Several months ago, I was interviewed for a city editor position at The Onion. I didn't get the job. My hideously brief five-minute interview in the lobby of a hotel and failure to receive a promised follow-up phone interview tipped me off that I had somehow failed to make a good impression. (Since I didn't get the chance to really make an impression at all, I've always wondered what I did wrong.) At the time, I was stuck in a depressingly horrible office job after a year of unemployment (from quitting a job that, though kind of a drag, was 140% better than the place I ended up), and my failure to get the Onion job made me feel hopeless and depressed. To make matters worse, the person who got the job was my arch-nemesis. I'll refrain from linking to his two worthless bands because that's what got me in trouble in the first place. You see, if this person were a Native American, his name would be Chief Googles Self. However, this period of depression and hopelessness led to my decision to go back to school, turn my English minor into a major, and get a teaching certificate. I am glad I didn't get that job I really, really wanted so, so badly. I will be much happier performing a task that is necessary, valuable, and potentially rewarding for myself and the community than I would be pretending to care about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah ("You don't happen to be a David Byrne fan, by any chance?"). Even if I fail miserably at being a teacher, at least I won't be filling the world with more pointless babble.
To illustrate my point, here are two questions asked by Chief Googles Self, the man who is better than me, in his interview with rock hack Britt Daniel of Spoon in this week's A.V. Club.
"Are you incapable of making a bad album?"
"When you say, 'You got no fear of the underdog/That's why you will not survive,' are you the underdog, or are you the one in fear of the underdog?"
Quick, give this man a Pulitzer!
(This post brought to you by Small Petty Man, Inc. and the Lemons Into Lemonade Society.)
2 comments:
Lucky for you that I find small, petty college men with glasses of lemonade to be very sexy.
You gotta post something else so I can stop singing Billy Joel every time I look at your page.
Although I do love to sing Billy Joel...
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