Finding a job is kind of like finding a boyfriend. That is, it’s a lot more fun to talk about how you don’t have one, and how hard they are to find, than it is to send out resumes (or lurk in coffeehouses). And not having a job, like being single, definitely has its perks. Both can be enormously thrilling. The world seems full of possibility! Nothing is tying you down or regulating your habits. There is no need to call home if you’re going to be out late; no reason to set your alarm for 6:45am and crawl out of bed in the weekday morning darkness searching for a button-down shirt and office-casual pants.
But this exhilarating feeling of freedom comes at a price, particularly for the unemployed. After all, you don’t need a boyfriend. But, if you lack a trust fund, you probably need a job. And when you’re between jobs, at every moment lurks the fear that you will never find another one, or that you will never again find a job you enjoy. It is very easy, in these moments, to let panic set in. The giddy thrill of wondering if today is Wednesday or Sunday; the joys of shopping in a deserted supermarket on a weekday afternoon, can dissipate all too easily with one glance at a dipping savings account, or a moment’s consideration of anything related to health care.
Harder still, jobs are often treated all too casually by those who already have them. Your employed friends may sigh wistfully when you relate in great detail what happened to Marlena on Days. They may mention at least once per conversation how brave you were to leave your job in search of a new adventure, and how much they wish they were brave enough to do the same thing. However, deep down, you both know that they have a steady income, and you don’t. That awareness kind of puts a damper on things. Similarly, no one who is single ever really feels like hearing how lucky they are to be single from someone with a live-in boyfriend. Trust me, they know. Unless you are also single, keep those sentiments to yourself, except when they are followed by, “but I have to introduce you to my adorable friend Bob who is also lucky enough to be single.”
I have moved my blog over to WordPress.com! Welcome on my new blog. Big things are moving and shaking here. Big things!
Last night Brian and I went to our third wedding of the summer. Interestingly enough, all three weddings were for couples that had been together for around seven years. I think that seems like a good length of time to be together before you tie the knot. My parents were together for at least 5 years before they got married, thirty years ago. I’d much rather it be something where everyone says, “Oh, you’re finally getting married, good.”
Anyway! I always have fun at weddings, because I like to DANCE. That’s right, I am one of those wedding guests. I will do the bump with your grandma, I will spin your 5 year old niece around, I will slow dance with your weird uncle (probably only once though). I will take my shoes off if they hurt and keep dancing. I will do the electric slide, the Twist; I will YMCA.
And that’s the great thing about weddings, is that they are perhaps one of the few times when you are encouraged, nay REQUIRED to get out on the dance floor and shake it like no one’s watching. Nobody wants to throw a wedding where no one dances. I am just doing my part. My gift might not be pricy, but my funky chicken will be priceless.
After my last move, into Brian’s house, ten minutes away, I swore I would never move again. Well, that was a lie. I am moving in approximately a week. This time not across town, but across coast! Along coast. Something.
Brian and I are moving to Garner, which is just outside of Raleigh, NC. I am excited about this change. Excited and terrified. I go back and forth between two extremes. Moving somewhere new, starting over and making new friends and finding your way in a new city and state, is fun and scary. Quitting your job without a new job lined up is inadvisable, but it’s what I’m doing. My last day at work is Friday, and my next day of work after that is up for debate. On the one hand, I enjoy having time off of work. On the other hand, I also enjoy eating. Which of these enjoyable things will be in my future the most? We shall see!
I have begun a small side-blog.
It’s about sandwiches, because who doesn’t love sandwiches?
A few weeks ago a group of friends and I emailed back and forth for several hours about different sandwiches we had loved and eaten, and I got to thinking. I decided to start collecting a list of these different sandwiches, in order to inspire the creation and digestion of yet more new and wonderful sandwiches.
Please, email me your favorite sandwiches, to molly.schoemann@gmail.com, and I will list them here:
www.mmmsandwiches.wordpress.com
May it serve as a sanctuary for lovers of bread, cheese, and everything in between.
Hi! I’ve been away! It’s been awhile! I am sorry.
Holy Bat Museum!
I spent the last week in Louisville, KY for a conference. I have to admit that I LOVE traveling for work. At least, the traveling I have done for this job, which is the extent of my traveling-for-work experience. The only conference I go to lasts almost a week long, and the last two years, it’s been in a neat city that I never would have visited otherwise. Last year it was Minneapolis, and this year it was Louisville. Last year I ended up having dinner with a friend of the family who convinced me to start this blog, and thus was born I Heard Tell. I also toured the Walker Art Center’s Sculpture garden, home of Spoonbridge and Cherry:
Spoony spoon spoon
And visited the Mall of America. There were a total of FOUR “Lids” stores in the Mall of America. That’s right, four of the same chain of baseball hat stores in one mall. It boggled the mind. In response, I bought a Mall of America shotglass.
Conference also means a week of high-class hotel living. This year my room had two beds in it! On the first night I started out in one bed, and then hopped into the other in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. I awoke in the morning confused, but somehow smug. This room also had two sinks, but no closet or fridge.
Which leads to the downside. Hotel living is not perfect. I don’t love eating out for every meal, because I miss planning my own meals, cooking, and having a refrigerator. There is something bizarrely rustic about buying a bottle of cranberry juice and keeping it cold by storing it on a frigid air conditioning vent. And by rustic, I probably mean wasteful. You’re kind of roughing it, but not really, but you’re still not really comfortable.
You do get to expense your meals, which is exciting, although it still makes me feel guilty, because I work for a small nonprofit. Although last week one of my dinners consisted of cookies and pretzels, so I don’t think the lifestyle to which I am accustomed was really a serious drain on my company’s bank account.
During the one-week trip I suffered a fever and sinus infection. (Another thing I love about hotels is that you can pick up the phone in the dead of night and someone on the other end will tell you where you can buy Tylenol at 2am. ) I also endured a harrowing late-night illness after dinner at Joe’s Crab Shack (perhaps I should have known that I was tempting fate by ordering the crab-stuffed shrimp; in any event I’m glad I didn’t also buy a t-shirt from there because I now have enough memories from Joe’s Crab Shack).
Despite all this, I had a fun time in Louisville. It seems like a city that’s working hard to attract tourism. There were all sorts of cool museums that my convention-booth hours did not permit me to visit– although I did get a chance to peer into the windows of the bat factory at the Louisville Slugger Museum. I think I gained about as much insight and entertainment by doing that as I would have by actually going on the tour, because they’re bats.
How do you go to the circus for the day and come back pregnant? Mrs. Bescombe asked her daughter. It was a good question. Sheila wished she could have answered it. However, she had
taken a vow of silence and did not feel at liberty to discuss what had happened with the Strongman.
His name was Stanley, and he was as charming as a monkey dressed as a dentist. Which is to say, that he wasn’t very charming, and there was definitely something unnerving about him.
When Stanley was a small boy, his father’s favorite thing to do was torment his son cruelly and
ingeniously.
“Stanley, you’re going to be a shrimp all your life,” he’d told him. At age six, Stanley’s father had his son convinced that he was in fact twenty-four.
“You’re certainly not a boy,” he’d say. “You’re a man all right, but a tiny one. Your mother and I don’t know how it happened, but the day we found out you were never going to grow to be a proper size was a sad one for us indeed.”
Stanley would listen, round-eyed. Had his father been a good man, Stanley would have worshipped him. As it was, Stanley spent a lot of time feeling conflicted.
“We kept it from you for as long as we could, but upon your twenty-third birthday” (actually his fifth), “we decided that it was high time you knew the truth.”
As was only natural for a boy in his circumstances, Stanley developed an unhealthy obsession with size. Once he figured out that he actually was a boy, a little boy but a growing boy, he stopped trying to worship his father and began to work on growing large enough to beat the living snot out of him. He achieved this goal at the age of 14.
His mother found this note on her husband, who had been left unconscious on the living room floor one Sunday afternoon. Dear Mom-I love you but it’s time I set off. Love, Stan
And that was that.
Stanley didn’t start out as a Strongman in the circus. He drifted from job to menial job and traveled from town to town looking for excitement. He stayed in motels when he had money and slept in bus stations when he didn’t. Eventually he got a job selling movie tickets and rented out a tiny one-room apartment above the theatre. Stanley didn’t mind the size of the apartment, though. It made him feel bigger.
Lots of things made him feel bigger by then, though. His favorite thing to do was eat, but his second favorite thing to do was to lift heavy objects. A large-framed young man to begin with, he was consumed by the need to make his body as towering and muscular as possible.
The manager of the movie theatre liked Stan because while he was rather insecure in person, he absolutely loomed behind the ticket counter. Nobody ever complained about the movies or the price of tickets or popcorn during Stan’s shift. The two of them got along nicely, then, and when the manager was given two free passes to the circus (which was in town for that week only), for lack of a son, he invited Stan.
Stanley had never been invited to anything before, and was delighted. He found the circus fairly amusing, although there were lots of little kids there, and little kids always made him feel uncomfortable. They reminded him of his childhood. When the Strongman came out, however, he was mesmerized.
Tim the Terrific was his name, and he had arms like cannons and pectorals like cannonballs. Three large barrels made of iron were rolled in from the sidelines. He hefted them up onto his shoulders one by one and then juggled them. Tim the Terrific signaled the end of his act by tossing the three barrels into the air and catching one on each hand and one on the bottom of his left foot, which he thrust out behind him.
But on the night Stanley was there, Tim, distracted by a pretty young mother in the first row, miscalculated slightly and kicked his foot out when the third barrel landed on it, sending it barreling out into the audience. A collective gasp rose from the stands.
Tragedy would have ensued had Stanley not acted immediately. He flung himself across the
bleachers and caught the barrel just as it was about to flatten a small boy and his dog.
There was complete silence in the tent. The boy’s snow-cone was crushed and he was badly scared, but otherwise unharmed. The dog had fainted, but it was a little dog and easily carried.
Stanley was a hero. The circus administration thanked him profusely and offered him a job as their new Strongman.
That is where he has worked ever since.
As for Sheila, she had been in the audience during the barrel-throwing incident. As a matter
of fact, she had been sitting right next to the little boy and his dog. The little boy was her brother, Charles.
Sheila and Charles lived with their mother in a tiny, run-down house on the corner of a run-down block in the less popular and more run-down part of town. But they were happy. Her mother sold cosmetics and her father was in jail for insurance fraud.
Stanley’s sheer enormity had awed her, as had his obvious pride in it. Most men as large as he walked awkwardly, as though they were ashamed of how tall they stood. Stanley, however, carried himself with the puffed-up, exaggerated manner of a much smaller, more insecure man. Sheila found it incredibly appealing.
She had gone home that afternoon with Charles’ hand in hers and his dog fainted away in her handbag. In the ensuing weeks, she found she could not get the picture out of her mind of Stanley crouched above Charles, his great strong legs planted on either side of her as he caught that barrel. Sheila knew she had to meet him.
There is a certain children’s book author that my company sells a lot of books by who comes out with a new 10 page children’s board book every 48 hours or so. They’re silly, and they rhyme, and they sell like HOT CAKES. I would like to be at that point in my career.
“Hey while I was waiting at the checkout line I wrote a rhyming book about toes. Now I have a billion more dollars! Sweet.”
Sigh.
Under the right circumstances, I get really excited about being locked out of my house.
The right circumstances mean:
-I’m wearing pants
-I have at least $5 on my person
Being locked out forces you to be spontaneous, and to fend for and entertain yourself with little more than the $5 in your pocket and the pants on your legs. Suddenly the day is full of unknowns. Anything could happen.
This happened to me the other night. I had planned on relaxing at home after a long day at work. Perhaps I’d make a martini, and see if I could cobble together a salad from the herbs I’ve been growing on the back porch (parsley, chives, oregano, basil…that salad would probably have been gross). I was even considering mowing the lawn, which is as high as an elephant’s eye. Then I realized I didn’t have my keys, and no one else was home.
It’s weird not being able to get into your own house. It makes you feel like a drifter, or a ghost, peering in the window at your unreachable possessions, freaking the dog out because he sees you and doesn’t know why you won’t come in.
After skulking around the perimeter of the house looking for an easy way in (i.e., a wide-open window with a ladder in front of it or an unlocked back door), I wandered back down the road and waited for a bus. Not THE bus, but really, any bus that would take me somewhere more interesting.
Waiting for any bus to come along and take you anywhere feels different than waiting for a specific bus to take you somewhere scheduled. It feels awesome! There you are; the wind in your hair, time on your side, destination unknown. For the first twenty minutes. Then it’s boring and annoying, just like waiting for the regular bus.
I ended up in Sullivan Square, where I drank beer, ate Indian food, and watched So You Think You Can Dance. It beat mowing the lawn.
Here’s one from the good old days!In the last few months, I have achieved a healthy balance in my working environments. In the morning I have an office job, and in the evenings I work at an Italian restaurant. While I am in the office, blearily watching the minutes tick by, I long for the hectic world of foodservice, and while I am at the restaurant, balancing awkward, heavy trays and splashing ice water everywhere, I long for the sweet, merciful release of death. So far, it has been a good system.
I wouldn’t mind the restaurant job as much if I weren’t in constant fear of being screamed at and/or fired. Mine is not a forgiving restaurant owner. There is a high turnover rate here—none of the other employees have worked for longer than a few months; all of us are fairly new. It is not difficult to see why; in this city there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bodies willing to bear steaming hot plates of gnocchi and salads buried in pine nuts across a polished wood floor, until the day they either die or drop something.
There is something almost exhilarating about knowing that your job hangs in the balance every time you cross the room. “Could this be it?” you think at every turn. Did I just make my last cup of coffee? Will this steak betray me? Might this soup be my undoing?
I am not good at selling things to people. I should probably not make a career of it, as it would not be a wildly successful career. I’m simply unable to make anything sound appealing that I don’t find personally appealing, which is a large part of selling things…possibly the whole part. I didn’t fully realize this until I began working with people who ARE able to sell things.
“The Tiramisu? Oh, uh, it’s ok. You might like it. I mean, I’ve never had it, but it’s…I mean, it looks pretty good.”
This is not the way to sell a dessert. My boss at the restaurant, the gay French boss, the one who could not be either more French or more gay or he would risk exploding in a blinding flash of gay French light, the one who spanks me when I mess up orders and who made me call his old restaurant on April Fools Day and make a reservation for Joan Rivers; now HE knows how to sell things. He could sell a can of ravioli on a doily on a plate for $23. Oh, you need a can opener? Excellent choice. Of course, there is an additional $7 charge for that.
In his case, the key to selling things appears to lie in mispronouncing words to make them sound more exotic and less intelligible. Somehow, when he says “Beef Onion soup,” it sounds like a magical, tasty elixir. When I say it, I sound like a grouchy, world-weary cafeteria lady.
Actually, my favorite thing to do is to warn people away from certain dishes. If my boss were aware of this, I would doubtless get more than a spanking. But I can’t help myself sometimes. “Don’t bother with the Lemon Delicious cake,” I’ll murmur, leaning in closer as the table falls silent and round-eyed, hanging on my every word. “It’s not that good. People don’t usually finish it.” If I know a certain dish is good (usually only because I’ve slunk behind the ice machine and scarfed up untouched portions when the boss wasn’t looking), I recommend it, but people are never as impressed by my assurances of deliciousness as they are by my candid admissions of mediocrity. Perhaps my real calling lies more in the area of food criticism.
I Heard Tell 