Cocktails for Carnivores

Now that I’m all growed up and graduated, I figured that I’d do the blog equivalent of entering the real world by moving over to regular wordpress. Thus, loyal readers, you may now find me at: yamwell.wordpress.com. I look forward to many more exciting adventures in blogging!

What a feeling

Don’t ask me, I fled the country.

Thus begins the second installment of “So, I was reading this article in The New York Times…”  Most of these are not breaking news at this point, as I was too busy being a useless senioritic whore to get this post up sooner, but I hope my vast and loyal readership finds these items at least mildly entertaining. 

When I started reading this article, I thought it would be a great opportunity to ridicule the idea of a 24-year-old, on the payroll of the family’s California furniture empire, living in a 1,500-square-foot Chelsea loft.  I mean, come on, if you’re rolling in trust fund dough, it would be a shame not to have a painfully stylish apartment in a painfully trendy neighborhood, threatening to collapse under the weight of its own art galleries.  Then I realized that I was just insanely jealous that someone only two years older than me was living in said painfully stylish apartment.  But then I happened on a couple of paragraphs that just made me feel pained.  By the time this kid graduated summa cum laude from U.C.L.A., he had already started a punk music zine (at age 14, no less) as well as not one, but two different record companies.  But then Daddy called: “I know you’re having fun with your music, but at the end of the day I won’t be paying your rent any longer, and it would mean a lot to the family if you would join the business. I think you could really help.”  Talk about slapping on the golden handcuffs.  “Despite your interest in this whole ‘music’ thing, your place in the world is hawking our expensive furniture.” The ironic part is that Daddy is really still paying the rent (which a real estate broker estimated at about 6,000 clams a month in today’s utterly batshit Manhattan market.) 

This next item did not arouse quite the same kind of sympathy.  It involves the sale of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s former apartment, the entire 15th floor of a limestone Fifth Avenue grande dame.  The owner, David Koch (VP of Koch Industries, the nation’s largest privately-held company, and reportedly worth some $12 billion) already has two kids and third is on the way.  Unfortunately, he claims, “There’s just no way we could fit another child in that apartment.”  I feel your pain, Davey.  Apparently the apartment has merely “four bedrooms, two dressing rooms, a staff room, a library, living room, dining room, conservatory, two terraces, three fireplaces, five and a half bathrooms and a wine room.”  God, just try to imagine shoehorning another little one in there.  It would be torture!  Regretfully, Koch must sacrifice views for space, and so he’s trading down to a duplex in the rather uninspired 740 Park Avenue.  I suppose we just can’t always get what we want. 

I can now assert, in a completely unironic fashion, that Condi Rice is awesome.  Who was the last Secretary of State that could play the Brahms Piano Quintet?  Or who ever accompanied His Royal Celloness?  Although she claims otherwise, if Condi ever runs for prez, all she has to do is tickle the ivories a little during her convention speech to bring this very blue voter over into the red column. 

And, last, but definitely not least, guess who’s actually ahead of the cultural curve for once?  Several days after I posted sclapp metal, those intrepid ThursdayStyles writers published a piece on nicknames in the digital age.  The point they seem to stress here is that people can now choose their own nicknames, rather than being stuck with unfortunate ones by uncharitable peers.  However, despite my earnest efforts at auto-christening, I am already being referred to as “sclappy the wise” in some corners of cyberspace (not to mention those who have taken it upon themselves to refer to me as Yam, which I hope is not due to any resemblance on my part to a certain rather plain-faced religious teen).  *Sigh* I suppose that said auto-christening is probably a Sisyphean task when one is stuck with a name as pregnant with humorous nicknaming possibilities as mine.

Continued from the previous post:

Hmm…interesting. Well, chin up, I thought. I’ve made it through four years at Williams, I can make it through two years as a legal assistant.  Interview day came and as expected it was a churning sea of normally über-casual college students all tarted up in recently purchased suits like so many cogs-of-the-corporate-machine in the making.  The interview itself was a fairly pleasant experience as interviews go, and I even got a goody bag at the end, a nice packet of glossy info on their legal assistant program complete with pictures of an appropriately diverse group of twentysomethings walking arm-in-arm down the middle of a New York street (awesome!) I got a weekend to recover and then made my way back to the shining spires of the Big Apple to meet the kinds of VIPs that Mommy and Daddy know and really think you should meet.  On Monday I met the chief patent attorney at a very prominent media company who was very cool.  I didn’t have to say much, I got good sushi and sake, and he basically told me, “Go do something interesting and/or public-service related.  You can always go to law school.”  Why hadn’t anyone told me this before?  More importantly, why did I have wait for someone to tell me something that I already knew for me to actually believe it?  The following day brought a marathon three VIP meetings.  The first was with a young lawyer working at Daddy’s company who had recently fled the batshittitude of big firm life for a saner in-house counsel position.  She was very cool as well and her tale of being in the office for over 72 hours straight was enough to give me some pause about this whole lawyer thing.  Next I journeyed a few blocks across town to Rockefeller Center to meet…her old boss!  Again, a very nice albeit intense person, who I caught on the one day he was in New York in between trips to Dubai and Oman.  Why he decided to come all the way back to New York I do not know, but he was the one person I met who seemed to think that working at a big law firm had some merit (which seemed to be mostly prestige- and resume-based merit).  After a lunch break which included an attempt to eat at Carnegie Deli that was aborted after I decided that it wasn’t worth a wait of who knows how long with the tourist crowd to get my mountain of pastrami, I headed a few blocks downtown to meet the last of the VIPs.  His advice?  “Travel around the world, especially Asia, because it’s cheap.  You can do whatever you want for at least 2-3 years without any repercussions.”  If I end up, in spite of myself, having an interesting life, I think that I will send him a (second) thank you note in 10 years or so.  I hope he gives the same advice to his four adorable children whose pictures were plastered all over his office (which had the most amazing view of the Empire State Building.)  I guess this whole plan to launch my career in the Manhattan legal establishment backfired on my careerist-by-proxy parents, but I definitely feel calmer and happier now, despite having even less of a plan for next year than I did before. 

Epilogue: I didn’t get a second interview with the big firm I interviewed with, but that was a smart move on their part as I had decided even before coming back to Williamstown that I didn’t want the job after all.  I did get offered a summer position at Tanglewood, which not only sounds totally fun, but could be a good way to ingratiate myself with the management of the BSO, as well as get more arts administration experience on my resume.  This is good, as experience seems to be the big barrier to entry in that line of work, which I would really love to pursue.  Mommy thought it sounded like “just a fun summer,” but I plainly told her no, it would help me towards a career that I actually want.  So she decided to outsource her nagging to Daddy, who awkwardly called me up the very next day to ask me how my job search was coming.  Phone interview tomorrow for a Boston charter school that pays microscopic wages but provides housing in the very same building. Which means a 30 second commute!  Not bad for a major American city.  Also seriously considering the running off to a foreign country to teach English idea, for which there are numerous programs.  Anyways, enough of this silly beans-spilling.  By now you probably think you’re reading a livejournal.

After the levity of the last entry, I thought I’d take a little dive into something slightly more topical, that ominous question of “How will I occupy myself post-Williams?”  For those of us without offers from the grad school or consulting firm of our dreams, this is a rather pressing issue.  I’m not sure if anyone’s ever explicitly told us this, but I don’t think that anyone would disagree with me when I claim that there’s definitely a feeling of:

 “Now that you have this top-tier academic pedigree, you are expected to go do something that meets most if not all of the following criteria:
1. Interesting (as defined by some vague set of standards that I am sure everyone understands but could not necessarily enumerate; foreign countries and anything involving “research” usually earn points in this category)
2. Prestigious (someone giving you vast sums of money to do whatever you want simply because you are amazing, or anything else involving Williams-esque admissions standards)
3. Important (anything in the District of Columbia racks up points here)
4. Altruistic (Teach for America and similar programs are the big winners in this category) and
5. Wildly Renumerative (read: investment banks and consulting firms). 
Bonus points for ‘following your dreams.’  Serious penalties for moving back in with parents or staying in Williamstown.”

It is with these standards in mind that I decided to start looking for a job as a legal assistant in New York.  Looking at the rubric, it seemed like a pretty good idea. Nos. 1,2,3, and 5 are all easily satisfied.  No. 4 is maybe a bit of stretch, but just make a big deal about your pro bono work and you’ve got this one covered, too. Not really so much on the “following your dreams” front, but who needs extra credit when you’ve done so well on the rest of the test?  So, with the added convenience of the fact that a whole bunch of big Manhattan firms were coming to ECCD, the resumes and cover letters were dispersed.  It was then that I decided to do some cyber-muckraking to see what more I could learn about these places:

“Do any of you folks work? Magnum brainpower and illustrious legal prowess notwithstanding, you are all there to do nothing but bill, bill, bill. As such, I am sure that each and every one of your prestigious clients would die of an aneurysm if they knew their overpaid, hubristic drones were idling in meaningless chatter and washing in unwarranted gaudery over the internet.  One last thing: clean up your grammar. It is unseemly for Harvard, and Yale-going folk to have such poor command of the English language. Get over yourselves and get back to work!”

“[firm x] is hell. evil people. not a care in the world for the associates. everyone is dispensible. most awful for women. do not come here.”

“I’m a lawyer. Being a lawyer sucks. I assume being an investment banker sucks also, but if your job has to suck, make the money and then quit and do something that doesn’t suck - you’ll make enough dough if you’re careful with it (and if you can avoid the Patrick Bateman-esque golden handcuffs). Lawyers will work like dogs for their entire lives and never make enough money for it to be worth it.”

To be continued…

manzovino and meanzovino both seem a little harsh, but could prove useful to me the next time I take a browbeating over not having my shoes on. 

¡Cuidado! ¡llindeke! 

Do you know arobinson? 
Which robinson? 
That robinson. 
I don’t know that robinson, but I do know this robinson. 
There’s also the other robinson. 
There’s another robinson? 
Who’s on first? 
What’s on second? 

Jyee, I sure do have a lot of money! Cyee later, I have to go yacht shopping. 

I’m sorry sir, your credit card has been dkleined. 
Well, your mom sure didn’t dklein anything last night! 

Now that we use ebonem all the time, I can’t believe we ever actually relied on snailbonem.

If one measures the success of a blog by the speed and degree with which it enters the cultural consciousness, then at least by Williams standards, I’m off to a great start.  However, if one measures a blog’s success by the comparative quality of its content, that I could blog 500 miles and I could blog 500 more just to be not even close to the genius of this blogging tour de force.  How can one ever hope to compete with such unforgettable turns of phrase as:

“the bestial connotations it arouses”
“titillates a culturally erogenous tissue of the linguistic parsing organ”
“proceed to examine the larger cultural orifices it penetrates”

The almost frenzied passion that the inimitable ASR brings to exploring every crevice of this subject is unequalled in our time.  This is someone who has his hand firmly planted on the throbbing pulse of contemporary American culture.  Required reading for anyone interested in the meat cocktail as a cultural construction.

Now I’ll begin what I hope will become a semi-regular feature called “So I was reading this article in The New York Times…”

Breaking News! Barneys is expensive and the people who work there are condescending.  I had no idea that Manhattanites spent a lot of money on clothes ($430 for sandals, but trust me, once you see them…) or that anyone associated with the fashion industry had attitude.  Thank god those ThursdayStyles reporters are hard at work getting the inside scoop on this whole “shopping” story.

My compositional dream is to write an opera based on a controversial subject, and I think I’ve found my plot in the still-unfolding and increasingly bizarre saga of the Kissel family.  Witness the mariticide-by-bludgeoning accomplished with the aid of a sedative-laced milkshake, the subsequent custody fight over the multimillionaire children, the plundering of an East 74th Street co-op’s finances, the locked room/Mafia-style murder, the $15 million life insurance policy, and the estranged wife days after the murder gushing about her new boyfriend and her fat paychecks which are now conveniently safe from those pesky alimony payments.  It’s like The Oresteia meets A Series of Unfortunate Events meets Death of a Salesman meets The Godfather.  Il Trovatore got nothing on this.

Everyone’s favorite failed presidential candidate (actually, now that I think about, second favorite…Ross Perot was at least moderately entertaining) is waxing bombastic again about the situation in Iraq.  News Flash! You’re not getting nominated in ’08.  But even if there was a chance of that, I’m impressed by your efforts at reaching out to the people who didn’t vote for you last time by writing an op-ed for that stronghold of Southern conservatism, The New York Times.

Hark! Thus begins my first foray into blogdom.  As with most cultural trends, I’m at least a year and a half behind the curve (Exhibit A: Every TV show with which I have more than a cursory familiarity is already out on DVD).  I guess part of it was fear that I would produce nothing more than some horrid electronic curio cabinet filled with chirpy updates on the vagaries of my non-life (Wow, did that feel good to finally turn in that paper!  ‘K, time to go take a nap…or watch Friends…or maybe both at the same time!  Haha!), or else a series of mild complaints whose triviality would be rivaled only by the speed with which they made the reader think “Does he have any real problems?”  But then I realized that even the most banal blog gives one the voyeuristic pleasure of reading someone else’s musings, no matter how sterilized and saturated with blogspeak they may be.  But really isn’t a blog just a performance, the same way that being on The Real World is a performance? (Even if the characters portrayed tend more often than not to have the mind of a 7th grader trapped in the body of an Abercrombie and Fitch model.) At the very least, it involves the creation of some sort of e-persona, which just by itself is a fascinating process.  I mean, anyone who claims that their blog is for me, myself, and I is seriously deluding him/herself – if you weren’t interested in broadcasting your thoughts to 80-90-whatever % of the world’s population, then you’d be writing this all down in that little pink diary with a lock that you keep under your bed.  So, here goes nothing.  I expect to change the title every so often, but to satisfy your curiosity the current one comes from a meal-time discussion (which crossed several lines of punnitude, as such discussions are wont to do when one ASR is around) about strawberry yakquiris and piña collamas.