“We’ll let you know in a few weeks,” the interviewer said.

He had a nice plastic smile, and I flashed my own in response. The truth was I’d bombed another one, and further unemployment beckoned. You need a job to get job experience, which is required to get a job. He shook my hand, wished me luck, and ushered me to a pair of impeccably clean glass doors, through which the harsh light of midday poured in, reminding me that I was a failure as an adult. Real adults weren’t supposed to be idle at this time of day. I stepped outside into a spotlight of inferiority.

A car honked.

It was my girlfriend and soon-to-be fiancée, Jen. The plan was I’d propose as soon as I found a steady job. These days, any job would do.

I shrugged as I got in to ward off any lurking questions. “They’ll tell me in a few days,” I said.

“You’ll get it eventually.”

“Yeah.”

“You have a degree in management, you’re tall, you’re good with people—”

“Yeah,” I repeated.

Maybe in another eight months I can find a job cleaning glass doors, I thought.

She kissed me and hit the gas.

Although I tried not to admit it, I was increasingly jealous of Jen, with her bachelor’s in biology, Masters in primatology, and looming years of scholarship-funded doctoral studies. Her life seemed set. She was happy, and the only question left about her future was for how long she would choose to put up with a loser like me.

“Up for lunch?” Jen asked, interrupting my train of self-loathing.

The question seemed innocent so I knew it wasn’t. She was planning something.

“Sure.”

“Great! I told Marcus we’d meet him at The Brass Arrow.” She bit her lower lip and glanced over at me. “There’s something I want to propose.”

I sank into the passenger’s seat.

The last lingering lunch eaters were filtering out of the pub when we arrived, which made it easy to spot Marcus waiting in a booth by the window.

Marcus was a friend Jen had made as an undergrad, and he’d kind of become our common friend over time. Kind of because I’d always suspected he was in love with Jen, and on my worse days it didn’t take much to imagine the pair of them running off together. Marcus, after all, had a job.

After the normal niceties Jen made her pitch:

“I was thinking,” she started, “that now might be the last time the three of us could take a trip together. I start at Columbia in September, Marcus has that promotion that likely means no vacation for a while, and—” She looked at me, hesitating for a painful second.”—once you find your job, you’ll find it hard to get away.”

I nodded.

She produced an atlas and plopped it open on the table.

“So I propose we go on an adventure, see the world, experience a foreign land…”

She rifled through the pages, blitzing through South America and Europe, before slowing down on Africa, until she found the exact spot she was looking for and declared, “And I was thinking specifically of here!”

She pointed to Uganda.

“Huh,” Marcus said. “Not really a big tourist destination.”

“Exactly! What do you think?” she asked me.

I thought I wouldn’t have known where Uganda was if not for the atlas in front of me. “Could be interesting,” I said, to say anything.

She could sense my hesitation. “If you don’t want to go, I totally understand. Backpacking in Africa is not for everyone.”

Backpacking?!

She went on: “And Marcus and I could always go by ourselves. Right, Marcus?”

We both looked at him.

“Of course.”

Did I want to go backpacking in Uganda? No. Was I going to let my hopefully-wife go backpacking in Uganda with a guy who was in love with her? Not a chance!

“Oh, I’m in,” I said.

“Great!”