First day on the job

Christina and I just had a busy weekend: IKEA all day
on Saturday, assisted by a big truck we rented from Enterprise.
They're closed Saturday afternoons and all of Sunday, so we rented it
for the whole weekend in order to do some last-minute leaf-seeing
before we're both working. Unfortunately, most of the leaves have
passed their prime at this point but we still got some pretty beautiful
scenery. We drove up the Hudson River Valley today for a few hours,
explored Harriman and Bear Mountain Parks (just a couple hrs outside
NYC), saw West Point from the top of the mountain, and then drove back
on the east side of the river, through Washington Irving country,
Sleepy Hollow (formerly North Tarrytown), and Irving's house, though it
was closed by the time we got there.


I am now sitting at my desk at a Mac computer. We just finished a brief meeting with the Executive Editor and my supervisor. There's another new hire starting today who worked for a Penguin hardcover imprint for a few years before this. Her first edition is Canada -- and mine's ALASKA! I have a meeting at 11:30 to go over a few things, then a couple hours to settle in and get used to my desk and computer, look at some books and catalogs, and then we have a meeting with the head of the Delhi office about how our office will work with theirs in the future.
First day's gone great! Lots of documents to
look through, mostly on book creation procedure. The head of the Delhi office spoke mostly about how best to
communicate with her folks, taking into account time differences,
language barriers,etc. She brought us little candles in pretty
handprinted paper baggies as souvenirs from Divali, the Indian
festival of lights, that must have just happened. On the bottom of
the baggy is a sticker with the name of the charity it came from: The
Spastics Society of Northern India.

Finally, the job I was hoping for: a brief history

-While still in Morocco, I saw online that a guidebook company I admired was hiring editors in their New York office. I wrote a cover letter in my hotel room and e-mailed it to them.
-Heard from them almost a month later, after I'd arrived home to Oakland. Had a phone interview and an "editing assessment" over the internet. Didn't think I'd done so well.
-Moved to New York with Christina thinking we'd be able to live in the beautiful apartment some family friends had offered to rent us for a reduced price in a co-op on the Upper West Side. Plan fell through because the owners got in trouble with the co-op board for renting to too many guests.
-I spent 2 weeks looking for apartments full-time while Christina was at work, sitting in the temporary corporate apt her work gave us for a few weeks. Worked with 21 different rental brokers. Almost closed a deal with one for another, smaller place on the UWS.
-Followed up on a lead from a friend of a friend in Morocco who knows someone who works at the New York Times. He hadn't needed assistance in his unit when I first contacted him, but once he heard I was in NY he put me in touch with the head of the Pulitzer Prize team at the Times, who needed a "junior production assistant" to help team assemble Prize submissions for this year's running; job would be almost purely photocopying and resizing electronic documents in Acrobat. Interviewed with them, which really involved them just checking my pulse, and was offered the job 2 days later. Told them I'd wait on it for a week to see if the guidebook got back to me.
-Found a fantastic place in Brooklyn, where we'd decided to live after we determined Manhattan was too crazy for us. The first place we'd been looking at on the UWS was still pending but required a lot of paperwork (parents' tax returns, etc.) and was becoming a hassle. We put money down on the Brooklyn place, had our credit checked and signed the lease that evening. Called the other agent back the following morning to thank her but tell her we'd gone with another place and got a hole bored in my head by my cell phone's earpiece for 10 minutes. Went back the next day to her agency to pick up my personal documents so she wouldn't hire some crook to steal my identity or set fire to my parnets' house.
-Took the NYT job; was convinced that the guidebook wouldn't call me back since they were 3 weeks behind on their promise of doing so and hadn't returned my 3 phone calls.
-Got a call the next day from The College Board. The recruiter said she'd heard good things about me and wanted to interview me, though she was compelled to tell me they were already probably going to hire a very qualified internal candidate. Over the past week I'd given myself numerous pep talks about the NYT job and had grown pretty optimistic and excited about it (hoping it would afford opportunities to advance), so I thanked her but said I'd already accepted an offer, but that it was a temp position through Feb and I'd certainly get in touch with her if I were looking for something new at that point.
-Sitting in a Starbucks on Christina's laptop on a rainy day, got a surprise phone call from the guidebook asking me to come in the next morning for an interview with the executive editor. Did, and thought the interview went quite well, though I had a feeling he was looking for someone with a bit more hands-on editing experience than I have. Overall left feeling pretty optimistic. Told me they'd get back to me in a week.
-Following weekend still no phone call -- I'd left a message asking for news -- and left for Tulsa and Minnesota to make a 1.5-day visit to both sets of my grandparents. Spent those 4 days in nursing homes and sleeping on my aunts' couches; the former, in Tulsa, with my father's mother playing Rummikub and eating mashed potatoes out of a box, the latter in Edina (Minneapolis suburb) moving my grandmother from her minimum-care assisted living condo where she'd lived with my grandpa for the past 8 months to a round-the-clock "extended assisted living" single room in the same complex but a mile away through tunnels under the building from my grandfather, who remained in the same unit but couldn't care for her due to his own health conditions. got a message from the guidebook around this time saying they were checking my references, and then another that afternoon saying they'd like to offer me the job. thought about it for 24 hrs, called from the minneapolis st paul airport to accept it, and called NYT from chicago to thank them but apologize for changing my plans. Was irrationally terrified that the Times guy would have a similar reaction to the realtor I'd changed plans on, but he was very understanding.
-Now back in Brooklyn, recuping and getting ready to see Madame Butterfly at the Met with Christina tonight.

Further explorations

I've felt completely wiped out today. I think it's because I took what I found to be a very rigorous pilates class yesterday. Though none of the three women in the class (I was the only male) seemed too challenged by it. In my defense, it was my very first time trying it, but having always thought pilates was "for girls," I was really surprised at how tough it was. My stomach is still tight and achey today.

I ran around Prospect Park twice this afternoon. I was going to go back to the gym to take another class, but the only one available to me at the time was called "Body crunch" or something vaguely violent-sounding and I decided against it -- especially after I learned that the area they'd be focussing on today is the abs. They've already had enough. So I ran in the park, and listened to a mediocre pop/rock band on Christina's iPod and then a very interesting cabaret/burlesque/gypsy music band.

I'm going to dinner with L. and her boyfriend and Christina very shortly; in fact, I have to leave in a few minutes. Haven't seen L. in over a year, probably. She's attending law school, in her first year. As more of my friends turn to law school eventually, I realize the likelihood of my eventually deciding law school's my most viable option gets greater and greater. I shouldn't think of it as a last resort (for me), but I can't help it sometimes.

Yesterday I took the subway to the end of the Q line and explored Brighton Beach and Coney Island. I got a better sense of the neighborhood in the former, though the latter was interestingly -- and creepily -- deserted. I kept imagining all sorts of scary geek stories being written about the place, and learned about an interesting-sounding website, www.coneyislandhistory.org, that I'd like to check out. Brighton Beach was, as I'd read, a completely russo-fied neighborhood. The novelty of seeing everything in Cyrillic didn't last too long, as I'd seen similar signage in Bulgaria (and that was the real thing, no less), but all the strange and not-so-appetizing-looking food provided plenty of entertainment. After browsing a few cafeteria/grocery stores with a grimace on my face, I sampled a couple things -- some sort of dumpling-ish morsels filled with mashed potato and a pastry stuffed with egg and mushroom which could have been a bit warmer -- and was quite surprised by how good the former was. I bought a huge plastic tub of it to bring home to Christina, which of course she liked a lot.

Tomorrow I leave at 5:30am for Tulsa.

Walking home

Today I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time. It was neat to feel the most famous connection between Manhattan and the borough we live in right under my feet. I was carrying Christina's laptop with me in her shoulder bag, but the extra weight wasn't too much of a nuisance. The sun was bright and it illuminated the huge stone blocks that were used to construct the thick towers that the bridge is suspended from. A horizontal placard repeated on both ends of the bridge provided a timeline of the bridge's construction.

Just before I found the entrance to the bridge, after wandering through Chinatown and Little Italy for a bit, I got dribbled by bird poo from a little chickadee or robin sitting on a telephone wire. At least it wasn't a pigeon; it's dropping was pretty miniscule and didn't cause me much anguish. I did have a hard time figuring out what to wipe my hair off with, though; I ended up using my shirt.

I'd ended up in Manhattan because I went with Christina to her office in the morning in order to take her computer home with me; she needed it to transfer a file she'd been working on onto her work computer. On the way from her office to the bridge, I walked by the UN complex, but I didn't see much going on there. Looks like they give tours, which would probably be really interesting.

In Chinatown I browsed my favorite kind of food stall, the fish market, where the goods are displayed on ice. There were several of these markets up and down Mulberry St., and all had delicious-looking fish on display. Too bad Christina doesn't eat any of this stuff; we could really throw together a feast if we could figure out how to get it back to Park Slope without thawing out too much. I had lunch at a nice Vietnamese place, where the pho was a little light on the meat and tripey goodies but made up for the shortage with really delicious broth that was infused with a whole lot of allspice or something. I don't know my spices too well, but I'm pretty sure that's what it was. And it was awfully cheap.

Once I made it back to Brooklyn across the bridge, I dropped off the computer at our apartment and walked to Target to look for a cooking pan to use while we wait for all our supplies and furniture to get here in the moving truck. I ended up going to a giant grocery store/pharmacy whose name I forget but which was just as bad as Target. I hate shopping in those places; of course, the prices are low, but the quality of the wares is really low, too, and there's no care taken in how they're displayed or in keeping up appearances. There's just junk lying all over the floors, and people are running over it in their shopping carts. And it's always horribly crowded. I much prefer small, slightly more expensive family-run stores.

I'm hoping to hear back from an employer I'd really like to work for this week. My fingers will remain crossed for the next four days.

An interview

I had an interview with a book publisher I'd really like to work for this morning. I hadn't expected them to call back for a face-to-face interview because it took them forever to get back to me after the phone screen. I've already accepted a temporary position with another employer, which won't begin until November 6, but I'm willing to tell them my plans have changed if I get a positive response from the folks from this morning.

I've read that it's a good idea to record your impressions of an interview shortly after it ends. I think my interview this morning went quite well. I wasn't stumped by any of my interviewer's questions, and I think I answered them satisfactorily, if at slightly greater length than necessary. I didn't have any new questions for the HR person who works for the publisher that owns the imprint I want to work for, since I'd asked her plenty of questions the first time on the phone. But I did have questions for the head editor of the imprint, and I think they were pretty good ones.

If I could have done anything differently, I think I should have talked a bit more about my editing abilities rather than my other office management skills. Turns out the job, as I expected I guess, is roughly 70% editing (the rest being financial and collaboration stuff), but I thought I'd addressed my writing/editing experience adequately in my resume and cover letter and had neglected to mention my other abilities. Seemed the interviewer was much more interested in my editing knowledge than anything else, and I felt slightly unequipped to answer some of his questions, like what my editing procedure is. I just like to edit stuff; I don't necessarily have a procedure I follow. But I made something up, and I think it kind of worked.

Despite the fact that I was nervous all morning and couldn't sleep soundly all night, I was pretty calm in the interview. The interviewer was quite personable, as the HR person said he'd be, and he didn't ask me anything very difficult. I had a hard time gauging his opinions of my answers, but he never looked too shocked, at least. I was perhaps a little more honest than I had to be with some responses -- I freely offered what I think I'm not good at, for instance, without him even asking me -- but maybe that'll work in my favor. Some of the things I said suggested to him that I'm perhaps looking for a slightly different office environment than he could offer, and therefore I'm a little sorry I mentioned them at all, but I think I was always truthful. When he brought this up, I tried as well as I could to backpedal and say that I'm adaptable to any environment.

Overall, I think it went well, well enough at least, and I hope to hear back from them soon, regardless of their decision. I'm in the slightly awkward position of negotiating with two different parties without telling either of them about the other, and I suffered the consequences of that when I was dealing with real estate agents. This is a completely different game, however, so I don't think I'll get nipped in the ass quite so hard.

Get me outta here

I took the subway down to Battery Park today to sit on a bench and think. I thought about how I'm not feeling very interested in things at the moment but how I'd really like to be. I thought that maybe it's just because we have so much stuff to deal with right now, logistically, that I don't feel that I have time for fun activities. But soon that'll change. Christina helped me come up with a whole list of things I could get into once we have the time.

Part of the problem is our apartment. I'm not getting a good vibe from it. It's very nice inside (I'm speaking of the temporary one we're in at the moment, in Midtown Manhattan), but kind of sanitized and bland. I feel hermetically sealed inside it; it has tinted glass windows and we have to keep our shades drawn most of the time because we look into offices in the adjacent building during the day. Whenever I'm in the apartment I want to go outdoors, but the area around the building isn't that enticing -- just a lot of tall buildings, people in a hurry and not a lot of light, since it gets blocked by all the skyscrapers overhead. So I'm either stuck in a cold glass cage or dodging expressionless businessmen. Neither is a very attractive option.

A sunny, strollin' day

I just might be a corned beef expert by the time we conclude our stay in New York. I can truthfully say that, in my gastronomic opinion, Katz's corned beef beats Sarge's for juicy fattiness, but the simplicity of Sarge's corned beef sandwich was refreshing after the Katz's reuben slobfest I devoured a week ago. That's not a fair comparison, though; there's not much out there that's as sloppy as a reuben, so to compare a straight-up meat and bread'wich to it is a little absurd.

Today we crossed town to meet J. in Brooklyn and stroll through the North Flatbush Street Fair together. It was a neat neighborhood event and held some surprisingly quality musical performances: a hip-hop group performing outside a new clothing boutique, followed up by an acoustic guitarist playing Bob Marley covers, and on another stage, a country band called The Difibrillators followed by a very excellent Brazilian-style hard rock/zydeco band called The Nation Beat. There were also a few karaoke singers sprinkled up and down the block. I had some soggy fries and we shared a mozza-somethingerother, two sweet corn patties fried with mozzarella in the middle. Yum, but oh so greasy.

This evening we've done a whole lotta nuthin' and I'm feeling a bit antsy. I feel like I could use this time I spend sitting around for other, more productive projects, but I can't really think of what. I never feel much like writing when all I have to use is a pen and paper; I'd much rather type on a computer, which allows me to write as fast as my brain expels words. When I'm writing longhand, I can't keep up with my thoughts and my handwriting, which is already terrible, gets even worse because I'm trying to write too fast. Not to mention that my arm and shoulder cramp up and when I extend my arm fully to stretch it, my elbow cracks with the sound of a dry acorn being crushed under your heel.

A sobering detail

It disturbs but also elates me that I feel so uninterested in most aspects of pop culture these days. Disturbs me because I worry that I'm missing something obvious that makes fashion, celebrity news, or whatever intriguing; elates because I think I can devote the time I'm not wasting on these pursuits toward other, more meaningful projects. Except then I don't. Instead I waste my time taking care of stupid, frivolous "tasks" that I've crowded the pages of my daily planner with. E.B. White had a point when he said something like "creativy blossoms when one ignores the major and minor distractions." I think I'm too enamored with the minute distractions of everyday life to ever devote myself entirely to a creative endeavor -- the kind that swallows all my time and becomes something astounding and fulfilling.

A girl at a friend's party tonight told me about a book she read called "The Tender Bar"...or something like that. Came out not too long ago and was on all sorts of bestseller lists. About a guy who grew up in the New York region (maybe?) and interned as a copyboy at the NYT. He gets along great with the staff and is convinced he's going to be hired as a junior reporter upon finihing his internship; in fact, he's told as much by his supervisors. But come the last day of his term, the news is broken to him that he just didn't make the cut. And this was after he'd told all his friends he was going to be a reporter at the NYT. That was a bit of discouraging news coming from someone in a position of authority: that is, someone who has a life here and has the appearance of one who knows what she's doing with her life.

An apartment and a job in two weeks

I guess that's pretty good. Not even two weeks, really. The apartment's really expensive and the job's temporary, but at least they're real. Now I have two weeks to get my other things in order, including moving all our stuff out here, before the job starts.

I haven't really sat still and considered it yet, but I'm not sure my...self...has adjusted to being here permanently yet. I have a feeling I'm still thinking of this time here as another stop on my around-the-world trip, rather than as the beginning of a new beginning. I haven't had the chance to just casually take things in at my and their own pace yet; instead, I've been running around non-stop for 14 days trying to set up a life that I don't really think of as "real" and "mine" yet.

Even though we'll have to watch our expenses for a while to make sure we can afford our apartment, I can't wait to get into the sights and sounds here. At this very moment there are three different festivals that I'm interested in, two of which have events tonight (and one of which is entirely sold out). I'm sure there are plenty of free happenings, too, in case I get too anxious about our budget. But in terms of my priorities, music, literature, and other cultural events (including eating at restaurants, I guess, since that can be a cultural experience) come first--after paying rent--so I don't think I'll let those go so easily. I suppose one could argue that everything is, in a way, a "cultural event," though I don't think throwing money away on drinks at a bar on a regular basis holds much for me to learn.

Signing my life away on the dotted line

This morning, after waking up from just a couple hours of fitful sleep disturbed by the apartment quandary (keep reading), I got a call from our broker saying we got the apartment we wanted...or that I think we wanted, though it's really, really, really expensive. To top that off, we have to pay him and the landlord an exorbitant amount of money up front for the place, some of which will be returned -- but it's still awfully scary, especially seeing my account balance dwindle to close to zero. I had to open a new bank account here with a new bank to make the funds available.

To make an already stressful experience even more stressful, the agent we'd been working with before this place appeared, and with whom we'd gotten pretty far into the application process, threw a fit when I told her we'd found another place. She screamed at me on the phone for 8 minutes and luckily I kept my cool, though it made me pretty upset. She was convinced (or was just acting convinced) that we'd deliberately screwed her somehow, when anyone should be able to see we were only acting in our best interests as renters with not a lot of time to look around -- we were just keeping our options open.

Then on the subway back to Manhattan, where I've been transferring money to my checking account online so that I can go back to Brooklyn to get bank checks on that money, I listened to a mother describe aloud to her 4-yr-old son what he was drawing on a piece of paper: a loopy star became "four points of sadness," a dot in the middle was described as "a locus of discouragement," and puffy frills around the edges were "clouds of abandonment." At first I thought there'd been a death in their immediate family and she was performing some sort of child therapy that her psychiatrist had recommended, but then I wondered if she was projecting her own unhappiness onto her kid, who, as far as I could tell, was just drawing a bunch of kid squiggles -- and smiling and laughing as he did it. Just goes to show that the weirdest folks on the subway aren't always the ones with no shirts yelling about Jesus and tacos.

Getting a little too familiar

Well, I've discovered a routine: I get up, maybe work out with Christina in the sterile, hotel-like gym in our building, send her off to work, and then sit in front or her laptop for five or six hours, connecting with brokers and arranging meeting times. I end up getting all tense and fidgety. Sometime in the early or mid-afternoon I finally leave the apartment and make my way to Brooklyn or another meeting point to see an apartment. It's a great way to see the city (even though I end up going to more or less the same neighborhoods every time), but it doesn't feel that fulfilling. Given that we're just looking for a simple one-bedroom apartment, and so far I've seen about ten places and spoken to at least twice as many brokers, it feels like I'm trashing around in an exhausting freestyle stroke just to keep my nose above the water.

I haven't had a chance to explore much more of the city since my last entry. I should make an effort to get down to the financial district, walk around Harlem, explore Central Park a bit more thoroughly, see Little Italy or what's left of it. Chinatown would be an interesting counterpoint to China as well as to the Chinatowns in Oakland and San Francisco. But there just hasn't been any time; I'm doing this apartment-searching thing from 9-5 (and more), it seems.

I feel as though I'm in a bit of a rut with this blog reporting but maybe I'll get back into the swing of it once the apartment thing is settled and I wrestle my way out of this rut.

A catch-22, maybe

I am wrestling with the desire to start on some creative venture (a writing project, for instance), but can't find the time or the motivation while I'm trying to deal with getting a job and an apartment in these first couple weeks here. I can't wait 'til I'm settled and feel more comfortable with my surroundings, when I can devote some time to such a project. On the other hand, maybe it's the chaos and uncertainty that give me these creative urges.

I'm beginning to get the feel of the subway system as well as the tides of city life. It's definitely nice to stay hidden away in this glass tower for at least a portion of the day, but once I step outside and adjust to the cacophony of car horns, polylingual denizens screaming and sputtering into their cell phones, and the psychological weight of steel and concrete high rises pushing down upon me from hundreds of feet above, I start feeling OK -- like a mackerel in an unbelievably massive school of other mackerel zooming all over the ocean in a giant swarm, in and out of the deep sea currents, up to the surface to feed and then into the dark, magma-heated depths to board the subway.

I briefly explored Chelsea today after being sort-of stood up by a friend of mine who was supposed to meet me for lunch. We had an understandable misunderstanding, however. I ate at Katz's Deli which, as my memory had predicted, served absolutely delicious sandwiches, albeit at pretty ridiculous prices. It is much more of a tourist trap than I remember it being when I was here four or five years ago, but I'm sure it hasn't changed much since then. Surely I'd have remembered being charged $14.00 for a sandwich, though? But the reuben was insanely tasty, even if the Russian dressing was a little over-sweet.

So then I took the train to Chelsea and strolled West on 23rd St. to the Piers. Wasn't much of note along 23rd, so I don't think I got a particularly good feel for the 'hood; the riverfront was nice, though, even if the Hudson River Park wasn't entirely finished yet. I did see a lot of presumably gay guys walking little tiny dogs.

In the afternoon Christina and I took the 1 train up to 109th and Broadway to see an apartment for rent. It was the grittiest one we've seen yet, and we walked out even before the agent hosting the viewing had finished her spiel. It felt like a druglord's tenement, with dirty rooftops, dead tree branches and piles of trash visible out the window. The hallways were littered with discarded tissues (used for who knows what purpose) and mounds of dust-bunnies. Gross.

Then we returned and spent a quiet evening in. I cooked some quite nice pork chops with sauteed apples and onions, as well as some polenta medallions with arugula tomato sauce and romano cheese. Watched a bit of television (old Daily Show) and then listened to Christina talk about a tough spot she's going through at work and some of the ideas she's working on at the moment.

To read E.B. White's essay Here Is New York today, for me, is an exercise in humility. I am one of the thousands he said come to the city "in quest of something...with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart." How he knew me so well in the summer of 1948, writing and sweating in a stuffy, unventilated chamber in a Midtown hotel, is less a testament to his prescience than a reminder that I am anything but a novelty. I didn't even have room for any manuscript in my baggage.
Nearly all of his descriptions of this city still ring true to me; I, who hasn't spent more than a week here since moving from the West Coast. New York is still a vast, concrete world sectioned into distinctive regions, villages and neighborhoods. One can live a complete and contented life within the confines of three city blocks, and never need more services or entertainment than can be found there. This must occur less today than during White's time and before, but surely it's still possible.
The city sounds -- there, the questioning bloop of a curtailed police siren -- float up to me from the floors of the canyons below. Though surrounded by a more substantial level of comfort than White was nearly sixty years ago, I'm sitting in a chamber of my own, inserted an if in a glass drawer into the side of a glass and concrete high-rise apartment building.