Eureka

Since yesterday's post I've been scouring my New Yorker archive, not quite sure of what I'm looking for, but feverish in my pursuit of it nonetheless. One of the first writers I was drawn to was Susan Orlean. I didn't know much about her, but I'd seen Meryl Streep portray her on screen, so I was intrigued.

She and her writing were the subject of a Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufmann movie a couple of years ago, "Adaptation." In a roundabout way, that film was about the writing of her book, "The Orchid Thief," which was developed from a New Yorker article that she had written. At some point in the movie, one character describes Orlean's style as "that flowery New Yorker shit." That phrase stuck with me and it was constantly in the back of my mind as I began reading the magazine this past summer. It sounded like the kind of writing that I would like to do.

Before I started sifting through Orlean's pieces in the archive, I Googled her. The first link was one to her own website (www.susanorlean.com). I went to the site, and I noticed a link on the main page to a section entitled "About Me." Here was her biography, which was precisely what I was looking for. What illustrious path had this esteemed writer taken on her way to literary greatness?

Excerpts from her first-person account:

"I am the product of a happy and relatively uneventful childhood in Cleveland, Ohio...This was followed by a happy and relatively squandered college career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor...I studied literature and history and always dreamed of being a writer, but had no idea of how you went about being a writer--or at least the kind of writer I wanted to be: someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events. There is no guidebook to becoming that kind of writer, so I assumed I'd end up doing something practical like going to law school, much as the thought of it made me cringe. After college I moved to Portland, Oregon to kill some time before the inevitable trek to law school--and amazingly enough I lucked into a writing job at a tiny, now-defunct monthly magazine. That led to a job at an alternative newsweekly in Portland where I wrote music reviews and feature pieces...I started writing for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice...I moved to Boston in 1982...I wrote for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe, and started work on my first book...Four years later I moved to New York. After moving to New York, I learned how to snowboard; wrote The Orchid Thief; became a staff writer at The New Yorker; got married; got a Welsh springer spaniel; learned how to order take-out food. These days I do some lecturing and some teaching, but most of the time I'm writing pieces for The New Yorker and occasionally for other magazines, and working on books."

Was this it? Had I found what I was looking for? A step-by-step guide (the kind of guide that Orlean claims doesn't exist) to becoming a writer? I'm already a quarter of the way there, but what's the next step? Buying a ticket to Portland? Dumb luck? To be continued...

Sidebar: I just received an email from an editor at The G* P* P* (the part-time publishing job I interviewed for last month). She makes it sound like the main reason I didn't get the job was because it was part-time and they didn't want to hire someone who might leave as soon as they found a full-time job. Frustrating (since I should have done more to assure them that I wasn't looking for a full-time gig (even though I was)), but not altogether surprising.

A big dilemma

It's life's small dilemmas that occupy most of my time these days: What to have for lunch. What time to go to get out of bed. Whether to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken while I'm driving around town. You know, the kind of decisions that make the earth tremble a little.

Today (actually right this second) I'm grappling with a particularly tough decision. I celebrated a birthday recently, and one gift I received from my mother was The Complete New Yorker, which is an electronic compilation of every page of every New Yorker magazine ever published. All I had asked her for was a subscription to the magazine (which she also got for me), so I was stunned when I unwrapped the hefty-yet-sleek volume. I knew about the set from seeing ads in the magazine, but I never imagined owning it myself. Only recently have I become an avid New Yorker reader. This past summer, I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle at their lake house in western Connecticut. They receive a free subscription to the magazine, which neither of them reads. So there are piles of New Yorkers lying around their cabin stretching back literally for years. Each morning, I'd grab a few copies to take with me to read as we boated or lounged around by the docks. I spent many a warm summer day sprawled out on a towel reading Jonathan Franzen and David Sedaris, wishing, as I often do when I discover something that most other people have discovered long before, that I hadn't joined the party so late.

Now is my chance to catch up. It might take a few years, but if I really wanted to, I could go back and read every word every published in The New Yorker magazine. But I'm not going to do that. I'll probably just stick to the highlights. Plenty of amazing authors cut their teeth at The New Yorker, and I look forward to going back to see how those people that I admire wrote at the beginning of their careers. The list is awe-inspiring: John Updike, Philip Roth, Truman Capote, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, Raymond Carver. Dozens of writers, any one of which I could only hope to emulate in my dreams.

I realize how ridiculous it is to think of this set as anything more than a thoughtful birthday gift. But I can't help but wonder whether there's something to be gained here. One miniscule grain of understanding, one instant of clarity, that lights a tiny little spark...

I'm incredibly anxious to begin scouring the archives for that one bit of inspiration that will catapult me into a career as a respected, successful (dare I say beloved?) writer.

But here's where that dilemma comes in: where to start?

28 shopping days 'til Christmas

Only in retrospect have I realized that Thanksgiving was probably a milestone (or perhaps more accurately, a deadline) in my job search. After a weekend of big family meals and evenings spent with friends who were in town for the holiday, it has become obvious to me that the last week of November and the first 23 days of December are really just a time out between the two major family holiday weeks of the year.

This was certainly the case when I was a college student. Thanksgiving break was a distant beacon of light when classes began at the end of August. After twelve unbroken weeks of lectures, papers, tests (and I suppose problem sets), the week off was a practical necessity. On the opposite side of the break, there'd be one final week of regular classes, one full week off to prepare for exams, and about two weeks for the exams themselves. Very little new learning actually took place. These few weeks were really about biding time until the semester was over. Studying for and taking exams were things we did to distract ourselves.

I can't imagine what sort of job opportunities will come my way during this four-week holiday wasteland. I'll be as diligent as ever in checking the web boards and sending out electronic applications (and following up, and following up again). But I find it hard to imagine anything new happening in December. It's getting on to winter. It's cold, plants are dying. Up in the Northeast we're getting into bad weather mode. And December is about spending money, not making it. I hope that I'm wrong. I'd be willing to start work on Christmas Day (especially if it were a job as an editorial assistant at NPR [my latest pie-in-the-sky application]). Maybe this will be my month. The alternative is (forgive me) a long December.

Turkey Day/Snow Day

Early this morning, I was awakened by the sound of a motor running. It was clearly a large piece of lawn equipment--a tractor or leaf blower or some such device--and not a car or anything else. My immediate reaction was "Why did my neighbor have to decide to mow his lawn at 8 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day?" I tried to ignore the noise, but I was unsuccessful in falling back to sleep after a half hour of tossing and turning. So I crawled out of bed and hobbled to my window with the intention of catching my neighbor red-handed in his incosiderate yardwork, and perhaps casting a stern and disapproving glance his way.

I began to pull on the drawstring of the shade and as I caught my first glimpse of the scene outside, I thought that I must have gone temporarily blind. It was a strange blindness--a kind of reverse blindness. Rather than my field of vision being totally black, the light that reached my eyes from beyond the window was stark white. The white began as the thinnest of slivers, but then continued to grow, unbroken, as I raised the shade higher and higher. The ground, the trees, even my bundled-up neighbor pushing his snow blower down his driveway were all blindingly white. I could barely distinguish the white siding of the house next door from the ground below or the sky above. A feeling of unease washed over me. The scene was familiar, but something about it was sickeningly wrong.

I hurried down stairs to find out whether the same scene was visible out of all of the windows in my house. I jumped down the last three steps and a moment later reached a ground floor window. With an awkward jerk, I pulled the unfurled shade away from the window, and was confronted by yet another view of a snow-covered winter wonderland.

As I looked out that window, and my brain registered the obvious truth that it had snowed overnight, there was a single instant, the briefest of flashes, during which I was convinced that I had missed the entire month of December. I remembered going to sleep during the wee hours of the fourth Thursday of November, Thanksgiving Day. As I drifted off that night, I did not dream of snow or cold; I dreamed of stuffing and cranberry sauce. In southern New England, snow in November certainly isn't unheard of, but it isn't terribly common either. When one wakes up on what one believes to be Thanksgiving morning, one does not expect to be greeted by the remnants of a spontaneous overnight snowfall. Christmas, on the other hand, fits that bill perfectly. And so in that instant, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Christmas day, and that the entire month of December had passed me by while I slept.

During this infinitesimally small cognitive hiccup, I felt like the anti-Scrooge in a bizzaro version of A Christmas Carol. Whereas Scrooge goes to sleep on Christmas Eve and wakes up on Christmas day having learned his lesson and having been given a chance to make up for his failings, I had gone to sleep on Thanksgiving eve and woken up on Christmas day, robbed of an entire month as punishment for squandering so many weeks of my life through my laziness and indecision. I felt awful.

But then the moment passed. I accepted the whiteness outside as what it actually was: a freak late-November snow storm. Without hesitating, I dashed back up to my room, pulled on some warm work clothes and gloves, and headed out to the garage to grab a snow shovel. Before anyone else in my house was out of bed, I was going to shovel the driveway. It was an embarassingly exhausting chore, but for the first time in months I actually felt useful. I had done work! And physical labor at that!

It was a Thankgiving miracle.

Funerals (and Weddings)

One thing I've had plenty of time to do over the past few months has been to attend funerals. [I realize that the previous sentence is grammatically awkward, but I can't figure out how to revise it so that I can keep the subject at the end and still make it sound right.] I've been to two funerals in the past month or so. Even though it's been only two so far, I already feel like I'm on the funeral circuit. At the very least, I hear that "these things come in threes," so I've been steeling myself for another funeral sometime in the near future. So far, the deceased have been distant relatives. A great-great-uncle several weeks ago, and a great-aunt today. But I've got plenty of old relatives, some closer relations than others, so I wouldn't be surprised if I were to attend another funeral (or two) before the year (or my unemployment) is up.

I'm tempted to draw out some of the mortality issues that I've been grappling with since I've begun attending funerals. But that's a pretty staid topic. Pardon me for being morbid, but these few experiences have been more notable for the chance they have afforded me to observe people in mourning. Grief occupies an interesting corner of the human emotional spectrum. As far as I can tell, it allows people to engage in short bursts of unfettered public displays of sorrow, and to receive the unequivocal sympathy of their more distant family members and aquaintances. Am I an asshole for being so emotionally isolated from these somber events, and for treating them as anthropological exercises? Perhaps. Probably. But the way I see it, the more funerals of distant relatives that I attend now, the better prepared I'll be for the funerals that are really going to matter in my life. I can already envision myself delivering at least a couple of eulogies. In my family, I'm basically the go-to guy for any kind of speech or considered reflection (not to mention the fact that I'm the go-to guy for emotional stability. Ha! Shows what my family knows!) People in my family expect me to be stoic during the tough times, so the best I can do now is get some practical experience.

Weddings, on the other hand, I'm looking forward to. I see many weddings in my future, and I'm looking forward to each and every one of them. Between my relatives and my high school and college friends, I hope to be attending dozens of weddings over the next couple of decades. I've only been to a couple (and in recent, post-drinking age memory, I've only been to one). But my meager experience has been enough to give me a taste of how enjoyable a wedding (the anti-funeral) can be. Again, I can see myself being called upon to pontificate at a few of these future matrimonials. For the most part, I've got a much more positive outlook for these sure-to-be trite speeches. I've even begun drafting a few in my head.

If I had a job, or if I was in school, I'd have an excuse for not attending funerals. But I have no job, and thus I have no excuse. So for now, I think of each funeral I attend as a chance to make the next one easier. And all the while, I'm thinking how great it'd be if I were at a wedding.

Long weekend

I've had a busy few days for a change. The college crew began rolling in on Thursday evening, and since then it's been nearly non-stop action. A pleasant change of pace, in all.

Re: last week's morbid "The gathering storm" post, the reality of this reunion weekend wound up being much less demoralizing than predicted. As always, it was intensely enjoyable to have the buds in town. In spite of the fact that they're all off earning astoundingly prestigious degrees or making remarkable contributions to society (I know you're reading this, and you know it's true), not one of them is even slightly condescending or disdainful of my current status. I never expected that they would be, but it's comforting to know that the old support system has withstood at least these past few months.

I was obliged to answer the dreaded questions a few dozen times. It occurred to me too late that I should've had a cover story prepared. A few ideas were floated (marine biologist, "imports/exports," industrial polishing), but none gained traction. Ultimately, there was really no need for a cover story. I told the truth to anyone who asked. Sometimes I'd get a pat on the shoulder and a word or two of encouragement. Mostly people just nodded politely, which is probably what they would have done if I told them I was at Columbia Law or Goldman Sachs or in training for a manned mission to Neptune.

I learned that there are even a few people from my graduating class who are just as unemployed as I am. The only difference between me and them, it seems, is that they're all wise enough to resist the urge to pour their frustrations and insecurities into an electronic journal that's accessible to the public.

48 states in 48 days

I've been fantasizing a lot lately. The more I think about working, and the harder I try to find jobs and get hired, the more I realize that there are a lot of things I'd rather be doing. Every couple of days, I'm struck with an off-the-wall idea for something to do that isn't what I'm doing right now. I've thought about the Peace Corps. I've thought about applying for a seasonal job at a ski resort. All sorts of things.

So far, the best idea I've had has been a seven-week comprehensive cross country road trip. One state per day. I'd probably start in Maine, head west through New Hampshire and Vermont, south into Massachusetts, then New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. I'd zig zag my way through the midwest on the way to the Pacific. After a trip down the west coast, I'd head back east through the southwest, the plains states and the southern states, and then north along the eastern seaboard and back home.

I've thought about the logistics, and I think it's totally doable. The only two obstacles I can think of are time/distance and cost. Cost is easy. If I gave myself a budget of $5000 (within my means, and a perfectly reasonable budget for almost two months), I'd have a little more than $100 per day. If I averaged one tank of gas per day ($35), $25 per day for food, and camped out at free or cheap campsites, I'd be within my budget with room to spare (right?). As for time/distance, I definitely think it can be done. I'd be willing to drive for ten hours a day, which is probably the most that would be necessary. Looking at the map, one of the longest distances would appear to be the length of Texas, and according to Google, that's only 800 miles or so. A long day's drive, to be sure, but then again it would probably be split over two days, as long as I started the first day in New Mexico and ended the second day in Louisiana or Oklahoma.

Clearly, a lot of thought goes into these zany schemes. One could make the argument that my time would be better spent, oh, getting a job. But there's a certain escapism in this daydreaming, which has done a lot of the work of keeping me at least marginally sane recently. I'm endlessly frustrated with the state of my life these days, but I've always found purpose (and pleasure) in making plans and having ambitions. All the time I spend thinking about law school serves this same purpose. Setting goals, doing research, weighing options, making plans. That stuff I'm good at.

It's the actual doing that's the hard part.

I quit

I woke up at 11 today. I was up until 2:30 watching Celebrity Blackjack and (surprise) Next.

I did absolutely nothing yesterday. Aside from driving around town for two hours while my dad's cleaning lady was doing her thing at my house, I barely moved from the couch in the TV room. I think that fact needs to be added to the record since it got no mention in yesterday's gloomy little post. It actually took me two hours to write those three paragraphs. It's mostly the fault of the Laguna Beach finale...and whatever three shows came on after it. I disgust myself.

I've barely got the stamina to get out of bed anymore. Not that it would matter if I didn't. There's literally not a single person on the face of the planet who relies on me to do anything between the hours of 9 and 5. And there are only a handful of people (my parents, a few friends I see on the weekends) who notice my existence outside of that window. There's not a single task in the universe, vital or mundane, that depends on my doing it. The rest of the world is turning, but I'm standing (no, make that sitting) still.

The phrase that I've got on my mind this morning is "I quit." At first, I wasn't sure why I was thinking that. But now I've been chewing on it for a while, and like all good students of the English language I've looked up the precise definition(s) of the verb, and it seems to work.

As far as I can tell, the verb "to quit" has three intransitive definitions. ("Quit" is a transitive verb when it's followed by a noun or pronoun [a direct object], as in "to quit a job." Obviously, I've got nothing to quit, so the object-less intransitive definitions are what I'm after).

The first definition is a slap in the face: "to cease normal, expected or necessary action." I think Webster must have been sitting around and plotting against me when he wrote this 200 years ago. (What's it called when a person thinks that they are the center of the universe, and that natural and historical forces are conspiring to do harm to them? It's some sort of psychological disorder, I'm sure.) In any case, nothing I do is "normal," "expected" or "necessary," so that definition is out.

The second definition is more like a punch in the stomach: "to give up employment." Ha ha. Doesn't quite sound like quitting is something I'm in a position to be doing, yet, does it? Well...

The third definition is a home run. "To admit defeat: GIVE UP."

Consider it done.

The gathering storm

I should probably be looking forward to this coming weekend. It's the last football game of the season at the old alma mater (which is a pretty big deal). Almost all of my friends are going to be in town for the game, and many of them will be crashing at my place for the weekend. It'll be a chance for everyone to chill, reminisce, and catch up. Sounds pleasant enough. Unless you're miserable, self-conscious, self-loathing me.

Rather than getting excited about squeezing into a packed stadium for an afternoon of football, or looking forward to tossing back a few beers with the old crew, I'm mostly just dreading all of it. Most of the alumni in attendance this weekend will be returning in triumph, all proud and confident for having moved on to bigger and better things. Questions like "What are you doing?" or "Where are you living?" will be volleyed back and forth.

Now, I don't want to come across as excessively cynical here; I genuinely believe that the vast majority of the over-achievers I went to college with are modest and are sincerely interested in what their classmates are doing with their post-college lives. All the same, given the current status of my own post-college life (or lack thereof), I'd rather just avoid the inquiries, as well-intentioned as they are sure to be.

Word search

I think I've finally figured out what's going on here. I've been trying for some time to summon up from my clogged (and generally unimpressive) vocabulary the single word that defines the state that I'm currently in. This particular task has been fueled by my belief that being able to define my present predicament will (somehow) make it easier to overcome. Once the beast has a name, maybe it will be easier to kill it (you might say).

"Indecision" was a leading cadidate for a while. I've been doing an enormous amount of agonizing over what it is that I want to do with the rest of my existence. But so far I've been unable to pluck out, from the meager list of possibilities, anything that shouts "This is what you want to do!" But indecision lacks a certain quality, a certain verb-ness, that I think is essential. These past few months have been about more than just thought processes. They've been about action...or more accurately inaction, or non-action. They've been about running in place as fast as I can at the starting line of a race.

That's why I think "waiting," plain and simple, is the word I've been looking for. While it hasn't quite been on the tip of my toungue, it's been looking my squarely in the face. What I do now is wait. I wait for jobs that excite me to be posted. I wait to hear back from people I've sent my resume to. I wait for interviews. I wait for offers. I wait for lunchtime. I wait for the weekend to come. But, mostly, I wait for something to happen. Can't say what it is. A stroke of inspiration, a gut feeling, even some sort of [I can't believe I'm about to say this] sign.

I heard something funny on NPR today. It has nothing to do with me waiting for something to happen, I only bring it up because I think it's funny and I'm sick of thinking about (and writing about) how much of a bum I am right now. This comes from one of those Saturday afternoon comedy shows on NPR. The question being posed to the respondent was: "Now that the Kansas Board of Education has adopted a policy of addressing intelligent design in the public school science curriculum, what will they do next?"

Answer: "Kansas history courses will be required to teach an alternate ending to 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

I liked that.

No news is no news

It's getting harder to stay on point here.

I know there are a handful of people (or fewer) who've been disappointed with the dearth of posts in recent days. Maybe if I had a desk job and knew what it was like to be deprived of a formerly reliable source of internet-based procrastination, I'd be more dilligent.

I've been lax mostly because there hasn't really been anything to report. I'm still in a post-F* & W* state of mind. That interview (which will have taken place one week ago as of tomorrow) had a strange, inexplicable effect on me. It's hard to define. The best I can do is to say that it was both a major event and a non-event at the same time.

It was a major event in that it came out of nowhere, and was kind of a big deal because F* & W* is a national magazine. Also, it was the first time I'd heard anything from a job I'd applied to in almost a month. And, of course, my parents were really heavily invested in this one, for whatever reason. They were basically no-shows on the last two, but suddenly I've got an interview in Manhattan for a publication they recognize and I've got to wear a suit and study up on wine and get a royal send-off from the both of them at 6 in the morning.

But for all the hype, it ended up amounting to almost nothing. I'm still struggling to figure out how it went; I really feel like I'm missing something. It was just so short and perfunctory. I wasn't exaggerating when I clocked it at 20 minutes. Either the interview was just a formality, and I've automatically made it to the second round of interviews (doubtful), or (more likely) it was obvious that I wasn't cut out for the job within the first minute and they just thought it would be polite to chat me up for a little while longer.

I won't be upset when I don't get it. I just wish I wasn't so baffled by the whole thing.

So that's that.

Since all this job crap is so boring, I've been fighting off the urge to delve into other topics that have been on my mind:
-TV: Cool shows I've been watching (I've been experiencing something of an MTV renaissance thanks to the awesomely good shows "Laguna Beach" and "Next"), or shows that have been disappointments lately ("Desperate Housewives" and "Survivor" seem to have forgotten how to be good, and even "Meet the Press" has been a major let-down lately in spite of the fact that this has been about the busiest few months of national news I can remember).
-Politics: Yes, Democrats won both governors races that were held yesterday, but did anyone notice Texas's new, over-whelmingly approved state constitutional amendment? Or that the Supreme Court issued two unanimous rulings yesterday?
-Law school: Should I go? If so, where can get in?
-Blackjack: When should you stand on 16? Or split 2's, 3's and 6's?

I guess there's nothing stopping me from opining on all of those things. I was trying to avoid turning into one of these dweeby know-it-all blogger types. I only really feel justified in writing about subjects in which I have demonstrable expertise. There's no question that joblessness is my forte these days. Who gives a rat's ass what I think about culture or politics?

The answer, of course, is another question: Who gives a rat's ass what I think about my own unemployment?

Post-interview listlessness

Perhaps the uncharacteristic three-day gap between posts speaks for itself. I've found myself drained of motivation since my Thursday of much travel and not much interviewing. Looking back, I find my last entry to be totally inexplicable. I certainly had a trove of observations and reactions stored up in the wake of the interview, but most of them have faded at this point.

I feel as if I've lost the coherent narrative thread of this...whatever it is. (Blog? Journal? Complaint department?) At the beginning, I had so much pent-up energy and emotion that it was hard even to address just one theme at a time. After an initial (hopefully relevant, if slightly over-cooked) burst of productivity, I began to drift into the dangerous waters of confessional purgation (see "Catharsis!" and "And the crazy letters continue..."). I'm especially embarrassed at having posted/sent those two letters. A rational person would have drafted those manifestos in a benign environment like this one, reflected on them for a day or two, and then decided whether or not to dispatch them into the real world; my process was precisely the opposite, less the period of reflection. Time and again, I've allowed impulse to override good judgement. And as a result I feel pretty pathetic.

Not surprisingly, my search for a job has taken a parallel course to my chronicle of it. It's random, haphazard, and generally misguided. I've already lost the hard edge that I thought I'd gained a few weeks ago. My resolve lasted all of a few days. Sure, Thursday's lackluster interview took a lot of the wind out of my sails, and maybe I'll rebound in a few days. But I feel like I'm at a loss now more than ever. I suspect that there are a hundred jobs out there that I could apply to on Monday, interview for on Wednesday, be offered on Friday, and start on the following Monday. But either I can't find them or, more ominously, I won't. I found reasons not to take the two jobs I've been offered, and I can't say I was that excited about the G* P* job, or that I am that excited about the F* & W* job. I'm not really excited about doing anything. Well, I'm pretty excited about applying to law school, but I can't say I'm as enthusiastic about actually attending. I'd say the most appealing thing I can think of to do right now would be to just get in the car and drive, Kerouac-style. But even then, I've never actually read "On The Road." See? Pathetic.

Interview in NYC

After an almost completely sleepless night, I got out of bed at 6 this morning and got ready for my interview at F* & W*. In lieu of a narrative description, here's a timeline of the day's events.

6:02-6:22 - Showered, Shaved, Dressed, etc.
6:23 - Left home for train station
6:43-6:52 - Arrived at train station; parked; bought ticket, New Yorker, and bottle of water
6:55 - Boarded train bound for Grand Central Station
7:13 - Train departed from New Haven
8:59 - Train arrived in New York
9:00-9:20 - Walked from Grand Central to magazine's office on 6th Avenue
9:25 - Arrived at F* & W* office on the 9th floor
9:30 - Greeted by the W* E* of the magazine, proceeded to her office
9:31-9:41 - Interviewed with W* E* (shared stories of our past lives in Toledo)
9:42-9:52 - Interviewed with S* E* (grudgingly admitted that I have little to no knowledge of wine, but was enthusiastic about learning)
9:55 - Shown the door
10:10 - Arrived at Grand Central, bought and ate a muffin
10:46 - Boarded train bound for New Haven
11:07 - Train departed from New York
12:55 - Train arrived in New Haven

I'm not really sure why I just wrote out that timeline. I think I was intending to make the point that I made a 7 hour excursion for a 21 minute interview.

I'm not sure how I feel about my chances for this job. It seemed like they were looking for someone with a broad base of knowledge about wine. And I'm not sure I did a stellar job of convincing them that I am a fast learner.

One interesting note: I gave the W* E* a few writing samples, and among them was a movie review I'd written. We began talking about my interest in film, and she casually mentioned a conversation that she'd had with her "friend P* T*" (the movie critic for R* S*). I'm currently mentally drafting an email in which I thank her for considering me for the position at F* & W*, tell her I understand that I'm just not a good fit, and ask her if she wouldn't mind showing my movie review to Mr. T*.

F* & W*

Out of the blue yesterday, I received an email saying that I'd been selected to interview for a job at "F&W."

I was caught completely off guard, and it took a bit of sleuthing to figure out what, exactly, F&W was. Turns out (as you've probably gathered from my spoiler of a title) that it stands for Food & Wine, which is a monthly magazine based in New York City. I submitted an application to an editorial assistant position at F* & W* late last week, according to my Gmail archives. But it was one of a flurry of electronic applications I sent out last week--the kind where all you're supposed to do is fill out their online form and upload your resume. I'd gotten so used to flinging such applications out into the abyss and never even hearing the thunk of them landing anywhere that the email from L* at F&W was doubly shocking. Someone had actually read my application, and they actually wanted to interview me. Weird.

I'll admit, I've been engaging a few getting-my-hopes-up type activities, like browsing apartment listings in New York and pricing TiVo subscriptions. My time would probably be better spent getting amped up about F* & W*. (Hardly a lyrical title, right?) The magazine seems to handle its subject matter in a sophisticated way. And apparently a large portion of the job's responsibilities are handling the logistics of in house wine tastings. But stil...I can't say I'm super jazzed. Am I insane? What the hell is wrong with me? At the first sign of a bite, it's like I suddenly want to let the line go slack.

[11/6: I've been gripped by paranoia that a certain pair of prying eyes might gain access to this site, so I've deleted a couple of sensitive paragraphs from this space]

The interview is on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. in Manhattan. Yipes.