.turn towards the hidden sun.

I've been (happily) employed for
2.5 months
(yes? yes)
and I thought it was about time to share.....

Kate Burnley's (Un)excellent Adventure(s in Job Hunting and Interview)

It's a Google Document
that includes
everywhere
I applied and for what position.

I started it during my
seemingly endless search
and if you're in a similar
situation
stay strong!

And for the record,
here's my &*($ list
of places I interviewed with
and never heard back from
(and I don't think any of the interviews went that badly - maybe not awesome but not enough to blow me off entirely, jeez)

Alexander Gorlin Architects
Wall Group
Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City
Sens Production
St. Raymond High School for Boys
Studio in a School
Artist Pension Trust
Film Forum

Thanks guys.

You stay classy

 (and professional) 

.so eleanor take a greenpoint three point.

I still believe too.

(taken in the Lexington-63rd Street Station)

.i could be there when you land.

Sorry Geoffrey Chaucer,
I had to put you down,
you just
weren't
good subway reading.

.leap until the gulf stream's brought you down.

(jump feature is not working on my blogger - sorry for any inconvenience) 
I've had very few traumatizing experiences. It's true. There is rarely one event that shakes me to my core. I usually let emotions take their run at me until I explode, but rarely do I feel like I've truly lost my way. For example, since starting my blog I can only think of two traumatizing experiences I've had: falling halfway between a subway car and the track and seeing my grandmother only moments after her last breath.

But tonight, I might have to add to the list.

Once my boyfriend asked me why I'm so self-conscious about something or worry what people say about me (I can't remember the specifics - see? I don't get caught up in details). I gave the example of this: You're walking down the street and a stranger stops you to tell you that the sweater you are wearing is the ugliest thing they've ever seen. The stranger walks away. You think it's odd and you keep walking. You tell the story to friends and maybe end it with a laugh saying, "I love this sweater, he must be crazy." But the truth is, every time you put on that sweater you're going to think of that stranger. Maybe you'll wear the sweater just as much but you probably won't - until the day you throw it in the Goodwill bag, wonder for a moment why you haven't worn it in so long and then remember the day that stranger came up to you.

I gave this story as an example of things ex's have said to me and I can't really shake. Maybe it's the color of my hair. An ex from years ago thought's on my hair color doesn't effect my decision in the drug store hair color isle but I can't help but think that maybe red isn't my color - that I should stay a brunette.

Things like that stick with you. It really depends of whether or not you allow it to hinder your decisions or not.

Tonight I was waiting in line. Galapagos Art Space has something called Nerd Night; which is a series of "nerdy" lectures preceded by nerd speed dating. A friend was doing speed dating but I excitedly agreed to meet him after to see the lectures - they are usually fantastic. I picked up four cupcakes knowing people usually get hungry after the first lecture. When I got there, the line was almost a block long - just to get in the post-speed dating event. And I didn't buy a ticket beforehand. Never had to before. Just waltzed right in during previous sessions.

I hate waiting in lines by myself. I've done it. I've done it a lot; I live in New York you know. But it's weird waiting with a bunch of pairs and groups of people having conversations while you just wanna be, like, Yeah, I'm waiting for someone. I'd have something really interesting to say if that person was standing next to me.

So I stood there, with my headphones on, holding a cupcake box (but it was in a plastic bag, so you couldn't tell). Waiting. And waiting - but it's a nice night, so whatever.

Then I see a man storming toward me. I know he's about to yell at me for something. You can just tell in the moments before a non-sequitur rant from a crazy person what you're in for. I thought it'd be about the line. It was taking up an entire block and making passage through a certain street impossible. He was a white guy. Maybe 35. Sweater and khakis. Backpack. Curly brown hair. Looked like a literary guy if I had to take a guess. He walks right up to me, bypassing the groups of people around me and I unplug my headphones; ready for the attack. And this is what I received in an angry yet a little below a yelling volume (to the best of my memory and editing because he repeated a few phrases a couple times):

You should loose 30 pounds. You should just starve yourself. Just starve yourself and do Japanese kickboxing. Then you'll know what it's like when someone walks up to you and says it.

My mouth may have dropped. I may have stammered. I may have tried to make a noise but I can't recall. The next thing I remember he stormed back away. And a few moments later I saw him pass around again but further down the block.

I don't think I have the hyperbole to express my shock. The woman next to me, maybe just a few years older than me turned to me and said, "That was fucked up. Do you know that guy?........No? Oh! I thought you knew him. That was really fucked up. I'm really sorry that he directed that toward you.""Hey, I've heard worse." But I felt myself shaking. I felt my cheeks burning, so much that I thanked the powers that be that it was night. And something about that last sentence actually made me feel better; knowing that he might have directed some sort of tirade, of any sort, to anyone - it just happened to be me and it just happened to be about my body. I think I laughed the best I could, shrugging my shoulders and responded to her,

And then we continued to wait in line. And wait. And wait. Until my friend ended up leaving and we left for dinner (he hadn't eaten, I had) with my box of cupcakes in tow. I ate one.

What I find disturbing is that I don't think men and probably some women (and trust me, this isn't some sort of feminist rant) don't realize that insulting a woman's body is the unspoken line you do not cross. Not because it's generally disrespectful and we should all be respecting each other because it's the right thing to do, but because I don't know a single girl/woman over the age of maybe eight that doesn't know every single flaw in their body. They knew every hair out of place; growing in a weird spot. They know every part of them that jiggles. They know every bump they think should be smoothed over.

Even those little girls you see holding their mother's hand or skipping on the playground asphalt hates something about their bodies. And if they don't now, they will. Under no circumstances am I saying that men don't go through the same things, the same idealized versions of themselves being plastered on billboards but when they say sex sells, they don't mean the act of sex they mean the female body in its least clothed form.

This is not a rant about advertising or fashion magazines. I've never flipped through the pages of Vogue and wished for that figure or that nose - I just like getting ideas on what to wear. Those things don't affect me. I don't envy images on paper. But when it comes to real life, I can get sensitive. If I hear one person calling another fat, I don't want to jump in and fight for Overeaters Anonymous but if I hear it about me I'm completely ashamed.

The funny thing is, I don't even really think I'm that fat. Under all the BMI indexes and such, I'm not. I'm a size 8 dress (10 jeans - I've got some hips on me). Really. Outside of the catwalks, I don't think anyone is looking at that number and thinking, Yikes! I don't want to be a size 0. I'm mostly afraid that if I become a size 6, I'll want to be a size 4 and when I'm a size 4, I'll want to be a size 2 and so on.

I could list everything I hate about my body (my legs, my underarms, my butt, blah, blah, blah) but it doesn't hinder my day to day life which is why in the few occasions that my weight has been addressed to me outside the realm of my inner voice, it throws me off so. I think, Jeez, I didn't think it was that bad.  And it isn't. Despite my worst paranoid thoughts, I didn't break the escalators, it's the 63rd-Lexington station, they're always breaking down.

I don't want to get into all the examples of times that I've felt that people are looking at me because I'm "fat" (another paranoia is that I'll be the biggest person in a full elevator and someone other than myself will fart and everyone will just assume it's me because I'm the biggest - out of all the things I think I have a problem with my body, gas is not one of them). However, it's always going to be there. That little thing in the back of your mind that assumes everyone thinks like that stranger who hated your sweater.

I remember the exact moment. The moment when I became aware that other people were aware of my body enough to say something. It was fifth grade. We were in music class; a nice airy room on the first floor of my newly renovated elementary school. Sitting cross legged on a scratchy blue carpet we were all given recorders (I know, right?) that came from a large plastic bin. We all got up and went to reach for our new instruments when Matt XX pushed past me and said in a voice he knew low enough that only I could hear, "Move it chubby!" 

Apparently the need for plastic woodwind instruments is enough to bring out the worse in a 10 year old.  I think my reaction then was not much different then it was tonight - silence followed by a forced laugh and some good old fashion Burnley stoicism.

I have no pearls of wisdom that extend well pass my years like I usually do. I cannot say what I got out of this experience tonight and whether or not it makes me feel better or worse about my body. I do not wish to harp on the knowledge that every girl knows what they hate about themselves. I just want to say this,

Buddy....you're a real prick.

.ride to the highest point and leap across the filthy water.

Here's a sampling of the horrifying things have happened to me in the last three days:

1. Last Saturday several children were standing outside my work and slamming their backs into the window. Which is, as you imagine, really fucking annoying (I work next to the overpriced shitshow know as Serendipity). I finally get up to kindly ask the children to stop it. Opening the door, I see no parents but approach the back of the one nearest to me. "Sweetie, could you please stop that, the noise is really scary from inside," I say to the girl. She slowly turns to me Exorcist/Children of the Corn style and looking back at me is a girl, maybe three or four with the most terrifying face paint I've ever seen in my life. Like, remember that scene in Red Dragon when you finally see his full tattoo and realize he's nuts - yeah, that was on this little girl's face. I froze and nervously repeated myself as she slowly cocked her head to side with a blank expression. We stood there staring at each other, me with a big fake smile, nodding for a while before I slowly back up and went back to work. In a few moments she continues pounding on the glass and I thought, hey, I could get used to that sound.
2. As a business next to Serendipity we often get people just wandering in, wasting time because they've decided to patron a restaurant that has three hour waits for frozen hot chocolate (yeah, I know). It was no different this day as a middle-aged woman and her mother walked in and looked around. I knew they weren't interested in anything but kindly asked them if they needed help, the whole spiel. They walk to my desk which is front of our back porch, that people are allowed onto. The mother (maybe 80/85) walks up right to my desk, I tell her she can go back there if she'd like and she just smiles at me and then proceeds to speak in Russian to me for about 30 seconds straight. Which may not seem like much, but it's like 30 seconds of gibberish to me. Life doesn't have subtitles; I can't understand foreign languages. I've tried. I gaze down at people's waists sometimes when they speak to me in another language, no words come up and they just look at you like you're mental. Her daughter then comes up to me and says, "Oh, she's just said you're pretty." It does not take someone 30 seconds to compliment someone else. I'm flattered if it's true but the paranoid girl who thinks life is more like The Truman Show rather than a mumblecore movie automatically assumes that she put a Gypsy curse on me. (It has nothing to do with my semi-low self confidence, I looked really cute that day - and maybe just a little Russian).
3. This happened today. I'm still calming down from it so just bare with me. On the way to the bank today, I was walking near the Queensborough Bridge area of 2nd/1st Avenues. It's a bit of a clusterfuck of traffic so not many people go that way but I thought, hey, let's try a different route. It wasn't raining, but I had a hat on with my lovely red trench coat just in case it started sprinkling again. A woman, perfectly normal 40 something slim black woman, walked up to me and approached me like she was about to ask direction. Understandable; it's a weird area. I take out my headphones and she jovially says to me, "You look just like Sarah Palin on Dancing with the Stars - especially in the face." She laughs and wishes me a great day, like she just imparted me with the secret of life and it's dancing around in circles with midgets dressed at monkeys. Now, I'm assuming she meant Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin's 19-year old daughter (I've put a link to her Wiki page but seriously if you need to look her up and understand why I'm so different from her, you have issues - the rock isn't that heavy, come out from underneath it). After this interaction I immediately called my mother, traumatized and, I shit you not, almost on the verge of tears. I've never been so insulted in my life. My mother's response was the lines of, "Aw, sweetie. I'm sorry. That's my little liberal baby."

And that's my life. I'm a bit shaky. I think I need a gin and tonic to calm my nerves.