No longer being considered...

So I had a phone interview while I was in Iowa. I was told via email that they had so many applicants they had decided to first do a phone interview, a preliminary one. I was sitting alone in the kitchen at my parent's house - my laptop open to the publisher's web page (just in case) and my moleskine open to the first page of six on which I wrote out answers to questions I thought I would be asked (remember, this is like my ninth or tenth interview at a publishing house so I know how these things go)- waiting for my phone to ring.

I had anticipated almost every question - from what's your greatest weakness (the worst possible interview question, in fact, if anyone wants to share how they answer this one positively I'm interested...) to why are you the person we should hire. They even threw me a curve ball question asking me to explain how I saw journalism (my minor) as correlating with working in publicity.

I won't bore you with all my answers but I basically nailed it - I was on top of my interviewee game that morning. They told me they'd be in touch in a few days and let me know if they'd like to see me for an in-person interview. I sent the two women who interviewed me thank you emails in less than an hour and tried to enjoy the weekend.

A few days later, my last day in Iowa, I was out shopping with my Mom. She took me to J.C. Penny's because I needed some blouses that weren't white (that's the only color I have and when I pair it with my black skirt I look like a caterer) for future interviews.

My mom and I then went to Borders because we'd decided that we would read Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin together. My Mom was off looking around for the new Nora Roberts or something and I was sitting on the floor reading Mary Gaitskill's short story "Secretary" when my phone starting playing its tune. I answered it.

--Hello.
--Hi Karen. It's __________ calling from ___________ in regards to the available publicity assistant position.
--Oh yes. Thank you for calling. How are you?
--Fine thanks. I just wanted to call and let you know that you are no longer being considered for the position.
--Oh.
(I swallowed and noticed that my throat had suddenly became very dry.)
--OK.

Then they said something about how they'll keep my resume on file in case something else comes up, which is just a formality. I really don't know if they actually follow through on that, and if they do I have never gotten an interview in that way.

So there I am sitting in the middle of a bookstore on the floor, still clutching my phone. Mary Gaitskill is still next to me, opened and by my knee. I don't want to read the story any more. The thought of reading anything is entirely repulsive. I hate books at this moment and yet I am surrounded by them on all sides. It feels as if the books are engulfing me and I suddenly feel very claustrophobic. But the phone call has also dumb-founded me into an immobile stupor. So I just sit there on the thin-carpeted floor. I stare straight ahead, my eyes fixated on one of the book shelves that is about five feet in front of me. I tell myself not to start looking at the spines for publisher logos, but I can't help it. I tilt my head to the right and my eyes focus. I see one - it's the three little FSG fish. That one's OK. FSG is OK. They're OK because they've never said they don't want me.

Then my eyes twitch and start to water and I get mad at myself for crying about a job. I leave Gaitskill open on the floor and grab Atwood. I hold back my tears by not breathing for the two minutes my Mom and I wait in line to pay. As we walked through the parking lot though she sensed something had happened and guessed perfectly. And I started crying again.

We drove in silence for a few minutes. Then she turns to me and says, "You want a new I-pod? We can go get you a new I-pod."

I humored her by walking into Best Buy, but I didn't want a new I-pod. Something just felt wrong about accepting an I-pod when I don't even know if I will be able to pay my student loan bill and rent this month. I want to tell my Mom to just give me the couple hundred bucks so I can pay my bills but this makes me start to cry again so instead I mumble, "let's just go" and we walk back towards the front of the store. My eyes were all glossy when we passed the three "security" guys in blue polos who guard the door and spout out effusive greetings and salutations to every customer who comes and goes. I had completely avoided eye contact with them when I'd entered the store, although they had still shouted at me: "How are you doing today ma'am!?" But now, as I pass, they say nothing. My wet face and somber expression has caused them confusion and baffled them into silence. This makes me somewhat happy again.

I am OK now. Accepted it. Just another one to add to the tally. There have been more positive updates as well - my resume was forwarded to an editor at a different publishing house and a woman in the HR department at another publishing house is sending my resume to two recruiters for two different editorial assistant positions. Hopefully an interview will follow one of these three in the the next week.

Until then - no money, lots of problems. All of them money-related.

Job Hurt #2:

Today was a bit more productive, at least in the sense of possibly, one day, becoming employed.

Found a promising job posting on a promising publisher's website this morning. After two days of absolutely no posts fitting my interests or skills, this was a hopeful sight. (All the other sites on my daily quest through the void of several barren career websites were without relevant postings.)

The good thing about this publisher is that I know someone who currently works for them -- and he's been there for sometime. I believe he is a senior editor, or something similar. I just sent in my resume and cover letter online and also emailed this guy to see if he can do any internal networking for me.

I keep telling myself that the autumn will prove better for finding a job. That in the summer some person or another is always off on vacation and it isn't until everyone is back in the office in the fall, sitting around the table in the conference room with papers all a scatter, that someone will raise their head and say, "Hey we really need some assistant in here doing this menial, side stuff." And then there I will be, shooting up the elevator all aglow from my visible aura of delight and fruitfulness, and I will float into the office projecting a soothing shadow on all those I pass as I deliver mail, make copies, and edit manuscripts in lightning speed and rework paragraphs until they are so neat and clean that they squeak. And before I know it I will have my own assistants and interns. Also, I think everyone will fall in love with me.

So not only will I have my own assistants and interns, but hot dog, I'll have my very own husband too.

Funemployed...

Funemployment isn't what it sounds like. It's not always fun and when it is fun that joy arrives only after long, laborious bouts of thinking and trying to come up with creative ways to have a good time while spending almost no money. (Because when those who are unemployed go out and have fun whilst spending money an inevitable and immense guilt trails the fun, hanging on to fun's ankle like a relentless toddler, ultimately destroying the memory of past fun and the chance for future fun.)

Therefore finding and thinking of ways to have fun for no or little money is essential to the unemployed's survival.

Sometimes the planning of how to avoid spending money will lead to a dark, dead end and you will wind up sitting alone in your apartment dwelling on how shitty it is that you are unemployed. You will think of all the work you've done over the past few years and how it seems to have gotten you nowhere beyond this simple apartment with its four messy roommates and its puddle on the kitchen floor that reappears every morning because the landlord is too lazy to fix it. This type of thinking often uses up all your will power and physical energy rendering you unable to think creatively or to be productive. Thus, one is left smoking cigarette butts that have grown stale from sitting in the ash tray for many days or flossing through the internet incessantly -- growing bored with anything after ten seconds.

Other times though, you think of an excellent idea and set off in pursuit of making that idea a reality. You suddenly have the will to put a stop to playing in your pity hole of despair and to get out and do something mildly adventurous. So this morning, after waking and doing my routine internet check of every god damn editorial/publishing-based career website and finding nothing new, I set off south on my bike, through Brooklyn, to this place:



The public pool in Red Hook.

On my bike ride down though I became nervous. The sky was very gray when I'd left, but weather.com (not that I should ever believe them) said it wouldn't rain until 4pm. I would be so very disappointed if I ended up biking down to Red Hook to swim and found the pool closed on account of the rain. But it couldn't be closed -- it was hardly raining now as I pedaled, the sky was just spitting really, only a light skin-tapping rain that kept me refreshed as I rode deeper into Brooklyn, clearing the residential brownstones of Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy and entering the more industrious neighborhoods that run along 3rd Ave before turning and biking over the Gowanus Canal, under the BQE, and into Red Hook.

My first glance of the pool is as I pass by on my bike, through its steel-bared fence. I'm still trying to watch the road in front of me but am also desperately curious to see if I can spot a moving person inside rippling waters as I bike by. But the pool was empty and all the lifeguards had orange lycra pants on with matching ponchos. My heart began to slowly sink a little, but jumped up as I rounded the corner and saw a few bicycles chained to the railing in front of the pool building. A hopeful sign.

I locked my bike up and pretended as if there weren't any external circumstances that could derail my plan - the weather was perfect and I was going to go swimming in a public pool, my right as a citizen of New York. I walked up the stairs to the building slowly, looking furtively around careful not to make eye contact with any of the park personnel. If I acknowledged their presence I'd give them the opportunity to tell me the pool was closed and I couldn't swim. Inside the building I had to act like I knew where I was going, though I'd never been there before. Directly in front of the door where I'd walked in was a woman behind a make-shift desk made out of two folding tables. I had to immediately decide then which way to turn, right or left. I went right, and I went right like I'd gone right every day of my life. I was feeling proud of myself for deceiving the woman behind the desk (who likely didn't even look up from her cell phone's key pad as I passed)when I lifted my eyes to the wall ahead of me and saw "MEN". Shit, I'd gone the wrong way. But I just kept walking for some reason, straight forward towards the men's locker room, like I would rather enter the wrong locker room than turn around and walk by that woman again. So I continued -- head held high but nervous on the inside as every step got me closer to the threshold of sticky balls and sweaty ass cracks -- when the wall to my left snaked off into a deep curve that revealed a "WO" turning MEN into WOMEN. Ha, I'd been right all along.

Inside the locker room there were a few older women with wrinkly thighs and backs mottled with age-spots, some younger women with even younger children. I kept feeling like there were men in the room for some reason, and though I already had my suit on underneath my clothes, I felt odd undressing in this space. And the presence of these people who had doubtlessly just finished swimming didn't so anything to dissipate my worry that I, myself, may not be able to swim because of the rain.

I left the locker room, towel around my waist and goggles anxiously bouncing in my hand and walked down the length of the pool toward the end, where to my relief, I saw a few swimmers moving slowly back and forth through the water, lifting their arms up and down.

It was still raining at the same pace it had been all morning, a delicate mist that either disappeared or simply went unnoticed as soon as I jumped into the pool. It wasn't until I took that first stroke that I was able to fully realize that my trip to Red Hook wasn't made in vain. I swam joyously for about an hour until a sharp pain on the left side of my chest caused me to stop in fear that I was having a terrible heart attack. I am OK now though, back at home, where one of my four roommates calmed me by saying that the pain is muscular and it's not what I think it is. And in the kitchen I found that someone had mopped up the puddle on the floor for once rather than leaving the tile grout to soak it up. But, come tomorrow, the puddle will again slip out from underneath the fridge, my roommates will again be messy, and I will still be unemployed.

Job Hurt #1:

I've decided, after a little positive feedback from some friends, to begin chronicling my quest for an entry-level editorial assistant position in NYC. Now to those unfamiliar with this specific industry, it may sound like a silly goal and you may be asking yourself - how hard could it be to find such a job?

Excruciatingly difficult is the answer. And that is for the EA jobs at academic and commercial fiction publishers - the vaunted ones (more literary or journalistic periodicals and publishers) are entirely impossible to land. A friend of mine who is in the same hard position as me once compared the pursuit for an editorial assistant job in NYC to attempting to break into Hollywood. This is an accurate comparison - only with the latter you get showered with luxuries and your sole responsibility is to act, with the former you get put in a small cubicle space with a pile of dozens of manuscripts (about 500 pages each) and told to have reader's reports on all of them by the end of the day. And that is what I desperately wish to be doing for the next twenty years of my life.

Every weekday morning for the past five months I awake and immediately search several websites which I have bookmarked in a folder called 'to find a job...'. Today I did just that and there is nothing. No job postings anywhere for editorial assistants. NY Magazine is hiring interns, but do I really want to be an intern again? I have had four internships. No, I do not want to be an intern again.
So I will spend the day reading, perhaps at a park that I will ride to on my bike, and then I will go to my restaurant job in the evening and serve people who can afford to spend thirty dollars on three glasses of wine and pretend I'm happy to be helping them relax when I'm actually frantically doing math in my head to find out if I will make enough to pay my student loan bill this month. (They make you pay those even if you are unemployed.)

Just the other day in fact, a young woman in a pretty white-and-black dress sat down at a table and slung a black tote with the Penguin logo on the back of her chair. I immediately wanted to find a way to start a conversation with her, but it seemed completely inappropriate, and unless she worked in HR it wouldn't do me any good as I already know lots of people at Penguin.

In fact, I know lots of people at several places (the plus side of having had four internships) and still, I have no job. I have dozens of contacts and plenty of experience and there is no job on my horizon. Welcome to Hollywood.

AM Randomness Pt. 4

I just had two nap dreams:

The first one was about my friend David. He lived in a very large (made me say How can you afford this?) and modern (couches jutting out from the walls to which they were attached) apartment. Colors: black, white, gray, and red. Mostly black.

David and I were with a friend - a woman. I can't recall now who it was but it was someone older and motherly. Where as David and I were a bit more rambunctious and emotionally driven. The three of us went to a party - in a different modern apartment with the exact same layout as David's. There were different colors though (dominant color green), and more people. And the specific books on the bookshelf that lined the curved wall of the circular living room were different as well. David's books consisted mostly of computer design books.

David and I soon ran through and out of the party - both of us immediately desiring to have sex with one another. We rushed home, leaving our friend (I asked David, What about ________? And he said, she'll be fine. Which was true, she was adult and unaffected by or lacked sexual inclinations) condensed in the middle of a group of social doers, cloistered away from the dips and chips and salsas she likely wanted - for though she lacked a sexual drive, her hunger drive was always in full force.

Then the dream shifted to panoramic view, and I watched from the side as David and I climbed, ran, dropped, jumped and slid our way through the large multi/split-level apartment to the door where we sprinted home and kissed and ultimately had sex.

The second part of my dream opened in the apartment on E 98th Street where I babysit. The parents had just arrived back home and were paying me and I was going on my way - down the street, to the left, through the park - over and down its ribbon path that curved frequent and often, not for any reason, say to avoid a tree, but just arbitrarily, and because it could - a joke on the pedestrian who blindly follows the path laid rather than cut through between the tree trunks and bushes.

Night was falling, and darkness was beginning to suffuse its way down and seep through the gaps between the trees. It was now that I realized I had forgotten my bag at the house where I babysit - containing my phone, apartment keys, and worst of all my cigarettes, for I never wanted it known that I smoked.

So I turned around and raced back to the apartment. Running back took an awfully long time as it was suddenly very hard to run for some reason, like my body had become lame and it felt like my legs were flailing through mud, or that I was sinking in quicksand, or it was as if the landscape had begun to slant upward creating a steep incline.

I ran past a bus stop where a woman of significant girth was seemingly waiting for the crosstown and as I passed she grabbed me by the ankle and her grip was so strong that as she raised the fist which was clenching my ankle the rest of my body levitated above the ground, as if my insides (my spine especially) were metal rods or made of concrete. It was now pitch black (no street lights in this Gotham-like version of NYC) and I was blindly grasping my hands forward - attempting to grab something with which I could pull on to wrest my ankle from her hand - opening and closing my fists with haste but catching nothing but air. Suddenly I can see through the dark (eye adjustment perhaps?) and a police officer is standing a few feet behind me. Help. I yell. Help.

The police woman runs over and kicks the fat woman in the pelvis with her shoes and helps me down. I run after the police woman like she's my mother and I've just had a terrible nightmare, wanting her to hold me and tell me it's OK. So I sprint up to her from behind bawling and grab on to her forearm tightly with both my hands, asking, begging her to just walk me home. No. Please. No. Just through the park then. No. She is entirely unaffected by my wet face and teary eyes. (I should mention the cop is played by Zoe Saldana - the hot bad ass in Star Trek and Center Stage.)

So eventually I just take it upon myself to follow her like a puppy and watch her as she maneuvers her way through a shitty, crime-ridden city. She never acknowledges me or turns around to see how I'm doing or even to check if I'm still there.

Eventually we walk by my apartment and I cheerfully yell Thanks and Goodbye to her as she continues to walk and I stop to go inside. She wordlessly walks away.