Los Angeles, I'm Yours

Remember when I promised to update regularly? Well in what seems to be a trend lately, my technology is failing me and Aperture has taken all of my pictures from Montreal hostage, which of course I hadn't backed up yet. We'll see how this all plays out on my laptop that crashes every 20 minutes.

But, onto LA! Considering I'm headed back there next week, I figured I had better get this post up before then! In September I went to Los Angeles to visit my good friend Veronica as well as to treat myself to a little vacation from unemployment (which, as you may not know, is very stressful). I’ve never been to California, so with a place to stay for free and plenty of time on my hands I booked a flight!

I booked the tickets before I had moved to CT, so I drove up to Boston that Wednesday afternoon to visit some friends and park my car before my flight the next morning. My car picked an unfortunate time to stall at a rest stop on the Pike but as soon as the tow truck showed up it decided to start. The tow truck guy accused me of having a car that would start all along, which was mildly embarrassing but I can rest easy knowing that I know what a running car sounds/acts like and mine certainly wasn't.

Day 1: Thursday
The Pacific Ocean!

I flew out of Logan obscenely early and arrived in LA around 11am, where my cell phone didn’t work (standard AT&T) but I was able to find a shuttle to meet Veronica at work. I stole her car and drove to Manhattan Beach for the afternoon, seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time and browsing the little shops. Once V was out of work we went to Venice for dinner, where we had Mexican food at a rooftop restaurant and watched the sunset. Veronica and I tried to stay up to watch Jersey Shore at 10pm, since we met in NJ and have a soft spot in our heart for it, but we fell asleep pretty much as soon as we laid down.

Day 2: Friday
Santa Monica Pier Ferris Wheel

While waiting for Veronica to get out of work (we love half day Fridays) I went back to Manhattan Beach and walked on the strand to Hermosa, about 5 miles round trip. The walk is gorgeous, watching the surfers and checking out the multi million dollar real estate.
After I picked Veronica up from work, we went to the Santa Monica pier:

It has an amusement park, so obviously we had to ride the Ferris Wheel to check out the amazing view!

That night I got to meet some of her CA friends, we went out to sushi happy hour and to a bar in Venice called The Brig. The only noteworthy thing about The Brig is that is where I saw the only (moderately) famous person while in LA! I decided that seeing a famous person is the thing to do when visiting LA, but if it hadn't been for V I wouldn't have recognized Kellan Lutz at the bar (so I'm not sure if it counts if I don't know who he is).

Kellan, who apparently always wears a hat


Day 3: Saturday
Volleyball Setup

Saturday we went back to Manhattan Beach (notice a trend? It is V’s favorite beach, so as my travel planner we went often) to hang out and watch the Men's US Open Volleyball Tournament.

Later that night the LA crew was having a going away party (which I totally crashed) for a friend of theirs who was moving then we went to the Underground, a bar that was both a sports bar and dancing bar- something for everyone!

Day 4: Sunday
V & me on Rodeo Drive
Sunday started with us heading to the Beverly Hills Farmers Market to try and see some famous people. While we didn’t see anyone of note, we did get some amazing peaches and food for our dinner that night. Then we headed to Rodeo Drive and browsed for what V is going to buy me when she is a big shot supply chain director some day. We grabbed some brunch then headed over to Venice for a street festival where the main attraction was food trucks- yum! It was about 100º, so I opted out of the grilled cheese truck (as amazing as it looked) and went for a diy ice cream sandwich instead:So many options!
My prediction is that diy ice cream sandwiches are going to be the new frozen yogurt (aka it will be in Boston in about 5 years). Also, Boston needs food trucks!!

Monday Veronica was back off to work, so I did some ultra touristy things on my own. I was warned that the stars and Hollywood is pretty boring, so once you add in the 113º weather (highest temps on record in LA ever) it made for a quick visit.

After that I drove up to the beautiful Griffith Observatory, where you can see the Hollywood sign and amazing views of LA:


Finally I met up with a friend from Northeastern, Dan, for lunch in Downtown LA. We saw the Staples Center and sampled some local beers with our lunch.

Once V was out of work, we picked up In-N-Out to go and ate dinner on the beach at sunset- what I decided was the epitome of CA.


Thanks so Much to Veronica for her wonderful hospitality and I can’t wait to drive cross-country with her next week!

Many more pictures from LA

Fall Vacation

It has been 2 months since I left Boston and started what I'm now affectionately calling "the summer vacation I never had in college" and I haven't written a single post about it. For that I'm sorry, as it has actually been a surprisingly busy 2 months. A recap is in order, then I solemnly swear that I will update on a semi regular basis for my regular readers, Mom and Grandma.

So as I mentioned I never had a summer vacation in college, between study abroad and coops I might have a month off here or there, but after 2006 I never had the leisurely break that most college students are used to. I've done my fair share of sleeping in and lazy days watching daytime TV, but I've also been having fun!

Manhattan Beach, CA
Los Angeles

Free time plus some leftover coop savings equal travel time! I went to Los Angeles in September to visit my good friend Veronica who is working out there until December. I'll have a post dedicated to LA soon, but for now there are more pictures here.

Notre Dame Basilica, Montréal, QC
Montréal
My next trip was courtesy of Joe, as he had a week off from Law School and wanted to get out of the house. Montréal is only a 6 hour drive from NY but feels like you went much farther in terms of the culture. I'll do a full post and pictures from Montreal soon!


Upcoming: Cross Country Road Trip!
The upside of unemployment is that I am the go-to girl for last minute travels, so when Veronica called and asked if I wanted to drive with her from California to New York in December at the end of her time in LA, of course I said yes! The above picture is our route, I am so excited for the adventure and for us to reunite with our favorite Southern Belle, Whitney, in South Carolina! If you have any suggestions as to where we should stop let us know!

I've seen the Roger Waters: The Wall concert (amazing, post in the future), spent plenty of time in NYC and Boston, developed an affinity for daytime television and finished my Christmas shopping very early! I've had time to catch up with my wonderful friends from my childhood and high school who are still in CT who I sadly did not get to see as much when I was living in Boston full time. I spend half of my life in Starbucks as I have dial up internet at my parent's house (yes, it still exists!) and to be quite honest, I haven't been looking very hard for a job at all. That all changes now, as my money is starting to run low and I think it is time for my fall vacation to come to an end, but so far unemployment has been a blast :)

Don't it feel like sunshine after all?

After a week of preparing to move, getting into a car accident (it was a taxi, but despite me not being the driver I was still hurt/shaken up) mere minutes before a job interview (guess how that went? awful), still working full time and not having a bed to sleep on because I prematurely sold mine, this has been a rough week. I've been tempted to just be the most miserable person and complain at every turn. Since that does nothing buy perpetuate the cycle of unhappiness that I am trying so desperately to forget, I made a list of things that made me happy over the past few days:

The woman in Sbux who overheard me talking about my bus ride back to Boston and gave me her magazines to read.
The random person on the subway who gave me their unlimited all day ride pass to use.
The really nice taxi driver who listened to me spill my guts after said awful interview and told me that everything would be ok.
The outpouring of positive support I received from my colleagues when I put in my 2 weeks notice.
Running into acquaintances on the street during lunch who give me hugs and tell me how much they are going to miss me.
ATT texting me to tell me I'm about to go over my data plan instead of just charging me overages with no warning.
Going home to CT, sleeping in my own bed, and hopefully seeing my family visiting from HI.
The boy getting to Seton Hall when I was ready for him to be in Miami for the next 3 years.
The weather is starting to feel like fall!

That felt good. Out with the bad, in with the new.

Unaccustomed Earth

Just ran across an apropos quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Custom-House:

"Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."

Everything can look like a failure in the middle

--Rosabeth Moss Kanter, via @HBSNews

I'm reviving the blog and I promise I'll try to keep things interesting if you wish to follow along as I figure out this next exciting step in my life (oh, and I guess you can read about my adventures in China, considering I've written twice since 2008.)

Today I put in my two weeks notice at work.

Throughout my life I've always been the kind of person to stick it out- wait until the end of the movie, even if it was awful or I fell asleep (W, anyone?). Even if I never returned to Irish Dancing, Rowing or Chemistry, I stuck it out until the end of the year/season/class simply because I had always been raised not to "quit" anything. We Zs, we finish things (including everything on our plate.) It is just the way I was raised- you don't give up on things.

I find myself coming to the end of a long summer of promises and expectations that I have been building up for myself. I told myself that I had until September to find a "real" job or I was moving back home. Also, I went from being in a long distance relationship of the 1,500 mile variety to a boyfriend living in a city I've always been fascinated with, New York City. Also, it is safe to assume that I am less than thrilled with the current job I find myself in. So instead of sticking it out I'm sticking up for myself and I'm leaving to find a better job and living situation.

Somehow the stars aligned such that my lease is up a mere 3 days before my last day of work. I'm looking at apartments in NYC (though who knows what will happen in the end in terms of employment) and in the interim I will be taking a little vacation in CT with my wonderful parents to refocus on applying for jobs, running, cooking and enjoying my life to the fullest as opposed to settling for the job I had in Boston.

I pinky swear to update more and to write shorter updates with more pictures. My warning is that this blog will probably have very little focus-- some job hunt here, fashion there, technology another day, perhaps a sports musing or two (did I mention I'll have TV again in CT?!).

Cinderella

I am a proud member of Northeastern’s Class of 2010. On May 7th, I received my diploma and took the obligatory pictures in academic garb and dined with family and friends in this great city that I have come to call home over the past 5 years. The logical next step for most people would to be to find a job as soon as possible. While logic is something I rarely ignore, heading into the worst economy of my lifetime I couldn’t help but feel that I shouldn’t waste this opportunity of a fresh start on just any job. I have been anything but lackadaisical in my job search, but the fact that I am still jobless in August is more a testament of my desire to find the perfect fit, m proverbial glass slipper of a job. A position that excites me when I wake up in the morning, where I enjoy what I do, where I actually enjoy the people I work with in social settings, and where, to paraphrase Google, I feel that I am doing no evil.

I started my job search way back in September, applying for all of the cushy corporate “Leadership Development” programs and had my heart set on two at different points over the fall. One program was canceled, the other I wasn’t selected for due to the cruel disadvantage that is phone interviews. This left me in an interesting position: I wasn’t so much interested in the corporate LDPs anymore, but most companies don’t want to hear from you until a month or two before you graduate, so I sat back and let the rest of my senior year unfold. As March rolled around I brushed the dust of my resume and got back into the swing of things. April came and a few mentors of mine reached out to help me, as well as a “Life Coach” whom I met at an alumni event. I sought out so much advice that it all ended up to be contradictory ("your resume needs to be 2 pages!" and "Your resume should never be more than 1 page!" type stuff). I realized that as in many of my job endeavors before, you need to stay true to yourself and I ended up disregarding a majority of the advice.

My former mangers and family members all pushed me to work in their respective fields, however subtly they though they were doing it. Others whom I asked for (and genuinely wanted) help from became hard to get in touch with.

Along the way I met a wonderful woman during senior week who got me a temp position at NU. I had a lot of fun, and when that position ended another one popped up in another department. I find myself now in the position where I can take my time in finding the perfect job because I have the "just for right now" job in the bag. I don’t need to settle for a job I feel lukewarm about, because I already have one and they don’t expect me to stay any longer than until I find my next big adventure. Am I completely satisfied? No, which is why I am leaving at the end of the summer, but for the past few months I was able to pay my way living in Boston while I’m looking for my proverbial glass slipper.

I guess my point is, there are amazing jobs out there and I'm sick of people telling me to suck it up and take a Servant to the evil Stepsister type of job when I just know that there are still a few Princess positions out there.

GrouPawn

**Draft version, I'll add some pictures later :)

You can all blame Groupon for my sudden return to the blogging world. Oh, and also my Grandmother, but we'll address that in a later post. I am a fan of Groupon, a wonderful business that provides discounted fun things to do around Boston, which this college student greatly appreciates! They have a simple business model: offer vouchers for discounted products/services for local retailers in a daily email, if enough people buy it we all win with a sweet deal! Example: my first Groupon purchase was unlimited fitness classes for a month at a swanky gym Healthworks for $20. If 150* people bought in, we all got the deal. If not, none of us paid a cent. They do deals like this for restaurants, spas, gyms, hotels, you name it.

So why the hell am I waxing poetic about Groupon (besides the fact that if they are in a city near you it would make your life a million times better to sign up)? Because they put together this absurd contest called Live Off Groupon and it is pretty much perfect for me. No, seriously. So this is the story of my application:

First of all, I found out about it on the eve of midterm exams and with about 5 days left to make my application. I purchased for $10 a Groupon good for $20 worth of food at the delectable Crazy Dough's Pizza, a gourmet pizza joint with delish daft beer to boot. I recruited my BFF since freshman year, Hillary, to come eat free pizza, drink free beer, and tape my application video. I made an offhand remark about needing a video camera and an acquaintance who I stumbled across at the NU Basketball game on Saturday mentioned that you can rent them from the Library. How did I go 5 years and not know this?! So I request the video camera for Monday (the first day my Groupon is good) and try to get my schoolwork under control.

Now, fitting this video making sesh into my schedule was a challenge to begin with. On top of midterms, I had on Monday alone: volunteer @ Mission Hill School, lead campus tour, class, workstudy, and meeting my hero, Christian Siriano. So I fit in a leisurely dinner at C.Dough's with the BFF which you can watch here. Along the way we ran into a fellow contestant who I bring up solely because he watched over literally thousands of dollars worth of electronics while I ran around the store and interviewed people. I just thought about how much all of that is worth to me and got a little nauseous thinking about what would have happened had he run away with it all. Thanks again, Paul! We eat our pizza, upload movies to my computer, and flit off to our next obligation.

Before I would return the video camera with my precious footage I wanted to be sure the video files were working, which fulfilling my worst fears would not play on my computer. My computer, for those not in the know, is a somewhat elderly PowerBook G4 circa Aug 2005. It gets Youtube about as well and my Grandmother does, so I was afraid that this might happen. Before I would relinquish the video camera to the Library Media Services people, I made them swear up & down that these precious files would work (and not to erase the contents of the video camera. And are you sure I have to give it back today?!) The nice man told me that Apple's "freak me out" and to use (some spammy program) to convert the files. My preface is that while I am not a tech goddess, I am not computer illiterate and the fact that I could not (neither could my certifiably techy father) through Google and poking around make these video files work. I decided to study for another exam and just do the smart thing: make an appointment at the Apple store and hope they don't ream me out for wasting their "genius" on something not completely debilitating my computer. (I'm actually somewhat afraid of these people, they are all very smart and mildly condescending and do not make small talk, which compels me to make even more awkward attempts to engage them in small talk. Needless to say, unless my hard drive crashes, I don't really like seeing these people.)

Tuesday rolls around and I go visit the Apple store after class (midterm one- aced!) and it was a surprisingly pleasant experience. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that they were completely deserted so I had 2 geniuses who thought my non-readable video files were a fun challenge, not a PITA**. They decided that I didn't need to shell out money for QuicktimePro or any other software, downloaded some freeware, and sat there during the hour it took to convert one file and import it into iMovie to ensure that the conversion had worked. Apple, we're cool again. I forgive you for the iPad and exclusive at&t contract crap.

So file conversions & imports take a loooooong time. I let it run while I took care of all my social and educational obligations then came home and started to edit finally! One thing I noticed is that I have a lot of strange ticks and verbal crutches I use when I don't know what to say/don't remember I'm on camera and need to act somewhat presentably. I tried to edit as much of this out (as well as all of the negative nancies about other companies/people- some people really need to do the anti-negativity thing with me!) but some sections have awkward breaks in them as a result.

Wednesday was Judgment Day, as the application was due at midnight (eastern? standard? we'll never know). I carted my laptop around all day and snuck in editing where I could (including while working at the NU Visitors Center, my workstudy in the RSA office, during a group project meeting...). The final product was shaping up, with the longest video on Youtube and the other exporting to .mpeg4 while I scrambled to write 2 essays as to why I am The Best Ever (thank you, college, for honing my ability to produce not crap writing in a rush). I upload video 2 with a tear in my eye, so proud of my babies that I have devoted countless hours that I should have been studying to. I go to watch video 2 and... it stops at 0:28. @#$%^&* its 11:45 pm and video uploads to Youtube take a solid 10 minutes. I try to export a lower quality video from iMovie, thinking that perhaps the video was too large for Youtube, but no, it was some unexplained technical glitch. I re-upload successfully and.... video rejected?! Upload a 3rd time and REJECTED AGAIN? YOUTUBE WHY ARE YOU RUINING MY LIFE?!?! Youtube decides that my videos are all identical (which is technically true, except that they chopped a solid minute off the back end of the first video, the only one working at about 11:50pm) and is rejecting them. I quickly delete all of the offending duplicates and try to re-upload, praying to any and all gods who would listen that Youtube clears its cache quickly, as they warned me that "Significant changes need to be made in order to make the video distinct, a simple file name change will not do" (sidenote: then how do 1800 people all manage to upload the same terrible Kei$ha music video?!). At 11:56 pm EST It crosses my mind that since Groupon is based out of Chicago, I might have another hour before this is due. Not wanting to tempt fate, at 11:58 I put a link to my Youtube profile in place of the introduction video link and submit. At 12:02am my introduction video is APPROVED by Youtube and goes live, bearing a Wednesday upload time stamp (there is a God!). I proceed to watch my videos 500 times each just to be sure that they were real. After showing a few people I work with in Admissions/RSA/Life they have all concluded that (a) I'm insane and (b) this would be the perfect job for me.

My Application:
90 Second Introduction to Kate
Short Video Review of a Groupon Business, Talking to Customers and/or Employees
Top 10 Reasons From My Essay Why I Should Be the GrouPawn:
10. I actually have an impressive resume/work experience
9. I'm used to being broke/not having money/begging for money/free sutff
8. I would do pretty much anything for $100,000***
7. I'll be unemployed come May 9th
6. I'll use it to feed the homeless
5. I traveled across Asia for 5-6 weeks living out of only a carry on sized duffel bag
4. I'm adventurous
3. I'm somewhat funny, even if it is just because I do/say embarrassing things a lot****
2. I already document my life for the public
1. Wouldn't it be really funny to see a girl try to survive without makeup/hair products/shopping sprees for a whole year?

Still confused as to what this thing is all about? Read the contest FAQ


* I don't actually remember how many people had to buy it, I just know enough people did.
** Pain In The Ass, in case you were confused.
*** In case I forgot to mention, if I pull this stunt off I win $100,000 for my troubles, not a bad entry level salary
**** I just discovered this past January that Narwhals are real animals. Thought apparently I'm not the only one in the dark about this absurd mammal.

Back in the saddle...

Oh, hey there. Yes, it has been a while. I decided to start updating my little blog again for a few reasons. I've still been doing interesting things, but I don't really keep my family informed in great detail of my adventures so I think this is a nice way for them to be able to see what I do if they are so inclined without doing the spammy mass emails thing. Second, I gave up being negative for Lent (a decision based less on religion and more on just to be a better person) and it is really difficult, so as my penance I will update my little old blog whenever a day passes that I fail to uphold my Lenten sacrifice. I owe you lots of posts, my friends! Finally, I guess it is probably quite entertaining to live vicariously through a 22 year old who is going to be unemployed come May 8th, 2010 and doesn't want to grow up so she is trying to find any type of creative endeavor (they can be in offices, just not many of the offices I have found myself in ever) to become her lifelong occupation. At the very least, hopefully the blog will pop up in future employer's Google search and they can see that I am more than my Facebook (and Linked In, Twitter, LastFM, Google Buzz) profile. So enjoy!