Perchance To Dream

Years ago I landed my dream job and showed up for my first day in my Theory suit and 3-inch high Louboutins, pretty much as excited as a person can possibly be. I walked out that first day with a burnt hand (coffee accident), blisters from wearing heels all day, and the realization that perhaps this wasn't going to be the job I had envisioned it to be.

I didn't last very long, just long enough to be sure that I couldn't make it work, and after that I was saddled with this nagging concern: What am I going to do now? I was only twenty-five and already jaded with the notion that I no longer had any goals to work toward since my dream job had turned out to be miserable.

I was thinking about this today after a conversation with a friend last night who said she had a similar experience when she got laid off from her company about a year ago and she commented in passing, "I never thought I would end up working in finance; I never saw myself doing this."

It made me wonder how many others feel the same way.

I don't know too many people that LOVE their jobs. No one is a huge fan of working. But I do know a few people, a really small select few, who do have an earnest passion for what they do.

My father, towards the end of his career, was one of these people. He is this complete math and finance nerd who used to read textbooks cover to cover just for the fun of it and thrived in a quantitative position at his firm. But even he took many, many years to get to that place, and was terribly unhappy for about two decades while he was working up the corporate ladder.

I think, on principle, it is hard to take something you love and make a career out of it, and the people that have enough talent and passion to do so are almost inevitably successful.

A decade ago, when I was 17 and graduating from High School, I had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life, which is pretty on par for a 17-year old, but surprisingly, I have come back full circle to where I thought I would like to be. I knew I wanted to write and that I loved to read and somehow along the way I'd like to be able to figure out how to build a career around that.

It wasn't until years later in college that I took my first marketing course and got interested in fashion and my career goals shifted. It's funny how things like that work out.

After all, it's the road blocks that define who we will become. Or I'm just paraphrasing what Steve Jobs said at a Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005.

"I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple...Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

And I think Conan O'Brien said it best at his farewell address from The Tonight Show: "Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, but if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen."

Pretty inspiring words.

The eHarmony Sequel

So Part One of my eHarmony experiment was not particularly successful by any definition. Thus, I did not have high hopes for the subsequent chapter.

I was matched up with this guy a few weeks ago who I thought was pretty cute, especially in comparison to the rest of the dudes on eHarmony. However, when I sent his picture to little sister E for her assessment, she didn't seem to agree.

E: He looks like a leprechaun!

Me: He does not!

E: Yes he does, you better watch out for him, I bet he's tricky.

Me: What?

E: If you go out with him, you'll have to keep an eye on him or he'll steal your money.

Me: Yeah I'm pretty sure that's not how leprechauns work...I think they just guard a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

E: But where does he GET the gold?

Me: I don't know, but he doesn't steal it. And even if he did, I don't really carry gold coins on my person on a regular basis.

(Side Note: I looked it up and apparently leprechauns acquire their gold through their day job of mending and making shoes, not stealing. However, they are known to be quite tricky so if you catch one, you need to hold on to him and keep your eyes on him at all times or he will fool you into turning away for a second and hide his pot of gold.)

E: Well, you should still be really careful. He might be a trickster. Are you going to go out with him anyway?

Me: I don't know, he's working late this week so we're trying to figure out a time. He was at the office until midnight last night.

E: Wait, what does he do? Outside of St. Paddy's Day parades and Lucky Charms commercials, of course.

Me: He is a lawyer! He is not a leprechaun! Stop saying that!

(Side Note: Is it weird that I find the making/mending shoes career to be more attractve than the lawyer thing? I mean, I have a LOT of shoes and I don't really require legal advice but fixing my shoes would actually bring something to the table...)

E: Well, I would still bring a friend with you. To make sure he doesn't trick you.

So, even though I didn't agree with E's opinion that eHarmony is a leprechaun, I asked my friend S to possibly screen this dude to see if he is, in fact, a leprechaun.

S: Well, how tall is he?

Me: His profile says he's 5'10".

S: Oh, then you have nothing to worry about! He's clearly not a leprechaun!

Me: I'm glad that you had to ask his height before you confirmed that he isn't a leprechaun.

S: Well, I had to make sure!

Me: Oh, man, what if he's Irish? Or he looks like this?



S: If he shows up and he has an Irish accent, I will laugh my ass off.

Me: If he shows up and he's Irish, I will have to run out of the bar.

After a few scheduling glitches, the Leprechaun and I finally got it together and planned on grabbing drinks on a Friday night while S and I were at a bar.

To prepare for the impending awkwardness and the possibility of meeting a real life leprechaun, S and I started downing shots so I was slightly toasted before he even showed up. Which in retrospect was a terrible idea because if he really HAD been a leprechaun I would have been too drunk to keep an eye on him until he led me to his pot of gold.

Anyways, he showed up at the bar and he was over two feet tall and his only magical power seemed to be that of being able to bring a conversation to an immediate halt with his awkwardness.

He wasn't exactly capable of carrying on a conversation even when given a direct question to answer and S and I continued to glance at each other over the table to raise our eyebrows at each other. And even more awkward, within half an hour he waved at someone across the bar and said, "Oh I invited one of my friends here," which he hadn't mentioned previously.

So his friend showed up with an entourage of six guys who sat down at our table, introduced themselves, and asked how we all knew each other. After a moment of silence, the Leprechaun answered, "We met on the internet."

And his friend asked me, "eHarmony?! Are you on eHarmony?!"

To which I had an entire group of guys turn to look in my direction and gawk.

"To be fair," I told them, "I am a writer and I was doing it as a social experiment so I would have writing material."

As everyone processed this, the Leprechaun asked me, "So if I had taken you out on a date and tried to kiss you, would it have showed up on the internet for the world to see?"

I blushed and laughed awkwardly (seriously, who asks a question like that in front of seven strangers?) and told him I was deferring to my counsel but I was going to plead the fifth.

More shots were consumed by the table and at this point, I realized the room was starting to spin and I wasn't going to be able to make it through the rest of the night if I continued to partake in shots. So I bowed out of the next few rounds, but it was already too late.

Now, this is totally my bad and I take full responsibility for what subsequently followed, but before Leprechaun had officially committed to coming to the bar, I had let my current boy toy, Yawn, know where S and I would be that evening. And through no planning whatsoever, we were at a bar across from the bar he was at.

So when he texted me to tell me he was coming to meet us, my alcohol-riddled brain couldn't think of one reasonable excuse to tell him not to come. When he walked into the bar (keep in mind, S and I are the only girls at a table of half a dozen guys and I am technically on a first date), he came over to give me a hug, sat down next to me, and introduced himself to the rest of the table.

The less-drunk part of my brain thought I could still get away with this if I played it cool and pretended he was just a friend and no one brought up e-Harmony again. However, I was much too drunk to be playing anything smooth at this point, and according to S, within five seconds of sitting down next to me, the rest of the table knew from our body language and the way we acted with one another that he was not just a friend.

S texted me from across the table, "Leprechaun looks sad. I think you crushed him."

Shortly after that, Leprechaun took off, leaving his friends with us, which was kind of strange, but I know now it's because one of the guys had taken a hankering to S and thought he could get somewhere with her.

A little while later, I got that impending feeling of doom, that I was not going to be able to keep down all the alcohol I had just sucked down, and I told Yawn, "I have to go home. Now."

The second I got through the door, I bee-lined for the bathroom and that was where I remained for the next hour. I remember thinking to myself, as I was hugging the toilet, that this was my punishment for having crushed someone'e soul and for dicking over a leprechaun. Those fellows don't take kindly to being messed with.

In addition to getting sick, I woke up the next day at the crack of dawn with a terrible hangover headache and lay there thinking that I had gotten what I deserved. Like seriously, if I was on a date with a guy and he brought another girl, well I would probably punch him in the balls. As my guy friend R later said to me while laughing at me, "Maybe next time, you shouldn't bring your boyfriend on a date."

Not being totally evil, I did (do) feel bad about the whole crushing of Leprechaun's soul and all, so I sent him a casual but apologetic text saying that I was sorry the evening had been awkward and perhaps we shouldn't have had multiple parties present. Unsurprisingly, I did not get a response and really don't expect to any time ever.

All in all, it wasn't my best performance, but at least I didn't get my gold stolen by a little bearded man wearing green.

And in case you were keeping score, it's now eHarmony: 3, Me: 0.

F is for Feminism

Anyone that knows me at all knows that I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching Bravo programming. And I noticed recently that almost all of the women in these shows, from the vapid housewives in The Real Housewives of Orange County to industry women I really actually admire like Kelly Cutrone and Rachel Zoe are constantly fretting about whether they are making the right decisions when it comes to prioritizing their careers and their family lives.

I watch this recurring story play out in various shows time and time again: Rachel Zoe doesn't have children and stresses over her career so much she's not sure she'll ever be able to fit kids in, even though she wants them, because as is she doesn't spend enough time with her husband. Kelly Cutrone, a single mom, has to make work sacrifices to make sure she picks up her daughter every day from school. Kelly Bensimon worries about the psychological toll that her posing in Playboy will have on her daughters. (Ok that one wasn't really a dilemma. Just keep your boobs covered you hussy!)

In college, I was a hardcore feminist. I took it so far that I minored in Women and Gender Studies and took any occasion I could to rant about how the definition of feminism is that women and men should be treated equally and that you don't have to be a crazy "Fem Nazi" to believe that.

Well, now that I'm older, I think that feminism has royally fucked over my generation.

We were fed this idea that we could be and do anything that we wanted, that it was possible to have a successful career, get dinner on the table, and then put on something sexy for the perfect husband after the kids were asleep.

Which is, frankly, a load of horse shit.

Every girl that I know has had that life-altering dilemma to face: do I focus on my career and make it up the corporate ladder or do I try to have a family. And in many cases, it's one or the other: doing both isn't an option.

I have oscillated between the two. At some point I thought I would rather be a wife and mom and then subsequently decided that my career was my priority, no matter the detriment to my social life and relationships. And now I have settled somewhere in the middle. I want to have a fulfilling career and someday be a mom, but am aware that by doing both, I will be doing neither to my greatest capability.

There is no way to have it all it seems.

Yes, I think it is possible to have a career and to have a family. It has been done before and millions of awesome women continue to do it every day. However, I think there is inevitably a certain amount of guilt that comes with doing both, whether it's because you missed picking up the kids from school because of work, or you couldn't get that promotion because you had a family life.

What I resent is the expectation that a woman is supposed to be Superwoman, that she can do both at the same time. No matter what anyone says, men are not held to that high standard yet. As long as they can provide for their families and have a degree of success in their work-life, they are still considered winners.

As I get older, I can feel not only my biological clock starting to tick, but the consequences of whatever decision I make starting to resonate with me. Only time will tell if I my friends and I will be able to pull off the balancing tightrope of managing a career and children, all while having some semblance of a personal life.

Or I can find an awesomely hot, intelligent man who is so secure in himself he would like to devote his life to being a stay-at-home dad. Let him cart the kids around to soccer practice, make me dinner, and then put something sexy on for me! A girl can only dream...

Boys With Girlfriends

I am having a string of bad luck where I keep meeting guys that have girlfriends. It's an age-old story: Girl meets guy that she thinks is a potential future husband. Guy mentions he has a girlfriend. Girl curses the heavens asking why the hell all the good ones are already taken.

My friend J in California has a roommate he has been trying to set me up with for forever, except for the fact that they live 3,000 miles away from me. But as a joke, Cali Boy and I would always kid around about getting together if I ever got out there. We talked on the phone multiple times and one night when I was feeling blue, he even sent me a picture of his ass to make me laugh and cheer me up.

This has been going on for about five years, so I was pretty excited to meet him in person. And in addition to being a nice guy, he is quite possibly the most adorable human being I have ever met. He is really cute, kind of nerdy, successful, funny, smart, and knows how to have a good time. Basically, he would be my soul mate if I believed in such things.

But, of course, by the time I made it out to California to visit, he had found himself a girlfriend. They've only been together two months, but they're serious enough that they are going on a trip to Germany together soon (so he can race and buy a BMW, could he be any more awesome?). She seems perfectly nice and whatnot, but really she's just getting in the way of me being with my perfect man.

So now, all I can really do is wait for them to break up and for him to decide to move to Manhattan to be with me. Hey, you never know, it could totally happen!

Then, closely following this heartbreaking tragedy, I went to a barbeque with my friend A to see some of her friends from high school. And the host, Roadie, turned out to be a very cute, successful guy with an amazing apartment and a puppy (two things that independently would be enough for me to date him, so together are astronomically more powerful).

Within an hour of meeting me, he turned to me and said, "So do you have a boyfriend? Because you're really hot so I don't know how you could be single."

Completely thrown off by the question, I blushed and said, "No, and that was really awkward."

He then proceeded to tease me about my discomfort with the question, but when I turned it back on him, he admitted that he has a girlfriend who he has been with for two and a half years and is moving to New York soon to be with him.

Now, I am not one of those girls who thinks guys are more attractive when they are taken. Usually, once a guy reveals that he is taken, he becomes invisible to me. As in later someone will mention him and ask if I remember him and all I recall is empty space where he was standing.

To my knowledge, I have only homewrecked once. It was six years ago, when I was a senior in college, and I met and started hooking up with a guy who had a girlfriend of seven years (that's right, SEVEN years).

They were doing the long-distance thing, and he broke up with her shortly after we became an item. Him and I actually ended up dating for a few months despite the fact that he was a total and utter moron. (In my defense, he had blue eyes AND played soccer and is now at one of the best medical schools in the country studying to be a brain surgeon.)

And honestly, I did feel really guilty about the whole thing. I was convinced for a little while that it would give me bad dating karma for the next seven years (apparently in my mind hooking up with a guy with a girlfriend has a penalty the same length of time as breaking a mirror).

But he ended up moving on and is currently dating someone else entirely, which eased my soul slightly and perhaps lessened my bad karma sentence by a few years.

So, back to my story, when Roadie revealed that he had a girlfriend, I mentally moved him from the "someone I would date" category into the friend zone. He continued to be very flirtatious, though, and kept joking that we were going to get married and referring to me as his "fiance."

A few hours of day-drinking later, he tried to have a serious conversation with me by starting, "So, if I didn't have a girlfriend, would you go out with me? Because I've been thinking about it, and I think on our first date I would come pick you up, take you to this Japanese restaurant that would blow your mind, and then walk you home. I wouldn't even try to get in the front door because I like and respect you that much."

I told him no, that it was a sweet offer, but I don't date guys with girlfriends.

And he looked into my eyes with his pretty blue eyes and said, "But you have to admit, there's something between us. There's chemistry there. I think you are a beautiful girl, inside and out. And I'd just like to get to know you better and hang out. I'm so glad that you came today and I got to meet you."

To my credit, I held strong to my resolve and told him that I don't think it's a great idea for us to hang out together. Which didn't stop me from giving him my phone number, but hey, I'm still human. And I still wouldn't go out with him if he asked. I swear!

Later, on the walk home, A asked me if I would ever consider dating Roadie because he's a really good guy and is questioning his commitment to his relationship, versus being a complete out-and-out scumbag.

I told her that I might consider it if he was single, but that was irrelevant so it wasn't even worth pondering to begin with.

So twice in a week I met someone with dating potential only to have the universe shut me down and reiterate that all the good guys in my age range are already taken by girls that snatched them up earlier.

Damn you, Universe!