-pretty feminist striving to become the ultimate woman in a man’s world.  She’s awesome… for a woman in the 1960s.

But, I have goals, hopes, and dreams besides working for a bunch of sexist men with a drinking problem.  Shocking?  Well, if you look in the top right corner of your computer screen you will notice today’s date is February 11, 2012.  Not 1961. 

What people fail to see when they say I am just like Peggy is that she is not the best copywriter at Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce.  She is at the bottom of the food chain.  She does most of the grunt work, rarely receives she praise, and she lacks the respect of her co-workers.  Worst of all, outside of work, Peggy is pretty stupid.  She blatantly makes horrible life decisions.

Sure, out of all the women in the office, and what seems like the rest of Manhattan’s female population, Peggy is earning the fattest paycheck.  But compared to her male counter parts, she’s working for free.  

Society has now crossed into the second decade of the 21^st century.  I do not plan to graduate from secretary school, plead my way into a pathetic, low-level writing job, and then try to sleep with my boss for a promotion.  I do not plan to become Peggy Olsen.

So the question I now ask is why am I never compared to Don Draper?  Why am I simply not the best?  If it is because I am female, well I simply cannot accept that notion.  That is not how my mother raised me, that is not what I learned attending a prestigious university, and that is definitely not what I want to limit my future. 

I’m still unsure if my friend’s joke was supposed to be a backhanded compliment or not.  Let’s face it, he was intoxicated.  But his insensitive words made him look stupid and ignorant.  More women than men attend college today – and just in case he failed noticed, I’d like to point out that we’re not all majoring in “trophy wife.”