Category: Career

April Showers Bring May Flowers, and Awkward Workplace/Romantic Encounters

On By KathleenIn Bio Pics, Career, Dating, insights/observationsLeave a comment

April showers reportedly bring May flowers. April, 2011’s spring rains were absolutely ones of renewal, bringing with them a new blossoming job and a budding new outlook on romance, the sum of which equated to countless new possibilities for awkward social encounters.

Apparently, there are mug theives in my office. Even personalized mugs aren't safe.

Scene: 9:45AM, Day 2 at my New Job. I walk into the staff kitchen with my spill-proof, porcelain coffee mug with an intent to fill it. There’s a petite blond woman kneeling on the counter top, straddling the sink, blocking the coffee pot while she rummages through the cupboards.

“Have you seen my mug? It has my name on it.”

“No…”

“I ordered that mug especially with my name on it so no one would take it. You’d think that if someone saw someone else’s name on a mug they would think ‘this mug belongs to Kate, so I won’t take it.’ But no! Not here. People just take your mugs. Do you have your own mug?”

“Yes…”

“Let this be a lesson to you. Keep it with you always, otherwise someone will take it. Sometimes they even break it. The coffee is fresh, by the way.”

So much for my plans to get to work early

Scene: 8:30AM on the first real springy day in April. I’ve decided I want to leave work early, so I wake up extra early to get to the gym extra early so I can get to work extra early. Post workout, I’m standing in a Diane von Frustenberg skirt and Cole Haan loafers in the parking lot of the gym. The car doors are locked and my keys are staring at me from the front seat, laughing.

Thanks to the keys locked in the car incident, I arrive at work late, only to discover the artwork hanging in the window (the piece that was the lead for a NYTimes review of the exhibit) has come unhung. To rehang it, I have to mount an 100-year old radiator, in a skirt. The burn on the inside of my knee was, luckily, hardly noticeable.

Scene: Late night Saturday, there’s a monsoon raging outside and I’m inside a cozy restaurant on a date with a guy nearly 10 years my senior who might, arguably, be classified as a “player.” Being rather forward, he kissed me. A metallic object suddenly bashes against my front tooth with an audible clunk. Concerned about the integrity of my incisor, I pause.

I saw the scarf and thought Parisian, my boss saw the scarf and thought "She's hiding a hickey." Imagine if my date's tongue ring had chipped a tooth...

“Do you have a tongue ring?”

“Yes.”

“A warning would have been nice. These teeth aren’t straight but they were expensive…”

Scene: It’s the Tuesday after the monsoon-bathroom-tongue-ring debacle, and I’m wearing a white collared blouse and have a magenta silk scarf tied around my neck in a bow. There’s cake in the staff kitchen. My co-worker and I are stuffing our face. She turns and asks:

“Are you trying to hide a love bite? WhoisheWhat’shisNameWhatdoesHedoforworkIsHegoodenoughforyou?”

“Umm… No? It’s a rainy Tuesday in April. I’m just trying to cultivate my inner Parisian.”

A New Job. A New Desk. An Old Memento.

On By KathleenIn Bio Pics, Career2 Comments

Forty-eight hours after writing a post about the agony of post-job-interview waiting, I got a call:

Welcome to the Nook. Where schedules are made, emails sents, and galleries coordinated.

“So, when can you start?”

“When do you need me?”

“What’s today?”

“Friday.”

“Come in on Monday.”

My first day as the Exhibitions Coordinator for a large art not-for-profit passed in a flurry of paperwork, meetings, and how-tos. I was taken to “The Nook,” a u-shaped work station that I would share with my boss’s executive assistant. I looked at the desk that had been vacant for 5 months and was now mine. It had been turned into a storage shelf — boxes filled with leftover wall-hanging materials, stacks of postcards announcing opening receptions for exhibitions mounted 5 years ago, and a box of crocheting hooks.

Why do I have crochet hooks and "Blues Clues" temporary tattoos in my desk?

Before I could begin coordinating exhibitions, I needed to coordinate my desk. Clearing the rubble took the remainder of the afternoon, but left me with a blank workspace to decorate. I walked in the next day with an armload of items necessary to transform my half of  the Nook into a homey yet functional gallery-managing command center.

“Your corner has a personality!” Ali-Kat cried as she joined me at her station. “I dig it. Do you have Pandora? Because yours is the only computer with speakers. Let’s get the party started!”

I could tell we were going to be good Nook-mates.

Of all the things around my new desk, the photo in the corner of the bulletin board is the most meaningful

Of all the things adorning my command center, there’s one item that has particular symbolic meaning. In the upper right corner of my bulletin board I’ve placed a photo from my 2007 college graduation. Four of us stand arm in arm among thousands of undergraduates and graduates dressed in powder blue, all receiving our degrees. We look happy and tired, young and ready for battle.

The photo is there in part because the 3 guys standing with me are my dearest friends, mostly because that moment represents an entire journey from that day in May to this job, this desk, this future. We posed for the camera to remind ourselves that we had survived 4 years together. The next 4 years would be unpredictable — each followed paths entirely different from the ones routed for us as of May 2007.

Then we were 4 kids just starting out, uncertain of the purpose of our past and clueless about our futures. It’s hard to always know where you’re going, but the way I see it, it’s important to always know where you’ve been.

Educated, Unemployed, Frustrated, but Looking on the Brightside

On By KathleenIn Career, insights/observations3 Comments
We're more than fodder for a cartoon. We're young adults stuttering at the start of our lives, but we have a voice.

I don’t know who Matthew C. Klein is, but I like him. I like Matthew because he wrote an Op-Ed piece entitled “Educated, Unemployed, and Frustrated” for the New York Times on March 21st, and in doing so, is one of the few of us early 20-somethings attempting to tell the world how we feel. We’ve been mocked on the cover of The New Yorker, labeled boomerang kids by those who need catch phrases, and attacked in the New York Times Magazine. But we’re not just fodder for a cartoon. We’re young adults stalemated, stuttering in our attempt to get going. But we have a voice.

“The millions of young people who cannot get jobs or who take work that does not require a college education are in danger of losing their faith in the future…Even if the job market becomes as robust as it was in 2007… my generation will have lost years of career-building experience.”

Right On, Matthew, right on.

Us educated 20-somethings trying to find work in saturated job markets, where entry level positions are going to applicants technically at a “mid-career” stage, are living in a constant state of uncertainty. It’s a Catch-22. The process is frustrating, and we’re forced to be victims — you can’t say to a potential employer, who may take weeks to get back to you, “Please, Sir/Madam, could you make your decision on me a little faster — I’d like to get my life together now.”

There are many times over the last few months when I wanted to bash my head against a wall — like when I learned an email I sent to an old boss about a job opening at her museum went into her spam folder. She liked me for the position, and would have gone to bat for me, but didn’t get my email until after the position had been filled with another applicant. Lesson learned? Pick up the phone.

Someone told me landing that first job is all about luck. And while luck hasn’t necessarily been on my side, I’ve managed to stay cheery. Remember, if all else fails, there’s always my back-up career as a wingwoman.

It's been 3 weeks since I've heard on those 3 interviews, there must be an outbreak of wastepaper basket fires

I try to be practical. Interviewers do have jobs after all, and they have work to do: “There was just an opening in their gallery — I’m sure they’re busy.”

Then another week passes. No one has said “No” yet, so I’m still inclined to give the company the benefit of the doubt:

“There must have been a fire in the building and they’re not allowed back into their offices this week.”

Yea, that explains it. I’ve only heard back on a handful of  job applications because of an unannounced outbreak of wastepaper basket fires raging across the tri-state area. And apparently, Mercury just entered retrograde.

Okay, it’s not me or my resume — it’s Mercury and office fires. I feel better now.

Rewriting “Life’s Little Instruction Book” from the Cusp of a Quarter Life Crisis

On By KathleenIn Career, Dating, insights/observations, Love in BriefLeave a comment
In the 8th grade, "Life's Little Instruction Book" was required reading. our teachers felt learning secularized parables would be more beneficial for our intellectual growth

Rather than learn the art of well-crafted sentences through a standard curriculum of books like The Jungle Book, the English department of my sleepy suburban school handed out copies of Life’s Little Instruction Book and Chicken Soup for the Soul to my 8th grade class. The thought must have been that learning secularized parables would be more beneficial for our intellectual growth.

Eventually, we were charged with the assignment of creating our own Life’s Little Instruction Book. We knew nothing of the real world and yet we were going to act as authorities on “how to live a happy and rewarding life.”

I recently found my flamboyantly illustrated attempt and was amused. “Don’t worry if you’re not the prettiest rose. We’re all beautiful in our own light” — my teacher found this little stroke of transcendental wisdom endearing. If I had to rewrite my 8th grade book of advice today, I might include that same instruction, though perhaps rewritten with less sentimentality, and add a few other insights I’ve picked up in the 13 years I’ve traveled since…

Invest in at least 1 Ina Garten cookbook. The orange scones in this one are an ace.

1. Invest in at least one Ina Garten cookbook

2. (Re)read Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style”

3. Learn how to make your favorite cocktail

4. Plant an herb garden

5. Always have a go-to outfit

6. When you’re a broke grad student, never refuse his offer to pay for dinner

7. Become a member of at least one museum and visit often.

8. Keep in touch with your old study groups

9. Get a good tailor

10. Get lost in Italy

11. Have a pet

12. Don’t forget to thank you parents

Find your red lipstick and wear it often. Mine is Laura Mercier's Sexy Lips

13. Find a shade of red lipstick that suits you and wear it often

14. Print calling cards and never leave home without them

15. Learn all the words to “American Pie”

16. Drink lots of green tea

17. Buy a really good yoga mat

18. Write postcards when on vacation and send one to yourself

19. Print out your digital photos

20. Start a blog… and don’t look back.

Happiness is a warm puppy who loves you.