Living vicariously through myself

Well, I turned down the job in Ottawa. It was certainly one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I did this after securing an in-person interview next Friday at the station in Lafayette. I'll be down in the area anyway because I'm traveling with DUCKS to Iowa City that evening, so the schedule worked out well there. I was afraid for a time that I'd have to cancel on a job and on DUCKS simultaneously. Apparently there were 40 applicants for the Lafayette post, and the news director said I was "in the top tier", by which he meant the top 5 or 6 applicants, he said. He and I got along well and talked for almost an hour early this morning (he called at 5:15). So I'll just keep plugging away for the next week, sending out more resumes and tapes and hope people call me back.

Well, I got offered the job in Ottawa -- at just more than $25,000 per year. Granted, cost of living is probably pretty cheap, but there's a catch or two:

1. The biggest catch right now is that I'm sort of in talks with a guy at WASK in Lafayette, Indiana. He needs someone quickly, too, and I'll bet the money is better. The cost of living there is not much different than in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Illinois.

2. The other thing is that I'd like to be in as big a place as possible. Lafayette DWARFS tiny little Ottawa and actually has some life to it, which is nice. Yes, Lafayette is media market 189, but there's competition with TV and print media, which is always good for getting the adrenaline going. Ottawa's market size would likely be smaller than even the smallest TV market (which is in Montana).

So I got the guy in Ottawa to give me until tomorrow morning to let him know whether or not I'll take the job. My hope is to talk to the guy in Lafayette and at least get a sense what my chances are of getting that job. The fear, obviously, is that I could be turning down a job in hopes of a better one that I won't eventually get. I think I have a fair shot at the Lafayette job, but I have no idea who the competition are. The news director there said I was "0n the top of his list" of people to call about the job, but he's very busy, so there's no telling when I'll get the call. He said today in an e-mail discourse we had yesterday, but that's hit or miss at best.

So I'm now officially on the clock. I have about 22 hours to make a decision, at least 8 of which will be spent sleeping. So, in reality, I have about 14 hours to figure out these things:

A. Is the job in Lafayette likely to happen?
B. Do I want to work in Ottawa at all?
C. If I don't get either job, how long will it take me to get one?
D. If I don't get either one, is there still a chance I could get one of the jobs that I applied for in Chicago?

This feels a lot like the week my senior year of high school when I was deciding whether to go to DePauw or to Missouri. I made a real good decision there, but this is a little different. I'll call some people tonight and tomorrow and see what they say.

Well, the interview in Ottawa went pretty well, I guess. The news director kept using the word "impressed", even when talking in front of me to his station general manager, so we'll see. The place is very small and you cover extremely local news. It's like working for a small newspaper like the Banner-Graphic, only putting it on the radio. You cover any police and fire activity, regardless of whether it's news or not, and the bread and butter stories come from city council meetings. I keep saying they're going to have to pay me a fair amount to go work there. If I were to take the job, I'd probably move to Yorkville -- there's actually life in Yorkville. The only modern thing about Ottawa is fast food. Other than that, there's not even a restaurant or a chain store that I could find. Everything is community-owned and the people all seem to know each other. Not a bad thing unless you do something they don't like, in which case EVERYONE knows. I applied for a couple part-time on-air jobs in Chicago with The Loop and with WNND. The Loop job has been open since April, which makes me wonder a little bit about it. I did have to search a little bit to find it, but maybe they've just been taking people on slowly but surely. I'd really like to work there. It's a nice office, it's in the Hancock building and it's on Michigan Avenue. Not to mention it puts me in Chicago, which would make it easier to stay there / move up within the city as my career goes along. So I'm gonna call them tomorrow. It's a long shot, but a shot nonetheless.

I'm driving down to Ottawa, Illinois tomorrow to go interview for a job there as a morning drive anchor / general assignment reporter. I think things have gone well so far. The news director has made quite an effort to stay in touch with me, first e-mailing me to say he had received my materials and this morning calling me to see if we could meet before he goes out of town for a week. He sounds like a nice guy, and has a voice you'd identify immediately as belonging to someone who's on the radio day in and day out. So we'll see how that goes. I don't have any other offers at this point, so if he offers me a decent wage, chances are I'll take it and go from there. One my foot is in the door, things get a little easier from there on in.

Also, I built myself a kick-ass computer over the weekend. It has a 2.8 gig processor (Pentium 4), 512 mb of RAM, a 256 mb video card, a 160 gig hard drive, 8 USB 2.0 ports and runs like the wind. This thing ought to last me quite a while and ought to do anything I need it to do in terms of sound or video editing. The best part is I did all this for about $700. A comparable computer from Dell would start at about $1500. Hooray for do-it-yourself computers.

There's a pretty self-explanatory psychology term for a defense mechanism that's called "blaming the victim". Essentially, it means that one person does not want to accept the consequences of something they did to someone else, so they blame the other person. Tell me if you think this scenario fits:

Someone begins a conversation string by asking me how my job search is going. I tell them politely (even making a joke out of it, at which they laugh) that I do not wish to talk about it. Eventually, the question asker tells me to "go wallow in self pity" and says that if I don't want to talk about it, why don't I change the subject?

My other question is this (it sounds like a question I'd ask my father's wife): If I don't want to talk about my job search, it automatically means I'm wallowing in self-pity? Pigs wallow. I send out resumes and tapes and cover letters literally every day. Wallowing would be sitting in front of a television eating Little Debbie snack cakes and waiting for some prospective employer to come knocking at my door. I'm not doing that. I'm printing off reams of paper and labeling dozens of CD's and envelopes and making daily trips to the post office.

I don't wallow very often. When I do, I tend not to speak to other people and to clear up whatever the situation is quickly and by myself. It may take a while to get a job, and I understand that. Sam Raue told me last night that the average time it takes someone in a good economy to get a job is 6-9 months. I want to get a job as much so I have to stop fielding questions about it as anything else.

This goes back to something that's been true of me for a long time: I hate talking about myself and tend only to do so when I feel threatened. The only time I ever point out anything about my capabilities is when someone tries to downplay them or tell me that I don't measure up when I feel I do. I don't want to talk about my job search. It's not interesting, and you have to imagine that anyone who has the same conversation every day or is asked the same question over and over gets tired of answering that question -- almost EVERYONE is that way.

So when I find a job, I'll say so here. Until then, don't ask me about it. I appreciate people's concern, but unless it gets me employed somewhere, it doesn't do me a lot of good. I'm not gonna forget about you if you don't ask me if I'm any closer to gainful employment.

It's very simple: I won't get the DePauw job.

Man am I sick of people. You know, I can be an ass at times, but at least I'm usually honest with people and don't pull punches about what I think.

I'm fucking sick of people blowing smoke about what they think of other people and their characteristics. I fucking hated it at Medill when someone would turn in a piece of shit story and other people -- the professors especially -- would give them a free pass for some reason. Fucking tell them it sucked or it'll never change. It's not a pretty business, anyway. Just stupid pretty people who can barely read and think they're really cute when they turn any kind of a phrase.

I fucking hate when people gloss over the characteristics of other people because that person is involved in some way with someone they care about. My grandmother, who I love dearly, brought up the subject of my sister's former teacher with whom she is now living at lunch the other day. She said "You know we think the world of Adam, don't you?" and I said "Yes, and I'll tell you to your face that I think there's ample evidence not to think that way" and listed off no less than 5 repulsive things he's helped my sister cause or maintain in herself. Don't give either one of them a free pass. They're both fucking idiots -- SAY SO.

And mostly, I fucking hate when people don't say what they think of me, but rather give me veiled insinuations of what they think or let someone else's view of me determine how they should think. Fucking think for yourself and if you don't like me or something about me, then fucking tell me. And don't give me shit about characteristics of mine that you hate if you give other people a free pass on those same things. It's fucking two-faced and disrespectful. It's times like this that I think it'd be a good idea to start applying for jobs in places thousands of miles from the Midwest just so that I can start from scratch with people who don't have some sort of preconceived notion of me perpetuated by other people. Idaho here I come.

I woke up this morning with about the most profound sense of sadness that I can imagine. I had a dream where I was leaving Washington -- and saying goodbye to everyone. There I was in my Medill classroom giving everyone hugs. Beth Shayne was the last person I hugged, and we just held one another and cried. I don't know why it was Beth, but it was. And suddenly I was at DePauw, and I had a train ticket to leave and had some of my stuff packed up and waiting for me at the train station, but I just couldn't get there. There was always something else to pack up, and always this nagging feeling that I could stay a little bit longer.

And it made me realize something: In the last two years, I've left almost everyone I know behind in one way or another. My schedule has changed and so have my living spaces. The people I hang out with have come and gone, and until this morning I didn't give it a second thought -- it was just the way things had to be.

So now I'm "home", but I'm really not home. My home is with my friends, wherever they are. And my friends are scattered across the country. I wonder if they feel the same way.

I had a short e-mail discourse with Dave Bohmer and he told me that the search for a new assistant Media Fellows director is taking longer than he'd hoped. He also said they've eliminiated many candidates from their applicant pool. Luckily, I was not one of those eliminated. So right now I'm planning on going down to DPU for a few days next week and weekend and hopefully getting in an interview sometime then.

In other randomness, I've been taking my tennis rackets to Galyan's to be strung for some time now. Typically, they've done an OK job, but it's been kinda shoddy lately. I called them today and not only did I get a surly saleswoman on the phone, but she told me that the rackets would be back by 7 this evening. Back? You mean they left the store? Yes, "some guy named Robin" strings them, I was told. SOME GUY?! I'm paying $15 a pop to string my racket for some guy and you have no idea what his credentials are? This is likely the last time I take my racket to Galyan's unless these strings magically last me until the new year or something.