Monday, June 28, 2004
It’s no accident that I love looking for new apartments, and hate looking for new jobs. Searching for a new home is all about how close a condo or apartment is to your ideal, while looking for a new job is about how well you fit someone else’s. In both cases neither really can gauge how well they chose. We look for something that on the surface seems likely to bring satisfaction. In the end we are just taking an educated guess.
I thought my apartment in Carroll Gardens was great when I moved in. It had everything you could ask for, it was big, had high ceilings, hardwood floors, and was very close to the city. It was also close to the Gowanus, which I hadn’t thought would be a problem. Little did I know what living so close to an expressway would do to my asthma. Still it was a reasonable choice, and now I make certain not to live on or near major throughways.
Last week I was on an interview in Midtown when I was told I was too young for the job. This was odd I thought. They obviously thought I had enough experience, after all they read my resume, and called me for an interview. My age could be deduced from my resume, after all I graduated college six years ago. Why suddenly did he think I was so young, I was wearing a conservative tie.
Now I am short, and I have thick dark hair, the gray highlights only noticeable to me. All in all I look young. My guess is that this recruiter didn’t want to present someone so young looking to his client. Which has nothing to do with my ability to perform the job. If I were 6’4” I doubt we would have a problem.
This all reminds me of my first time managing people while working at the on-campus café as an undergrad. Promoted to manager, I was responsible for hiring people to work on my shift. Of course my hiring criteria was as superficial as the afore mentioned recruiter (Can you say Karma?), but what can you expect of a responsible yet immature 19 year-old. Staffing my café with only cute girls, I thought I could make the workplace more interesting. Instead I got workers more interested in filing their nails than slinging out mochas.
If there is a moral to this story it is that one should try to make decisions based on actually helpful criteria. I learned this when I was 19, and that is young.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Finally I’m home! It’s hard to put my finger on why I wanted to move back to Jersey City. Many of my closest friends in New York have long since moved away. Josh is here for the summer, but that is a fluke, and come September he’ll be back in Philly. There are all the happy memories I have of my old place on Warren Street. After six months of solitude in Buffalo maybe there was something I wanted to recapture. Not the craziness of the Dot-Com boom, or the wild days before the death of the NYC club scene. It is something harder to communicate, a feeling, happiness, friendship, and an optimistic view of the future. Jersey City is the place where I figured out who I am. Now that I’m back who knows what the next year will bring.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
During my entire stay in Buffalo I never visited its one great tourist attraction, Niagara Falls. Now when I was six, and again when I was 17, I did go there, but seeing something as an adult is always a different experience. So I took my rented Toyota Echo, drove the 20 miles up river, and in a fit of patriotic fervor decided to visit the American side.
On my last two trips to the falls I did my viewing from the Canadian side. This was unfortunate, because I now know that America side is considerably nicer. Canada is a big tourist trap, with casinos and an amusement park, while the US viewing area is a green-wooded park. Plus in the states you get much closer to the actual falls. In fact it’s hard to stay dry, quite refreshing on a hot day.
Click here to see some pictures from my trip. These shots came out much better than the ones I took in San Francisco. I was getting a bit worried, but I guess this camera works pretty well.
In other news, I move on Friday. This will be my last entry from Buffalo. Good bye chicken wings.
Monday, June 07, 2004
Big things are easy. It’s the little things that kill you. Death by a thousand pin pricks. A mere car wreck can’t raise my blood pressure but the insurance aftermath may tick it up a notch. Add to that the hassle of moving, and the fact that uhual has doubled its rates since last time I hauled my ass across the country. I have a theory; the government is lying to us. Ok, that’s not a theory, that’s reality. Least I mention the Nigerian uranium scam. The specific lie I’m talking about is inflation. If it costs me $500 for a truck that last year cost me $250, something funky. I won’t mention gas prices, or real estate prices, or the cost of milk and eggs.
On an unrelated note, people having been asking me to post the pictures of my recently destroyed car. This first picture shows the point of impact, and this second picture shows the tire on the opposite side after it was pushed up on the sidewalk. It’s a miracle that I wasn’t seriously injured.
