"Death will be a great relief. No more interviews."*

   [After righting (really??) writing this and rereading it, I imagined it in a deep, emotional voice.]  

   Hello.

   It’s been a while.

   My life is a series of unimportant misadventures, so I won’t try to make this seem more epic than it is.

   But changes have occurred.

   No, I’m not majestically thin and one-chinned, like I hope for every year.

   And I do have new stories and drawings…but they mostly play on iterations of my failures at life, which is fair game for this blog. But still.

   Okay, enough. This post is veering toward what seems disturbingly like a Todd Rundgren song (not that there's anything wrong with Sir TR).

   I had the worst interview of my life the other day. (Just kidding I've had worse.)

   I’d been in Omaha for FOUR WEEKS (what?!?) and I’d only been back in Austin for a day when I received an email from one of the higher up professors here at school (we’ll call him Dr. W) saying that I’d been suggested as a viable candidate for a TA position (no idea who would have gotten that idea).

   These TA positions are rad. I mean, at the very least, you get in-state tuition, which would, if I were to receive it, significantly decrease the inevitable hell of debt I’ll face upon graduating from this super expensive lofty institution.

   So I pulled my hung over responsible, well-rested ass out of bed at the butt-crack of dawn to be at Dr. W’s office at 8:30. Okay, so it’s not really that early, but whatever, I was coming off 4 weeks of 13-hour sleeps. I was seemingly the first person in the building. The janitor was just getting started, classes hadn’t begun and I had on my most responsible looking ensemble (eye-drops, blazer, socks, etc..). Another gal was sort of sneaking in and out and around through the building, but I figured she was lost. Dr. W wasn’t in his office yet and so I had to be his first interview of the day.

   By 8:45, I was draped over a chair, my chin on the back, staring out the window at the fog.

   Dr. W stepped off the elevator with the creepster girl and started walking towards his office.

   I followed them.

   “I’m early,” she said.

   “No, I think you’re right on time.”

   “Maybe you’re thinking she’s me. I’m Lacey. I’m supposed to be your 8:30.”

   He turned and stared at me for a moment.

   “No, Lacey, I think I have you at 9.”

   The other girl said, “I’m supposed to be at 9.”

   He said, “Lacey, you won’t mind, will you?”

   I'm not gonna lie to you. I think he took her first because she's black. But whatever.

   So I slunk back to the lobby and read the 3^rd installment in the Caroline B. Cooney’s The Face on the Milk Carton series for young adult readers for half an hour.

   When he finally ushered me into the room, everything seemed odd.

   I sat down.

   He got on his computer and typed for a few minutes.

   “So, do you have any questions?”

   We hadn’t spoken before, so I had several.

   I began by asking him to explain the class.

   He said that in addition to one graduate TA, he would have 5 undergrad GA’s who would effectively do all the work. Then he explained the online discussion forum, how they'd tried it 3 or 4 times, how he didn't think it was so great and he wasn't sure why the University kept doing it.

   I said, “And you’ve done this before?”

   He said, “Yeah. I just said that. Literally one minute ago.”

   I suppose I’d meant the question as more of a rhetorical one, as in "why do you keep doing a virtual discussion that you think is counterproductive?" but okay. I was shamed, in the way I generally feel shamed anywhere I go outside of grocery stores, the only place where I feel free to tell people how rude and inappropriate their behavior is.

   “Sorry.”

   Meek.

   Then he talked some more about the class, and the program in general. He was mostly reading emails and looking out the door.

   “Do you have any questions?”

   I tried to explain what I felt the class was about, structured as a question. “It seems to be a class about the practical application of advertising in different career fields…?”

   “No. That’s not really it at all.” You could feel that what he meant to say was, "No, you fucking moron. That has nothing to do with anything. Shut your mouth when you're talking to me."

   I felt like I was in some sort of awkward shame spiral. I didn’t have anymore real questions to ask, because usually people ask me questions during interviews.

   “Well, do you have a syllabus I could look at?” I had asked him repeatedly to just tell me in plain language what the class was about and every way I approached it, he acted as though I were some sort of feeb who didn’t understand English.

   The syllabus cleared up a few points. But not many.

   But for some reason, we looked at it for a long time and then he started telling me stories about undergrads who'd tried to use this class to get into the advertising major and how they'd failed: Jason and Maria, in case you're interested. Yes, he was naming names. I was sweating in a weird, sick person sort of way. My face felt really hot.

   He asked me if I had any questions. I was very uncomfortable. I couldn't keep coming up with questions for a whole interview, could I?

   So I asked if he had any questions.

   He pulled out my résumé and stared at it.

   It was all misformatted (not a word), with a bunch of crapola HTML printed out in large type all over the top.

   “Oh no. That’s not right.” I pulled out a copy from my bag.

   “Well, now you know that this can happen,” he offered, throwing the ill-formatted résumé in the garbage. "And, so you know, you're here because what's-her-name Natalie bailed on me. Maybe you know her?"

   “I don't know if I do?"

   "Well, she flaked."

   "Sorry...?"

   Meek again. Who was I? Why couldn’t I speak? Why did he keep ratting people out?

   Long silence.

   “Why did you spell ‘copyeditor’ as one word?”

   I panicked. As you already know, if you read this blog at all, I AM A HORRIBLE SPELLER.

   “Um, I don’t know.” I crept behind him and read over his shoulder. “I thought it was one word?”

   “Hmmm…maybe it is. I don’t actually know.”

   He stared some more.

   “If you want to know, I’m actually a really bad speller. I mean, not bad. I’m a good writer. I write. I mean, I use the computer to help me when I’m spelling. I have a blog. It’s about how I’m good with ideas and not so much with spelling…?”

   (OH MY GOD WHY AM I TALKING ABOUT WHAT A BAD SPELLER I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF AN INTERVIEW FOR A TEACHING POSITION??)

   “Are you in creative?” he asked.

   “Yes. But I just got in.”

   “Okay, so what was your answer to the question?”

   He pulled out the prompt from a month ago. The one that caused me a lot of sleepless nights and hard, hard work.

   I told him my answer to the prompt.

   He raised one eyebrow and shook his head as if to indicate that he had no idea why a big old dumb-dumb such as myself could have made it into Texas Creative.

   Silence.

   “Why don’t you send me a copy of that application?”

   I agreed to it, though I was scared he'd tell people all about how bad it was. It seemed clear that he didn't keep secrets very well.

   “You wanna see some really great résumés?” he asked.

   We spent the next 15 minutes looking at résumés on his computer, beautiful résumés clearly created by graphic designers, with timelines and pie charts and arrows and colors, and he said he’d email them to me, so I could make mine better.

   I felt thoroughly shamed.

   My résumé was bad. And it was not well formatted. I couldn’t spell. My creative application was awful. I’d arrived at “the wrong time.” And I asked a question he’d already answered a minute before. I couldn’t wait to get back into bed.
   He said he'd be in touch and let me know by the day's end.

   On my walk of shame home, I looked up “copyeditor." Chicago Manual of Style agrees with me, as does Word. Your basic Google search and this here Blogger: not so much.

   But She of the 9 o’clock appointment got the gig, even though it turned out all the words on my résumé were spelled correctly..

   Life is a game of whack-a-mole, as my friend Rebecca always says. And I’ll talk more about my insane blessings in a future post (yeah right, who wants to hear about things going great for someone? Isn't that just a blog about bragging?), but it feels good to be back and telling you all my troubles. 

Do you think my résumé really needs work?

*Katharine Hepburn. Dark, admittedly, but she has a point. Although I'm pretty sure she wasn't referring to job interviews.

"How lovely to be a woman and change from boys to men. To go to a fancy night club and stay out after ten. How lovely to be so grown up and free! Life's lovely when you're a woman like me."*

    In precisely one month from today I will be 30 years old. Huzzah! Here’s what I want you to do for me for my birthday: subscribe to my blog. Blog and I just celebrated our 8 month anniversary yesterday, and the best present for both of us is for you to be an official follower so that by this time in a year I can inundate you with ads for erectile dysfunction and diarrhea medication and tampons that are somehow better than whatever tampons came before.**

   Here are other things I want for my birthday, since I know it’s hard to decide what to get someone:

1.     A plane ticket to anywhere. (This only excludes countries that end in –stan. Those countries tend to be iffy and a little bit sandy for my taste. And I think they’re largely war-torn, but US Weekly is my primary news source, so I could be off on that. If there’s a good vacation spot in a country ending in –stan, please let me know.)

Um...actually Tajikistan looks kind of amazing.

And Kazakhstan does, too. I take back my stance on the -stans.

2.     A lifetime supply of tampons. I don’t want to pay money for these anymore. I think this is why women are considered the “weaker” sex: we haven’t figured out a way to get rid of periods and we spend hundreds of dollars every year contending with them. It makes little sense, as we are the sex that tends to care more about our clothing, so why does it happen that we are the ones working full time to keep blood off ourselves? Guys wouldn’t care: they’d act like it was cool that they were bleeding and it didn’t hurt at all.

3.     A camera that can compensate for my intention tremor. I don’t need a $1500 camera, but a $300 camera would be really great. And maybe you could also teach me how to use it.

4.     A Costco membership. (I have a feeling this will help subsidize the cost of those tampons.)

5.     A job writing for a sitcom. Preferably one of those successful sitcoms that will be airing for 8 more years.

6.     Pay for my health insurance or car insurance for a month. I really hate paying for those.

7.     Take the GRE for me. I took it already, but my writing scores were really weak (I know you’re probably shocked because I’m so incredibly talented at writing).

Okay, I thought this list would be much longer. Maybe I’ve become less materialistic because I’ve approached the age of undeniable wisdom and maturity.

*Quote is song lyrics from "How Lovely to Be a Woman" (Music: Charles Strouse; Lyrics: Lee Adams) from the epic musical Bye Bye Birdie (George Sidney, 1963). I think Lee was being ironic.

**I have points to make on the advertisements I talked about. Also, is it just me or did this whole idea of promoting medication on television start happening only in the last 10 years or so?

So:

 1. I don’t understand why they have to promote erectile dysfunction medication so much. If someone has erectile dysfunction, I wouldn’t think it would be one of those “scary medical issues” that someone felt compelled to hide from their doctor. It’s not like hiding your smoking habit or being embarrassed to talk about how rarely you exercise. It’s the kind of problem that sort of fixes itself because what kind of man is going to sit around waiting until his erection comes back? Plus, why do they sell “performance enhancing” pills in gas stations?  Who would end up crediting Chevron for improving the dimensions of his penis? I always think of those old SNL Celebrity Jeopardy sketches with Will Farrell and Darryl Hammond, when Darryl Hammond played Sean Connery. 

"The day is mine!" SNL Celebrity Jeopardy. (Photo)

Sean Connery: “I’ve got to ask you about the penis mightier.”

Alex Trebek: “No, no, no, no. That’s the pen is mightier.”

S.C.: “Gussy it up however you want to Trebek, what matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis, man?

A.T.: “It’s not a product, Mr. Connery.”

S.C.: “Because I’ve ordered products like that before. Wasted a pretty penny, I don’t mind telling you. And if the penis mightier really works, I’ll order a dozen.”

2. Diarrhea medication: chances are if you have diarrhea, you’re not sitting at home in front of the TV on a Wednesday afternoon trying to decide what to do about it. You’ve probably already surfed Web M.D. and, if you’re anything like me, you’ve told everyone you know about it and asked for their advice. And if you have the runs, odds are you're not watching TV at all, unless you have one in your bathroom (lucky).

[Which brings me to another issue about advertising: I know they think they’ve got their target demographic nailed down, but they don’t. Just because I’m home in the afternoon doesn’t mean I need to go to DeVry Institute of Technology to get my criminology degree. Nor does it mean I need to be slammed with diaper ads every 5 minutes. I’m neither unemployed nor a stay-at-home mom. I do not need a lawyer because I’m sitting on the couch in the afternoon thinking about who the fuck I can sue so I don’t have to get a real job. I just happen to have the afternoon off, you assholes.

DeVry Campus and entire staff.

3. And tampons: Emily and I had a really good idea about how to revolutionize the tampon industry. I can’t really tell you what the idea is, because too many of my ideas have been stolen because I can’t shut up about my brilliance. What I will say is that it’s criminal what women have ended up having to pay for the privilege of having a period. And when I hit menopause and look back on my life, I’ll be totally fine with the amount of money I spent on toilet paper over the years, but what I spent on my period will be (literally) money down the drain and a true misuse of precious natural resources (paper/cotton/plastic). What a sad, sick waste. (And please don't try to sell me on the moon cup. It may be the best thing out there so far, but it has a long list of problems as well. And this website makes me mad because it looks like these two women are so happy to be together talking about their g.d. periods. Who does that?!? Seriously, are women sanctioning these ad campaigns?)

Look! A woman can run even while using a tampon! What will we women conquer next? (Photo)

UPDATE: As of 11 a.m. this morning, I was granted one of my birthday wishes: my buddy Chad sent me a text offering to let me join his Costco membership. You can give free membership to one person, but that person has to have your address. Since Chad lives in my old apartment, my driver's license has his address. Hooray! See, you just have to ask for stuff and sometimes the universe throws you a fricking bone.