September 22th, 2001.  Saturday

 
    The job fair on Thursday was one of the more depressing events in recent memory. Or at least, it should have been.  It was a pretty terrible day in general, but for some reason I got through most of it pretty unphased.  The day started horribly with the most aggravating experience of my life at kinko's.  Then it began to pour. There were fewere people at the fair than last year, but there were also fewer magazines present, so the lines were extra long.  It just sucked.  You waited in line for like an hour, then you talk to some jerk from the publishing company who says "hi, how are you? How 'bout that wait, huh?"  Then, 32 seconds later, "Well, we actually don't have any editorial openings right now. But I will keep your resume..."  Thanks. Thanks for nuthin.  So I waited in three lines for a total of about 2 hours, and had a total of 3 minutes conversation.  If I hadn't gotten that one call last year from the fair I never would've gone.  While I was there, I thought it might be a good place to meet girls.  I mean, there were some lookers around, if you took them out of their awful pants suits and bad fashion statements, they'd be pretty attractive. And best of all, no one there could be turned off by my unemployed status.  Well, they couldn't be justifiably turned off.  Anyway, speaking of fashion statements, this job fair was also a showing of some terrible, terrible wardrobe decisions.  The standout was the tan and white searsucker suit, but for the most part these crimes were much moresubtle. You had to pay attention to see how terrible a lot of these people looked.  You had you middle-aged guys in the middle-aged guy suits, then you had the recent grads in their 50 dollar H and M suits trying too hard to look stylish.  It was really quite sad.  A whole room of poorly dressed, unemployed college graduates.  Some even with graduate degrees.
    I listened to my cd played while I was standing in line in the hopes that no one would talk to me.  The last thing I wanted to get involved in was a "So what do you do?" conversation.  I narrowly avoided a woman standing next to me asking "Why do you even bother? Why bother standing in this line when your resume is just one out of 5,000?"  she asked this of course while standing in the same long line. Maybe she was trying to discourage the rest of us into getting out of line and going home.  Anyway, another guy interrupted my Neutral Milk Hotel listening to ask me what I did.  At first I was just kind of shocked that he'd started a conversation, especially since I was standing right in front of him, deliberately making exaggerated movements and tapping my feet to let him know how into the music I was and how much i was content just listening to the music and not talking to anyway.  Anyway, he goes on and on, he's a photographer, he has a journalism degree but "tries to never got there," whatever that means, and yada yada yada.  I really wasn't looking for any unemployed empathy.
    Anyway, after that, I really didn't have anything else scheduled for the day except a Washington and Lee sponsored event in the evening.  But I didn't really want to go home either.  So I sat in Taco Bell for a while, eating burritos and reading some of the magazines I got for free at the job fair.  Dennis Publishing, the publishers of Maxim and Stuff and Blender, just started a new magazine called "The Week." It's kind of an adult version of the Weekly Reader you got in elementary school.  It just goes over the important events of the week throughout the world, and goes over what different publications said about them.  At first I was out off by the fact that they didn't really do any writing, but once it became apparent what the point of the magazine was, i enjoyed it quite a bit.  It's a pretty thin magazine, and it was easy to read the whole thing later in a coffee shop.  So after a pretty satsifying experience at the Bell, which was probably the highlight of the day, I hopped on an eastbound bus on 14th Street and got off on Avenue A and 11th Street.  The coffee shops were all full, so I walked around in the rain for a while, listening to the new mix cd.  I wandered into Tompkins Square Park.  It was completely deserted.  Which made it really pretty.  Various memorials and candles were still scattered about the park, but of course all the candles and incense had been extinguished by the rain.  There are a ton of candles around, and I stood there wondering when it'll be ok for whoever has to clean it all up to come and clean it up.  All this stuff will just be tossed in the garbage with the rest of the refuse.  When you're looking at a bunch of rain-soaked candles, there's a sadness in how uninspirational they are.  Just piles of melted wax and dirty glass.  surrounded by dead and dried flowers.  However, the entire rainy scene itself had a really serene beauty about it.  It was certainly a more thought provoking scene to me than when it was night time and all the candles were lit.  The lit candle scene was pretty much an ungauged outpouring of emotion.  The rainy scene seemed a lot more thoughtful and poetic.
    The rainy scene was made alternately more cinematic and cheesy by the fact that the Beta Band's "Dry the Rain" was playing on my cd player.
    Anyway, after a half hour of this, I sat in the coffee shop for a good two hours reading and talking on the phone.   I was reading in The Week how the Paris restauranteer union has decided to stop letting coffee shop patrons sit for hours and hours in their cafes sipping on thimble fulls of coffee.  It's costing them too much money apparently, and the number of restaurants in paris has been cut in half in the last 20 years.  The head of the union proclaimed the death of the "Jean Paul Sartre tradition."  Oh, the French.  Not that I've spent more than two hours of my life sitting in Paris cafes, but I half to say those were two of the more pleasant hours I've spent in my life, sitting there and talking and developing a taste for the way coffee tastes after sitting there for an hour.  Luckily, no one in Cafe Pick Me Up seemed to mind me sitting there for a few hours over two cups of coffee.  I really don't see how they can make that much money.  but they still employ at least ten people.
    Anyway, then I went to Kmart and bought new underwear, then met up with Caryn and sat around the Astor Place Starbucks for a while.  We didn't order anything, but just sat. Another benefit of the impersonal corporate stores.
    So then off to meet Jed on 49th Street to attend a Washington and Lee University "welcome to New York" for recent grads in the city.  We went last year, and didn't have any fun at all. But since Jed's now unemployed, he thought maybe it'd be a good place to look around for a job.  You know, network with the almuni.  We didn't do any of that, but sat around and talked pretty much to ourselves over two beers.  We spoke with a few people who lived on our freshman year hall, and to this very attractive girl jed was in a play with who is now married.  I started to feel pretty bad about myself telling people I was unemployed.  It was a definite self-esteem wrecker.  It's the kind of thing, where if I were to sit down and really talk about it to people, I could maybe justify to myself and to them, but when you're in the 20 second conversation, you can't really do much with the "So, what are you up to?" question.  At least, I can't.

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