Poetry.

I have been quiet recently because the events of this world have made me fearful. I’m not the type of person who screams when they are afraid. Once, when I was little, and I was afraid of being sick, I told dad that he would know to get mom to help me in the bathroom when I screamed, but all I could manage was a small whimper before I threw up all over the bed. Once, while camping, I saw a spider the size of my hand on the wall by my sleeping bag–literally, in front of my nose–and I didn’t scream or run or even flinch. I closed my eyes and repeated over and over in my head, “There is no spider. There is no spider. There is no spider. There is no spider…”

When I am scared, I grow quiet. I close my eyes, cover my ears, curl up into a ball, and do my best to disappear. It’s comforting to feel invisible in the darkness, to feel removed from the danger. These days, I can wrap myself in the warm security of my upbringing (of my skin color) and I can hide for weeks.

It’s surprising how easy this is.

Growing up sheltered in the suburbs was a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is possible that I didn’t see color as a child. I knew my best friends were Indian, but that wasn’t the point, because we were all just horses or tigers on the playground. I was open to everyone, and I loved the new cultures my friends’ families invited me to learn. Racism didn’t exist in my world. It wasn’t something I brought to the table, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t already there. What is magical in children is less so in adults, and I learned this the hard way. I wasn’t just blind to color. I was blind to everything.

Derogatory terms were so far off my radar that I didn’t even know they existed in the 21st century. I had never heard them on T.V. and I had never heard my family use them, not once. We read Huckleberry Finn, but I had never heard the word spoken aloud, and so I thought that’s just what it was–something you read but you never, ever say, the relic of a very distant past. I remember in college, I heard someone talking about a person I knew and they called her a J.A.P. It was the only term I’d heard before, thanks to watching a lot of corny WWII movies. I remember leaning over to my friend and whispering, confused, “But…she’s not Japanese.” My friend just looked at me and frowned. “That’s not funny, Jen.”

I realized much later that the comment had had nothing to do with being Japanese. In my ignorance, I had missed an opportunity to defend someone I cared about. How many times, I wonder, had I missed that opportunity growing up? Had any of my friends tried to talk to me about what it was like being a different color, practicing a different religion? We talked about books and movies and boys and ice cream. We frolicked like champs and did science experiments together. Maybe I missed something then, too.

When I was in high school, I remember hating poetry. The first poem analysis I completed my senior year was titled “NO,” and I basically failed. My gracious English teacher gave me a second chance, even after I tried giving up poetry for Lent, and I ended up doing okay, but I didn’t like it for one minute. I couldn’t connect with the medium at any level, and I refused to try because I didn’t like it. The best description for this literary Catch-22 I have ever heard comes from a scene in The History Boys. As the teacher announces it’s time to read some poetry, one of the students groans and falls forward dramatically onto his desk. “Sir, I don’t always understand poetry,” he admits. “I don’t see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry’s about hasn’t happened to us yet.”

The pain and suffering, all the life and love of poetry, wasn’t accessible to me at that moment. I was soft. My worldview was small and myopic. I didn’t possess the tools to understand and I wasn’t able to step out and realize that how I experienced the world could be so wholly different from someone else.

This entry is me eating crow.

I’m older now, and trying to be wiser. Despite the temptation to shut my eyes and plug my ears, to burrow deep into my privilege like a cicada into the earth, I have tried to remain present. I am reading what articles I can. I am listening to people grieve. My mind is opening further than I ever thought possible, and, as time goes on, the events of the world cut closer and closer to the core of my existence (the security of my white skin). The more connected I allow myself to be to the world around me, the more personal these news stories become…

A twelve-year-old boy from my city, who attended a school that sends kids to my museum, was shot and killed in less than two seconds.

Another woman is raped on a college campus and her rapist is pitied.

Men and women who look and love like some of my best friends are gunned down without apology while they were carefree and dancing.

My friends, some of the kindest people I know, are scorned and forced to answer for senseless acts of violence they had no hand in committing.

Still more friends are waking up to learn that their homelands have been bombed beyond recognition and must come to terms with the fact that most people would rather look away.

Still more friends are waking up almost daily in their own country to pictures of violence and murder perpetrated by law enforcement against people that look like them, and have to live with the realization that their lives still count for less, even in this nation of freedom.

The more I live, the more I come to appreciate the power of poetry. This world is a broken and a terrifying place, but poets are craftsmen, magicians. With an idea as pure and simple as light and a scant few lines, poets take all that pain and suffering and transform it into a thing of beauty. The meek and mourning find their souls’ grief articulated so perfectly in so few words. It’s as if the poet were holding you in their arms and rocking you gently back and forth, whispering gently, “Me, too.”

A tiny flower grows from a mountain of crap.

The events of the past few months have shaken me, and, again, I have retreated into silence, but this time it is different. I have been silent, but I have also been listening. I may not have the words to articulate how I am feeling (she says 1000+ words later), but I thought I would share three poems that have recently brought me to tears. Read them slowly, perhaps quietly in the dark, alone, and reflect. Open your mind to the fact that violence against anyone is wrong, but that it occurs disproportionately across the world to people who may be different from you. Allow those ideas to enter your heart and to course through your veins. Open your eyes and lean in.

Allowables
I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Not even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her.

I don’t think
I’m allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened.

– Nikki Giovanni

A Small Needful Fact
is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue 
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

– Ross Gay

It goes without saying that our world needs peace and compassion and understanding. Our country–the cities we live in and were raised in–needs people to be brave and to hold out their hands to their neighbors. Poetry may not be the answer, but it does make me more optimistic that the answer is out there. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to continue. But I feel stronger knowing someone out there has the words to plant that flower in this giant mountain of crap.

love is immortality

Last year, I said I was done posting about my friend Jenn and how she died in a car accident on January 17, 2009. I’d rehashed the story so many times it had lost its meaning. I felt guilty. She died while I was asleep. I cried. I bought flowers. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is immortality. I was so afraid of forgetting that I had forgotten the best parts of knowing Jenn. Mourning became an obligation that I had reduced to a formula for the easiest processing.

Last year, I said I was too old for that. It had been five years. I was older. I’d kissed boys. I had a full time job. I wasn’t eighteen anymore. I was an adult, and it was time I grew up.

Well, last year I was wrong. Like it or not, I can’t just erase what rocked my world six years ago. I can’t go back and smile more. I don’t get re-do my first year of college and make sure I’m a more open, friendly person. I won’t pretend that Catholicism hasn’t helped me feel better. I can’t go back and meet all the friends I should have had. I can say I won’t post about it, won’t talk about it, won’t even think about it, but that isn’t going to change the fact that I spent six years doing just that.

I want to keep posting about Jenn because I don’t want to ever look at a picture of my friends in high school and struggle to remember her name. I don’t want to see her face and wonder where I met her or how or why. But, instead of rehashing the same old details about guilt and grief, I’m going to do something different. I can’t help wanting to write about her, so I’m going to write down a memory. It will probably be stupid. We were in high school, and everything back then was chalkboards, assigned seats, and crazy spirit week outfits. Who cares?

This one time, we were in biology class together, and we were supposed to be doing a science project. It was advanced biology, which meant there had to be something that set us apart from the plebeian masses. We had to do a science project that employed the scientific method, and then we had to write up our results with graphs and science like we knew what we were doing. It was terrible. I didn’t have any burning questions about the universe. I figured most of what I needed to know could be read in a book. But, I did care about grades, and it was kind of mandatory. Jenn and I did what any sixteen-year-old slackers would do: we picked the easiest project we could think of. We decided to let vegetables rot in my basement, and we pretended like our results would actually impact the world.

I remember, the vegetables were really molding something fierce one night she came over after school. We were poking the crusty layers of mold with a fork, trying to think of a way we could quantify our results. She suggested we measure what was left of the vegetables…only, we couldn’t seem to see them (see: crusty layers of mold). Enter my bare hand. The mold actually made a sound when my fingers pierced its mottled visage. My fingers curled around and emerged with a fat pile of stinky mush, and Jenn ran away screaming with our clipboard. It was pretty gross, but, on a different level, I definitely enjoyed making her squeal with disgust. That was when I learned that I would pretty much stick my hand in anything for the story. Since then, my hands have been in moldy compost and a bowl of maggots.

I don’t know what my hands added or detracted from the scientific-ness of our experiment. I don’t even remember the grade we got. I do remember it was one of the first times we signed a group project with our nickname: Jen(n)². I do remember feeling like she was my friend for the first time, and not just because we knew the same people or were in the same class. I also remember her telling me she had a relative who was a truck driver, but I’m not sure why that matters…

I know. I broke the promise I made last year. I still made a post about Jenn, but here’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t stay up all night last night worrying. I didn’t spend all day trying to write this post, rereading old essays on the same subject. I didn’t request off work. I didn’t change my profile picture or look at her Facebook page. I didn’t even wear all black. In fact, I actually referred to my black dress as “my party dress” today, instead of thinking of it as “my funeral dress.” (That’s right. I’m going to a party tonight. Take that, guilt!)

So, maybe I can’t forget I loved her that easily. Maybe I can’t forget I cried that easily. Maybe there are too many Irish ballads about dying well and comfortable. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I am happy today. I am happy because I am growing up, and that can mean whatever I want it to.

All that was me is gone…

“I’m going to go blog about my feelings,” I joked as I left the apartment this morning. My keys jingled as I put them in my backpack, and I slammed the door shut behind me. (If you could only see the door, Your Honor, you would agree that the force was necessary!) I walked around; I got a little lost; my backpack made me sweat in really weird places. My left shoe broke halfway to the coffee shop, and then it started raining. Now I’m sitting here watching a woman in the restaurant across the street chew her food. It’s been a weird morning…

I came to blog about  my feelings, but the truth is, I’m not 100% sure what those feelings are. My friends in committed relationships like to remind me that I’ve never been in love, that I’ve never had the experience of sharing a life with another person, all your interests, hopes, and dreams. Out of respect for their opinions, I’ve refrained from calling any romantic engagement I’ve had with another human “dating.” I’ve refrained from calling any ending a “break up.” What I say is this: “We did stuff, then he rejected me.” I even called one instance “A Mutual Dissolution of Something That Was Bad,” or AMDSTWB for short, to avoid taboo terminology. I did this because I heard my friends, and I agreed with them.

I don’t agree with them anymore.

I’m going through a break up now, and you know it’s real because I’m calling it a break up. For a few years now, we knew it wasn’t working the way it should. The love was still there, so we tried to make it work. I think we succeeded…for a little while. I had something to talk about to strangers in bars. I had a reason to get up and get dressed in the morning. I was proud of it, of how much I knew, of how special it made me feel. We saw each other every day, and it was almost spiritual the connection I felt we shared. The more we kept it up, though, the more I realized that something was missing. Most of the important places in my heart were full to the brim, but those that weren’t were empty and meaningless. I cried sometimes for no reason. What we had couldn’t help that. What was staying giving me? I felt thin and old, stretched too far. My wants and needs echoed unanswered in the emptiness. I knew it was time to leave.

Yes, Oberlin is the closest thing I’ve had to being in a relationship. Did we go on dates? Of course not. Did I get weak in the knees thinking of the well-manicured streets and cute historic homes? Don’t be silly. But for upwards of six years, being an Oberlinian has been a defining part of my personality. I loved walking through the streets knowing who had walked there before me. I loved chatting with the bartenders and baristas that I knew, not only by name, but by having actually worked with them. I loved everything about it, and I still do. That’s the thing: I still do.

You may think I’m crazy for comparing moving to a new city to breaking up with a partner, but hear me out. What I had in Oberlin, I can’t have anymore by virtue of not living there. We’re not strangers, but whenever I walk the streets, it will just be temporary now. The storefronts will change, the kids I taught will grow up, and we won’t share that experience. I’ll visit, of course, but it won’t be the same like I want it to be. We’ll make casual small talk. We will part amicably and promise to see each other soon, but I can’t wrap myself up in its familiarity on a cold, lonely night anymore. The intimacy that existed between us is gone, and my future is unknown.

As scary as it is, I think separation is okay. If movies have taught me anything about break ups, it’s that the love is still there, but you’re better apart. There’s a lot my deep connection to Oberlin prevented me from experiencing. This is a step forward, but it is so hard not to look back. For the next two weeks, I will be filling my unemployed hours with things I haven’t yet planned. There’s nothing I want more than to go back to Oberlin, to drink where I know I’m safe, to make old jokes with good friends, to be somewhere where my crazy knowledge of local history adds to a conversation…

It’s hard to describe my feelings because, like most of my knowledge, I find myself suddenly displaced and irrelevant. Cleveland is a small city, but my experience of life is minuscule in comparison. I know I’m smart and talented and independent and all those good things people keep telling me. (That’s another similarity to a break up. My friends are rallying around me, validating me, and rehashing all the bad things about my relationship to Oberlin like that will help me forget I ever loved it.) I know I’ll be okay. I know someday I’ll find what I couldn’t in Oberlin. But for now, I’m going to randomly start crying. I’m going to miss it with all my heart.  And I’m going to call it a break up.

P.S. Cleveland is still perfect.

unable are the loved to die.

Five years ago today, I woke up to the news that my good friend, Jennifer Caitlin Viveiros, had died in a car crash. As I squeeze my hips into my old funeral dress and brush my hair into a neat bun, as I paint my lips red and try to ignore the worried bags growing under my eyes from another sleepless night, I feel like a child playing dress up. What am I commemorating? This dress belongs to another time. These tears belong to another me. It doesn’t seem to fit anymore.

I can’t tell if I’m getting better or staying the same. I can talk about it now. I can hold someone’s hand and ask for help. But I hear myself becoming a broken record. “I’m worried,” I say. “Please don’t drive tonight.” I twist my fingers around each other and look down at the floor. “I miss her,” I say. “I’m scared.”

I can’t tell if I’m getting better or staying the same. I’ve put our things away in a box in a room I never see. The shirts we earned through our fitness class seem permanently creased at the bottom of my drawer. Her picture is…somewhere. I don’t carry these things with me, but I’m carrying something around. I can feel it weighing me down, in a nameless, shapeless anxiety that eats away at my stomach and isolates me from my friends. I don’t carry her; I carry my guilt, my fear, my sorrow.

I can’t tell if I’m getting better or staying the same. I don’t remember her face. I don’t remember her voice. The rooms at the funeral parlor are there but they’re all jumbled, connected by a fabricated, orange-lit hallway in my mind that echoes with a dull static as I wander through memories. It’s a visceral space. It’s disjointed and choppy, but it is real. I can see myself sitting alone in a room with a slideshow of her life. I can’t see my face, but I can see my shoulders shaking. I can feel the coarseness of my friend’s varsity letters as I pressed my wet face into his jacket and cried. If I close my hand, I can even imagine another friend’s hand there as we slowly, cautiously approached the coffin together. But I don’t remember Jenn’s face…

When I’m telling people the story of Edmonia Lewis, I often mention that there is a building dedicated to her on Oberlin’s campus, and most students have no idea what happened to her here. “There is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it,” I quote, and everyone nods solemnly. By trying too hard to remember Jenn, I’ve made her into nothing more than my own guilt. I am guilty that I didn’t try harder to see her over winter break, that I actually made up a lame excuse so I didn’t have to get out of bed. I am guilty because I was asleep when she died. I am guilty because I didn’t answer my phone when my friends called to tell me because I was being blissfully antisocial. I am guilty that when I first discovered the Facebook memorial group, I thought it was a joke. I’m guilty that I don’t remember the day we met, the things we did, the laughs we shared, but I remember so vividly the day she died. I’m guilty that I don’t cry anymore. And I am guilty that, despite all my best efforts, I couldn’t find a way to make her permanent.

So, this is the last time I will write about her. This is the last time I will tear apart my room looking for a dress I only wear once a year. This is the last time I will tear apart my brain for even the slightest memory. This is the last time I will put more than love into wishing my friends safe journeys. This is the last time I visit her Facebook looking for answers. This is the last time.

I’ve said all there is to say. I was 18 when Jenn died. I’d just moved away from home to start college. I’d never been kissed. I’d never driven on the freeway. I’d never held a full-time job. I’d never learned how to say goodbye.

I’m 23 now. I live on my own (albiet in my college town). I’ve been happy in love and sad in heartbreak. I know the highway network of northeast Ohio like I know the back of my hand. I work at the closest thing to a dream job I could hope for without a higher degree. And now it’s time I say goodbye.

I can’t tell if I’m getting better or if I’m just staying the same, but it’s time for me to try.

Work in progress

Imagine if you will, a distressing scenario.  You’re stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean.  Your throat is parched, your lips cracked–for the love of God, you would lick an iceberg for a swig of anything that does not taste like brine.  You look out at the rippling expanse of sea that you know stretches miles further than your own pathetic humanity can perceive.  A familiar adage comes to mind.  “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink,” you murmur methodically, wondering if there was ever a time when you considered using this phrase literally.  You remember the last time you uttered those words.  Oh, how you’d laughed!  Your intern, a lovely chap, placed another file on your desk.  “How goes the hiring?” he inquired.  “You know how these things go,” you chuckled, fingering the edges of the twelfth application that day.  “Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink.”

Little did you know, just six months later, you’d be waking up afloat in a vast desert of salt water with no end in sight.  Little did you know, you’d be drifting into…The Unemployment Zone.

Melodrama aside, the job search sucks.  Nothing I have ever done could have prepared me for this unfortunate fact of life.  I have held eleven different jobs since college, and I have only interviewed for three of them.  Of those three, one of them was practically guaranteed by my status as an Oberlin student, and one was partly guaranteed by my status as a member of the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not like I didn’t work for those jobs.  I spent time on my applications, and I sweated through every minute of the interviews.  I worked hard and got promoted, or received good enough grades to be considered for department-specific positions.   When I was a notetaker, I never missed a single class, and I developed a reputation of excellence.   I had to prove myself, and it wasn’t easy.  I’ve ridden that reputation into creating a sort of free-lance research assistant position at the College.  I’m really trying hard to keep it up and not exhaust the opportunities I’ve been provided.  So, it’s not like I sat cross-legged, spread my arms, looked up into the clouds, and expected it to rain employment.  I didn’t think it was easy, but I also didn’t think it was going to be this hard.

I was raised to think I was special.  I was raised to believe that if I put in the effort, I would get the results.  When I practiced dance, I won medals.  When I wrote papers or took tests, I got As.  When I spoke in class or in the co-op, people listened and nodded.  When I interviewed for a job, I got it (or, in some cases, a different job within the same organization.)  I was raised with the understanding that my feelings and opinions mattered, that no one was going to ignore me, that I would get exactly what I wanted if I tried hard enough simply because I am me.  I am brilliant.  I am a genius.  I am talented and sharp.  I am well-spoken and polite–amiable, even.  I am passionate and industrious.  I am employable.

The problem is that there are plenty of ‘Me’s in the sea, and, I hate to break it to you, but there are plenty of ‘You’s too.  So, what I wanted to do was compile a sort of working list of things that I have learned related to the job application process, because I know a lot of people my age are wrestling with the same problems.  Or, maybe they’ve won and pinned the other guy, but I still think it’s good for people to hear that–hey!–just because you have work today doesn’t mean you’ll have it tomorrow.  You are privileged.  Recognize it and grow from it, and don’t you dare look down on me like I am worse than you.

my professor boss gave me this friend to borrow while i am sad so i thought i would share him with you before this post takes a turn

1) Qui tacet consentire…NOT: Sorry, Thomas More, you were wrong in assuming Henry VIII would buy that your silence meant you had accepted his marriage to Anne Boleyn, and you’d probably be wrong in assuming that silence from a potential employer means they’re considering your application.  Fortunately, being wrong in this assumption doesn’t mean that your head is going to roll.  Unfortunately, when you apply for a job, you are not in the power seat.  No one has to respect you.  If you don’t RSVP to a party, it’s inconvenient and rude.  If an organization doesn’t respond to let you know that they have received your application, it’s still inconvenient and rude.  It’s annoying and stressful and all those other badjectives.  The difference is that they have something you want, and, in my case, need.  They can do whatever they please, and there’s no way to hold them accountable.  The worst part about it is, you still have to be polite.  If there’s even the slightest glimmer of hope that you might still be contacted about the position, your fingers have to be dripping in honey when you type up your follow-up e-mails.  When you call them, you have to sound sweet and inquisitive, not paranoid and aggressive.  Who needs dignity as much as they need money?  The answer?  No one.

2) You cannot polish a turd:  Somewhere in the process of losing your dignity, you also (somehow) have to find the ability to brag.  So, there’s this position I held once that I have mixed feelings about.  The truth is: I worked in a dusty, disorganized student co-operative archive up in the Student Union.  I had office hours that no one visited, and I wrote a monthly publication that was probably used more for toilet paper than edification after it had been distributed to the various co-ops around campus.  I planned events that few people attended and created memory-making projects that few participated in.  The truth is: I managed the archival library of a multi-million dollar 501(c)3 non-profit student co-operative association.  I wrote, edited, and distributed a monthly publication, in which I disseminated information about historic and current events.  I developed and tested theories related to co-operative memory making, with some success.  I planned and facilitated education events for co-op membership.  Both truths describe the same position, but which sounds better?  It’s time to invest in some rose-colored glasses.  No matter how successful you consider your work in a position, you have learned something about something.  Through this position, I learned that motivating a group of over 600 busy college students to care about institutional memory is really difficult.  I learned that, even when you bring the history down from the fourth floor and lug it across campus directly to the membership, it can still be inconvenient and inaccessible.  I learned the value of social media, and I later created a successful memory-making project based on this experience.  Long story short: any turd can be polished.

“The Happenings of one co-op are, in a great measure, the Concern of all. Many happy diversions have, and will arise, which are not purely local, but Universal, and through which the spirits of all Members can be raised and loving Community fostered. May these Happenings be recorded with diligence; for, ‘tis not solely the History of generations past. The History of this esteemed cooperative Association belongs to all Members: past, present, and future. It is your History, as it is our History. We own it. Let’s write it.”

3) It’s what’s inside that counts: Yes, your work experience is what makes or breaks your resume.  It’s true.  You can’t apply for a senior archival directorship without ever having worked in an archive.  But I also want to suggest that you shouldn’t apply for that directorship if your resume uses Comic Sans and word art.  Thanks to a post on my friend, Maggie’s, Facebook, I gave my resume a face-lift.   It looks great and natural.  No overly-puffy lips or too-taught cheeks.  And, best of all, it proves that I know how to use Microsoft Word before an employer even reads that fact all the way down at the bottom.  It shows that I am organized and can produce an attractive end product.  Without exercising any brian power, you can figure all of this out.  How easy and convenient!  Before my resume was pretty and I was proud of it.  I can make bullet points, but so can everyone else.  This new format makes my resume from Nashville.  (Because it’s the only Ten-I-See?  Get it?  I made a joke.  It fell flat.  Deal with it.)

the coveted “after” photo. mmmm, that’s one smokin’ resume.

4) Hey, girl, let me talk to you:  If you get an interview, you are qualified.  It means that they can see you working in the position–the you on paper at least.  They want to talk to you and get to know you.  If you get an interview, have a celebratory drink.  I’m telling you: feel good.  It’s the same way with human relationships.  If someone at a club wants to take you home, it means your smokin’ hot.  Don’t wait until you have a wedding ring to feel validated and beautiful.  Don’t wait until you have that job offer to feel qualified and worth something.  Just like human relationships, there are plenty of other people on earth.  There are hoards of recent history graduates trying to work in museums.  Sometimes it’s just not right, and it can’t go further than an hour long talk or a steamy ONS.  But just because I’m still looking for my soul-job doesn’t mean I don’t deserve one.  The fact that I have had one interview–even just the one–gives me hope.  Even for an hour, maybe even still, that person thought I could do a good job.  I wasn’t lucky enough to receive the coveted acceptance, but that doesn’t mean that someone else was better.  Someone else just happened to be someone else.  I’m trying not to take it personally.  There’s something out there for me.  There’s something out there for you.

There are plenty of other things I’ve learned but I want to end on a positive note.  I’ll save those for another post, perhaps.  Until then, I am your underemployed, yet ever hopeful Friend.

a note i wrote on my hand before my phone interview