Good News

Today I was called and asked to interview at a local company for a writing position.

Heh. I just found my cover letter to them...here's an excerpt for your enjoyment:

As a writer, I'm also an avid reader. At the moment I'm reading a book called "The No-Asshole Rule." Its premise (and it is a serious one!) is the idea that when a business is looking to hire a person, the team agrees not to hire any "assholes." This means that even if a person has won the Nobel Prize, colleagues shouldn't hire them if their personality will shake the overall well-being of a team.

Not only am I *not* an asshole, but I'm a great person and an overall pleasure to work with.

Om My God

The latest ideas in the job search have involved the fitness world:

• I'd get the daily exercise in that I'm always meaning to do AND I'd get paid for it
• Talking is limited
• I'd get to wear comfortable clothes

So, I've been researching places around town where I can get my yoga teacher training certification and decided to check out this one place with a training session at the end of this month. The yoga I'm used to usually involves soothing music and poses at varying speeds/flows, depending on the type of yoga you're doing and an instructor that speaks very little. We'll call this Ohio yoga.

I believe in the mind/body thing with yoga, you know? But this place I went to yesterday? We literally chanted "om."

And then we had to roar like lions.

And I'm not kidding.

It wasn't the instruction that scared me so much as the other students. I mean, it's downright shocking how loud fellow yogis will roar or om or exhale. The instructor never stopped talking (albeit soothingly) about our auras, colors, third eyes, and higher gods. I'm all for quiet visualization, but when you ask for a response from the yogis, it's a scary look into how seriously people take this. I was waiting for someone to start passing out kool-aid, dousing themselves with gasoline, and setting the place on fire. That's just the "mind" part of this class. I won't even go into the Good Will Hunting moment.

Now for the physical part: all the rage in California is yoga in rooms heated to 120 degrees F just as this one was. I don't know about you, but the first thing I think when I walk into a sauna is, why isn't anyone exercising? Here, naked guy, take this parka. My only explanation for this is that native southern Californians have different blood than everyone else. 70 degrees is chilly to them. Or it's just a very bulimic way of sweating off the pounds. All I know is that I had to lie down three times because I started to faint. Lucky for me on the third time down, we started the floor exercise portion of the 1.5 hour class. You know how saunas have that sign posted where you're not supposed to be in it for longer than 15 minutes? That's just another thought to consider.

Unless I can find an Ohio speed of yoga out here, I guess idea #5938 for a job is out. Wet, hot, lion yoga might work for some people, but it's not for me.

Idea #5939: I might try pilates next. Less spiritual. I think.

Lucky Vegas

Five days in Vegas and I broke even, Ryan walked away a winner, we consoled a fellow elevator rider who was in the hole $1500+, two job opportunities came up for me, and a friend from grad school called with news of a big break.

Check the shelves of your closest bookseller next Fall for the Best New American Voices because my dear friend, Jordan McMullin, will be one of the new stars featured in the annual anthology. This is some much deserved attention for a writer whose work I admire as much as Lorrie Moore and Amy Bloom. She's the real deal.

Needless to say it was a great trip and reunion with the in-laws. A lucky trip, indeed. Pictures start here.

Categories: Travel

Confession

Looking for jobs blows. It's downright depressing. I started off gung ho in the search process two months ago, happy to finally be in a situation where employment was an option, but in a matter of weeks I found myself sometimes bedridden. Dreading the number of cover letters I'd have to revise for whatever random jobs of the given day. Sick of my own story.

Whereas the English major presented itself as a flexible degree because it taught "critical thinking," the job search has left me wishing I had specialized in something specific like dentistry. Dentistry = teeth. English = words. Words are in everything; every specialization. Teeth are only in your mouth and are supposed to behave a certain way. When they don't, you fix it and it's pretty black and white. Words have no specific behavior. They bend, jump, drag, and constantly change their meaning. These behaviors affect every moment/interaction of our lives. I've seen firsthand how different languages and their syntax, pronouns, and word choice, inform the behaviors of various cultures, but where does that get me in the job world? Where is the space in my resume for this?

My newest low is a wrapped beach towel around the torso in place of shorts and underwear. Why dress, right? It's only to the mailbox, but...

I think this is all in response to a friend recently asking what the job search was like. It may be exciting at first, but it quickly becomes dull and utterly uninspiring. All I can be is myself and pretty much no one is interested in that because they want me to suck their ass and conform to what they want me to be.

These have been hard weeks.

However,

I love San Diego and yesterday was a good day for the seratonin levels. On a whim I decided to contact Habitat for Humanity and go help them out on a project all day, which was awesome. I used to do Habitat every Saturday in high school and liked it (especially since I was doing it with friends) so I thought I'd give that a shot since my attempt at volunteering at the animal shelter didn't work out. I had forgotten that it was a Christian affiliated organization until the truck pulled up with a quote strewn across the side of it saying something like, "God's love in action," or "Working by the love of God," or "For the love of God." And then, of course, we began the day with a prayer. I was like, snort and roll of the eyes but whatever. I also had forgotten that I went through those motions for 12 years, morning, noon, and afternoon. They had us praying all the freaking time so it was an odd flashback. The Christian part of Habitat was relatively minimal though...thank god.

I was semi-flattered that the leader guy picked me to operate what was essentially this gigantic industrial chainsaw on wheels for digging trenches. It was sort of ridiculous at the same time that he picked me only because I was literally pushing on the handles like I was a fucking Olympic gymnast on the parallel bars to try and get the thing to turn...alas, I managed. But between that and the pickaxe, I look/feel like a tetanus victim. So if I'm sitting here saying, "digging trenches was awesome!" you might be able to better imagine the quality of my normal days of looking for a job.

But it was a jumpstart. It was a motivator. It made the day go by faster, I learned something, and spent the day with people that were pretty nice. It made me get up today and at least get in the car and out of the apt. So today I finally went through Little Italy and stopped down at Chicano Park and topped it off with a trip to the grocery store where Little Italy inspired me to buy some salami. A fuckload of it too, which was sort of unintentional. In Germany I could justify it by "not knowing the metric system" but the truth is I've always been afraid of the deli counter because I have no fucking clue what a quarter of a lb. vs. a half lb. looks like. Kind of like when people give you directions and say "in 300 ft. you'll go right." I act like I know what they're talking about, but I'm really standing there like, " ? "

Basically I guess it was important to have two fuck all days where I spent little time on the computer, thinking about jobs.

What Do You Do During the Day?

is the most common question I'm asked, being unemployed and all. So I've decided to compile a list of the activities that have consistently occupied me over the past two years:

• Read, read, read. And this answer seems to leave a lot of people blankly blinking at me. Since the graduate program in fiction, I've largely been reading non-fiction and I'm a slow reader. This fills up a lot of time and pseudo-fools me into thinking I'm still a student.
• Listen to music the way I did in high school. You know, when listening to music was the *only* thing you were doing. This includes looking up lyrics, which I haven't done since high school. It's so easy now with the internet.
• Find podcasts. A recent development since I've never been a big fan of listening to talk on the radio, but stand-up comedy has made this more appealing despite the lack visible gestures and expressions.
• Exercise. These days it's an hour long hike or walk. Hikes to explore the area or walks to explore the fat-burning zone of exercise (I'm more familiar with the cardio side). The NPR podcasts "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me" and "All Songs Considered" serve these activities very well. I may never go back to running. I can only concentrate at most on the beat of songs when I run...very much a zoning out thing for me.
• Photograph. Hikes lend themselves well to this activity. If the motivation to move my body isn't there, photography is a back-up. Later I can spend hours sitting on my butt, playing around with them in Photoshop.
  
• Play video games. Grand Theft Auto is my current choice (I play until I beat them). The past two years have included Halo, Halo 2, Katamari Damacy, and various Nintendo classics. I don't play video games too much strictly because they're hyper-addictive for me.
• Make dinner. Figure out what to make for dinner is more like it. Sometimes this is time consuming and underappreciated (not by Ryan...society in general), but of late, it's been easier and an inspiring chore since a recent subscription to a wine club. In fact, dinners have never been so creative in this household. They tell you the matching food and you're halfway there to figuring out the age-old question of "What's for dinner?" The beer book helps too. If you're having recipe block, decide dinner by your drink.
• Blog. If you're here, you get it. It's the culmination of these hobbies, my interests, and my Web surfing...but more. You tell people you blog and they think it's your diary. Blogging, to me, is just as much about the community building and knowledge sharing as it is staring at your own navel.
• Etc. Crosswords, Sudoku, teach myself stuff like Chess or knitting, swim, find the lowest possible price online for something as simple as a vegetable peeler specifically because I have the time and not because I'm cheap.
  

I actually find it hard to be bored.

New Interview Techniques

New interview technique or bad company? I give you three examples:

1. Last year I interviewed with a large company to edit their English pamphlets. They called me late, but the interview went well, I passed the test they gave me, they offered me the job, asked me if I wanted to be paid in dollars or euro and never contacted me again.

2. Person B submitted a resume to another very large company, was contacted to schedule an interview, and then the company never called. He contacted them and they rescheduled, calling over an hour late for the rescheduled time.

3. Person C was contacted by yet another very large company--they sought him out--to schedule an interview. Lo and behold this company didn't call until the interviewee sent an email an hour later saying, ??? After a half hour passed for the rescheduled interview, person C again sent an email saying ??? and was called.

So the question is, is this a new phone interview technique? Seems common enough. Seems like it could be a MTV boiling-point-esque tactic to see how the interviewee holds up under stress and angering situations. What up, companies?

Staring Contest

I had a staring contest with my neighbor the other day. He won. Just look at him basking in his stupid glory:

What a jerk. He thinks that just because he lives in a building on a higher level that he's better than me. Pssh. Well no siree. He just doesn't...even...know...stupid dweeb.

(Another day's highlight brought to you by Kell)