navigating the job market in the electronic age

jobs that I have applied for: 11
jobs that I have applied for through email or web-based forms: 11
cover letters addressed to a person with a name (not simply "Hiring Manager"): 3
jobs that I applied to that I thought I was qualified for: 11
responses received: 2
non-automated responses received: 0

hope of ever getting a decent job: dwindling swiftly

a lesson from the dandelion:

death is the precondition of rebirth
(or, spring must fade to make way for the brightness of summer)






















photo taken at Provo High School soccer fields, Sunday 25 May 2008

how to make something scrumptious out of unassuming ingredients hanging out in your pantry

With the vague sense that I will be moving soon (never mind that I still don't know where, or even when, exactly), and that it will be easier to transport less stuff than what I have now, I have been trying to get rid of things that I don't need. I have three garbage bags full of clothes and shoes ready to go to D.I., I have been selling some things on ebay (I could make a pretty good living at that... does ebay offer medical and dental benefits?), I have taken note of a few books that I think that I can part with, and I'm sure there are plenty of knick-knacks and whatzits that I can find new homes for.

You might think that I have only considered the stuff in my closet and on my bookshelves. But then you would be underestimating my extremely developed sense of and aversion to waste of any kind. Chalk it up to my being an economist's daughter: it could be environmental or genetic, or both. Anyway, I have lately been thinking that I should make good use of the food that I have in my cupboards, since I won't really want to take cans of chicken broth or bags of flour with me when I move, and I definitely would hate to let them go to waste.

A few weeks ago, I found in my cupboard a Costco-sized container of couscous, a can of chickpeas, and a can of tomatoes, so I looked around the Food Network's website (their recipe search is great) and I decided to make this. I didn't have all the vegetables and I had to be a bit creative with the spices, but it turned out very yummy and boy does it smell heavenly while it's cooking.

Then, a couple of days ago, I was thinking about the tub of plain yogurt in the fridge (we used only half of it to make tzatziki to go with Vanessa's sundried-tomato-couscous-stuffed chicken) and then I spotted (for at least the hundredth time) a huge can of Quaker oats not doing any good just sitting in my cupboard. And I thought, granola!

I turned again to the Food Network's website, and what I ended up making was a sort of variation on a combination of elements of these three recipes. Mmm it's good. Because I like you, I'll share my recipe with you:

4 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
2 cups sweetened, shredded coconut
3/4 cup sliced almonds
3/4 cup pecan pieces
1/2 cup shelled pistachios
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
1/2 cup honey
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
dash of ground nutmeg
1 cup dried cranberries
1 cup dried pineapple chunks, torn into smaller pieces

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In a large bowl, mix together oats, coconut, almonds, pecans, and pistachios. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan over low heat, melt together the butter and honey. Pour butter-honey mixture over oat mixture and add cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. Stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture is evenly coated. Spread on a jelly roll pan and bake for about 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes, until evenly toasted to a nice golden brown. Let cool, stirring occasionally to keep it from sticking to the pan. Mix in dried cranberries and dried pineapple. Enjoy on its own, or mix with plain or flavored yogurt. Yum!

It turns out I already had a bag of coconut, since I had bought two last year for a coconut custard pie and only used one. My little culinary experiment also helped me get almost to the bottom of the jar of delicious honey that I bought last summer at the Fiddle Creek fruit stand in Idaho, though it didn't make much of a dent in the five-pound bag of pistachios that I bought at Costco who knows when.

So. Here's to yummy granola and culinary experimentation and efficiency in personal foodstuffs management. The end.

i want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week; otherwise, what's life all about anyway?

I first discovered the joys of Netflix during my freshman year of college. Julie had a Netflix account, and whenever she got a new movie in the mail we would get some lime tostitos or mint pirouettes (or both) and go either to her dorm room or to mine to watch the latest arrival on the big screen of one of our laptop computers. Almost invariably, the movie would end and Julie would be fast asleep, often in some odd contorted position or leaning against the cinderblock wall, and I would either have to wake her up and send her home with her eyes half-closed and her mind clearly waiting in dreamland, or I would turn off her computer, move her glasses to a safer spot than where she had placed them on the pillow next to her, and quietly head out the door, wishing sweet dreams to my friend who I'm sure was already dreaming them.

It was in that year that I began to develop my eclectic, sometimes quirky tastes in music and in film, thanks mostly to Julie, of course. She introduced me to Björk, now one of my alltime favorite artists, and she has quite the knack for scoping out the bizarrest of the bizarre music of the world. One of my most vivid memories from that year is the way that Julie's neighbor would wander in from the adjoining room in their suite and, without fail, ask bewilderedly (not so interestedly), "What are you listening to?"

Off the top of my head I remember only a few titles of films that I saw for the first time that year, but they are rather indicative of my current tastes in the moving picture art form:

• Genghis Blues ..... I am still very much drawn to eccentric documentaries, like Helvetica, for instance.
  
• Dancer in the Dark ..... Oh man Björk is bizarre so nothing really compares, but we can put this in the category of non-traditional musicals, like Once, maybe. Traditional musicals, on the other hand, I usually don't handle well.
• Behind the Sun ..... As a general rule, it instantly gets bonus points if it's foreign. The Brazilian films that I have seen, like City of God and Four Days in September, tend to be pretty fuerte, but well-made films.
• Spirited Away ..... I love Miyazaki films. If you have never seen any of his movies, and especially if you are skeptical of and/or averse to Japanese animation (not all anime is the same), go watch Spirited Away or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind or Princess Mononoke or My Neighbor Totoro (my personal favorite) or anything else made my Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli. Seriously. Go now. Are you still reading this?

I guess that the off-color comedies like Juno and The Darjeeling Limited* have found their way into my repertoire more or less as a result of Little Miss Sunshine. Easily in my top five favorites ever, that movie still makes me cry with laughter every time I watch it, and I cannot even describe how beautiful I find it to be.

I have been watching a lot of movies lately. That list I put up on the sidebar over there is rather long, as you can see, and those are only the movies that I have watched this calendar year and really liked or loved. Maybe I need to get a life. I'm working on that. In the meantime, I guess you could say that I am getting my money's worth from Netflix.


*If you haven't already seen it, I recommend for the sake of, um, decency, that you don't bother with Hotel Chevalier, the short tacked onto the beginning; it's not necessary in order to understand and appreciate the main film. You'll see on the DVD menu that it's easy to skip it. If you feel like you've been cheated out of a few minutes, check out the short making-of documentary. It's actually pretty interesting, and the only things they reveal are the hand-painted elephants on the custom-designed train/movie set.


(This post's title comes from The Purple Rose of Cairo.)

monopolistic flight incarnate: documentary, unskilful

Those were the first five words, in order, that came up today when I clicked on the OED's "Lost for Words?" button. I first encountered this curiosity while living with Claire, the English major (yes, the English major, never mind all the others), and it somehow became more or less habit to click on Lost for Words early in the day, and then to muse on how the randomly-selected word that appeared would somehow or another describe the day to come. It also works the other way around: if it is already evening, Lost for Words will comment on the past day's events or mood or color or what have you.

You don't believe me, do you? Well, there was this one day when both Claire and I were in the thick of thesis-writing, stressed out and sleep-deprived and nearly brain-fried and even aching from sitting at a computer for countless hours at a time. I was checking my email and the weather and that sort of thing, and I went over and clicked on OED's Lost for Words, and what came up? Karoshi. I commented by gchat to Claire how uncanny it was, and she promptly discovered by the same method her own OED word for the day: foot-shooting. As in the second definition here. Coincidence? I think not. Of course, it doesn't always work so well. I mean, there was that period of a few weeks when banana slug kept coming up. I never did figure that one out. I think it's like the OED's way of saying, "Reply hazy. Ask again later."

it's almost like real friends

I just knew that all that hard work would pay off!

drove to chicago, all things go, all things go

Okay, so I didn't really drive (though I did see Mayor Daley's name plastered everywhere). I flew instead. You didn't know I could fly, did you? Oh. Well, I can't. Not without some help, anyway.

I made the trip to Chicago last weekend in celebration of three things:

one: Passover
two: Having finished my thesis
three: Claireness

That's right, Claireness. You probably know that my bestest friend Claire moved to Chicago last August, and boy do I miss having her around. I felt a particularly acute lack of Claireness during the last month and a half, when my many all-night thesis-writing parties would have been both more accurately named and more enjoyable with Claire's company, like in the old days. Speaking of the old days, we used to eat a lot of Costa salads. I still do; in fact, after a long thesis-afternoon at the library, when I hadn't eaten since noon and I would probably be working until five or six in the morning, a stop at Costa on the way home was a frequent occurrence. Claire, unfortunately, lives far from any Costa restaurant, and, as she was lamenting this, I agreed to take her a Costa salad when I went to Chicago. So Vanessa and I stopped for lunch on the way to the airport, and I took the two salads (I didn't get to finish mine because I was running late--shocking, I know) in their lidded takeout containers, slipped each into a gallon-size ziploc bag, tied them both inside a plastic grocery bag for good measure, and put the bundle into a little backpack, one of my pieces of checked luggage. I knew that the dressing wouldn't make it through security, and I didn't want to risk the salads themselves, and besides, they would stay nice and cool in the cargo bin. I am pleased to report that they arrived intact (not, however, in one piece, as I mistakenly said to Claire) and delicious, though their aluminum pie-tin-like containers took a beating and the ziploc bags were a smart precaution.

Claire and her husband Joseph live in Hyde Park, near the University in south Chicago. The weather turned out to be gorgeous (not cold and rainy as was forecasted) while I was there, so we took many strolls around the beautiful neighborhood. The streets are lined with a plethora of blue mailboxes (whose scarcity in Provo I lament, especially in my current apartment where we have no outgoing mailbox), big and lovely shade trees that remind me of home, and beautiful old mansions. One afternoon while Claire stayed home thesising, Joseph and I visited the University's Oriental Institute Museum, where we saw, among other things, an enormous bull-man (weighing 40 tons) and an exhibit on the looting of Iraqi cultural artifacts. What boggles my mind is that we have good-quality photographs of looters at archaeological sites, and detailed data about how many looters visit which sites how often, and yet nobody seems to be able to stop them. Oh, and some of that loot falls into the hands of independent American collectors, who often donate items to American museums in exchange for a tax break.

We also stopped in a couple of used book stores, one rather dusty and confusing, the other more well-lit, more organized, and somewhat less dusty. A real highlight, though, was shopping at the wonderful little Hyde Park Produce store just around the corner from Claire & Joseph's apartment building. Avocados for 65 cents each, heirloom tomatoes, a wide selection of other fruits and vegetables, some of which I had never seen before, everything bright and fresh and inexpensive. Plus a full-service deli and a few aisles of basic to gourmet packaged and refrigerated items, and on weekends the nuns set up a table in a corner of the store where they sell homemade tarts and other pastries. If I lived near a store like that, I would cook far more often and I would eat much healthier. Just one of the reasons it's time for me to move to the city.

While I'm on the topic of food, I should mention the delectable bacon-blue-cheese burger that I devoured at Medici café (a favorite frequented by Claire, Joseph, and, they say, Obama). We also enjoyed a number of yummy homemade breakfasts (french toast, popovers, hootenanny/german pancake), as well as a do-it-yourself version of Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme, which I tried to replicate last night with slightly less success. The biggest tortillas I could find were still not big enough to wrap around a loaded tostada, so I had to be creative. The result was a bit less elegant, but still very yummy.

An account of my Chicago weekend would not be complete without a note on the Passover seder. Four years ago, I attended a Passover seder service organized by a professor of religion at BYU. That experience gave me some background in the traditions, but suffice it to say that a Passover seder with a bunch of Mormons differs significantly from one with a big Jewish family. For one thing, the former was far quieter, and more sober, in both senses of the word. Sharing the long table with a few dozen members of my brother-in-law Doug's extended family, I tried to follow in my copy of the Family Haggadah (which, on the pages opposite the actual service, suggests games and activities to get the whole family involved) what was being read by Doug's father at the other end of the table, but it seemed that the little kids were the only ones really paying attention. The adults were excited to see each other: only a few branches of the family live near Chicago, and the rest had come to town from Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, or California. So, many of them see each other only once a year at Passover. Noisy might be an understatement. Uncle Marty and Uncle Randy sang and danced and shouted at random intervals; Doug and Matt kept asking me what page we were on; Amy was busy chasing one-year-old Jack, who, still on west-coast time, was tired but happy; Uncle Dave chatted non-stop; Aunt Sharon was getting irritated at the noise and lack of cooperation; and eighty-year-old Aunt Edith was oblivious, no more confused by all this than by anything else. And for a delightfully bizarre touch, Maria had brought a set of finger puppets, each representing one of the ten plagues: a frog, a locust, a little guy with boils all over his face, an amorphous red blob with the label "blood," and you get the idea. I don't know who would have imagined that such a product would sell, but I must admit it was pretty amusing.

I think that some of the family thought it was a little strange that I wanted to attend their Passover seder and that I came all the way from Utah for it. Maybe that's partly because the event is normal to them: as Doug said, it's sort of like Thanksgiving, where the whole family gets together once a year to talk and laugh and eat. As an outsider, anyway, I thought it was great. The trip was totally worth it. Especially since I got to enjoy several days of Claireness, too.

It was a wonderful way to recover from a month and a half of sleepless thesis-writing before my defense on Wednesday (which I passed! yippee!), a much-needed escape from Utah valley and a very pleasant and relaxing weekend.

this is where i live

rows of tall bookshelves as far as i can see under these fluorescent lights, here i sit, slouch, shift, stand up, stretch, sit down again, hour after hour, facing the computer screen and keyboard which, in a certain combination, are supposed to produce a publishable thesis. from time to time i glance out the window at a patch of sunny blue sky, and the beginnings of daydreams form in my imagination, but i keep them in check. for just a little while longer, i'm staying in with harold.