Optimist Under Siege

So Eric and I were woken up last night at about 2:00 am by a car alarm, which proceeded to keep ringing in a wonderfully piercing manner for about 30 minutes. I love living in the city, but this is one of the disadvantages. Now, we don’t currently own a car, and so we know it wasn’t our car making that disharmonious noise. And I’m sure everyone within a few city blocks was probably thinking, That can’t actually be MY car. It must be someone else’s. And so no one checked and the alarm continued to ring. This was probably exacerbated by the fact that in the city you often end up having to park fairly far away from where you live. The person who owned the car probably didn’t even wake up! ARGH!

Well, looking back it’s actually kind of funny, but I’m not sure my sleep-deprived husband thinks so!

It’s amazing to me how people behave in interviews. It’s not that I’m perfect at it, and I certainly understand that people are nervous, but there are some basic things which I’m always surprised to see. I have recently been interviewing at work and maybe I just have overly high expectations, but here are few things to avoid from my perspective.

Don’t chew gum! Seriously, do you think I want you blowing bubbles while I ask about your career ambitions? Yuck! Next, you must actually know something about the company and/or position you’re applying for. I love it when interviewees tell me they want the job because they’ve always desired to work in publishing. Hmmm…maybe you should try a publishing company then! Have a question or two to ask during the interview. It just doesn’t look professional or interesting if you answer, “Do you have any questions,” with a blank look and silence. And please, don’t ask anyone but the HR person questions about how much vacation you will receive. Why not worry about what you will do when you’re working rather than already anticipating taking time off?

Oh, one of my favorites, please don’t answer a question about solving a serious or difficult problem with a cute anecdote about fixing the copier (ie. removing the paper jam), unless of course you’re applying to work at Kinkos. I’m not impressed! One girl I interviewed used the copier fixing story about five times in a 30 minute interview. Wow! And don’t even get me started on misspelled words on resumes. For goodness sake, use spell check at least (and better yet have someone intelligent read it over before submitting). And then there was the guy who misspelled, “yess” on his application. Yess? Really?

After writing about all this, it makes me wonder why I’m not Queen of the world yet! (And yes, I said queen, not president…in case you were paying attention!) I’ll just have to continue to bide my time on that one!

Spring has finally sprung in Boston. Well, it’s sprung for one day only, but I’ll take whatever I can get! The temperature went up to the late 50’s today. For those of you who don’t live in New England, yes, that’s warm. Not really warm enough for the spring skirt and strappy, pink sandles I wore today, but my optimistic heart felt the need to take whatever advantage it could.

It’s funny to me how perception of the temperature varies so widely. Although there does seem to be a pretty clear gender divide. When my husband and I woke up this morning he commented that he had woken up around midnight because he was so hot. I, on the other hand, had to pull up an extra blanket around 4:00 am. Huh. Of course, my waking up might have been related to Eric turning off the heat when he woke up at midnight. It may be 55 degrees and officially spring in Boston, but I’m not sure I’m ready to turn the heat off yet. I’ll be watching Eric more closely tonight. Don’t mess with my heat!

Hey, one more thought on spring which is supposed to be the season of love and rebirth (especially love!)… A friend of mine is single and looking for a significant other. She has found a couple of good leads after looking for online dating site advice on http://www.betteronlinedatingsite.com. I just thought I’d throw that out there for anyone who’s interested! Cheers!

I had the greatest conversation with someone at work today. She called to ask me if my team could get a given project done faster. Not having my schedule in front of me I asked if she knew when it was supposed to be finished. She said no. Well, I asked, when do you need it to be finished. I don’t know…Faster, she says. Faster than WHAT?! If you don’t even know when the project is supposed to be done in the first place, what utter uselessness to ask us to pick up the pace. Maybe we were scheduled to be finished today…do you really need that extra 10 minutes?! Point of fact, we are actually scheduled to complete the project Thursday. To appease her we are aiming for Wednesday instead. Wahoo…24 hours earlier. The face of business will surely change forever! At least it makes a funny story…

Public transportation is a wonderful thing, but it can be so frustrating! Speaking as someone who lives in downtown Boston and sold her car, and who never actually enjoyed driving in the first place, public transportation is the answer to my prayers. And I must say, Boston has a decent public transit system. It’s nothing like Europe and many Bostonians gripe about it, but it’s pretty good.

But, man, there are definitely times when it fails you! Yesterday my husband, Eric, and I went out to Brighton (the part with no train accessibilty!) to visit some friends. We had a fun time and left their place at around 11:30 pm, plenty of time considering that the Boston T-system does not shut down until 1:00 am. Unfortunately it was cold (the calendar can call it spring, but I’m not believing it!) and it was snowing, and we waited for at least half an hour for a bus to come pick us up. Then we made it to the T (Boston’s subway system) and had to wait for the train. At least in that case we were inside protected from the snow (although it still wasn’t warm!). Then, we got into Park Street station and had to wait for a new train.

By the time we arrived at our apartment we had spent well over an hour in transit, and the trip itself is probably no more than 4 miles total. If we had known it was all going to take so long we would have sprung for a cab! Now it’s Sunday and Eric is cranky because he didn’t sleep enough (an occurrence which will someday warrant its own blog entry. My husband must sleep well, and for goodness sake make sure to keep him fed!). Oh, the perils of public transportation!

After yesterday’s rant on my movie deprivation, I feel the need to justify myself by saying that I also enjoying reading a good book and doing other things! In fact, I just finished reading a really interesting book called Ella Minnow Pea (say it out loud a couple of times and you’ll notice something neat!). Without ruining it for you, the premise is that there is a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina which evolved its own society separate from the U.S. It’s a highly developed linguistic community founded by a much revered linguist, Nollop, who coined a sentence of only 36 characters containing all 26 letters of the alphabet. This famous sentence graces the front of the Nollopian town hall, and one day the letters start to fall. In keeping with Nollop’s supposed postmortem wishes, the town council sees fit to ban the letters. As the letters are banned from the island, so too are they banned from the book. I thought it would be a tedious book to get through, but it was actually quite engrossing. I would recommend it to anyone who appreciates unique use of language. As a French major in college and grad school, I find language fascinating. That’s part of my own dorkiness, or rather nerdiness. I believe there is a clearly discernable difference between the two.

Let me explain. I consider my husband a dork, while I myself am a self-professed nerd. In my husband’s case, dorkiness is defined by his enjoyment of role-playing games and LARPing (if you don’t know what this is, count yourself lucky! ;-)), predilection for science-fiction and fantasy in books/movies, desire to watch anime, and occasional use of plumbing supplies to fight with his friends (otherwise known as boffer fighting).

In my case, I am a nerd in the school-nerd sense. Back in school I was the one who got A+ grades. My husband is very smart and did well in school, but was more likely to do just enough to get an A- and that’s all (a conscious choice). I was the one who did all my reading, studied, and put my heart and soul into school. I wasn’t annoying about it, not the stereotypical teacher’s pet brown-nose you see in high school movies, but a nerd none-the-less. In my post school life this translates in several ways. First, the difficult to suppress but always present desire to go back to school. I already went back to school once since college to get my Master’s in French literature (I had originally wanted to be a college professor). The reason I don’t go back to school again is that I promised myself I would only do that if I had a very clear concrete end goal. If I want to become a lawyer, I can go to law school, but not if I’m not sure I want to be a lawyer (for example)!

The other ways my nerdiness still shines through are in my love of languages (French, English, anything) and reading. I have tried to address the back-to-school instinct by taking German and Spanish adult-education classes. Additionally, I’m the first one to sign up for extra “training” of any kind at work, and I was the only one of my team members who knew what, “ladies in waiting,” were when someone asked. I also tend to be an excellent speller, a sure sign of a school nerd. So that is how I define the difference between my husband the dork and myself the nerd. We’re a match made in non-prom king and non-prom queen heaven! (Hey, we know we’re cool. We don’t need a plastic crown and scepter to prove that! Once I move into my tower room at Chambord castle it will be clear anyway!)

At work today I had what is probably for most people a pretty normal, frequently engaged in, conversation pertaining to movies we’ve seen. It started because one of my coworkers had heard that Pan’s Labyrinth had been listed somewhere as one of the 10 best movie of all time and I don’t agree. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed the movie. It was bit graphic at times (to the point that both myself and one of my guy friends noticed that we were both putting our hands in front of our faces to avoid looking at anything too graphic!), but overall was imaginative and fun to watch. I do not believe, however, that it was an extraordinary movie in league with others like Shawshank Redemption or Labyrinth. Oh come on! Maybe the movie with David Bowie and a bunch of muppets isn’t high art, but it was a fabulous movie. Someday, I tell you, I will be the Goblin Queen (forget about saving my baby brother!). This will probably happen directly after I move into the middle tower of my new castle, Chambord, in France. I continue to tell my friends I will live there someday (I’m not sure they believe me!).

As I was saying, I just don’t think Pan’s Labyrinth is one for the ages. While imaginative, it was pretty predictable. And furthermore, I just didn’t have that ineffable impression when leaving the movie that wow, that was a GREAT movie. It was okay. The reason I brought it up in the first place is partly to explain the strange position I find myself in regarding movie watching.

It was not in any way strange to be chatting about movies at work, but I was definitely the one who had seen the fewest movies mentioned and I’ll tell you why. My husband is a distinct anomaly: He does not like watching movies. Now, I don’t mean that he doesn’t like to go to the movie theater, or hates visiting the video store. He just does not enjoy sitting and watching a movie, pure and simple. I could certainly understand it if he only liked watching action flicks or comedies or even anime (which he will sometimes watch). Most people have certain genre preferences, but that is not the case here.

By contrast, I am one of those people who likes watching pretty much any movie. I have my own favorites…comedies, drama, sci-fi/fantasy, and yes, the occasional chick flick, but any movie will do in a pinch. I don’t necessarily feel the need to look up which movies are playing if I want to go to the theater. I just go and pick something once I get there. The result of all this is that I very rarely get the opportunity to see movies. It’s sad, but true. Weep for me!

Last night I convinced my husband and three of our friends to go to a local trivia night out in Brighton (technically part of Boston, but when we’re going there Eric likes to joke that we’re visiting the “suburbs.” It may sound pretty snooty- and funny considering we’ve only lived in downtown Boston for a few months- but it’s not really meant to be snooty, more a jibe to our friends who live there, and I just think it’s funny). Phew, that was a long parenthetical notion. Past English teachers are cringing!

Anyway, it’s surprisingly difficult to convince people to go to trivia night and I don’t really understand why. I’m particularly confused about it considering that I am awful at trivia games, but I still enjoy playing them. I just don’t have enough useless trivia running through my brain. I do get excited whenever there are literature or eighties movie/music categories, but those just don’t seem to come up on a regular basis! Trivia nights seem to me a perfect combination of organized activity, beer, and hanging out with friends.

Last night’s trivia went much better than usual. We ended up coming in 4th (one point away from 3rd) out of 16 teams. The big difference was that our friend, Curt, was there and he actually knows something about baseball. Generally sports is one of our big downfalls! We’re not especially good on popular culture who-divorced-who kind of stuff either. We live for the literature (me) and science (my husband) questions! Even losing at trivia night is fun though. Hopefully last night re-ignited the trivia night flame. Only time will tell.

I talked a lot about career stuff in my last post and, as today is Sunday, it’s still very much on my mind. I am currently experiencing the “it’s Sunday and I really don’t want to work tomorrow” phenomenon. Now, you might argue that this feeling isn’t actually worthy of being called a phenomenon. Even people who love their jobs aren’t thinking Sunday night, “Gee, I’m so glad to get to go back to work tomorrow!” As a side note, there have been times when my husband has expressed this sentiment. What a (lucky) weirdo!

Anyway, let me explain this phenomenon further. It’s not just a matter of dreading the start of the workweek. Rather it’s the end of a complete cycle of changing opinions surrounding my attitude toward my current employment. Here’s approximately what the weekly cycle looks like. On my way to work on Monday I consider quitting my job. It’s not like I would do that with no second thought or on the spur of the moment, but that doesn’t mean I can’t roll the idea around in my mind. I often purchase coffee as a way to bribe myself to go, sometimes at Starbucks (a latte with some sugar to improve my mood) or sometimes I’ll purchase flavored French vanilla coffee at the local place near work. It is definitely, as Office Space has so well taught us, a serious case of the Mondays.

By Tuesday, I’m feeling a bit better. I’ve gotten over the initial employment nausea and life seems a little brighter. I start to think that maybe my job is okay and, assuming I’m able to leave work at a reasonable hour, I get excited again about continuing my life during the week. Even though I’m working I can still go out for drinks or dinner with friends or my husband. I could even see a movie or attend a local trivia night. Life does not end just because the weekend is over.

Wednesday, traditionally thought of as hump day, sees my good mood spring forth in a more pronounced way. By the end of the day there are only two work nights left. My job is actually pretty cool. The stress is invigorating and I’m a successful business woman. Yeah for me!

My husband usually goes out for drinks on Thursday with some work friends, and I will often join him. It makes Thursday seem like the start of the weekend. Sure, it’s not Friday, but the weekend’s almost here. We may not party like it’s 1999 (when we were both still in college), but we’ll have a couple of drinks, laugh, and be social. We’re winning at the game of life.

Friday, well, isn’t that enough said?! Friday, I love my job; I love my life; I don’t even mind when it’s winter in Boston and freezing out. Life is good! Saturday is pretty much linked to Friday’s phase of thinking. I don’t have to work today or the next day. I can love my job at a safe distance.

Then, there’s Sunday. It starts out okay, but as the hours tick away the anxiety of having to work tomorrow sets in again. And here I am back to the beginning of the vicious cycle. Sigh.

Okay, so some of you may be thinking, Damn, just suck it up. Everybody works; Deal with it! And you know what, I agree with you, but that doesn’t really alter the emotional rollercoaster of my week. The funny thing is that I’m an optimist about 99.9% of the time. Anyway, thanks for listening (or, um, reading) and, as I described, I’ll be more upbeat tomorrow night!

Looking back at my first couple of blog entries I realize that I am sounding a bit on the one-dimensional side. There is more to me than just my husband. On the other hand, man is it fun to complain about him! Some of you out there reading this must understand that! That being said, let me tell you a little more about myself.

I’m 27, married for one year now, and still trying to feel out whether or not I’ve found the correct career. I am a quintessential example of that 21st century quarter-life crisis trend. Many of my peers and I are still searching for our paths. I remember back in high school that the teachers used to tell you, don’t worry if you don’t know what you want to major in during college. There’s plenty of time to make that decision. Just find a college where you feel comfortable, focus on doing well, and over time you will naturally veer toward certain interests, a given major, and ultimately a career choice. That was how the procrastination tactics and, “don’t worry about it yet,” strategies started.

Then, in your first year of college, you receive the same reassurance. You don’t need to decide on a major until the end of your sophomore year. Just take some classes, explore your interests, and maybe take care of a few general education requirements. By the time the middle of sophomore year rolls around you’ll have your major. Don’t worry about it. You have plenty of time. Well, for some of us, we chose a major under protest, because we had to. I chose French because I enjoyed my French classes on literature, plays, popular culture (ie. comic books and stuff- and who can NOT like studying comic books!). I also chose anthropology because I find studying people fascinating. Now what kind of career can you pursue with a major in anthropology and no interest in doing fieldwork in remote villages? How about a major in French with no desire to teach? Here’s where the next sage reassurance and delaying tactic comes up. It doesn’t really matter what you major in. You can major in political science and still go to Med school (provided you take a couple of science classes along the way). You can major in English and still go to law school. Heck, you can double major in French and anthropology and become a high-powered business woman, or join a non-profit and save the world, or become a world-famous chef, or a super hero! So never fear! Just continue to excel in college and by the time you graduate, you’ll know. Don’t worry about it.

So then senior year sneaks up on you before you know it and your peers start applying for jobs. Oh crap, you still don’t know what career is destined for you, but that’s okay. No one really sticks with their first job anyway, they tell you. Just find someplace to start your post-college career life and go from there. So I did. I didn’t particularly like my first job as an illustrious Media Researcher (capital letters showing the importance of the title!), but it wasn’t terrible. I had a pleasant work environment even though the content of my job had some similarities with cold calling (ugh!).

And where did I go from there? I continued to follow the path of many a recent college grad and decided to go back to school! Hello academia, I can’t wait to see you again! I figured I would run back to the fold and become a French professor. Now that makes sense for someone who majored in French! Well, two years and one Master’s later, I decided that studying some obscure 19th century French poetry was not what I wished to do for the rest of my life.

Since then I have been a French teacher (in college and high school), a Starbucks barista and supervisor (Email me all your coffee questions!), and an account manager in the printing/direct mail industry. I think I’ll leave the details of these for another day. More details to come in tomorrow’s blog…Stay tuned!