"Heaven is Ten Zillion Light Years Away"

I got my hair cut today. My favorite barber was alone in the shop this morning, it still early for a Sunday. He was blasting salsa music and reading a newspaper while he sat in a barber's seat. I find him in this position a lot when I come in. I used to take so much pleasure in the same thing, just sitting in front of a sunny window and reading and listening to music.

It's a vanishing sight, someone reading a print newspaper by choice, not cause it was handed to you underground where you have no cell service and you want something to read. Meanwhile I had probably spent an hour lying in bed reading bullshit on Facebook and just scrolling through images.

For some reason, I bought a new phone today despite thinking I needed to live more like this man and to quit always having my attention absorbed by my phone's screen.

I also today did something it has taken me more than a decade to do. After living in this city for nearly 13 years now, I finally went and visited the Frick Collection, something I had always meant to get around to seeing. It's a beautiful, beautiful space and walking through it, I played fantasy. I imagined myself living in this house, what it much have been to inhabit this place, walking through scenes of early 20th century New York glamour.

My left eye is red constantly. Stevie Wonder is amazing.

Burrito Fever

Other projects have been consuming my time lately. I haven't forgotten you, dear Diary. You still mean the world to me. I plan to recommit myself to our relationship very soon in a much stronger fashion. It's just that I've been a bit busy. New job. Trying to figure shit out. Life. The usual. You know. Plus, this new website that I've been putting some time into:

www.burritofever.com

The War on Drugs - "An Ocean in Between the Waves"

I am sitting in the snow globe that is this midtown high-rise for my second to last day, watching the March snowstorm swirl around outside these large windows. It is my second to last day here because, friends, I am happy to say that sometimes dreams do come true, that even when it seems like they may not, even when you are beyond discouraged and at wit’s end from sending out letter after letter to recruiters for months, that still there is hope.

I got an email yesterday morning from an agency that I have been wanting to work at and that I have been in communication with for seemingly months now finally offering me a freelance position there. And I can’t think of a time where news has ever made me happier. To be honest, I guess that’s the feeling you experience when you get a job you’ve been waiting to hear about or that feeling when you got into that school you really wanted to go to, and, yes, I have certainly experienced the emotion before. But the thing about it is that it always feels new, always feels like the pinnacle of happiness, like something you’ve never felt before.

What am I saying is that I was incredibly, incredibly happy, all the more so because I had been starting to experience severe doubts about my competency, about whether I had chosen the right career path, that maybe I wasn’t good enough. I interned at a big agency this past summer, then afterward, despite thinking I would easily get a job, I did not. A couple months went by and I took the only industry offer I got - another internship, this time under the presumption that it would quickly transition into an actual job after a couple months. Five months later, it did not. 

I have been applying everywhere in the past couple months once it became apparent that I would not quickly transition here to being a regular employee as I had been told when I accepted this offer. There were a lot of almosts. Various positions that it seemed like I just almost got. Back and forth with recruiters, only for the talked about jobs to vanish, to no longer be needed, to have been filled by internal referrals, to have needed someone that could start right away.

And so after several of these and after being stuck in intern limbo for the better part of a year now, I was really starting to feel crazy, wondered if I was too old to try a new career path, wondered if I was perhaps not as talented as I thought I was. Almost a year ago, I took a big leap and left the hospitality industry which I had worked in for years and which paid me comfortably to embark on something that I wanted to do, something that let me indulge my creative impulses that I have, something that would let me employ language as my job, to come up with clever ways of saying things. I didn’t think it would be this hard. Recently, I had even started to fear that I might end up going back to hospitality, that maybe I would never get a job in advertising.

Which is why yesterday’s email was such a relief. I wanted to run laps around the office here, shrieking with joy. Instead, I giddily bounced up and down in my chair here and waited until I left for lunch to shriek with joy on the street. And I am still not entirely there yet. It’s a temp-to-perm freelance job. It just means that I have to go in there and be amazing every single day and show these people that I deserve to be here. Which I am going to do, which I can do. 

I am so, so happy.