Here’s a way not to start the day — Pass the kitchen counter en route to tea brewing and pick up and bite a chunk of last night’s garlic bread.<\/p>\n
Garlic bread is not just for breakfast anymore. Oh wait, make that garlic bread blows for breakfast. Hours after chucking the rest of it out and showering and tooth cleaning, I’m still feeling the regret.<\/p>\n
I’m continuing my self-torture vigil as I wait word on a paying gig meant to lift me from poverty and squalor. (OK, not so much poverty as idleness.) Maybe it’s nostalgia for the halcyon days of interviewing last week, but I’ve pretty much convinced myself that this job could be a good fit. I liked the folks I met, and I’ve liked everything I’ve read and researched before and since the interview. (I’m holding off on reading a bio of someone who battled publicly the foundation’s founding son, since I tend to lean toward obsessive anyway.)<\/p>\n
My current mantra is kind of like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” But, it goes, “Non-profits aren’t assholic, assholes are assholic.” Just because I once worked for a woman who tried to convince me “my people” were all working-class drunks, and I couldn’t possibly have intellectual thoughts because I wasn’t ivy educated, doesn’t mean I will again.<\/p>\n
One thing I just can’t get over is all of the references to “transparency” and openness on their website. Transparency would cripple the Boston establishment that had been my milieu. You pretty much can’t sustain back-stabbing fiefdoms of power if everyone is all open and shit. Even now, the nasty secrets kind of still worry me a bit, even though I’m literally and figuratively miles away.<\/p>\n
Here’s one thing from the interview that I think makes this job seem vastly more comfortable compared to the last (and even then, I was there seven years). When I interviewed for my old job, I got a few questions about my alma mater and my degree. It was pretty clear that the journalism school I attended, which is generally seen as noteworthy, had not been heard of and, therefore, certainly not noted.<\/p>\n
Years later, in a story I’ve told before, my boss returning from lunch and stated something like “Hey, I just found out that your school is tough to get into…” She went on to tell me about how competitive my journalism school is and how one of her colleagues children was having a tough time getting in and apparently it’s not easy, blah, fucking, blah. She ended with “I didn’t know that some programs are seen as ivy caliber; I thought anyone could go there,” or something to that effect.<\/p>\n
Fucking hell. Without even discussing the intricacies and inherent bullshit of education and name-branded learning, that whole conversation made me feel like “I thought you were dumb and assumed that’s why you went to a dumbshit school.”<\/p>\n
By contrast, and for the first time in many, many, many years, in the interview last week, I was greeted by a flattering remark about my old school. True enough in many areas the university has a pretty solid reputation and has innovated in some, among them global policy and international study.<\/p>\n
It felt good to not have to explain about where I had been.<\/p>\n
(Still and all, the best part of all of this process, whether I get the job or not, should be considering that so much is behind me. M. is a bit right (I can’t say too right, in case he reads this) in his assessment of New England’s hide-bound, hierarchical bullshit. Funny that Boston\/Cambridge’s unique brand of conservatism also came up in the job interview, and also probably a good sign.)<\/p>\n