Take This Job

Well, here I am nearly a week after my last post. I'm blonder, for sure. I told a friend that I feel like Amy Winehouse in reverse. If there was rehab for bottled hair color addiction, I'd be there, smoking cigarettes, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a trucker hat. The desire to be blonde was a good instinct. I've ended up with Aniston stripes on a Von Teese base--my for-the-moment homage to Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. The cliche is no bullshit--I do feel like I'm having more fun.

I'm taking my retro stripes abroad for 10 days where I'll once again be hawking lipstick to the masses. I leave tonight and nothing's done. I can't seem to get motivated. I'm reading email newsletters, slamming coffee, trying to G-chat my tech-poor father. I never do this. Usually, my suitcase is sitting by the door a day ahead of time, neatly packed, plane outfit folded into tidy squares on top. It's currently in the closet, screaming at me to fill it full of proper on-air wear, shiny baubles and shoes, "pocketbooks" and all manner of scrubs and sprays which I'll use to fluff myself into a presence.

Fact is, my head is elsewhere.

On Friday, I started submitting my resume. When I opened it up to print I saw that I'd last revised it in February. It's been ready to float out of my computer and onto the desks of eager employers for five months. And the funny thing is, the decision to finally get out there and start looking was so unceremonious. It wasn't a final straw situation or the dream of a Mary Tyler Moore hat-in-air moment that sent me to the fax machine at Kinkos. It was just. Simply. Time. I sent two resumes on the first day. That effort alone was enough for me to justify two agave nectar margaritas and a Modelo's worth of celebration to myself later that night. Just the doing of it--the breaking through the fear that there's nothing out there, that the search will be fruitless, that I still don't know what I want and won't be able to project it...the fear that someone might call me and I might have to go in and tell them who I am and what I want and represent myself was so drink-worthy, so "hell yeah, power to the people"-ish, that I felt satisfied.

And then one of them called me last night.

It's super early stages. A pre-screen. A you-tell-us-who-you-are-and-we'll-tell-you-if-we're-even-remotely-into-that kind of meet and greet. But after I took the call a billion little futures exploded in my mind: the submitting of notice, my first week on the job, buying a professional wardrobe. I'm going to let myself go there because I think it's good. I haven't been able to for 7 years at my current job and I'm pretty sure that's why I've been there for 7 years. Gotta be able to see it if you're gonna be it.

So, who knows? If it's not this one, it'll be another one. But there's no use doing what I usually do: immediately trying to bring myself down to earth, telling myself not to get excited, minimizing it, making it seem small so that if it doesn't happen I won't be disappointed. That just doesn't work. And if nothing else, it sure doesn't save me any difficult feelings. I'd rather feel potential disappointment on the other end than miss out on the great feeling of possibility now.

So, fuck it. I'm gonna get excited. There's light at the end of the tunnel...somewhere.
And if nothing else, there's light on top of my head.

Ciao, OneKate

Lighten Up

I've just been in California. I don't get there nearly enough and every time I visit I wonder why I don't just go ahead and vacation there. Why do I always feel I have to go abroad instead of packing up a Dodge Neon from Hertz and heading down the coast to sample tangerine olive oil and ride a bicycle barefoot in some funky yet upscale beach town?

Sadly, this was a work trip and I was stationed in the positively standard Hilton in Oakland. I found myself taking breakfast at that absurd business travel hour of the morning along with all the casual businessmen wearing cotton golf shirts, forced to listen to them talk about Body for Life over grapefruit.

I had some time to kill in the afternoon so I walked to Wal-Mart in hopes of finding beer to take back to my room. All I found was Red Bull and some diet tea with creatine that made me super edgy during an episode of Locked Up Abroad that I watched later from my flowered bedspread. If I were a real business traveler I'd be an alcoholic.

After a few hours trapped in depressive Hilton anonymity, I decided it was time to head for San Francisco. I arrived just as the sun was melting over the tops of the palms. I felt the familiar feeling I always have in California--slightly starstruck, oohhing and aahhing inside over the way the sun reflects off a particular window or a piece of fruit sits high in a tree.

From the moment the taxi picked me up at the airport and I scoffed at the driver's suggestion that I wait for the Hilton shuttle, I felt my east coast cliches slicing through that quality Cali air like a million little X-Acto knives. Hurry, hurry, gotta get to my supremely lonely hotel room so I can sit and watch crime television in the dark. As I walked up and down the gorgeous San Francisco streets carrying my unnecessarily large platinum patent purse I suddenly felt so...sullen. There I was, wearing all black in the middle of a shimmering San Francisco street. No light reflecting off of me, that's for sure. Proof of the sullen suspicion came when I reached Fisherman's Wharf and a "tourist sheriff" tried to arrest me for not smiling.

Since I've been back in the gritty city I've had this urge to shake off the darkness. It was pretty shocking to go somewhere else and act as wound up as people always say New Yorkers are. I do love me some edgy urban intensity, I do. But lately I'm finding myself fantasizing about Cate Blanchett's hair in The Talented Mr. Ripley--California crystal blonde. What if I just lightened up a bit?

(P.S. I got that little raise I asked for. It was little. And way more than a little late. But it might pay for a bleach job)