12/25/09

Quoteable

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

- Excerpt from David Foster Wallace's speech at Kenyon College in 2005; read the whole thing here: http://bit.ly/sUCD8

12/7/09

I feel like I owe everyone a big, fat explanation.

It's been a period of extended transition for me, as Lana puts it.

I think that's a nice way of saying: "You keep getting and quitting jobs because you have no idea what you're doing with your life."

Let me refresh your memory: May - quit Causecast. Unemployed May - September. Started AmeriCorps in September. Quit AmeriCorps in October. Started working at Homegirl Cafe and Free People in November. Quit both in December.

Sigh.

I was beyond thrilled to start working at Homegirl Cafe, but since it was only part-time, I had to pick up another part-time job working retail at Free People in Manhattan Beach (in addition to babysitting!) in order to pay the bills. I was driving all over LA, spending a ton on gas, working crazy hours between all three, and only loving one - Homegirl. Two weeks ago, I was offered a position at Direct Partners, a cool marketing firm/ad agency (I keep telling myself it will be like Mad Men) as part of the 4-person team working on the Playstation account. It was a chance to actually use what I studied in college - graphic design, journalism, marketing - and gain experience at a pretty prestigious company.

So I took the job. (It wasn't that simple. It was at least a week of being completely depressed over "selling out" at 23.) Now, this meant quitting two jobs I had started only three weeks before. That was pretty rough. I mean, that Free People discount to Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie was pretty rad, but making little money + spending it all on clothes = disaster. Leaving Homegirl was a little more hard. I felt like I was really letting everyone down. But now, I can be refreshed enough to volunteer each Saturday (really!) and spend some evenings doing design work for them.

I'm excited about Direct Partners. I feel like I'm going to learn a ton and it's going to be harder than I thought, so it will nice to be intellectually challenged once again. So it's a new phase, again.

PS: I found this tidbit on Wikipedia today as I was researching Playstation:

"Soon after its release in Japan, the PS3 was released in North America on November 17, 2006. Reports of violence surrounding the release of the PS3 include a customer shot, campers robbed at gunpoint, customers shot in a drive-by shooting with BB guns, and 60 campers fighting over 10 systems."

Dang.