Interviewing while black

That glass of water is way to close to that laptop, if you ask me.

Interviews, interviews, interviews, interviews. Selling oneself is an exhausting pastime, especially selling oneself many times in one day to many different people, wanting various different perspectives of that which makes you golden. Was it four or five today, with 10+ people? I forget. I know I straight up ghosted one and told the recruiter I had to leave town and that I was sorry and I took full responsibility. I was just exhausted from selling myself so much and I couldn’t track down my ‘corporate-ready’ clothing to wear to his Midtown office and I couldn’t track down my passport he no doubt wanted to make a copy of for whatever reason. Patriot act, probably, or whatever. It felt good to blow it off, relieve myself of the pressure and rush to get into the city from my Brooklyn sanctuary, facing all those people and the chaos and the traffic, and to just go to my local griddle and get my baconn-eggann-cheddar on a croissant with my black coffee. Also, it turned out, I had double booked my time with midtown man, as I received a phone call from another company I had set the interview time with. That call was fruitful and seemed like it may be a situation that would better fit my situation– if I decide to stay in NYC and not move back to Minneapolis.

My passport. I really need to track that thing down for this trip to Thailand that I’m going on in a little more than a week. What better way to spend under-employment than galavanting around New York City? Galavanting around Thailand, because your dollar gets you way more galavanting than in NYC.

It’s a stock image that has little to do with this brain dump.

At this film industry networking event I attended tonight, I was talking to this young guy about work, what else, and he was so tortured. Not at all a misplaced sense because we, as he put it, live in one of the most uncertain economies of uncertain economies in history, and we always have to be marketing ourselves. But, he was tortured by his assignment at work, to produce a bit about the racism of hair from a black perspective. The way he put it, he was kind of just the black producer around so he got shoehorned into the project. He jumped to it, because as staff, he couldn’t say no. It’s just that, explaining how things are racist is not the sole perspective of a CP experience. There are actual stories, good stories that come out of CP perspectives. White liberals are always pushing for explainers, but you know, white liberals are going to white liberal. I gave him my card.

I gave my card to a number of people this evening, but also an Italian gentleman, who was working on a production of his own. Something to do with the food of Sicily and it just made me want to sprint to Italy and never leave. He was from Sicily and was telling me all about the mountain scapes to the beaches, and how one could ski from one into the other, and about the food, the ethnic history. Did he say there were twelve major ethnic groups from the surrounding regions represented in Italy? I’m not so certain, but he did say the Greeks were the first outsiders and they killed the indigenous Sicilian population, because ‘the first ones in always kill the people that were there.’ He had a point. Rome also seems nice, everyone loves it and most people want to live there. Maybe I’ll move there one day, but unlikely anytime soon as I would just be guilt-ridden for moving even farther away from my parents-in-need. I also just desire to be closer to my parents. I know I won’t regret spending more time with them, when I look back from future times where I can no longer spend time with them.

Maybe I’ll have the globetrotting life where I just spend loads of time in Minnesota, loads of time in NYC, loads of time in Italy and Portugal, loads of time other places. There really isn’t enough time in our material experience.