more job drama, and another tale from the theatre

My career counselor wrote to me, "30,000". It was in response to the e-mail I wrote her saying that I had spoken to the boss of the job she had foisted upon me. I told her that when I asked him how much he would be willing to pay me that he said he did not know and would have to consult someone about it. And then proceeded to ask me what an entry level person would receive, his justification being that I had just come out of college and so would know. I said that I would imagine it depends on what the position is, the requirements of that position, and the qualifications of the applicant. This, however, was not specific enough for him and he asked me to tell him what exactly an entry level person would receive a year. 40,000 dollars, he asked. I told him, quite frankly, that I hadn't a clue but that 40,000 did seem a little high. Perhaps 25,000 to start? And I reiterated that it depends on the position and qualifications of the applicant. It was not as though he was trying to figure out how much I wanted to be paid, but how much he should pay me! I am constantly surprised by people.

But, anyway, yes, my career counselor wrote me back nothing more than the figure 30,000. No: thanks for telling Bob that it was not at all my fault for Helen's inability to fill the position -- as I had tried to stress to Bob and told her so in my explanatory e-mail; no: so should we get together to help you with finding another position? Nothing. Just the figure 30,000, as if to say: there, you bitch, that is how much you would have been paid. Don't you feel sorry now?

But I don't at all. East Pittsburgh. There's no way in hell I am working in East Pittsburgh. I may have less than 150 dollars in my bank account, but I'm still too proud to take 6 buses a day, over 3 hours, to get paid what will not even amount to 30,000 dollars after paying transportation fees and taxes.

I just realized that in my last blog I said that I would only take the position if I were paid 30,000 dollars -- and then wrote: who would pay me 30,000 dollars? ........... Well, I still have made the right decision. Not just because it is so far away, but because the job -- research and writing -- sounds very boring.

Oh, am I messing with Fate or what? Well, She deserves a bit of a shake-up given the things she has (and hasn't) brought to my life.

But in better news, I worked at the theatre yesterday. There is a couple who work on my team. They are in their early 80's. They met roller skating and married when he was 21 and she 18. I talked to the woman yesterday as we filled programs with cast changes. She told me she has been married to John for 61 years. 61 years! I told her they should receive some sort of medal for that. After the show they were going dancing. They do it every Saturday night. She is very energetic and funny. The life of the party, you would say. But not at all annoying as some people who are full of a lot of verve can be. Just a right laugh to have around, and acts and moves a lot younger than she is. Her husband is tall and, I must admit, a pretty good looking chap. Also looks younger than he is, and is rather charismatic, but a lot more quiet, down to earth, and withdrawn than his wife. He tells jokes and talks to their friends but in a much more understated, lethargic manner. She works downstairs and he on the balcony. She says -- people always ask us why we do not work together, but I tell them: we live together, eat together, sleep together and have done for 61 years. We need some time a part.

exasperatedds

MAN! MAN! MAN

C'MON!!!!!

So I visit my career counselor last week -- after not having seen her for about a month because she couldn't fit me in. This is after our last meeting when we had looked at a job and I was to send her a completed resume for it and she would send it out and talk to a contact at this place that she knew. I did so the following day. Didn't receive word back from her until weeks later.

I go into the office ready to forgive. She has a job for me, a place very far away from where I live, -- but no mind she tells me, it is a good position. I'm not very enthusiastic. She calls up the guy to talk to him about me. She's very pushy. He calls back while I'm still there. He starts talking like I've already got the job.

Well, long and short is that I can't get to this place and back without spending 90 bucks a month on transportation, taking three buses to get there, and it taking 3 hours a day to and from on buses, and now I have to call back this guy and tell him this. Unless he's willing to pay me 30,000 a year (which, really, who would pay me 30,000 a year) it ain't going to be happening.

I don't want someone to be disappointed in me. Again.

Well, I think I'm done with career counselor. I would never have gone if my brother hadn't been insistent about it. I didn't want to. Don't believe in that.

I've been better about sending out resumes to places, and may get a call back at one of the local libraries, alas only for a weekend position, but it's something -- and it's not working at McDonalds.

Although if I worked at McDonalds I could probably get free double cheese-burgers.

No, that's not enough of an incentive.

EDIT: APPARENTLY I'M SO "EXASPERATEDDS" THAT I CAN'T EVEN SPELL EXASPERATED CORRECTLY.

vigils

Life wastes fast in such vigils as Caroline had of late but too often kept -- vigils during which the mind, having no pleasant food to nourish it, no manna of hope, no hived-honey of joyous memories, tries to live on the meagre diet of wishes, and failing to derive thence either delight or support, and feeling itself ready to perish with craving want, turns to philosophy, to resolution, to resignation; calls on all these gods for aid, calls vainly -- is unheard, unhelped, and languishes.

The always cheery Charlotte Bronte. From her novel Shirley
262

an unexpected chat

I love impromptu conversations. I was sitting in the cafe at the William Penn, a biography of Jane Austen by Claire Tomalin resting open face down on my chest as I rested slouched back into a white-covered plumpy chair when a man came over with tea and asked if he could sit near me, there being five other chairs similar to mine empty within my vicinity. I of course said yes, with a smile. I was in a good mood, having just had lunch with a good friend, and just that afternoon started a new book at my favourite cafe. And, I must say, hopped up on a grande size tea very aptly named "Awake."

He started talking to me. I feigned reading my book for a few seconds, disinclined to talk with him, fearful he would be boring or weird and I'd be stuck in a 45 minute conversation thinking of an excuse to exit the building. But I was interested the minute he said he was from Rochester, New York and staying at the William Penn for a wedding (not, as I presumed and later discovered, his own).

So we talked for an hour and a half. He's an economist. Owns his own business, the money from which he makes he gives to various charities he supports. He got into economics as a young wanna-be activist.

I could write more about our conversation but I don't want to, and it was not especially note-worthy. It was the sort of conversation you would have just meeting someone. What movies and books do you like, politics, where you've traveled... Except what made it very nice was that, unlike most first time conversations with someone, we weren't being set up on a blind date, or have met online in some I'mdesperatesoImgoingtofindadateonline sort of thing. But an unexpected chat with someone who I was interested in, no small feat truth be told.

I like the unexpected. Any day of the week I will take that over the boring yet safe existence of a repetitious life.

By the way, he's like 45 and lives in another state, so there will be nothing romantic going on. Although he did give me his e-mail address and phone number.

imagination

william godwin: Imagination is the ground-plot upon which the edifice of a sound morality must be erected. Without imagination we may have a certain cold and arid circle of principles, but we cannot have sentiments: we may learn by rote a catalogue of rules...but we can neither ourselves love, nor be fitted to excite the love of others.
396

the BNP strike again, literally

I never thought I would actually get my nose bloodied trying to cover a press conference for a British political party — but that is the true face of Nick Griffin and his BNP.

I have been following the developing story of the BNP, the British National Party who is steadily gaining support in Britain for their neo-nazi sentiments. I cannot believe this! For a press conference about the BNP's forced acceptance of whites and other nationality groups in their party as a result of the equality legislation which is soon to pass through Parliament, a reporter from The Times was bullied and forcibly removed from the conference merely because he had previously published some true yet negative remarks about one particular member of the party.

Here is the link if you want to read the complete story of what happened, written by the journalist himself. BNP attack journalist

Previous posts by me about the BNP:
an overview of the BNP and their offenses

British Fascism: a snippet of an article written in The Spectator about how strong the BNP have become and how ignoring them will only make them stronger.

to love another

'Be sure I feel it,' he declared to a friend. 'Be sure I am not the fool to look for that happiness in any future vicissitude of life, that I was beginning to enjoy, when I was thus dreadfully deprived of it. My understanding was enlarged, my heart was improved, as well as the most invaluable sensations of admiration & delight produced in me by her society.'
William Godwin on recent death of wife Mary Wollstonecraft as a result of giving birth to their child, the future Mary Shelley

--

Godwin did eventually re-marry, not that long after Wollstonecraft's death, a lady pretty insipid and who it seems evident he may have married only to have someone to help him with Mary Godwin (later Shelley, upon her marriage to the noted poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) and Wollstonecraft's child Fanny from a previous liaison.

When Godwin died many years later (in 1836) at the age of 80 he requested he be buried with Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Shelley would be buried between them.

Love, like life, is fleeting.

"sooner or later in life the things you love you lose." -- Florence and the Machine, "You've got the Love"

a spot of tea...(EDIT)

Instead of watching the Superbowl, I watched an adaptation of Jane Austen's EMMA on PBS. What a surprise there. If the Steelers had been playing, I would of course have watched the game, but only because I'd already seen EMMA when it broadcast in Britain.

The adaptation is brill, as BBC costume dramas go, but man am I really disappointed with how much was cut out of it in America due to time constraints. PBS has sent out official word saying that they have to delete scenes because they do not have enough time to present long-running shows in their entirety, but this, I know, is a fallacy. They would have enough time if they did not advertise their other shows so heavily before and after their programs. I thought they were a non-profit organization? It is just not right, and I do not understand why the BBC would let them get away with it.

Oh, yeah, money.

But hey, I've seen the original, and while watching the degrading cut version tonight I enjoyed a cup of tea. And that is good enough for me.



EDIT: I just found out that the REGION 1 version of EMMA will include all the scenes snipped out of the Masterpiece presentation....for which I am heartily grateful! Long live the Americans right to see BBC productions in their entirety.

my theater

Benedum Center, Pittsburgh
As I sit in one of the many empty seats in the theater where I usher I hear a mans voice jovially boom over all the stage hands walkie-talkie's -- "Hey, we're going to be in Cincinnati next Sunday. Anyone want to play whirlyball?"

I smile and lounge back further into the plush maroon chair, placing my black slipper shoes on the top of the chair in front of me. Yes, I am happy, I am in my theater watching the stage hands set the stage for the production of CATS that will be playing in a little over an hour, and I am happy.

This is my theater, where I have been ushering for six years. There is no greater peace in my life than when I am in my theater. There is no greater production for me than the one that plays before a show begins. The stage hands joking with one another onstage as they set the props and check and re-check the mechanical devices while the sound techs blast pop songs over the speakers. Sometimes people dressed all in black rush up and down the aisles to converse directly to the sound techs, usually about some problem that leave both people with furrowed brows.

I sometimes wonder if life can get any better than this, sitting in my theatre seat, watching all this transpire. But then the audience come in and my languid voyeuristic attitude changes to one of engaged activity. I love rushing up and down the aisles as I seat people. This is perhaps the only customer service job where it is as fun for the person doing as for the people who are being served because the latter are all so happy. They know they are about to be entertained. Sometimes we have regulars, usually people past the age of naivety who consequently no longer get much enjoyment from going to the theater. Also, they are often rich, another impediment to experiencing joy. And they ignore you when you ask if they need assistance or say brusquely, "No, I know where I am going." But that is really the worst I have to contend with and that, I know from my past experience in customer service, is hardly something to worry over.

During intermission today an older gentlemen of about 70 in a mechanical wheelchair was coming toward the door to enter into the theater with two open-drinks in his hands. Drinks are not allowed in the theater, so I had to reluctantly tell him that he could not come in until he finished the drinks, but one of them was for his wife, a woman also nearing -- if I may be so blunt -- death's door, and who I knew was mostly deaf and almost completely blind and whose cane did little to help her walk. I told the man I would get her so they could consume their drinks in the lobby. I felt bad that I could not let him go to his seat, as I knew his wife had trouble walking and that, frankly, it would be a bit of a hassle for me to worry about getting these two in before the show started again momentarily. But I went to the lady's seat and moved in very close to her and told her, in a raised voice, that her husband had a drink for her and that she would have to drink it in the lobby as no drinks were allowed inside the theater. She said, "Oh, dear, I told him not to get me anything," and I smiled and helped her get up. I offered to help her walk up the aisle, which at this moment was quite a hazard area with people walking down it to return to their seats. She took my arm and I walked slowly with her up the walk-way, trying to help her avert people, as she had just told me that she couldn't see the people in front of her very well. Eventually we made it and her husband gave her the drink. I continued a watch out for other people whose hands may be full of those dangerous liquids known as coke, diet coke, and sprite. Just before the curtain was to rise again (proverbially, as in this case there was no curtain, the stage being kept visible while a man dressed in a large fur outfit was, during the whole of the intermission, perched on the stage to amuse the audience), the lady had finished her drink and automatically took my arm for me to lead her down the aisle. I asked her if she was enjoying the show and she very jovially said that she was. She had never seen CATS before. I marveled over this, that at her age she had never seen it, and almost said to her -- "Well, it is certainly something to see before you die." Luckily today I was less featherbrained that I normally am and had the foresight to keep this thought to myself. Her husband soon followed on his electric scooter of sorts which he was able to park next to her in the chair-less space -- another task I am privy to before a show begins is the unscrewing of bolts to take away seats for wheel-chairs.

My third favourite part of the day is the applause which comes at the end of a show as the actors take their bows. Never fails to produce a feeling of euphoria in me. The theater is a place where people who don't know one another come together for a few hours to enjoy a communal experience. Although this sounds pedantic, I think it is true of theater: in a world that is full of so much that is fearful and soul-crushing, the theater is one place where one can go to escape "real life" for the (usually) more happy and fulfilling existence of a fictional world.

I believe

I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.
~ Villette (ch. XXXI) by Charlotte Brontë

cynicism

I was thinking: there is not one person in my life that is happy most of the time. I am literally surrounded by people whose life makes them miserable. I do not think it is their fault that they are unhappy – most people have bad situations that are difficult to get out of. [like me]. But it has to be said that sometimes people make their life so by cherishing a negative outlook on life.

Conan O'brien in his goodbye speech on his late night show on Friday said that young people should not be cynical, that is will never lead you anywhere pleasant.

“I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

I think I have forgotten how to be happy and, more so, how not to be cynical. I thank him for saying that because it reminded me that I used to not be as cynical as I’ve become.

So many people in my life make me sad because they are. Truth be told. It is hard to stay positive when there are others who, by example or even word, are telling you that it is fruitless to do so. I really wish I were being overly dramatic. After listening to Conan’s speech I tried to think of one person in my life who is happy, genuinely happy with their career, family, themselves, and could not think of one. Is this reality? Not being happy. Or is it just the reality I happen to be stuck in?

Yesterday I was dreading working on my resume. I have had people prodding me to send out resumes and became very agitated and upset at them and, more so, myself for procrastinating, for fearing to do anything, to even think about this horrible situation I am in: jobless for almost a year, having no clue what “I want to do with the rest of my life.” But after a good 12 hour sleep, I sat down at my computer and decided it was going to have to happen, but instead roamed about the Internet for a while, until I came across an interview David Tennant was giving on Scottish radio and listening to him and his always fun, simple positive attitude I began working on my resume and sending it out without really realizing what I was doing.

I do simply adore DT. Those unfortunates who read my blog know this. Hopefully less so for any psychological problem – although I’m sure it is connected somehow. Seriously, I just like him because he is (or, rather, I should write, seems to be) a genuinely happy bloke. He is the biggest star in Britain at the moment (although hardly known in the States – which may change if he gets the NBC show he shot a pilot for) so I’ve seen a lot of interviews and behind the scenes material with him. There was one article I ran across about him titled something like, “Is there anything wrong with David Tennant?” He’s known to be a very professional actor. Everyone loves him; it is very odd how well he is loved. He can be serious, he can be funny, he can make a complete fool out of himself (check out videos of him dressed up in drag for a comedy sketch show; the Brits love them some drag), and he works both low and high art (Doctor Who and Hamlet, for instance), something for which British actors are not known for. In Britain, you have stage actors, and you have comic actors, and never the twain shall meet.

Anyway, the point is, that he has the sort of joie de vivre that I aspire toward, and when things are difficult for me, I think of what he has accomplished and all with a nice attitude and a smile. Then life suddenly doesn’t seem so difficult. I would very much like a real live person in my life of his ilk.

(For the record, I am sure DT’s not perfect, and probably sustains a cocaine habit that allows him to be so happy, as well as I’m sure he is not happy all the time. Have I covered my bases?)

perfections of Jane Austen

"Sense and Sensibility" 2008 (BBC)

There are those that argue that literature exceeds reality, making real life something that it is not, usually something nicer than it really is. Eva Brann argues that Jane Austen is able to transcend this issue. In her novels she is able to present real life in a fictional landscape:

In the Republic, Socrates speaks of "a certain ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry," in which philosophy can be said to charge fiction makers with a double crime: first the shameless fabrication of images which insidiously obstruct the search for being, and then the reckless vivification of these shades by means of a lurid singularity -- so that the more brilliant the fiction, the greater the blame. Jane Austen sidesteps the first charge by being so candidly imitative and yet so careful to refrain from touching the last things as to offer not the least impediment to philosophy, while she meets the second by conforming all her fictions to a serenely normal pattern - she never even invents an authoress. The wonder is that figures so carefully middling in stature are nonetheless so absorbing: Sir Walter Scott caught the essence of her excellence when he observed that she "renders ordinary, commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment."

But if Jane Austen's prosaic poetry is neither false nor egregious and her six novels give delight and hurt not, then that "ancient quarrel" is here for once composed, and these fictions, at least, can be loved rationally.

----
Brann, Eva. "The Perfections of Jane Austen." 1979

confused

I'm pretty upset with my career counselor. She hasn't gotten in touch with me and her secretary called saying that she has been busy. So here I am, with an unfinished resume, and no prospects of a job, the one that we were looking at for which she was going to supposedly call someone to find out about has probably been filled. I was actually interested in that one too.

I don't understand how people we are suppose to be able to depend on are actually the ones who are the least dependable.

a modern heroine, Austen's Emma

While twelve readings of Pride and Prejudice give you twelve periods of pleasure repeated, as many readings of Emma give you that pleasure, not repeated only, but square and square again with each perusal, till at every fresh reading you feel anew that you never understood anything like the widening sum of its delights. Reginald Farrer

A BBC production of EMMA starts next week, on Sunday, on PBS, at 9:00. EMMA is considered Jane Austen's greatest novel, for its complexity of character and plot. Emma is in every sense an anti-heroine heroine, the first of her kind, a character who the reader at first finds difficult to love, and may never do, even once she repents of her "sins" toward the end of the novel.

She is given over to what Lionel Trilling considers "self-love". A narcissistic quality that is at once detestable and necessary. Emma depends on it more for self-preservation than a need to over-reach her boundaries. Although, as Trilling points out, self-love is a quality that allows Emma to become an almost revolutionary female character in 19th century literature:

We understand self-love to be part of the moral life of all men; in men of genius we expect it to appear in unusual intensity and we take it to be an essential element of their power. The extraordinary thing about Emma is that she has a moral life as a man has a moral life...And perhaps that is what Jane Austen meant when she said that no one would like her heroine -- and what Newman meant when he said that he felt kind to Emma whenever he thought of her. She needs kindness if she is to be accepted in all her exceptional actuality...It is the presumption of our society that women's moral life is not as men's. No change in the modern theory of the sexes, no advance in status that women have made, has yet contradicted this. The self-love that we do countenance in women is of a limited and passive kind, and we are troubled if it is as assertive as the self-love of men is permitted, and expected, to be. Not men alone, but women as well, insist on this limitation, imposing the requirement the more effectually because they are not conscious of it.

But there is Emma, given over to self-love, wholly aware of it and quite cherishing it. Mr. Knightley rebukes her for heedless conduct and says, "I leave you to your own reflections." And Emma wonderfully replies: "Can you trust me with such flatterers? Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?" She is "Emma, never loth to be first," loving preeminence and praise, loving power and frank to say so.

Inevitably we are drawn to Emma. But inevitably we hold her to be deeply at fault. Her self-love leads her to be a self-deceiver. She can be unkind. She is a dreadful snob.

...

When we have said that her fault is hubris or self-love, we must make an immediate modification, for her self-love, though it involves her in self-deception, does not lead her to the ultimate self-deception -- she believes she is clever, she insists she is right, but she never says she is good. A consciousness is always at work in her, a sense of what she ought to be and do. It is not an infallible sense, anything but that, yet she does not need us, or the author, or Mr. Knightley, to tell her, for example, that she is jealous of Jane Fairfax and acts badly to her; indeed, "she never saw [Jane Fairfax] without feeling that she had injured her." She is never offended -- she never takes the high self-defensive line -- when once her bad conduct is made apparent to her...There is, then, sufficient reason to be kind to Emma, and perhaps for nothing so much as the hope she expresses when she begins to understand her mistakes, that she will become "more acquainted with herself." And, indeed, all through the novel she has sought better acquaintance with herself, not wisely, not adequately, but assiduously. How modern a quest it is, and how thoroughly it confirms Dr. Leavis's judgment that Jane Austen is the first truly modern novelist of England...There is no reality about which the modern person is more uncertain and more anxious than the reality of himself.



---
Trilling, Lionel. "Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen", 1957

"Hypocrisy", again

True humility, a virtue so unfashionable nowadays that we scarcely believe it exists and use it as a synonym for "hypocrisy".

other posts on hypocrisy:

Hypocrisy is good, m'kay
Well, sometimes hypocrisy is not good

---
quote: 33 Great Writers On Why We Read Jane Austen, Edited by Susannah Carson, quote by Susanna Clarke