Someone sent me an email recently that told me it’s been a month since I updated this blog. Oops.
What has been going on with me? Well, I am still unemployed, but I am not dead (which should not be confused with not employed and undead). In the past month, I’ve come within tasting distance of a really great job in Chicago—so close, in fact, that I was actually ready to start calling landlords to set up appointments for viewing apartments—and of course, I didn’t get it. How could I not have gotten the job? I was perfectly qualified, I had a great interview and got along really well with the hiring managers, they started calling my references, and then I got rejected. I spent the first hour after I got my rejection letter feeling positively murderous, then a few days being indignant, and a few days being bitter. Luckily, my phases for dealing with rejection are fairly consistent, and after the bitterness comes the productivity. Which probably explains why I excelled with my previous employer.
So now I’m back at the drawing board and feeling really good about things again. This week I’ve gotten over ten applications out there for jobs that are mostly in Chicago. I almost applied for a job here in St. Louis, but part of the application required a writing sample—I went to look for my papers for E Comp from my freshman year of college and realized I didn’t have any (and literally everything else I wrote in college was in French. Well, everything that wasn’t a personal essay, anyway.), I know I’ve got a lot of work to do and I’m going to have to keep my nose to the grindstone and keep putting myself out there—the MO state legislature is not going to extend my unemployment benefits until I die—but I am confident that I’m going to find something soon. And it’ll be fantastic!
The main problem I’ve been running into this week is that I’m not sure what I want to do with my life—at least not professionally. I’ve been trolling all kinds of employment websites for administrative jobs, assistant jobs, jobs at universities, jobs with non-profits, jobs with symphony orchestras and opera companies, and jobs that involve actually using my French degree (I realized how much I miss using my French when Zazie shuffled her way from my iPod to my eardrums the other day). It was pretty frustrating this week: seemed that no jobs for someone with my vague qualifications were out there anymore. And then I found my calling: a job as a bilingual French/English video game tester. Brilliant.
Too bad it’s in Washington State and I would have to buy a car. Details details. I’d still move for it.
Anyway, my project for this weekend is to think about what I really want from a job. I want to be able to answer the following question: “If you could have any job in the world right now, what would you want it to be?” And I want to be able to come up with something better than “Heiress.” For so many reasons.
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