Call me (call me) on the line, Call me, call me any, anytime

Dun dun duuunnn! Second round interviews today - two half-hour long interviews with two different potential supervisors.

The first interviewer was great: personable, friendly, engaging, and interested.
The second interviewer was a little different: uptight, high strung, and likely to have an exploding head.

All in all I would say that it went pretty well, perhaps more so with the first woman. But interviewing is a tricky thing... you don't know what kind of day they're having, what little thing you said that maybe set them off, who will be interviewing after you, or what they inferred from your slightest blink of the eye.

One thing that should go in my favor - no bloody feet! That's right, I bought a pair of good fitting shoes over the weekend! They were less than half of what I spent on the blood drawing pair, which does not please me. They may not be the most attractive things ever, but they cover my toes so that I can look "professional." And I was really just going for comfort.

Yet when I'm not exuding confidence, warmth, and energy at job interviewers, I'm prone to somewhat zany activities... like buying a gravy boat.

Definitions of gravy boat on the Web:

• a dish (often boat-shaped) for serving gravy or sauce

It's ceramic and green. No, I haven't joined Food Network or the antiquing club. I don't really know what came over me, I don't even cook turkey, or roast beef, or roasts of any sort. Perhaps it's a pre-mid-life crisis. Yes... the quarterlife crisis!

What’s a quarterlife crisis? It’s the awkward phase you go through halfway to your midlife crisis: that thrilling period when the structures of your life -- parents’ rules and school schedule -- fall away. “The extreme uncertainty that twenty-somethings experience after graduation occurs because what was once a solid line that they could follow throughout their series of educational institutions has now disintegrated into millions of different options,” write Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner. “The sheer number of possibilities can certainly inspire hope…. But the endless array of decisions can also make a recent graduate feel utterly lost.” Too often, Robbins and Wilner report, recent graduates find themselves drowning, directionless, in an open sea of possibility.

Wracked with the change of quitting law school, unemployed, moving to a new city with her boyfriend, going on interviews with bloody feet, and with no long term plan for financial stability or career realization, Seredne turns to the only stable thing in her life... something that brings her back to happier times... something everyone can recognize as harmless and holding fond memories of dinners made with love... a gravy boat.

Confronted by an often shattering whirlwind of new responsibilities, new liberties, and new options, they feel helpless, panicked, indecisive, and apprehensive.

According to the authors, the difficulty arises when 20-somethings are ejected from the structured academic environment and forced to choose a career, find a home, carve out social niches and manage money (or the lack thereof). This period can indeed be rocky, especially when a young person is told that the world is her oyster and then can't find a satisfying job. In a somewhat self-conscious vernacular, Robbins and Wilner discuss, among other things, spirituality, job-hopping and living with parents.

Spirituality? So after the college party is over then it's time to focus on the afterlife?
Job-hopping? We could always just be like our parents and stay in the same job for 30 years. Nah, social security won't be waiting for us anyway.
Living with parents? YEAH RIGHT! Good one, book, go back to the comedy section.

Or perhaps to explain our quarterlife gravy boat buying crisis, all we need is a little wisdom from the 1994 lukewarm hit, Reality Bites.

Troy Dyer: There's no point to any of this. It's all just a... a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know... a quarter-pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle... and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt.
----
Lelaina Pierce: I was really going to be somebody by the time I was 23.
Troy Dyer: Honey, all you have to be by the time you're 23, is yourself.
Lelaina Pierce: I don't know who that is anymore.
---
Lelaina Pierce: Hey Sammy, what's your goal?
Sammy: My goal is... I'd like a career or something.

Times are most certainly changing. I could certainly never say "same shit, different day." Every day I hear awful news or, if I'm lucky, great news. Any time I tell my mom something she says, "What's next?!!" Well, it's all next. Things don't stop happening. There is no lull. We spend so much time thinking about getting to some point that we made up in our head... the point where things will be calm or settle down, when we'll be satisfied, when we have everything we need. Maybe we come upon those moments every now and again, but for the most part they're not the norm. This doesn't mean that everything is hopeless/pointless/depressing, just that we need to stop living like this is the practice when it's really the game (as a dear friend of mine has said).

So if this means buying a gravy boat even though you've never cooked anything that could possibly use it, then I say, "go for it." I should give myself a pat on the back. There is no better time to buy a gravy boat than today.

p.s. Job place, please call me.