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Loss, hypothetical and otherwise.
Apr. 22nd, 2011 02:50 pmYaycorp said no. :( I was pretty crushed last night.
I did 5.5 hours of back to back interviews with no breaks, and had been quite certain I'd knocked it out of the park, and waiting for them to say yes was just a formality. I kept telling other people, and trying to tell myself, 80% chance. The last 20% is that it's a tight economy and they're Yaycorp. They can afford to be as picky as they like, and if I don't get it then it's for something that I can't begin to imagine or control.
Not having gotten it, I started racking my brain for something I could have controlled. Was I too negative? Did I sound like I couldn't handle stress? Did I sound too positive and they thought I had to be making it up? Did I actually do horribly on all the practical puzzle questions they asked and I'm just a horrible taxonomist?
Y'know. That stuff.
Today is better. I might end up being a microserf, doing contract work in Bellevue and accepting that after 1 year I have to take a 100-day furlough, which is to say I have a year to line up a better job. I talked with a contracting firm that feeds people to MS and pays for health insurance. It would be a decent gig.
I totally would have baked Yaycorp a cake shaped like the Internet if I thought it would have helped. :(
Elizabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith) is dead. Losing actors is always this weird shadow of losing the characters, even though the Tralfamadorians would cheerfully point out that everything you actually knew about them is still safely enshrined on DVD. I love characters, so I feel these things, and we lost the Brig just a couple months ago, so this is all a bit raw.
A year ago, I just would have said, "Aw. So it goes." I historically was not a Sarah Jane fangirl. I learned through fandom that she was considered one of the classic bests, but she always blurred into the list of normal '70s Earth girls who existed to ask the Doctor, "What's that?" I latched onto the weird ones who weren't human or weren't civilized or blew things up. I didn't have the perspective to appreciate that Sladen and Baker had remarkable screen chemistry and she brought more to the role, etc., etc., etc., and that's fine.
Sarah Jane the 21st Century adult is a totally different matter, and I've watched a lot of the Sarah Jane Adventures in the last year. She's not an eternal young man, or a disposable young viewpoint character who exists to be impressed by everything and then wander off when she... or the Doctor... or the BBC... gets bored and wants something else.
The Whoniverse has big complicated ethics and norms and tensions that have all been addressed, pretty much exclusively, by immortal young men and disposable galactic tourists. Then we have Sarah Jane, who got dropped off in Aberdeen instead of London, never knew if the love of her life had even survived, and just had to get on with things, and is growing old.
As real life humans not filtered through a script, there comes a day where most of us look around and go, "How the hell did I end up in Aberdeen?" At some point I looked in the mirror and knew that my body had hit and passed its peak of conventional beauty, that the fantasy billionaire lover I hypothesized at 20 is not going to turn up, and I am never going to be an astronaut.
Say it with me. I am never going to be an astronaut.
(Yes, my over achieving friends who have strived and been brilliant and got to ride the Vomit Comet to test your own 0G robot, you can opt out of that one. Substitute "build my own time machine" or "romance Janeane Garofalo.")
I am never going to be an astronaut, and like Sarah Jane, who is merely never going to be an astronaut again, I've just got to get on with things and make my own fun. She showed that. I watched her face getting older on SJA and was painfully aware of her mortality, and I knew that she's the one we need to be watching for How To Do It. She's not settling. She's just living as hard as she can with what she's got to work with.
But getting to work at Yaycorp felt like it might be a little like getting to be an astronaut within my chosen vocation, and finding the energy to live as hard as I can is daunting today, knowing that I don't have another season of her example to look forward to.
I did 5.5 hours of back to back interviews with no breaks, and had been quite certain I'd knocked it out of the park, and waiting for them to say yes was just a formality. I kept telling other people, and trying to tell myself, 80% chance. The last 20% is that it's a tight economy and they're Yaycorp. They can afford to be as picky as they like, and if I don't get it then it's for something that I can't begin to imagine or control.
Not having gotten it, I started racking my brain for something I could have controlled. Was I too negative? Did I sound like I couldn't handle stress? Did I sound too positive and they thought I had to be making it up? Did I actually do horribly on all the practical puzzle questions they asked and I'm just a horrible taxonomist?
Y'know. That stuff.
Today is better. I might end up being a microserf, doing contract work in Bellevue and accepting that after 1 year I have to take a 100-day furlough, which is to say I have a year to line up a better job. I talked with a contracting firm that feeds people to MS and pays for health insurance. It would be a decent gig.
I totally would have baked Yaycorp a cake shaped like the Internet if I thought it would have helped. :(
Elizabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith) is dead. Losing actors is always this weird shadow of losing the characters, even though the Tralfamadorians would cheerfully point out that everything you actually knew about them is still safely enshrined on DVD. I love characters, so I feel these things, and we lost the Brig just a couple months ago, so this is all a bit raw.
A year ago, I just would have said, "Aw. So it goes." I historically was not a Sarah Jane fangirl. I learned through fandom that she was considered one of the classic bests, but she always blurred into the list of normal '70s Earth girls who existed to ask the Doctor, "What's that?" I latched onto the weird ones who weren't human or weren't civilized or blew things up. I didn't have the perspective to appreciate that Sladen and Baker had remarkable screen chemistry and she brought more to the role, etc., etc., etc., and that's fine.
Sarah Jane the 21st Century adult is a totally different matter, and I've watched a lot of the Sarah Jane Adventures in the last year. She's not an eternal young man, or a disposable young viewpoint character who exists to be impressed by everything and then wander off when she... or the Doctor... or the BBC... gets bored and wants something else.
The Whoniverse has big complicated ethics and norms and tensions that have all been addressed, pretty much exclusively, by immortal young men and disposable galactic tourists. Then we have Sarah Jane, who got dropped off in Aberdeen instead of London, never knew if the love of her life had even survived, and just had to get on with things, and is growing old.
As real life humans not filtered through a script, there comes a day where most of us look around and go, "How the hell did I end up in Aberdeen?" At some point I looked in the mirror and knew that my body had hit and passed its peak of conventional beauty, that the fantasy billionaire lover I hypothesized at 20 is not going to turn up, and I am never going to be an astronaut.
Say it with me. I am never going to be an astronaut.
(Yes, my over achieving friends who have strived and been brilliant and got to ride the Vomit Comet to test your own 0G robot, you can opt out of that one. Substitute "build my own time machine" or "romance Janeane Garofalo.")
I am never going to be an astronaut, and like Sarah Jane, who is merely never going to be an astronaut again, I've just got to get on with things and make my own fun. She showed that. I watched her face getting older on SJA and was painfully aware of her mortality, and I knew that she's the one we need to be watching for How To Do It. She's not settling. She's just living as hard as she can with what she's got to work with.
But getting to work at Yaycorp felt like it might be a little like getting to be an astronaut within my chosen vocation, and finding the energy to live as hard as I can is daunting today, knowing that I don't have another season of her example to look forward to.
