Big News

I got a new job. Please, please—hold your applause until the end.

It all happened so fast. One minute I’m sitting alone in a tiny office, writing fart jokes for greeting cards and—BOOM!—the next thing I know I’m in a fancy downtown agency that has a ping pong table, beer on tap and awards lining the walls, trying to write copy for a major fast-food joint. I wasn’t looking for a new job but this just kind of fell into my lap—I know, I hate people who have that kind of luck too. But remember, it was only a mere 18 months ago when I was drowning in the despair of unemployment, thinking I would never find a writing job and then, just when I was about to give up and start cleaning rich people’s toilets, I found a great job which has since led me to another great job. I’m not going to say anything about the power of a positive attitude or about how the economy is getting better because optimism makes me feel dirty, but I will say that perseverance in the face of total shit does pay off. If it weren’t for this blog and my Twitter addiction, I wouldn’t have gotten this new job. That being said, I still can’t believe there are people out there who are willing to pay me to put words on paper.

I started my new job about six weeks ago and so far I love it. Although I wouldn’t have admitted this a few months ago, I missed the hustle and bustle of the ad world. I missed stressing out about other people’s problems. I missed having to work late because I was needed. I missed powering through a ten-hour workday on three hours of sleep. I missed being challenged and pushed to my limit. I know, I’m a total masochist.

Although I worked in advertising before my stint as a greeting card writer, I never worked in the creative department. Creative departments at advertising agencies are like beehives, we’re all responsible for our own pollinating; yet we’re all dependent on a queen. The queen bee is mostly the client, but can also be a creative director, an account manager, the economy, anything—the point is, even though we have the freedom to fly wherever we want, buzzing and stinging shit, our survival is contingent on a much larger entity, which provides us with the work to do. And if the queen bee dies, the beehive has only a short window of time to replace her before the entire hive is compromised and all of the worker bees die. So, uh...long live the queen! I guess?

Despite my uncanny ability to put people off by acting like a total ass, everyone I’ve met has been extremely nice and welcoming. I get the feeling that my coworkers are trying really hard to not seem too stressed out or pissed off around me, which is adorable and flattering. Apparently I started at a really busy time because at least once a day someone tells me, “I promise, it’s not usually like this.” I haven’t told anyone how much I enjoy being a busy bee. I just smile and nod a lot because 90 percent of the time I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, which makes everyday an exercise in not looking like a total idiot. For instance, it was my second or third day when an email came through regarding a project for a client.

“Can you do a download at 10:30 this morning?” it said.

I sat at my desk, reading and rereading the email. What download? Am I supposed to download something? Am I supposed to download myself? Can you do that now? There was no attachment to the email, no instructions, so I just replied, “Sure,” hoping more information would come to me as a result. I waited 30 minutes and there was no response. It was 10:15. I was running out of time to figure out this whole download thing, so I decided to consult a nearby coworker.

“Hey, uh, Sarah? Can you tell me what this means?” I gestured towards my computer screen as if it was full of hieroglyphics I needed to interpret.

“Sure. What’s up?” she said, rolling her chair over to my desk.

“So, I got this email and it says I need to do a download but it doesn’t say anything about what the download is, where I get it, how I get it, and I’m apparently supposed to do this by 10:30,” I said, trying to disguise the panic in my voice.

“What?” Sarah leaned in to read the email. “Oh! No, no, not like a computer download. It means they’re going to download you on a project, like, they’re going to tell you about it. It’s like a verbal creative brief." My insides turned to stone and I cringed.

“Oh, I see. Well, I feel stupid now.”

“Don’t. It’s industry lingo. You’ll get a hang of it,” she said and rolled back to her desk like it was no big deal I had just spent the last 45 minutes trying to figure out how download some mysterious file for a meeting.

“Cool. I get it, yeah…well, I’m going to go get downloaded now…I’m going to get the down-low, the DL, the—”

“It’s just download, nothing else,” she said.

“Right, I was just—yeah, cool, never mind…okay, I’m going to do that.”

Since then I’ve said and done countless other dumb things. I don’t know enough yet to know how dumb I seem, but that’s what learning is, right? You throw yourself into the unknown, try to fake your way through it until you get a hang of things and then you look back and squirm with embarrassment every time you think of what you were before you became what you are now. It’s hard. It’s tough. It’s stressful. It’s everything I ever wanted, for now.

Luck Is Such An Asshole

Luck is like a bad boyfriend.

It comes and goes as it pleases with little concern for your feelings or needs. When luck is around, everything seems wonderful, which causes your mind plays tricks on you and you think that “perfect” really must exist because you are living it (only you’re not because your idea of perfect has morphed into luck’s idea of perfect, which is really more like perfect shit). But then, without warning, it just picks up and leaves. It doesn’t return your phone calls, it doesn’t listen, it cheats on you with your friends, and it makes you think you must be crazy for expecting more. So, WTF luck? Why you got to play me like that?

Much like men, I think luck comes in floods and droughts. Sometimes you’re rolling in it and you have several prospects to entertain, all of which vie for you attention in equally satisfying ways. For instance, I can recall a time four years ago when I was flooded with luck—so much luck, it practically created a mold problem (I’m taking this analogy too far, aren’t I? That’s too bad because I can’t stop now). I turned 21 years old and could finally do what I had been doing for the previous four years legally, I landed an amazing internship I never thought I would get, I started dating a cute guy and had just declared him my official “boyfriend” (after four years of not having a boyfriend at all) and, yes—and, I got a brand new car which happened to be the car of my dreams—this all happened in one week, like a severe luck storm warning that might flash across the television and drown out a crucial part in your favorite show. Or maybe it was more like the pipes had been frozen for years, but then, all of a sudden, they burst and lucky sprayed everywhere, causing irreparable damage in the form of uncontrollable awesomeness. This luck lingered for several months following my one-week of intense flooding; it didn’t die away immediately or get up in the middle of the night to leave while I was sleeping. Instead it was a gradual decline, but I wouldn’t say it led to “bad” luck right away—I was just forced to lower my expectations, much like you do with bad boyfriends. Eventually, you’re expectations are so low you find yourself flushed with joy when you win a dollar playing Powerball—or, rather, you’re flushed with joy because he remembered to call you and tell you he wouldn't be able to hang out tonight because he had to study with that cheerleader from his Stats class.

The drought strikes as soon as you realize you’re too good to be tied down to such a lose-lose (loser) situation. At first you think you’re prepared for the drought, you know you’re going to be in it for the long haul and you brush off the concern of others because you’re completely capable of handling this all on your own, or so you think. But then something bad happens: You find out that your parents had to put your childhood dog down. And then another bad thing happens: You get two speeding tickets in two weeks. And then another bad thing: Your landlord refuses to return your deposit. And then an even worse thing happens: You lose your job. More bad stuff: Your friends move to different, cooler cities. But we aren’t done with the bad yet: You have a constant case of hives that have spread to your face making it so that you can’t leave the house without feeling like people are staring at you and your incessant itching. This is like when you find out that all your used-to-be prospects from the previous flood now have girlfriends and consider you their “pal,” and the only men you seem to attract are the ones with glaring abnormalities—they have horns instead of ears or they have an unusual obsession with madras print shorts.

Once you’ve been living in the drought period for an extended period of time, your thirst is so extreme that you’re willing to drink anything. You look back at that one week of uncontrollably awesome luck with bitterness, nostalgia and chest-searing pain, and wonder if you can create your own luck given that you’ve sort of created your own boyfriend (so what if he lives in a drawer next to your bed, at least he’s there for you when you need him, right?). But luck doesn’t work that way. Like a bad boyfriend, luck makes you ache for something you thought you had but never really did—you think you had something great because now that things are so bad, you can’t help but build up that sort of good, but mostly delusional, part in your own mind. Now you consider yourself “lucky” if you break a mirror and manage to avoid cutting yourself and a trip to the hospital.

Just when you’ve resigned yourself to being the poster child for Murphy’s law, something lucky—not fabricated lucky, but truly lucky—happens to you. So, after months of not calling, your bad boyfriend decides he wants to patch things up with you. He’s sorry about all those times he cheated on you with that whorish cheerleader from Stats class. He can’t stand the thought of not being with you, he needs you, he wants you. He promises to be the boyfriend you always deserved—the kind that buys flowers for no reason, leaves notes on the mirror, showers you with compliments and cooks you dinner because he knows you’re hungry. And luck does the same thing—after months of mourning the loss of luck, wishing for it to come back and then finally accepting the fact that it hasn’t, and may never, come back—you find yourself bombarded with it.

Currently, I think I’m riding out a lucky streak. It took a lot of luck to get the job I now have—so much luck that I can’t help but feel like I stole it from someone. But I’m older and wiser now. I know that luck is a one trick pony, no-talent asshat with nothing to offer but maybe a venereal disease from that whorish cheerleader. So I refuse to get attached. The longest drought in the History of Quinn just ended, and I survived, so I don’t know if I believe in luck anymore. Of course, these summer luck storms might produce flash floods, but I won’t lose my head this time. I know luck is a bad boyfriend that I’m better off without.



(Note: I am not personally familiar with most of the bad boyfriend traits discussed above because I have been fortunate enough to have an extremely awesome boyfriend for the past four years who tolerates my nonsense and understands more about me than I ever intended for one person to understand. Sorry, I don’t mean to brag, but he is really awesome. This doesn’t mean I’m not familiar with the bad boyfriend traits that make this analogy work—I have many girlfriends who have been the unlikely victims of such a bad boyfriend. Oh yeah, and I watch lots of romantic comedies because I just can’t seem to help myself from falling into that all too enticing female-centric demographic. And yes, these things totally make me credible.)