I need to find a young(ish) single woman who has recently moved to New York City from another land. She needs to be willing to talk about dating and get her photo taken for a local magazine. It'll be fun! Please have her email me at judy.mcguire (at) gmail.com!
1. Despite having looked at the email outlining the details of your interview, misread the time. Naturally, you want to misread it so you're late, not early.
2. Have only one outfit selected, with no contingency plan because all your other clothing is either dirty, doesn't fit, or is at the dry cleaner. But it's okay, because you have the go-to dress.
3. Do a phone interview with a Croatian travel agent located in London ten minutes before you're supposed to be out the door. Look up at the clock, panic, and hang-up the phone.
4. Put on the aforementioned outfit and realize you need a bit of makeup.
5. Grab tube of tinted moisturizer and proceed to squeeze it so ferociously that it sprays all over your dark blue dress.
6. Attempt to clean off Pollack-esque beige splatters with a wet cloth. Realize that this is only serving to turn spatters into smears.
7. Give up on the idea that there's any way you're going to be able to wear this dress, throw open your closet and try on everything you own. Settle on an ill-fitting brown shirt and a pair of filthy pants. Bonus points if you don't notice that they're filthy until you're actually sitting at the interview.
8. Already really late, thank your lucky stars that the L train is miraculously at the platform the second you get there.
9. Realize that it's sitting there because there's been some kind of incident and it doesn't plan on moving anytime soon. Note that you have one minute to get to 58th and 6th.
10. After the L train finally pulls out and proceeds to move at a snail's pace towards Union Square, tear up to the F train and wave bye-bye as it leaves the station at the exact moment your foot hits the platform.
11. Finally reach your destination sweaty and panting, only to find out that your 11:30 interview (which you are already 15 minutes late for) was actually supposed to take place at 11:00; rendering you 45 minutes late.
While cruising craigslist for work (and penis pics) today, I found the following:
I'm sorry, but if by 40 you can't write your own damned personal ad, you really have no business dating. It's not like most men even read the ads anyway—as long as you show enough boobie nobody's going to notice that you made "a lot" into one word, "online" into two, and forgot the apostrophe in "it's." Also, I believe "stand-out" should be hyphenated. God knows I'm no grammarian, but c'mon.
Remember CD ROMs? Yeah, probably not. A precursor to the DVD, these things were interactive, but kind of clunky. In addition to a huge project for Animal Planet, I am proud to say that I wrote most of the text on the original Baywatch CD ROM. (If you click that link you'll see that Entertainment Weekly gave it a B+!)
I don't even own a copy (though I'm sure it's brilliant), but I did come across my copy of the Official Baywatch Writer's Bible yesterday. This is a document the show's producers give to writers they've hired so the writer can get an idea of the show's continuity, style, etc.
It's fairly hilarious, so I'm excerpting selected bits after the jump.
My first real job was waiting tables at a lunch place across the street from Lord & Taylor in Millburn, NJ. I was about thirteen or fourteen. My friend Liz and I would go every Saturday and take orders for tuna melts from crabby old ladies who'd tip us a quarter if we were lucky. I usually got less because for the life of me, I could never remember to bring silverware. So I'd inevitably get some biddy screeching "I NEED A FORK" while she calculated how many pennies she could stiff off my tip for that transgression. This place was old school—we even mixed our own Cokes with syrup and seltzer.
My second real job was at the local drug store. I was a little older then and regularly pilfered the place for everything from tampons to conditioner to birth control pills. Though we had bottles of pharmaceutical cocaine, I was too nice (i.e., Catholic-guilted/scared) to dip into those. There was one lady who would call in every Saturday and give me a long list of things she needed delivered all so I wouldn't notice the last item on her list—her valium 'script. Inevitably, every other week, Nick the pharmacist would have to get on the phone with her and explain that as she'd just gotten 200 pills the week prior, he wasn't really allowed to dispense anymore or he'd get in trouble.
I guess I was just thinking back on these jobs because I've been looking for work lately. Reading these customer-service type blogs—as hilarious as they are—reminds me to count my lucky stars that my contact with other human beings is strictly optional.
. . . but I have to run off to my agent's house and sign my brand, spankin' new book contract!!!!
Yaaaaayyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can't see it, but I'm doing the happy dance around my office!!!! I'm going to be the weird lady cackling to herself on the R train! I'm going to write a book!!! I'm so happy!!!!! Yippeeee!!!!!!!!!!
Even more important than knowing how to throw a sentence together, writers have to have very thick skins. Unless you're really fucking lucky, because most of us face scores of rejection for every tidbit of acceptance. I've been doing this for a long time now, and a few years back, I just got sick of the constant "no's" and kind of retreated from pitching stories. This is a really stupid way to be, because it's not like I think I'm such a terrible writer that I should pack it in, I just couldn't stand the constant ego body blows. I fully know I could be doing a lot better if I pitched a lot more, but instead of getting easier, it kept getting harder and harder. Thus, my tiny little bank account and my giant, looming credit card bills. And it's not like I'm any good at much else!
But anyway, with the help of pharmaceuticals and exercise, I've trying to boost myself out of this mindset and make a little money. Lately it seems to be working a tad better, which is why I wasn't that upset when I got a nice little form rejection letter from the New York Times. I submitted a story to the "Modern Love" column about finding out at his memorial service, that my dead ex had cheated on me. I discovered this little nugget of info via a performance piece that his new girlfriend played out in front of his casket.
In order to pander to the Times audience, I pretty much wiped it clean of all the really nasty bits and sort of lied by saying the whole thing didn't bug me that much. I was even somewhat charitable towards the chick he cheated with, which anyone who knows me, knows is a blatent lie. Because the fact is, I can be one unforgiving bitch. So, yeah, they rejected it (me) and I feel like I deserved it because I was dishonest. (Not that they would've accepted it with the adult diaper jokes, but still.) Maybe it's the happy pills kicking in, but I'm really okay with it.
I've had a lot of crap jobs. I delivered auto parts, I worked at the Gap in the Short Hills mall (while rocking a mohawk!), I was an editor at High Times and spent three years following heroin addicts around. But no job came close to being as humiliating and all around demoralizing as my brief stint as a factchecker at Allure Magazine.
Let me set the scene. . . I was working at my heroin job, when my partner and I got a development deal with MTV. It seemed like a go. We hired an entertainment lawyer, we had a contract, we got paid. . . I was so on my way to becoming a TV mogul. So I did what any sensible person would do and quit my day job. I'm not sorry about that because hanging out with and observing heroin addicts 24/7 gets to be a little depressing after three years. It was time to go. But until my TV ship came in, I needed something to pay the rent. So a friend of a friend hired me to fact check at Allure.
Obviously, this was not an intellectually taxing job. Calling Revlon and ascertaining whether their new line of lipstics is called "Shiniest Reds" or "World's Shiniest Reds" is not brain surgery. But working at Condé Nast was worse than I could've ever dreamed. For one thing, all the women there are a size four or smaller. I am not. They're also hyper-well-groomed and wore makeup every day. Again, not me. As you might well imagine, there were other issues as well. So to keep my sanity, I started sending out daily email missives to my friends:
Subject: Another Condé Nast Feel-Good Moment
Date: Thurs, Dec 9, 1999
Today makes TWO Condé Nast editors who told me I smelled good. I believe today’s compliment—now I’m guessing here, but I think I’m getting it down—came from a Glamour editor—she wasn’t tall or emaciated enough to be a Vogue girl. Plus, she was pleasant. I was waiting for the elevator on the 22nd floor, after purchasing a yummy veggie wrap (mmm) and a Seagram’s Seltzer from the temporary cafeteria, when this nice young woman told me I smelled like Hawaii. Her woefully undertrained nose thought she detected gardenia (ha—it’s tuberose!). I am fitting in around here like a key in a well-oiled lock.
A: Not desperate enough to answer this ad offa craigslist.
Reply to: see below
Date: 2006-07-21, 12:01PM EDT
Licenders Is The Professional Service For The Removal of Head Lice.
If you like working with kids, we can train you as a clinician for headchecks in schools and at our Manhattan clinic.
Call (212)759-5200
I like how they bill it as a job for someone who likes working with kids. Like picking nasty vermin out of kids' heads is somehow equivalent to teaching fingerpainting or supervising nap time.
I'm home from the office all day today, trying to think up pitches, working on my Bust story, and writing next week's Dategirl. This week's column is up and sensitively discusses dating out of your league. I tell the guy in doubt that there are indeed women who'd be considered out of his league, physically speaking, but if he's rich and famous enough, all bets are off.
And so then isn't it a coincidence that this week's Observer features a story on 59-year-old James Woods and his busty 20-year-old girlfriend, Ashley Madison. You can practically hear her gurgle upspeak through the page. My favorite quote was from Woods, gassing on about his belusted: “She’s a great singer, which people don’t sort of realize because, you know, she’s more of an actress." Really, James? She's an actress? I'd never heard of her, so I IMDB'ed her ass.
Hmmm. I feel so silly for being unfamiliar with her oeuvre. After all, she played the part of the "possessed jogger" in the yet-to-be released Pretty Cool 2 (I seem to have missed the original as well). Ms. Madison also played the part of James Woods' girlfriend in last week's Entourage, and the "model girlfriend" in another movie nobody's ever heard of. But who am I to be mean about her? I was an idiot at 20 too, only I had neither implants nor a rich elderly boyfriend. At that age I was slutting around DC, wearing a giant mohawk and a ripped t-shirt.
I've tried dating much younger men and it's always failed. Mostly because I'm cranky and the youth have a lot of energy for the chatter. Then there's the angst. The illusion that their pain is dark and unique and no one will ever truly know the mystery that is them. Yawn. But I'm guessing Ms. Madison doesn't have a whole lot of angst rattling around in her pretty little noggin. Either that, or James Woods is a more patient elder than I. Then again, maybe he's just a bigger perv.
