New Faces, New Places, New Blog

I wanted to take my blog in a different direction, and since wordpress won’t let you change your URL, I had to get a new one.  I’ll still be keeping track of books there, but it’ll be a lot of musings about what I see on my commute to/from work.  Hope you’ll follow me!

http://thesubwaydiaries.wordpress.com

“For Hire” No More.

It’s official, I am joining the ranks of the working world on August 17th.  Until I have started working and know that there is no turning back, I won’t say where I’m working, or what I’m doing, but I’m going to have to go about changing the title of my blog, aren’t I?

Looking back, I suppose my adventures as an unemployed college graduate weren’t so bad, I am one of the lucky ones.  I’m incredibly excited to start working, to start making money, and to start making my place in the world.  I do have a list of things I want to get done in my free time, though, as I do believe it’s true that a busy person gets the most done because they handle their free time with efficiency.

I have some ideas for a novel brewing in the recesses of my brain, and I also want to get my Marist scrapbook done, but I guess those will be going on the backburner, to be done after I get home from the office.

That sounds weird in the greatest way possible.

Also, I don’t have a sidebar to plug blogs, but if you haven’t already, check out my friend Kait’s blog [here].  She’s got some great insight, and also has some escapades that you will want to live through vicariously.

There is a difference between iced coffee and cold, watery coffee.

I was in the city today for a 2nd round interview, which I think went pretty well.  I did have a bit of free time to wander around the Manhattan Mall and the nearby vicinity, and I decided to partake in my favorite sport: peoplewatching.  In all actuality, I have a lot of favorite sports, but being un-athletic, that is one of the few I’m good at.

A lot of people don’t like the city, it’s too big or loud or full of rude people.  But I love it for the consistency.  You always know that something new and different will be happening, and even though those new things may change, the fact that they’ll happen remains the same.  There will always be a tourist waiting on the corner of an empty street, refusing to cross until the walk light says to.  There will always be someone flagging a taxi down and nearly being run over in the process.  There will always be a girl in a beautiful dress stopped on the side of the street fixing her shoes because they are giving her blisters (this girl may or may not be me on occasion).

Sameness takes a personal turn in the entryway to Penn Station between 7th and 8th, the LIRR terminal on one side and Amtrak on the other.  There will always be that tiny Dunkin Donuts with no line, ready to hand me my iced coffee.  There will always be four other Dunkin Donuts within a two block radius, but that is always mine.

Until today, when I wandered over and saw it was Tim Horton’s.

I was devastated.  I know I need to move on.  I can try Tim Horton’s (which I did today), or I can walk half a block to another Dunkin Donuts, but it won’t be mine.  Today my iced coffee was a little watery, and not very cold.  My bagel was toasted, but wasn’t crispy.  They could have been made by the same person I ordered from last week, but it wasn’t the same.

I always pride myself on being accepting of change, but this time it’s going to take me a bit longer to get used to.  RIP Dunkin Donuts behind Madison Square Garden, you will be greatly missed.

Go ahead, ask me what a jeroboam is.

I just finished reading The Billionaire’s Vinegar, and now I feel like a wine expert well beyond my means.  The whole book is about the vintage wine and the people that buy them.  Apparently in the wine world, a “double magnum” isn’t dirty, it’s just a wine bottle that holds four times the standard amount of wine.  Mmm.  It is fascinating how much money people will spend on a single bottle of wine.  I don’t care how old or delicious it is, spending more than $10,000 on one bottle?  Excessive.  Of course, that’s coming from someone that doesn’t have a job.  I’m sure, if you worked it out, the ratio of my savings to the amount of money I’ve spent on $15 bottles is probably similar to the ratio of billions to $10,000 bottles for all of these upper crust-ies.  But I digress.

The book did further my desires to open a wine shop, one day.  Somewhere.  Anywhere.  I think it would be fun to schedule tastings and classes and really, it would just be great to talk about wine all day.  But I would need money for rent, and for inventory, and for advertising.  Oh, it always comes back to money.  Sigh.

I did have another interview yesterday, so hopefully I hear back positively from one (or both) of them.  There is a slight chance that in the next few weeks, “Cindie for Hire” will no longer be for hire and I’ll have to come up with a new name.

Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?

Due to circumstances I’d rather not go into, my life has been quite the crazy mess over the past week.  I haven’t really done anything constructive, hence the fact that this entry’s main topic is something rather mundane: Lucky Charms.

More specifically, the evolution of one’s method of eating Lucky Charms.  It was something I pondered this morning as I ate…Lucky Charms.  I rarely ate sugary cereal in college but now that I’m home and it’s in the pantry, I find myself reaching for it every once in awhile.  It is interesting, really, that when you are little, you always want to save all of the marshmallows for the end.  You’ll eat the plain, boring cereal first without any marshmallows in it, just to get that extra sugar jolt at the end.  Really, everyone did it.  That’s why the plain Alphabits never sold as much as the marshmallow Alphabits.  Plain Alphabits was like getting Lucky Charms and eating all of the boring cereal, but never having the satisfaction of knowing it’s leading to the marshmallows at the end.

When you get older, though, you realize that you’d rather enjoy the marshmallows evenly throughout.  It gives each bite a little bit of crunch and a little bit of sweet.  The sugar rush at the end isn’t nearly as satisfying when you aren’t six.  Perhaps it all represents the fact that in many careers, Monday through Friday is monotonous and work-oriented.  It’s the plain cereal.  So you really want to keep that excitement built up for the marshmallows, if you’re going to have something good, you may as well wait until the weekend to enjoy it.  And since you can’t control your work schedule or the fact that the weekends are only two days long, you can take it upon yourself to level the playing field in elements you can control.  Namely your cereal-to-marshmallow ratio.

Or perhaps it’s a load of bull and people still eat the marshmallows at the end anyway.

I have a job interview this week.  So as to not jinx myself, I will not disclose when, where, or with whom.  But I’d be pretty darn excited if it goes well.

Our vocabulary goes downhill after we take the SATs.

Annoying.

In my quest to find a job, I have come up with a long list of other interesting things I should pursue as a career. The next thing on my list? Teach people how to expand their use of adjectives beyond the word “annoying”.

That teacher is annoying.
I can’t go to that store anymore, it’s annoying.
Isn’t it annoying when it rains so often?

If we all had to pay the annoying police five cents every time we said annoying, it would get, well…annoying. Or would it get to be redundant? I honestly think that the word “annoying” can be replaced by a million other words, all of which we do use in everyday speech, if we just thought about the characteristics of the subject that make it so “annoying”.

“That teacher is annoying.” Why? What makes him/her so annoying? Well, she always takes points off of my papers because I don’t share the same viewpoint as her. Well, then she’s…unfair, isn’t she? Or biased? Unfair or biased would be much clearer in a RateMyProfessor.com review.

“I don’t go to that store anymore, it’s annoying.” Why? Because they never have the products that they advertise on sale in stock. The store isn’t just annoying, it’s unreliable.

I could go on, but I think I made my point. My sister is the worst offender, and she knows it, but she also has a strong enough vocabulary that she could replace every single one of her “annoying” utterances with something more descriptive.

And scene. Apologies for going all “writer” on you.

Also, I appreciate that a lot of the traffic coming to my blog is a result of googling something along the lines of “pantyhose mosquitos”. This probably isn’t the site those people are looking for, but I think it’s amusing.

In case you were wondering, I used the word annoying 16 times in this post.

I don’t know why Guy Fieri calls his son “Boo”.

I want to do a lot of things. I want to be one of the people that works at the Food Network making nondescript labels for the products that the television personalities use. Imagine being the person that makes Giada’s extra virgin olive oil label. Or being able to say, when Paula Deen opens two sticks of butter to make cookies, “I designed that butter exterior”. Maybe that’s really not that exciting though, and my excessive viewing of the Food Network in the last week or so is making me think it’s more fun than it actually is.

I want to just sit in the park and take pictures, which I’ve already discussed a little bit on here. I would need a camera with more gadgets, but it would be nice. Of course, there are probably a billion and a half people in the world that want to make a living taking pictures of things, and it doesn’t happen. But do they also want to compile it into a nice coffee table book? Only three quarters of a billion people would want to do that, probably.

I want to write a book. I have the time, I know I can do it thanks to previous National Novel Writing Month accomplishments. But of course, when I have the time and motivation, the ideas that pop into my head are so awful that I can’t fathom writing five words about them, much less thousands upon thousands. The next great American novel will not be penned by yours truly, I know that, but it’s on the to-do list anyhow.

I want to travel. Now is the time to do that too. But funnily enough, free time to travel often goes hand in hand with not having the job or money to do so. What a vicious cycle that is. You have a job and money but are too busy to go anywhere, until you don’t have a job and have time, but then you can’t afford to pay the $15 fee for having a suitcase that needs to go in the cargo hold.

I applied to another job at Madison Square Garden today, and I’m hoping I fare better with this application than I did with the last one. My illusions of receiving priority due to being a previous intern were shot to hell last time around, but now that I’ve graduated I think I have better leverage. To be read as: I can start tomorrow. Even if it’s a holiday weekend. So many feelings go through my mind when I send in an application. It feels good to be doing something, to be working towards getting a job. But it feels terrible to know that it’s probably yet another resume and cover letter that will go unread. I’ll try to stick with the positive things, though. So I’m off to send out a hard copy and hope for the best.

“I don’t think Mariano Rivera has ever had an RBI before.”

I said that after Rivera walked with the bases loaded to put the Yankees up 4-2 yesterday, which eventually became the final score. As a third generation Mets fan, I was very excited to be at my first Mets/Yankees game, and my first game at CitiField.

I was (w)right, Mariano Rivera had never had an RBI before. Technically he didn’t “bat” the run in, he just walked, but I guess it counts. What I didn’t know was that I witnessed his 500th save, which I suppose is a pretty big deal. I would have rather seen a Mets win and skipped history for a day.

I’ve come to realize that even though I don’t have a “weekend” per se, since I’m not really doing anything, I still enjoy them much better than the weekdays. On weekends, a lot of people aren’t working and I don’t feel left out or unaccomplished by having a 7 day weekend every week. But the job hunt must go on. Technically I take a break on weekends from job hunting, so I guess that’s kind of a weekend, if you consider the hunt a full time job. Which I do.

I took this picture at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens this past weekend, when the sun finally decided to come out and stay out. Within walking distance, student discounts and beautiful flowers? Sounds like a good break from job hunting to me.

Even with a sewing machine, I’d be a disaster of a seamstress.

I finished reading Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace today, and since I’ve already got another four books in the queue, I figured it would be good to keep track of how much I read during my sad period of unemployment. The book was written in the 1990’s, but takes place in 19th century Canada, and reading those sorts of books always makes me wonder about how the role of women has evolved so far. Here I am, in 2009, looking for a job out of both necessity and of a desire to be independent. In Grace, young girls had jobs as servants until they earned enough money, found a husband to support them, and lived the rest of their lives giving other young girls orders until those girls earned enough money, etc. The ones that broke the cycle were either shamed mistresses or prostitutes. Skills that were valued were needlework and the ability to keep quiet and smile when men entered the house. Today, we go to college, learn all sorts of things, and who knows what skills we will ultimately need in our jobs. Whatever the case may be, my needlepoint skills aren’t up to snuff so hopefully my other talents will be put to use. It’s amazing what 150 years and a progressive women’s movement can do. But I digress.

I’ve gotten into the habit of setting little goals for myself, just to make every day seem productive in one way or another. It’s good because it keeps me focused and from reverting into a sloth, but it’s not what I want to be doing. A month ago today I graduated, and before that I would be running around between clubs, work, homework, and classes. Now, my day consists of goals like “I will apply to two jobs”, “I will get outside and walk 3 miles”, or “I will get another page of my scrapbook done”. They’re goals, sure, but they aren’t leading to anything. I long for the day where my goals include getting projects done, acing a presentation, or finishing a task before a meeting or deadline. I’m sure once I’m employed I’ll be longing for a break from all of the work that being a real, employed adult requires, but for now, there is nothing I’d rather be doing.

Even I can run laps around a baseball diamond.

I keep coming up with ideas for things I’d rather do than have a regular, 9-5 job. Today I was wandering around Prospect Park, and there were so many interesting people there. I wanted to whip out my camera, take some pictures, crash James Cannavino Library and do some research, and put together a coffee table book about the park. There were cute old men sitting on a bench talking, dads running with their children in strollers (which looks like a lot of fun for the little kids), and a man jogging with his dog around one of the baseball diamonds. And all of this was just in a the 20 minutes it took me to make my first lap around the fields. I practically wrote the photo release forms I would need mentally. “Hello, I took your picture for a book that will seen by (most likely) 0 people, but I need your approval to publish your likeness anyway…”

One thing I did notice though, was a group of boys playing baseball. They were probably in 4th or 5th grade, and at first I thought to myself “that’s great, they’re outside taking in nature instead of sitting in front of their computers”. At the time, I was also outside taking in nature instead of sitting in front of my computer. The little culturally diverse diamond would make the United Nations proud too. So I sat and people watched for a little while.

And then they opened their mouths. I think what came out of them would make a sailor blush.

You don’t need to remind me that harsh language is used by little kids, way back in the day I was in elementary school too. I’ve been known to drop a choice word here or there, even then. But holy moly, you would have thought these kids were trying out for a role in a stage version of The Departed…as the Mark Wahlberg character. Alas, it is not my place to tell someone how to raise their kids, and I feel like an old lady thinking about how sad it is that these kids were raised to think that using that language is okay when there are even smaller children and their own guardians within hearing range.

At any rate, I suppose I would need to spend more time in the park if I was going to write that book, and I’d have to listen to more 10 year olds cursing out their friends for dropping fly balls. But who am I kidding, I would turn down any literary dreams in a second for a job that actually pays me on a weekly basis. Heck, I’ll even take bi-weekly. And so off I go on the job hunt once again.