Sisyphus goes to Granville
When I got home from my job interview this past Friday, I stopped home for a few minutes to check email and get changed before going back out. While online, I noticed a comment on the blog from my old pal Liz. It said, "Not trying to burst your bubble, but Granville is one of the most depressing places in the universe--Don't Move There."
Having just returned from Granville, I was in a position to either object or concur with Liz's analysis. I wholeheartedly concur.
Granville, New York, and its environs, the home of the Whitehall Times and the Granville Daily Sentinel, is the last stop on a long trip to nowhere. I'd heard about towns like this one: one main street lined with boarded up shops and seedy bars, a flashing yellow light marking the sole intersection. I used to think that places like this only existed in South Dakota or Oklahoma, but since Friday my Yankee snobbishness has been deflated a bit.
It took about three and a half hours to traverse the 180 miles between New Haven and Granville. My route took me along I-91 north to I-90, and then westward toward Lee, Massachusetts. From there I followed US-7 (passing The Mount along the way) through Pittsfield and Williamstown, Mass. and Bennington, Vermont. In the outlet store mecca of Manchester, Vt., I turned onto US-30 which led me to the New York border near the southern tip of Lake Champlain and Granville. I think it was somewhere along that last stretch of Route 30 that I realized the hopelessness and pointlessness of coming all this way for an interview. As pleasant as it was to be snaking through a Green Mounain valley in the grey afternoon light, passing silos and clusters of cows and three-wheeled pickup trucks, I knew that this wasn't where it was going to happen. I tried to console myself, saying inwardly, "Well, at least you'll be getting another interview under your belt," but I wasn't really encouraged. Any last vestige of optimism vanished when I crossed the New York border into Granville and passed the first of many sagging clapboard houses with porches littered with old mattresses, plastic tricycles and perhaps a toothless grandparent in a lawn chair.
The cruel irony of the situation is that the actual interview went very well and I could probably have the job if I wanted it. At one point, the editor of the papers asked me what I had been doing since I graduated, and I was obliged to tell him that I've been looking for a job and not doing much else. To that he said, "Well, looking at your resume and reading your writing samples, I'm surprised you haven't found anything yet." It's the story of my life. There's no overlap between the jobs that I can get and the jobs that I want. It's not a Ven diagram, it's two totally separate circles.
After the 30-minute interview, I left Granville. It was 4:21, already getting on toward dusk. It was a long ride home, and a dark one.
Please forgive me for the title of this post. But by this point it should be obvious that I'm compelled to resort to awkwardly pretentious allusion whenever I don't have anything creative to say.
Having just returned from Granville, I was in a position to either object or concur with Liz's analysis. I wholeheartedly concur.
Granville, New York, and its environs, the home of the Whitehall Times and the Granville Daily Sentinel, is the last stop on a long trip to nowhere. I'd heard about towns like this one: one main street lined with boarded up shops and seedy bars, a flashing yellow light marking the sole intersection. I used to think that places like this only existed in South Dakota or Oklahoma, but since Friday my Yankee snobbishness has been deflated a bit.
It took about three and a half hours to traverse the 180 miles between New Haven and Granville. My route took me along I-91 north to I-90, and then westward toward Lee, Massachusetts. From there I followed US-7 (passing The Mount along the way) through Pittsfield and Williamstown, Mass. and Bennington, Vermont. In the outlet store mecca of Manchester, Vt., I turned onto US-30 which led me to the New York border near the southern tip of Lake Champlain and Granville. I think it was somewhere along that last stretch of Route 30 that I realized the hopelessness and pointlessness of coming all this way for an interview. As pleasant as it was to be snaking through a Green Mounain valley in the grey afternoon light, passing silos and clusters of cows and three-wheeled pickup trucks, I knew that this wasn't where it was going to happen. I tried to console myself, saying inwardly, "Well, at least you'll be getting another interview under your belt," but I wasn't really encouraged. Any last vestige of optimism vanished when I crossed the New York border into Granville and passed the first of many sagging clapboard houses with porches littered with old mattresses, plastic tricycles and perhaps a toothless grandparent in a lawn chair.
The cruel irony of the situation is that the actual interview went very well and I could probably have the job if I wanted it. At one point, the editor of the papers asked me what I had been doing since I graduated, and I was obliged to tell him that I've been looking for a job and not doing much else. To that he said, "Well, looking at your resume and reading your writing samples, I'm surprised you haven't found anything yet." It's the story of my life. There's no overlap between the jobs that I can get and the jobs that I want. It's not a Ven diagram, it's two totally separate circles.
After the 30-minute interview, I left Granville. It was 4:21, already getting on toward dusk. It was a long ride home, and a dark one.
Please forgive me for the title of this post. But by this point it should be obvious that I'm compelled to resort to awkwardly pretentious allusion whenever I don't have anything creative to say.
posted by temporarily unemployed at 16:35
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