Bummer summer

Like everyone else, I fled the city for the long weekend - encountering some of the most horrible people alive at Penn Station in the process. What is it about traveling to the beach that brings out the absolute worst in people? People who are going to the beach houses should be HAPPY, no?

I, with my limited money and social connections, was not traveling to a glamourous, preppy locale like the Hamptons or Nantucket. Instead I went home, so that I could have a weekend of eating actual food, paid for by my parents, sitting in furniture that wasn't bought at Ikea, and going to Six Flags with my sister. Not exactly a "cool" weekend, but I came back to the city refreshed, ready to face the job search with a smiling (if slightly sunburned) face.

And then I had one of those days. It's only one o'clock, and so far:

- a homeless person (or perhaps a drunk person, you can never tell in this city) decided to use the hallway of my apartment building as a toilet.

- I recieved a letter telling me my rent was going up by $100.

- I got three e-mails from editors rejecting my freelance pitches (although I suppose I should be happy that they responded at all).

- I got an e-mail from another editor about a position I applied to FOUR MONTHS AGO, telling me that my edit test just wasn't strong enough, and that they've decided to go with another candidate. Um, thanks. I kind of figured. (Although, again, maybe I should be happy they let me know at all?)

Now all my happy positive energy has kind of been zapped. I think I'll go home tonight, sulk a little, and see if I'm back on my game again tomorrow.

It turns out my computer wasn't dead after all - just pining for the ffjords. While this is obviously good news, living without a computer for a week has made me desperate never to repeat the experience again. I never realized how many of my friends communicated only through e-mail, instead of using the phone - I missed several weekend get-togethers due to the fact that I didn't find out about them until I got to work on Monday. So from now on, my computer is going to be on light duty only - checking e-mail, doing blog posts, that's it. No using it to watch YouTube videos of Blake to remind myself how much I hate him.

Anwyay. Last week, before the computer blew up, I went to a fundraising event. It was one of those snotty events where people pay $100 to go to a fancy party where they drink their weight in champagne and flirt with each other, all the while pretending that they desperately care about starving children in Africa. I was there for free, on behalf of my dad, whose friend runs the charity.

And while I was there, I met that girl that so many of us hate, and feel that we'll never beat - the nepotism EA. She was talking loudly about how her job at one of my favorite magazines was boring her to death - all the COPYING! And the PHONE MESSAGES! And her boss makes her write things OVER AND OVER AGAIN!

Doesn't that just sound terrible?

I could tell, from the way she was talking, the way she was dressed, and her last name, that she had not gotten this job through good old fashioned hard work. Eventually, I had to go over to the bar and down a few glasses of champers just to get over it - she proudly proclaimed that she couldn't wait to get married, so that she could just quit.

Everyday I wonder how I can ever compete against girls like this. When they go to interviews dressed in Chanel and I go to interviews dressed in H&M, I start to feel like Jennifer Beale at the end of Flashdance. Granted, there are some editors who hire their EAs based on their clips and their edit tests. But far more seem to hire EAs to be prestigious accesories, content to let them sit at their desks IMing their friends all day while they recover from their hangovers gained from a night of partying with Lindsay Lohan. To lose jobs to people like that, when I've been trying to work all day and then do perfect edit tests at night, is disheartening, to say the least.

At the same time, I wonder if I'm really any better. A lot of people want my job, and I would give it up in a heartbeat if a magazine job came along. Does that make me as bad as the nepotism girl? If I don't appreciate the job I'm in, would I be better off giving it up to go work at Starbucks, so that someone who dreams about it at night could have it?

I've never been one to think that people should feel obligated to appreciate things - back in the day when my parents would try to get me to eat my dinner by telling me children were starving in Africa, I would always say, "So? Me eating this digusting dinner isn't going to help thme, is it?" I was sort of a brat.

But when I'm confronted with someone who so clearly doesn't appreciate the job thousands of people would do ANYTHING to have, I wonder.

-Ed's Girl #5

Radio silence

Guys, sorry for the lack of posts this week. After three and a half years of loyal service, my little Mac laptop had a catastrophic meltdown on Tuesday morning. It actually occurred while I was watching Heroes, which makes me wonder if Sylar had something to do with it.

Anyway, the lack of a computer at home has made it extremely hard for me to continue my job search, and almost impossible for me to make blog posts. So, if you have any advice on whether I should continue dating the cool, hipster, t-shirt wearing Mac or switch over to the bespectacled and be-tied PC (who I totally have a crush on) let me know. If not, I'll see you guys as soon as I borrow an emergency computer from my parents.

-Ed's Girl #5

Living up to the hype

Lately, everything is disappointing me.

Stephen Colbert's "Americone Dream" ice cream was nowhere near as good as I was expecting it to be. Spiderman 3 sort of sucked. Lakisha got voted off of American Idol (come on America - you realize Blake's basically doing a Porky Pig imitation, right?) The New York weather basically skipped over beautiful Spring days and went straight to that sticky, humid summer weather that makes my subway ride to work unbearable.

It seems like everything is promising a lot, but delivering little. And that's how I feel about myself, right now. Today is the end of my fourth week at my job - so basically, I've been here a month. And while I've settled in here, gotten my business cards, found the places I like to go to lunch, I haven't done ANYTHING for my mag career beyond signing up for an Ed class.

This is partly my choice - one of the reasons I took a job in book publishing was so that I would have the freedom to only apply for the jobs I really wanted. I haven't seen that dream job pop up on the boards yet, so I haven't applied for anything. Makes sense.

But not applying for anything makes me feel like I'm doing nothing, resigning myself to a job that I'm not entirely happy in just because I don't want to shake things up. During the month I was unemployed, I made sure to apply for a job a day, even if it wasn't perfect for me. Going from that to nothing is a pretty drastic change.

So starting on Monday, I'm going to go back to my proactive ways. A friend of mine has always said that when you're single, you should spend every day of the week either going out to meet guys, or doing something to improve yourself. I've decided to apply that philosopy to my job hunt. If there's not a job for me to apply for on a particular day, then I'll look for ways to build my portfolio. I'll submit pitches, I'll look for freelance opportunities, I'll attend networking events.

Even if everything else in the world is disappointing me right now, I'm not going to disappoint myself.

-Ed's Girl #5

"Let's never forget, we're the real story, not them."

I find "Law and Order: SVU" or "Law and Order: SI" or whichever one focuses on things that actually happen in real life very strange. The idea of taking events that actually occurred - like Anna Nicole's death or the crazy astronaut thing - and turning them into a one hour fictional TV show starring Mr. Big is baffling to me. Why would anyone want to watch that? Didn't they get enough with the 24/7 news coverage?

Sometimes I worry that this bafflement makes me ill-suited for journalism. When the Virginia Tech shootings happened on my first day of work, I ended up, for a brief moment, thanking my lucky stars that I wasn't in the news. Watching TV and seeing the reporters pursue the story, seemingly not for the sake of news but for the sake of sensationalism, convinced me that I could never be one of them.

But of course I realized that the reporters were just doing their jobs, that the type of mags I want to work for will probably have serious, thought-provoking stories about Tech in a few months, and that, of course, the sensational side of news in unavoidable, in almost any industry. These days, news is so tied in with entertainment that it's pretty much impossible to tell the difference. Because I was interviewing for jobs after the infamous Britney Spears incident, almost everyone asked me what I thought about her. As a serious interview question! I was mentioning her in my cover letters!

Books aren't really any better - I think there are probably about four books scheduled to come out about Anna Nicole already. And this love of pop culture is part of why I want to be in magazines - I love the idea of actually having it be part of my job to know that the kids from "High School Musical" are dating each other, instead of it just being a freaky piece of trivia my friends mock me for caring about. And I bet some of you want to be in magazines to get the pop culture out of the news. I think there's a happy medium to be found some where, and I think there's a reason some people read the New Yorker and some people read Entertainment Weekly.

People like to mock pop culture, and the people like us who love it enough to make our livings from it, but I always like to point out that at one point Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Mozart were all part of pop culture.

I still don't get the "Law and Order" thing though.

Testing...testing...

I nearly garroted myself with my office phone cord today by leaping for my keyboard as soon as I saw the information about Ed's "ace your edit test" class. I have severe edit test anxiety, since I've managed to convince myself that faulty edit tests are the reason I'm currently wrangling difficult authors instead of fact-checking articles on Britney Spears.

In a few instances, I've gone and checked the display copy in the actual magazine, and compared it to my edit test. And my copy has been nearly identical?

So I have to be doing something wrong, right?

The truth is, as many of my friends have tried to tell me, probably not. Positions probably went to interns, or my edit test was equally good as someone else's, but they had more clips, or my edit test was great but didn't suit the editor's personal style. If I was really as horrible at writing as I've convinced myself I am, I would never have even made it to the interview portion of the job hunt process.

But it's always easier to blame yourself than to be rational, especially after a couple of close calls. So I'm hoping that even if this class fails to reveal some sort of all-powerful secret, it will at least give me a little more confidence the next time I take an edit test. And that confidence will be worth the $100, even if spending that money means I won't be able to eat for a week.

Until then, I have beer, sushi, and, in about half an hour, American Idol to distract me from re-living my edit tests of yore. C'mon Chris! Maybe the three hundred votes I cast last night will be enough to save him.

- Ed's Girl #5

All the world's a mag...

You know how some people like to imagine their lives as if it's one big movie or TV show? I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who does it - walking down the street, listening to your iPod, and imagining that the song is really the catchy background music for an adorable montage of scenes of you triumphing over adversity?

Well, I do that with mags, too.

Recently I had a pretty bad personal experience - someone I had trusted showed me that my trust had been severely misplaced. And what was the first thing I did? Go home, crawl into bed and cry? Eat a tub of Ben & Jerry's Half Baked while watching Heroes on the couch? Call up my best friend so that I could rant for hours?

Um, no. I thought about what a good magazine story it would make. I imagined it fully, in my mind, complete with accompanying photos, captions, and heds and deks. And afterwards, I felt better, because of course the last imaginary paragraph was all about triumphing over adversity and coming out of my ordeal a better person. I could see the magazine story of this particular obstacle laid out before me, complete with a conclusion, and it was comforting.

I guess it's a weird form of therapy - and I of course did all the other crying, ranting and ice cream eating later that night - but it made me think about how for people who work in magazines (or want to work in magazines) everything feels mag related. I go to some hidden new bar and think, "can I pitch an article on this somewhere?" I watch Ugly Betty and The Devil Wears Prada and think that the other millions of people who watch don't understand the way I do. I watch The Hills and end up screaming at my TV, "that's not the way it is!" much in the way I imagine historians do while watching Rome. I don't just read magazines - I criticize or admire the articles, I note trends, I think about the work that went into making them.

Other people may think we're a little strange, but I think it's a nice way of looking at the world. Really, it's a reflection on how creative we are. And who knows. Maybe one day your melodramatic crisis that makes your friends roll their eyes really will turn into a great magazine article. I can hear the triumphant music now.

- Ed's Girl #5