I Want To Be A Consumer... But Not A Destroyer

Last week my graduate class had a special guest: one of the original founders of our theatre department.

Prior to his lecture, he wanted to get to know a bit about the current class of grad students, and went around to all of us asking about our backgrounds, what kind of theatre we liked, and where we hoped to direct after graduation.

I was the last to respond, hoping that he might skip me or something. After all, there were the other grad students saying things like "I'm going to start a theatre company in rural America and provide art to people who don't otherwise get that experience," or "I'm going to go to New York and take my chances in the big leagues!"

But he didn't skip me. "You're in your final semester? Congratulations! What do you plan to do after you graduate?"

I didn't let my voice waver for a minute. "I'm going to relocate to a major city, probably the DC area, and transfer my talents to a job in a private industry. I'd love something in PR or Events Management."

"Oh," he said. "Why not theatre?"

And then I got a little chicken. The truth is, I know enough about my skills to know that, while I am a competent director on my own merits, I am in no way set up for the competitive theatre world, nor do I want to spend my time working crap jobs and doing one of the "next step" options: assistant directing "for the experience," trying to start an unpaid theatre company, etc.

But I didn't say "I'm getting out of the theatre because I'm not good enough."

I said "I feel like I've become disconnected from the world, and I need to spend some time back in the world before I direct my next piece."

Which was probably an even dumber thing to say, because his next response was a very disappointed "Theatre... makes you feel disconnected?"

And as soon as he said it, I realized my response was truer than I realized. Theatre does make me feel disconnected from the world. It shouldn't, but it does. For three reasons:

1. The theatre artist's schedule is generally "work (or take/teach classes) all day, rehearse all night." The environment quickly becomes insular and restricting.

2. 90% of the plays performed in America, at both the educational and professional levels, are revivals of "classics." Often, directors attempt to spin these plays so that they have a contemporary relevance, but... putting Henry V in modern dress so people will be reminded of the Bush administration is barely groundbreaking. All of the productions of Henry V in the past eight years don't have the impact of a single showing of Fahrenheit 9/11.

3. Due to both schedule and monetary restrictions ('cause we don't make any money), the theatre artist cannot fully participate in the world around her.

And that's what I really want, and I didn't even realize it until I said it. I want to be a participant. I don't want to live like the former child Blue, reading her parents' copies of Newsweek to memorize details about film and literature (and yes, theatre) that she was thousands of miles too far away to ever see; nor do I want to live like starving artist Blue, in Minneapolis and surrounded by culture and opportunity but too underemployed to afford any of it.

I want to be a participant. More than that, I want to be a consumer. This isn't a popular statement to make, in lieu of environmental concerns, but I don't mean that I want to be wasteful, or consume beyond my needs.

I don't want a lot of shoes, but I want to be able to replace my shoes when there are holes in the soles. (While I had the foot cast on, I spent the entire six weeks wearing a shoe with a big hole in it because that was the only one which matched the sole height of the foot-cast boot.) I don't want to buy a lot of overpackaged, overprocessed food, but I do want to have money to socialize with friends in restaurants.

I want to take a yoga class. I want to find time to volunteer for something interesting and worthwhile (which I kind of did already -- just signed up for the American Democracy Project). If I make it to DC, I'm definitely finding some way of volunteering for Team Obama.

I also want to get a little closer to current technology. I have a secret fantasy of being able to become an early adopter, but I know it will take a few income-level jumps before I get to that stage. Right now I don't even have a phone that takes photographs. ^__^

Long story short, I want to be a participant in the world, not an observer. And theatre, as enjoyable as it is, makes me feel disconnected.

Which is strange, because historically theatre people are supposed to be the types who are engaged with the world and use their talents to spur social change. Did that stop happening, outside of theatre textbooks? Or... has it all been transferred to YouTube?

Notes from a DC Tour

Here are a few snapshots from my DC adventure:

* Going into an interview and hearing "You put on your resume that you type 100 wpm. Is that really the truth, or aren't you exaggerating a bit?" "I've been clocked at 100," I say with a smile. "Well," my interviewer tells me, "we'll give you a chance to prove it." After the test is over he comes back, astonished. "98 wpm and not a single mistake!"

* While I'm blitzing through the standard "prove you know Microsoft Office" tests, suddenly realizing that there are job interviews out there that don't require you to prove you can do a mail merge, and that later on this week, I'll be going on one of them. ^__^

* En route to the Apple Store, helping a group of very old, very giddy British ladies navigate the Metro -- from the turnstile to their eventual landing at Fashion Centre. No doubt they're here to take advantage of the falling dollar; one of them spends the entire Metro ride bursting out with little fits of happy "shopping, shopping, shopping!" Followed by "how many more stops?"

* Taking a breather at the Fashion Centre food court (to rest my foot) next to a group of young people involved somehow with our military (couldn't tell whether they had yet gone to Iraq, but they were clearly the troops in "Support our Troops"). They were talking about other young people in the military they knew who had committed suicide. They knew a lot of people who had committed suicide, mostly after returning from Iraq. "It's usually the really young ones who do it," one of them said. "The ones who haven't started families yet." It was a very sad conversation.

Off to DC!

I'm traveling today... it's time for the DC Interview Tour.

Interestingly, I was in DC this time last year, though for different reasons.

If anyone will be in the area and wants to get in touch, well... you know how to reach me.

TTYL!


(BTW -- sorry I haven't responded to some of the recent comments, esp. the ones from new commenters... will do so when I've got a smidge more time. ^__^)

Job Search $$$: Shall We Start Keeping A Running Total?

Over on the hilarious A Philosophy Job Market Blog (tagline: "It'd be funny if it were happening to someone else"), the group bloggers keep a running total of how much money they are spending on the act of job searching.

From the most recent money post:

Holy shit, the APA was expensive. Three nights in the hotel, even at the reduced grad student rate and splitting a room with one of my office mates, came to a $180 plus taxes. Transportation was $288. Add in internet service in my room at $10 a night, a couple of burritos at Chipotle and a sandwich from Potbelly, and I'm looking at a Visa total of about $544.60 for the conference.

So I've spent $995.39 on the job market this year. That's more than 5% of my gross annual income.

To amuse you all, I thought I might start a similar tally. Today, I spent $84 on interview clothing, and $200 on a round-trip plane ticket to DC.

Which is... over a third of my monthly income. Woo-hoo!

The Job Search Defined

I've been trying to define, for the past few months, what I am looking for in a job -- and in a job search. I had been floating around, trying things out, without a real plan of action.

Recently I had the chance to connect with a person who is going to talk with me about opportunities in DC and will undoubtedly give me some indispensable advice. But I couldn't meet with this person without a plan.

So I sat down, and thought it out, and then wrote it out -- and then revised it, until it made sense and felt like an achievable goal.

And here we go.

I'm not necessarily looking for a job in the fine arts, despite my degree. My goal is to find an admin or entry-level position in an organization which will allow me to use my analytical/writing skills. These seem to be the two biggest assets I have to offer an organization, and are also the parts of my current work which I find the most interesting.

With the entry-level job in hand, I'll begin to learn more about the internal structure of the organization, determine where my skill set could be most useful (and where I need to fill in the gaps in my education), and prepare myself for an eventual move up or a lateral move out.

Which means, at this point, that I'm not focusing on getting a job in a particular industry (e.g. "I want a career at a publishing house"). I'm looking at a variety of possibilities and am hoping to find an opportunity.

Part of the reason why I am looking at so many options (academic sector, government sector, private sector) is because, in truth, I don't really know what's out there -- in DC or anywhere else. My knowledge of the working world is framed by growing up in a tiny town.

That last part is especially true, and seems to be why I've found it so hard to name the type of job I might want. I just... don't know what kind of jobs there are, in a world larger than my hometown and larger than my university town.

But this goal seems workable, achievable, and promising. I like that.

It also -- perhaps most importantly -- gives me a logical next step.

Blue Dreams of Cherry Blossoms

Those of you following the blog know that I'm "on the market" this year; that I will need some kind of a job to follow my imminent graduation, and that I would prefer it to be a nice job, with things like sick days and health insurance, and possibilities for advancement.

Although my initial fear was that I was unqualified for anything except blogging, I have since created a pretty spiffy LinkedIn profile (wanna connect? email me at prettybluesalwar-at-gmail-dot-com), gotten my resume professionally analyzed at a Resume Rodeo, and crashed a rather famous national convention to talk to industry reps.

Long story short, I'm more qualified than I thought. Thank goodness.

What's the next step?

For me, it was deciding on where to live. I know that some people think the job should come first, but environment seemed to want to come first for me, for two reasons:

1. What I want is an opportunity rather than a specific position. My education thus far has been... um... liberal, and so I'm not lined up for any particular type of opening. Whatever job I get, I'm going to have to get through my communicative skills and my ability to sell myself. And, because I know so little about the professional work world (though I know a great deal about the service work world), I'm open to any opportunity that I can find.

2. I do not have the money, or the time, for a national job search. I have one spring break, which I know I'll have to spend in a single city, meeting and talking to as many people as possible. After graduation, I could temp in my sleepy university town, but my best bet would be to relocate to the city I visited over spring break, start temping there (at more prestigious companies, natch, with possible temp-to-perm options), and continue to meet people and apply for positions until I find something permanent.

So. Where, in the entire wide world, should I go? One friend suggested I go to Singapore; I've always wanted to live in Toronto; Chicago's just a train ride away.

I knew I didn't want to move to a city where I didn't have any connections or current friends. That's what I did after undergrad; moved to Minneapolis on the strength of an internship that fell through, and spent a year in the city with no social or professional connections. I'm smarter now. I know, for example, that the bigger your social network is, the more opportunities you have for both work and fun.

So I made a list of the places where I knew people. And then I thought about each of these places.

And then my heart did something kind of silly. It told me "Blue, the most exciting place in the world to be next year will be Washington, DC. Can you imagine, living at the heart of the place where a new president is going to be working to restore our country?"

I told my heart to be quiet for a moment, and reminded it about things like "no taxation without representation" and DC's expensivity and the fact that it might not be Obama, after all, doing the restoring (to which my heart responded "okay, but Hillary would be cool too!"), and that the idea of moving to a place because it was close to a bunch of exciting white buildings seemed... romantic, at best.

But my sister lives in DC, and I miss her.

So I called my sis to ask about life in DC, and what kind of opportunities would be available to me.

And she talked about what she was doing at work, and what her friends were doing, and then she said the sentence that clinched the deal: "... and with your skill set, we might be able to get you an entry-level job in a think tank."

Which she had to immediately follow up with "Hey! I said might!"

Long story short: after research, consideration, conversation, and a bit of idealistic romanticism (the heart wants what it wants, after all), I'm flying out to DC in two weeks to go on the "informational interview tour," to see what actually is available for a person with my resume, and whether or not I'll be moving there this summer.

Hold your thumbs for me.

Workend

Today I was in Borders, reading another "career guide" book (really, I should stop; they all say pretty much the same thing).

This one mentioned that to get ahead, a young go-getter should plan on spending most weekends in the office, secretly getting projects done ahead of schedule so that the boss can be pleasantly surprised "to find them in his mailbox on Monday morning."

Eew, I thought. That's vile. I want my weekends!

Then I thought about what I did this weekend. On Saturday, I spent about six hours working on an administrative project for the Shakespeare Festival, since it's part of my graduate assistantship which I really like ('cause it's administrative rather than "artsy-fartsy creative," although it also involves a lot of writing, which I love) and because I want to impress the pants off of the Artistic Director of the Festival (also my supervisor) so she will give me even better projects and, eventually, a good recommendation.

I got the project on Friday, and was advised to complete it within a week, but you betcha it's going to be on her desk Monday morning.

I guess I'm a "young go-getter" after all. And, I suppose, like the career book says: you work the hardest when you like the work, and when you have a good supervisor.

"Diverse and International Populations"

When I got my resume critiqued at the Resume Rodeo, my HR representative told me I should make one addition to my "statement of qualifications."

"You've been to India," she said. "So you need to promote that you're good with diversity. Diversity is a big thing right now."

She told me that I should add the sentence "experience working with diverse and international populations" to my statement of qualifications.

Which I did, because any piece of advice is worth taking at this point, and it now shows up both on my resume and my LinkedIn profile.

And it makes me feel really, really weird. It's like code for "this white person won't wig out around people who aren't like her."

The HR rep who gave that piece of advice falls under the category of "diverse and international" herself, so she's seemingly okay with it; and yet I have to wonder if she puts it on her own resume. If she worked in an office full of white people, would she be able to include the statement?

After all, it might help her move her career forward. Diversity is a big thing right now.

Blue's Resume

I'm putting up my resume for reference's sake, although I have changed any details that might give away my current location, as well as left off my "Objectives and Summary of Qualifications" section.

Just wanted to share my "career path" with the team. ^__^

(BTW -- the formatting seems to work in Firefox only. So if you've got IE, it'll look messy. Dunno about Opera or other browsers.)

**********************************

Visiting Instructor, Sarojini Naidu School of Performing Arts, University of Hyderabad, India, 2007

· Directed and produced a Telugu adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest; led class sessions on movement, voice, acting, and design

Banking Associate, Insurance Company, 2007-2008

· Restored over $13,000 to the company through continual contact with Unclaimed Property divisions in all fifty states

Director, Super Shakespeare Festival Annual Fundraiser, 2006

· Wrote, designed, directed, and produced a promotional fundraiser for the annual SSF Donor Dinner; raised over $10,000 for SSF

Assistant Company Manager, Super Shakespeare Festival, 2006

· Facilitated and managed internal paperwork relevant to Shakespeare Festival personnel; provided hospitality services to the 100-member company

Producer, Hometown Festival Theatre Summer Drama Camp, 2006

· Managed the second season of the HFT Summer Drama Camp, including writing a $800 Foundation Grant

Producer/Director, Hometown Festival Theatre Summer Drama Camp, 2005

· Managed the inaugural season of the HFT Summer Drama Camp, including a $500 National Endowment for the Arts Rural Initiatives Grant; taught camp sessions and directed the final performance

Receptionist/Mailroom Assistant, Giant Insurance Company, 2004-2005

• Managed and directed incoming calls; greeted and provided hospitality for clients; wrote and managed correspondence for upper-level executives; assisted with mailroom and postal services

Subscription Sales Associate, Famous Orchestra, 2004

• Led outgoing sales calls to lapsed orchestra subscribers; earned “top seller” designation for the last three consecutive months of service

Critiques are welcome, though not required. I just wanted to provide a reference for this post.

Career Fun Fair: The Resume Rodeo and the Importance of Career Trajectory

Today was the first in a series of Career Fair Events hosted by my university. We'll call it the Resume Rodeo, because it's real name was equally silly.

The hook? Get a free resume critique by local HR representatives.

The catch? What you have to do while you wait.

I showed up, resume in hand, expecting to be able to sit quietly and read The Amber Spyglass until my name was called. Instead, they shepherded us all into rows of chairs where we had to listen to employer pitches from Giant Fast Food Franchise and Giant Big Box Store(s). Sure, the fast food reps were theoretically telling us "helpful interview tips," like "don't chew gum!" (Seriously? People don't know that?) But what they were really doing was promoting how much fun it would be to work as a shift manager, or, in the case of one Big Box, an "Executive Team Leader," who does all of the same things everyone else on the retail floor does but has the ability to decide who's turn it is to go on break.

I was really disappointed in my university. Yes, fast food places need shift managers; but (as I blogged earlier), as graduates of the flagship public institution in the state, shouldn't our Career Services program be promoting careers that are a little more... career-oriented? Or at least something that pays in salary instead of wage?

After an hour of this, it was my turn for the Resume Rodeo. I think I was the only graduate student getting her resume critiqued, and my HR rep wasn't prepared for what I set before her. She couldn't find anything wrong with the layout, or the wording (although she did suggest I reframe my directing credits as management credits; this prompted her to ask "as a director, how many people were you directly responsible for supervising?" and I responded "usually between 30 and 50," which made her jaw hit the floor).

Then we got down to the real question; the reason I was at the Resume Rodeo in the first place. I asked the HR rep how I could present my combination of directing credits, professional theatre management credits, professional writing credits, and all of my unrelated but transferable "doin' it for the money" office experience as a package that an employer would understand or appreciate.

Her answer surprised me. She said "When I look at your resume, I see a person who must be very talented at a number of things, and that's good. But as an employer, I see a person who doesn't know what she wants. You've done so many different things in the past four years that you seem unfocused. I'm looking for someone who's been climbing a path towards a specific goal."

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this in Bait and Switch -- her discovery that employers found any deviation from a traditional path a justification not to hire someone. It didn't matter if the deviation was because of health issues, or parenthood, or an attempt at entrepreneurship or freelancing; once you stepped off the path, you were sunk.

The "I see a person who doesn't know what she wants" comment was stranger still, because all of the resume books in the world say not to make it about you want, but about what you have done for other employers and what you can do for this new potential employer. Ironically, at this point in my career I don't know, exactly, what I want; but everything on my resume is something that I very much wanted to do, and don't feel like I should regret doing.

When should I have started aiming towards the goal? And what should the goal have been?

Dream Job?

I had a dream last night that I was running a successful business.

What was I doing?

Teaching adults how to engage in dramatic play (e.g. "make-believe") with their children.

Hmmm. Wonder if there's a market for this kind of thing.

Researching the Career Fair

So I spent some time today investigating my university's career center.

It was a novelty I skipped in undergrad, primarily because I had already snagged myself an internship with a theatre that would later go on to win the Tony for Best Regional... but before it did so, the person with whom I was supposed to intern left the country, leaving me in a brand-new city with no real idea of what to do next (this is, btw, the story of how I became a telemarketer).

But I went online to see what kind of opportunities were available.

They'll meet with me to discuss my career goals and give me what appears to be a free resume critique, which seems useful enough.

There are a few Myers-Briggs-type tests that I can take. (Bonus points for anyone who can successfully guess my Myers-Briggs identification.)

There's a place for me to submit my resume online and have it be considered for any available jobs that come through, rather like Monster.com.

And then there's the spring career fair.

Great! I thought. Let's see what kind of careers they're showing off!

Of the 71 companies/corporations recruiting at the career fair, twenty are insurance companies. I never knew there were so many insurance companies (and these are just the ones within a 100-mile radius).

The remaining are split between accounting, banking, law enforcement, industrial work, supermarket chains, health care, and the armed forces.

Oh, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, which bears the honor of employing the largest number of immediate college graduates nationwide, five years running. (For a sort of post-and-riposte on working at Enterprise, click here -- and read the comments!)

I have to admit I was a little disenhearted by the recruiting pool, which seemed to me very one-sided. Where, for example, was Harpo Productions? Where was Steppenwolf or the Goodman, or the Art Institute? What about McGraw-Hill? These places also have entry-level jobs. We have the cultural and artistic wealth of one of our country's major cities within our backyard, and each of those individual organizations has a staff ranging from copywriters to number-crunchers to publicity assistants. They won't employ as many people as Enterprise, but...

I suppose if I want to meet companies that aren't visiting our career fair, I'll have to do the legwork myself. Maybe that's for the best. I'll be a candidate... with initiative!

I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What Was Holding Me Back

First of all, a disclaimer.

I blog to get free stuff.

Absolutely.

So, when -- after reading my recent post on how I felt like I had every single possible career trajectory leering in front of me and I didn't know which one to pursue -- a friend gave me a copy of a book with the very title I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was, I was delighted.

And then depressed.

And then still delighted, but a little confused.

The premise behind I Could Do Anything is that people who aren't doing the "anything" that they want to do are stuck where they are because of psychological factors from their past.

For example: a person stuck in a low-level office job who wants to go back to grad school and pursue a career in journalism might be putting off grad school apps because his teacher/father/former girlfriend told him he was stupid, and so he's afraid he's too stupid for grad school and avoids applying.

The book falls victim to the general flaw of "improve your life and finances" books, which is that it states that everyone can achieve their dreams and that no one has to get stuck doing mindless grunt work... and then completely skips over the niggling issue of "but if everyone is following their dream, who's left to do the grunt work?"

Besides that, however, it's fairly provocative and led me to make a significant realization.

As blogged here, there, and everywhere, I grew up in a tiny Midwestern town and attended an underfunded "rural route" school. A school where the high school science teacher taught the food chain, and gave the example "sun, weeds, rat, cow." (When a classmate and I protested that rats don't eat weeds, never mind about the cow, we were told that the individual elements didn't matter; the state tests were only looking for us to understand the "idea" behind a food chain.)

I was bored silly. I sat at a desk all day and didn't have a lot of friends, particularly as I got older and started doing incredibly dorky things like memorizing passages from Shakespeare and writing them down in my notebook instead of copying whatever was on the overhead. (I also wore pink suspenders to class, which probably contributed.)

And there's a chapter in I Could Do Anything specifically for the young job-seeker right about to leave a university program; a chapter which asks "Why are you not applying to all of the fantastic jobs out there? What are you afraid they will be like?"

My mind went "I'm afraid they'll be like the office work I've done thus far. Sitting at a desk all day, doing the same repetitive thing over and over, the only possibility of advancement being moving on to other repetitive things."

Then the book asked "where were you in your life when you first experienced the thing you're afraid of?"

And my mind went "OMGWTF SCHOOL! It's exactly like grade school and high school, and people kept promising that there would be something better for me, and the people in high school said it would come in undergrad, and the people in undergrad said it would come in grad school, and no wonder I'm so afraid of real jobs because all they seem to be are more of this sitting-and-waiting business!"

Then the book tells me to forgive my childhood for not giving the child Blue what she needed. I'm not sure my childhood needs to be "forgiven," because I kind of like the adult Blue, and I know that she was shaped by her childhood.

Most importantly, the book gave me some ideas about where to look for entry-level jobs that weren't all this "sitting-and-waiting business," this office work that does in fact remind me of those long classroom hours of copying notes from the overhead.

But I hate writing about my dreams while they are still so new. So... watch this space, and when things begin to transpire, I'll tell you.

Editor's Note: In case you were curious, free stuff Blue has received via blogging has thus far included grocery money (from this post), an invitation to visit Bangalore (see this post, and then click on the "Bangalore" tag to read the rest), an offer to write travel columns for an Indian magazine (from this post, and yes, she took it up), and a burgeoning social network which has led to dinner invitations, theatre tickets, etc. For which she says, to everyone: THANK YOU.

The Unexamined Life, or: I Should Seriously Get Up Early Enough To Cook Eggs

I've been trying to do an exercise, for the past couple of days, to help me with my... um... "life coaching."

(I'm not an actual life coach, nor do I have one. I just read books written by life coaches and steal their ideas.)

I feel like I am at a point in my life where I could go anywhere, and do anything (albeit at the entry-level), and it's a bit overwhelming.

The one path I steered myself towards, for a number of years -- until right before I left for Hyderabad, in fact -- was becoming a university faculty member. A few things happened last summer, however, that suggested this might not be a workable path for me. (I might write about them in a later post.)

So, to borrow a video game metaphor, I feel kind of like I'm in SMB3, World 7, and I just went down a big green pipe and lost a life, and now I'm at the beginning of the level again, Small Mario with no powerups, and I don't know which pipe to jump into.

And I thought "Okay, I'll borrow an activity from Martha Beck. I'll write down what I would like an ideal "ordinary" day in my future life to be like, and see what adjustments I need to get myself there."

The beginning was easy.

Morning: Feed and pet kitty, do yoga, eat hot breakfast with coffee.

The reason writing down an ideal morning was easy was because it was pretty close to my actual morning. Right now I really do wake up, feed and pet my kitty, and do yoga. (Before I hear anyone snipe at me about how I can't possibly understand yoga, let me mention that due to my theatre training, I have been taking yoga classes off-and-on for the past five years -- and yes, I know my classes are nowhere near how yoga is practiced in India.)

The one part I'm missing is the hot breakfast part, which -- although I love my eggs and toast -- is time-consuming and makes a mess of the kitchen. Usually my breakfast is a granola bar eaten in the car. Still, in an ideal world I'd have eggs or oatmeal (or idlis and chutney, if I had an idli-maker) for breakfast every morning.

Anyway. With my morning written out, I set out to describe the next part of my day.

I drew a blank.

Where would I be? In an office? In a classroom? Writing a novel in a ridiculously chi-chi Manhattan loft?

Certain things pop out at me, in my vision of the "ideal" future. I want to sell my car and switch to biking and public transportation. This means living in a certain type of city. I also want to have a garden and grow my own vegetables, which seems to mean living in a different type of place (or a place which supports community gardens). And I seem to want both of these despite the fact that I've killed every plant I've tried to grow, and I haven't been near a bicycle in fifteen years.

But the job part is blurry.

It may have something to do with the fact that I've always looked at my jobs as things to be gotten through before I can get down to the business of living my life. So perhaps I can't imagine, yet, a career that isn't based on "getting through the day so you'll have enough money to pay rent."

I also made an unnerving discovery while visualizing my "ideal" life. In all my images, cooking or biking or reading or cleaning the kitchen (yes, on an ideal day I would clean my kitchen), I'm always alone. Well, alone plus cat.

I can rationalize it by saying "well, you've never lived with a significant other, or with children, so you don't have the sense of the reality of those images to put into your fantasy." Which is true. I have no idea what it would be like to come home to a family for whom I was responsible, or a husband with whom I was sharing and negotiating our mutual-linked lives.

Another unnerving discovery is that my "ideal" life seems to be just as tightly frugal as my current one, and it seems to take place in a tiny studio apartment. Is this my way of combining fantasy with truth, or a fear of dreaming for anything larger?

Duties Include: Buying Edible Underwear

Now I really want to be a personal assistant.

I'll Be Your PA, Too!

The NYT had an editorial about the rise in hiring Indian "personal assistants" (people willing to do any task you request, from buying groceries online to selecting birthday presents to recruiting and assessing romantic partnerships). I've written on that subject already, here.

The editorial took me to this blog, which took me to a British website titled I Want A PA.

I scanned the website eagerly, looking for the one piece of information I could not find.

Where to sign up.

No, not as an employer. As a PA.

I'd be darned good at it; I'm charming, articulate, youthful, and full of internet-savvy. I could make those dinner reservations for you, no problem. I'd even make a chart incorporating nutrition information as well as any reviewer ratings of various dishes, so you'd know exactly what to order.

Why should this new world-flattening trend exclude me? You could even pay me in rupees, as long as they eventually ended up in my Midwest, USA bank account.

*sigh*

Interested parties can contact me at prettybluesalwar AT hotmail DOT com.

Book Club Production Assistant

Well, I finally have a name for the job I want.

Oprah's Book Club is looking for a Production Assistant.

Check out the job description:

Supports team and producer in daily production-including answering phone, getting lunch, opening mail, copying scripts and post-show notes, and other administrative duties. Production skills include research/resourcefulness-proficient in Lexis/Nexis, internet searches, DT searches. Must be resourceful in searching for guests, doing research, and obtaining footage. Reads all books considered to be selected with a critical eye. Maintains up-to-date knowledge of publishing industry. Consistently reads new books, searching for potential book club selections. Can suggest titles that are worthy candidates for upcoming selections. Can create system (charts, procedures, etc.) that are specific to the needs of the club/special projects production process. Charts and tracks show production and book selection process and can anticipate deadlines for the team. Must be able to consistently demonstrate solution driven communication. Communicates effectively with all Harpo departments demonstrating respect and professionalism. Team player works consistently to mesh well with supervisor, teammates, other department members and fellow staffers. Good phone etiquette.

I can do all of those things very, very well. And I have extraordinary phone etiquette.

The online application form, unfortunately, is one of those fill-in-the-blank ones with no opportunity to send off a cover letter. Cover letters and the like (statements of purpose, etc.) tend to be the places where I distinguish myself from the competition. Otherwise I'm just another kid with a degree and a bunch of McJobs.

But I can't not apply.

Is MTurk Really The Best Way to MAKE MONEY ONLINE?

So I promised you a story. And, quite anti-Murphy's Laws of Blogging, I'm providing it. ^__^

I wrote a few days ago about my "continuous, constant" thought process re: the post-graduation job search. This includes my trying to do one thing every day that will get me closer to a post-graduation job.

Yesterday, this "one thing" was going shopping and investing in some functional, professional-looking winter clothing. Not as cause-effect related as, say, updating my resume (that's on the list for next week), but a huge step up from my graduate-student wardrobe of thrift-store sweaters and tatty "theatre-person" scarves.

However, there's something else that I'm trying to do "one thing towards," every day. That'd be "finding ways to earn more money."

Now wait, you might ask. Aren't these the same goal? I mean, won't getting a good job get you more money?

Yes and no. Or, more accurately, "Yes, but in the future. I need money now."

Not to mention that landing a decent job is a cost-intensive process. There's the clothing budget, the travel budget, the transcript-printing budget, etc.

Oh, and rent-food-utilities.

So, in the name of "what's one thing I can do today that will help me earn more money," I joined Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

In case you're not familiar with MTurk, it's the sort of thing people do right before they start selling their bodily fluids. (Which I've thought about. There's a plasma bank two blocks from my apartment.) It's... well, click here for the details, but it's essentially a way for companies to outsource menial tasks to anonymous workers, while paying very, very low prices. Think "0.06 per task." That kind of low.

It's also about the only legitimate "make money online" thing I've found, so far. So I signed up.

I chose a task asking me to transcribe thirty minutes of an audio podcast, in exchange for $5.00. I've got over 100 wpm (sixteen years of piano lessons), and so thought it would take me about an hour. That's almost minimum wage!

Three hours and twenty typed pages of text later, I earned my $5.00. I don't think I've ever typed twenty pages in a single block before. 7,000 words.

Part of my problem was that I was a n00b; I didn't know, for example, that I could reconfigure WinAmp to play the dialogue at a slower rate (thus allowing me to type alongside it in real time instead of wasting time stopping and starting the audio). With a little practice I could probably half my transcribing time. This would put me at... well, less than minimum wage, but still something.

And yet I don't know if I can type 7,000 words night after night; an extra $25 or $30 at the end of the week would be great, though, and the incentive is enough to make me want to give this transcribing business another shot.

What about the rest of the offerings on MTurk? Dismal. And mostly related to spamming people. One pays $0.06 if you send them the name and phone number of a local gym owner (for telemarketing purposes, no doubt); another pays $0.10 for you to post advertisements in the comments of people's MySpace pages. One, which I almost did, pays $1.00 for you to call a number and give your opinion about "your college experience;" then I wondered if they were just after my name and phone number (for telemarketing purposes) and decided not to bother.

I suppose today's "one thing towards," then, is turning over the question to all of you (my own crowdsourcing, as it were). Is there a better legit place to make a little cash via the internet, or is Turking, sad as it is, the best way to go?

The Secret, LinkedIn, and Why Blue Should Apply For Jobs Instead of Me

Whenever I visit my parents' home, I intuitively sniff out all the new books that have arrived in my absence, and -- with few exceptions -- read them. It's how I became acquainted with Blink and The Tipping Point, and, on this visit, The Secret.

The "secret" of The Secret is that if you think about particular goals constantly, continuously (not continually -- that would imply breaks in the thought process), you can achieve them. The Secret takes it a step further and states that you will achieve them, and achieve them by thinking alone; the power of thought will "attract" your goals to you.

That's why people think The Secret is a bunch of hogwash. I agree. However, there's one thing The Secret gets right, and it's something I already knew: if you want to achieve a goal, it's a good idea to work towards it -- not just think about it -- constantly and continuously.

So. I want to get a job. Not just any job; I've had jobs, and plenty of them. I want a job that allows me to use my best skill set (that'd be the "writing" one, also possibly the "teaching" one, not the "stuffing envelopes and answering the phone" one, although I'm good at that too). And I've got a deadline of sorts; next May, after graduation.

I want the kind of job that a person might more accurately call a "career;" and I'm thinking about it constantly and continuously.

When I was applying to graduate school, I began nearly a year in advance. Every day I said "what's one thing I can do today to get myself closer to grad school?" Likewise, with the India trip, I took some time every day to figure out "what can I do today that will get me closer to going to India?"

And so, in the name of "what can I do today to get me closer to a good post-graduation career," I joined LinkedIn. (I've got a sneaking suspicion that networking is going to play a major part in this career process.)

And after I filled out my profile, my education (state schools) and resume (service and temp work) looked so unimpressive that I quickly ditched the entire thing.

After all, without the background to prove it, how could I promote myself as a "Writing Professional," as the site encouraged me to call myself? No one would believe me.

Then I thought "well, if they read the blog, they'd know where my real skills were." And that's when I began to wish Blue could apply for jobs instead of me.

The real world says my education and experience only qualify me for service jobs; but Blue has been hired to write articles for magazines (real, paying articles), not to mention getting tagged and linked-to across the blogosphere.

I live in the "middle of nowhere," but Blue rubs elbows and trades comments with many influential people; people who have founded successful companies, who write articles for major magazines, who work for prestigious institutions, academic-or-industry; people whose names jump out from the insides of books and remind me of how cool they are (Niranjana, that'd be you, in my copy of Sacred Games). Even someone who might be the Next Marketing Guru. ^__^

(Did I miss anyone? I hope not.)

Blue's even prettier than I am, because the world only sees Blue when the photograph turns out well.

In short, Blue's a much better job candidate than I am. Should I make a LinkedIn page for her?

When I began this blog I chose pseudonymity because I thought revealing my true identity might negatively affect my career options. Now I am wondering if and when I should out myself, or whether I should simply change my name to Blue.

A Substantive Blog Post

"A substantive blog post."

That's what I wrote on my to-do list today, along with "clean out closets" and several spring-semester-related items. So far everything's been done except the closets.

I've been back in the U.S. for four days now. At my parents' house, temporarily, for Thanksgiving week. My mother was concerned that she would need to put me in bed for several days to detox me from all the pollution, etc. that I encountered on my travels, but a day or two of sleep and fresh fruit seemed to do the trick. As to the jet lag, I recovered very quickly -- mostly because I possess the theatre artist's capability of suspending disbelief, and was able to look at my watch and say "oh, it is 11 a.m.," and never doubt otherwise.

To the commenter who left this note: thank you. ^__^

While I was in India, several people asked me about my "spirit of adventure," as the anon commenter described it, and why I seemed so excited to do crazy-ass things like travel the entire length of India on a train.

I told them that this was, in effect, my holiday; and probably the only one I would have for a very long time. (This necessitated an explanation of American vacation days, or lack thereof -- followed of course by a segue into American sick- and maternity-leave policies. Suffice to say that my Indian audience was always shocked.)

Now that it's done, I find my mind pushing me forward, almost frantically, towards the next step. Which is, at the moment, getting my academic life in order and getting my temp work lined up. (Like an insomniac counting hours, I find myself thinking "if the temp job comes through by next Monday, then I will make $$$$, but if it doesn't come through until Wednesday then I will only make $$$...")

And after those two pegs are in place, of course, comes the even more daunting task of landing the real job. You know, the one that's supposed to come after the degree.

What I hope most, and I will continue to write about this over the next few months, is that I will be able to keep this sense of assertiveness that I acquired in India. I learned quickly that I had to be very specific and very direct if I wanted anything; I gave up trying to please people in the name of trying to get what I needed. I learned how to haggle with auto drivers and salespeople; more importantly, I learned how to walk away from them. In Amritsar, I checked out of a hotel without looking back, after the manager took me into his office under the guise of looking up cinema listings and then began showing me his porn collection (never told you that story); on the way to Delhi I enlisted the police to remove a young man who had been stalking me for a few days (never told you that story, either).

I don't want to lose the person I became in India; the person who "survived the Punjab" and made it through solo, unscathed, through breakfast weevils and Sleeper II trains and getting lost time after time after time, standing alone in the middle of Dworka-who-knows-where with nothing but a highway stretching in either direction (never told you... you get the idea), but who has her wits about her and is able to wrap her dupatta around her head to shade her face and walk alongside the traffic until she finds buildings again.

In theory I shouldn't be afraid of anything anymore. But in practice I am a five-foot-two young woman who still gets nervous about making people (employers, professors, etc.) happy.

We will see what happens. For other people who have made the trip (Susan, I'm thinking of you), how did you feel when you returned? Were you able to keep that sense of adventure with you?

For now, the scent of India still remains with me. Mostly because my perfume bottle broke en route, and the attar leaked into everything in my cosmetics bag. ^__^