This is a tl;dr that covers employment opportunities, bras, and friendship. Read or scroll.
I’m flying out to NYC at the end of the month for at least three weeks, two of which I’m going to use to prepare for my big interview. I need all that time to prepare for what could possibly be a minefield and I need to be prepared 110%. I don’t think I ever mentioned it on here but I have virtually no friends in Los Angeles that went to school with me nor do they have jobs that are remotely similar to what I want to do. It’s no offense to them but they can’t help me prepare for interviews or develop strategies to get these jobs that I want. But I do have friends in NYC that have mid to senior level management jobs in public service and know how these things work.
I had actually interviewed for this job last year and obviously did not get it. It went to someone else and then a few weeks ago, my old boss notified me that the person they hired left and the position was open again. Because the interview was so awkward I decided to not give it another go. But then the executive director called me a few days later to ask if I was still interested. Apparently I was the number two choice the last go around, but the other person was already in NYC and I was still here in Los Angeles. She didn’t work out and now I’m presumably the prime candidate.
Both times we spoke she never asked about my prior experience, which I found odd, but then again, it’s all laid out in my resume, as well as in the cover letter where you basically discuss how your experience relates to and qualifies you for the job. She is looking for someone motivated and driven. Someone that she won’t have to tell what to do all the time. So I’m taking what I know about her organization’s strategy to - well I don’t want to discuss it here - but the position is basically organizing what will become a national coalition to change a very particular area of policy - and I have to prepare to discuss project challenges and constraints, developing project plans, overcoming project obstacles, organizational politics, professionalism, work ethic, decision making, competence. And I have to get her to like me, as a person. Because you can’t work with people that you don’t like. This is going to be rough. Interviews are my greatest weakness. But this is the closest I’ve come to being employed in a very long time.
I felt really good after we spoke on Monday. I decided to fix some of my broken possessions. I went to get the light switch on my vanity mirror replaced and then I took my bras to the tailors. After my lightning speed weight gain last year the expanding width of my body broke through the delicate netting on the part of the straps that come together in the middle of the back. I could still wear them, and I did, but I felt sad every time I put one of them on or took them off because they reminded me of not just the weight gain, but the reason for the weight gain and that I could not afford new ones and then the reason why I couldn’t afford new ones. These are some pretty expensive bras, but unless I want to wack people in the face with them all day or shove them out of my way all the time or look good in a top, then I kept them. They also made me feel like I wasn’t wearing a bra, which is the best sort of bra there is, and that doesn’t come cheap. I felt like I deserved to have them fixed so I could feel good about putting them on and taking them off again. Just to explain how awesome my bras are, once, when I was in the emergency room (long story) the nurse had to give me an EKG, which is a test to see if something was wrong with my heart. She had to lift up my shirt to place something on my chest and when she looked down she said, “I know this is probably the most inappropriate thing to say right now, but I really like your bra!” So there.
One other thing I want to address here with respect to the myriad new experiences I have had since being unemployed, and that is the loss of friendship. The night before my interview I was told by a friend that a mutual friend of ours had recently run into a friend of mine who I had considered very close and whom I have known for so long. She hasn’t spoken to me since September, and I never understood why. No returned phone calls or texts. My friend asked her how I was doing since, last he knew, we were close friends. She told him that she stopped talking to me because I was too negative to be around.
I was really hurt. But I’ve also been sinking into a terrible depression for a very long time. It has been such a struggle to seek work in this economy and applying for jobs is a job unto itself. A soul crushing, maddening exercise in futility that rarely offers anything in return besides despair, self doubt, a frail ego. I never know when it will end. Scarier even, I would sometimes think that it would never end. That is a terrible place to be. But mostly I am just sad. I’m sure I must have said some negative things about my situation, but it never ever stopped me from trying to change it. I’m always applying, I’m sometimes interviewing, I’m trying desperately to cling to the thought that this will one day be all over. If my friendship was valuable to her she would have stuck around till the very end.
As Homer once said,”You don’t win friends with salad.” - from the Lisa is a Vegetarian episode
