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Saturday, November 7th, 2009
(comment on this) Friday, November 6th, 2009
pervymalfoy
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12:41p
The job a million girls would kill for
Prologue: This is my revamped effort to chronicle the tumultuous senior year at uni, although I have failed to do so for my epic year abroad in Japan (though, it shall live on in photographic infamy) Inspired by the idea of NaBloWriMo (National Blog Writing Month)-- pointing to the evolving ways by which we now disseminate and absorb information-- I will attempt to do weekly updates for this entire year.
Updates will also continue with frequency at my fooding site: http://www.slavetoappetite.wordpress.com
This is it-- half-way through my first semester of my last year at Boston College. Taking inventory of my last 3 years and 2 months as an undergraduate student:
1 major, 1 minor, 36 courses, 6 outstanding, 4 in progress with 3 left to complete major, 1 new language studied (French,) 1 year abroad in Japan, 5 jobs & internships held, 1 food critic gig for the Heights, 2 Harry Potter movie releases, 4 European and 5 Asian Countries visited, 3 new blogs created, 2 abandoned, 2 thriving, 2 relationships lasting a year or more, 2 relationships lasting 2 months or less, 2 many one-night stands, 2 many concerts gone to, 2.5 times in trouble with the law, 1 breakdown, 1.5 current crushes, 2 interviews, 0 job/job offers, 6 months til' graduation!!
I am scared, but excited about the future-- though I may not be qualified to be, considering it's November, and I have only gone on 2 interviews and have not received any notice about a job offer yet. At first I was applying to various firms in the financial markets, you know, the usual-- the companies where you only need to say the name and not a whole lot more needs to be said-- black suits, black cards, massive bonuses, expense accounts, 100 hour work-weeks, rigid hierarchies and all that great stuff.
I had an interview with Bloomberg (and two tall, white male representatives, the more submissive of the two with a sexy irish accent) which my clear lack of enthusiasm for the subject at hand, financial markets, probably reeked from down the corridor in the waiting room. The first time I took a critical look at the NASDAQ, NIKKEI, DOW JONES graph? Embarrassing, don't ask. Spent the night before interview half-heartedly reading the Time's 10 paragraph summary of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Realize too belatedly that I didn't want to devote my limited waking hours to crunching numbers on excel spreadsheets and pretending to be knowledgable about the P/E ratio of Walmart.
Would have gotten a huge kick out of it if I had somehow wrangled an offer, but I am glad that someone more deserving (gets boners about oil prices and market rallies, and who will gladly crawl into bed with Ben Bernanke,) will get the chance to work for them. It's "a job a million girls [and boys] would kill for, but not me."
I feel such a burden lifted off my shoulders now that the image of me being chained to my desk for the rest of my 20s has been erased from my life's protential trajectory. Disaster averted. This is the part where the future moves away from the scary to the exciting.
Recently, I had an interview with the Hillstone restaurant group. I had gone to the career fair to look at potential employers to drop my resume off at, and in a turn of events, I ventured upstairs for the food, only to have a picture of a pair of well-weathered hands cupping the whitest, most symmetrical cauliflower distract me from my mission. A restaurant group? Here? Where there isn't a hospitality or culinary program? So I woo-ed them, wrote an article about Houston's, maintained correspondence with the HR recruiter, and finally!, received an opportunity to interview despite my unrelated Economics major and my resume an arid desert of restaurant experience. For all they know, I am cooking with my TI-84+ silver edition and a laptop.
I think it was the many e-novellas I wrote to Emily, the recruiter, about my passion for food and unwavering confidence towards this notion that I can somehow rise to the ranks of Thomas Keller and Jean-Georges Vongerichten in restauranteuring someday. (Digression: Did you know I won my 3rd grade class spelling bee because I was able to spell "restaurant" correctly? Fate.) And they thought, give this naive little girl a chance.
In the gloomy November rain, I climbed into the T, rode an hour into the city and waited in one of the booths, where there were people happily eating interpretive sushi, steaks, and drinking their premium gin and tonics all around me, while I waited, sitting awkwardly by myself, with sweaty palms to talk to an HR manager I have never met before. Inevitably the interview itself, involved alot of defending my decision to apply to a restaurant management position despite not having any prior background in hospitality. But the question that caught me slightly off-guard (at least in terms of preventing the situation from being reduced to incoherent sputters in impossible attempts to verbalize emotions that have no words) was: Why turn it into a career? Why not just keep it as a hobby?
I wanted to shout: Because it is NOT a hobby. It is love, and my relationship to this subject would be deemed marriage by common law in the eyes of God were it a human entity. And by extension, I love places that house food, I love introducing new food to people's palates, I love entering a restaurant I have never been to or showing a friend an old favorite, I love creating dishes in the rare occasion that I do; I love it all. It's something that I care so wholly about, that to limit it to "just a hobby" is not even a choice.
I am unsure whether or not I managed to convince my interviewer of this. I think I might've sputtered one or two more cerebral reasons, and then bawled: Love meeeeeee.
But whatever the outcome, this interview nonetheless served as a learning experience,and I am going to try to contact a few alumnis in the food & restaurant industries to see what options there are in getting involved in this. As if my father could sense something was going on, he called that very night and I had a nice chit-chat with him-- he is the master of networking. Papa is aggressive. He is in talks with some chefs to get some kind of culinary class deal going, as well as helping host some bigwigs in the restaurant industry in February, where if it comes through, I get to schmooze with all these people in places where I want to go. I will try to get in contact with a few friends here who are working at country clubs, and somehow get some experience through that, because it is an obvious barrier to getting these jobs.
Hitting up the gym and then tapas with Victoria tonight! I don't know what Bruni was going on about attention span, but tapas are GREAT. People order a variety anyway, without regard for portion sizes. Can get 12-different dishes but don't have to eat as much as one would at a 12-course full-portioned Chinese dining meal, therefore preventing self from being the 1 in the 1 in 4 obese people in 'merica.
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(2 comments | comment on this) Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
fierywaif
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12:20a
I typed up the parts of the novel I'm writing that I can actually use, and the official word count is 3,361. Including stuff I've written but haven't typed up or trashed it's probably like 6,000 words. I'm aiming for 90,000 so this is a small drop but still good.
This month is Nanowrimo (National Book Writing Month) so it'll be interesting to see how much I have at the end of the month. I'm averaging 1,500 words per day these past couple of days and I decided not to throw anything out at the moment, just keep everything until my first rewrite, so... by my calculation I should be able to finish it in 58 days? That doesn't include more plotting that I have to do. Right now maybe 2/5 of the novel still needs fleshing out.
I know nobody really reads LJ at the moment but I'm just writing this out for my own benefit too. I'm excited, but a lot of work ahead.
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(6 comments | comment on this) Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
(comment on this) Monday, November 2nd, 2009
fierywaif
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8:24p
Well, on the one hand got rejected for a job at the Princeton Review today, and also am sick with a slight cold.
But on the bright side, Meryl Streep is hosting a premiere at NYU tomorrow and I got dibs to write an article on it for the Washington Square News! Very excited about this, it'll be my first published article. Last year I got an assignment, did intensive interviews etc, but then missed my deadline and then my editor never contacted me back about it so I ended up never giving it in. Hopefully this one will work out better (well I know they'll definitely contact me back about the article at least).
Mad Men final episode on Sunday! This season went by too fast. I'm kind of annoyed at all the plotlines left underdeveloped and I don't think they'll be able to resolve everything in a single episode.
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(6 comments | comment on this) Friday, October 30th, 2009
12012fan
[ rebirthreborn ]
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4:35p
Request
-Delete if not allowed-
I'm looking for Shinki Graduation & Departure 2007 featuring 12012, Phantasmagoria & Vidoll. I'd prefer in .avi format and from mediafire (where possible).
Thank you very much!
-Delete if not allowed-
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(comment on this) Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
(comment on this)
(2 comments | comment on this) Monday, October 26th, 2009
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