How It's Gonna Be Alright: The Email

Hey, [one of my favorite Marist professors]! I was thinking of you the past couple of days!

How have you been, especially through this whole pandemic?

How is teaching with all these social distancing guidelines on campus?

Overall, any new developments in your life?

Hope you are staying safe, given your profession's relation to the healthcare industry.

These past 7 months, it has just been me and my dad. At home, in New Jersey, during all of this (pandemic, protests, election, etc.). I am the youngest of three, so my older sister lives 45 minutes away at most, inland off one of the shore towns; my older brother is finishing his engineering doctorate over in...wait for it...Abu Dhabi, of all places.

Unfortunately, the family dog - a cairn terrier named Stifler - of over 17 and a half years passed away two months ago. We were really shootin' for him to get his basic drivers license. His funky musk has not left us though.

All I remember of this summer was how it started: dirty knees, picking weeds. No one tells you, when it comes to homeowning, is how many garden areas you can have. Garden in front of the porch, but what's that? Starts wrapping around one side of the house, another end on the other. A garden is just a spot where we decide to let pretty flowers grow. Why did my dad want so many pretty flowers, and why could they not have been in the same plot?

We went through the same experience weeding the garden last summer. Except, we let the weeds grow back. We are not learning from our mistakes...

The mulch was the most memorable part of the endeavor. Both my older brother and I, separately but in consecutive summers, helped our neighbor mulch his yard. We ended up getting summer jobs out of it. So, I am no stranger to wheeling off barrows full of steaming greens.

But, my dad definitely bought way too much mulch. After dumping and covering all the weeded areas with it, we still had excess mulch. There was simply TOO MUCH MULCH. We had to start getting creative with it. Un-weeded plots, trees, bushes, ivy patches, whatever plant life asked for the nutrients, got it. All, except for the holly trees! Those bastards make sure I cannot enjoy my front lawn barefoot.

I had mulch on the brain. All I could talk about with my friends, family, and dad was the mulch. After over a week and a half of accommodating it in our driveway, we were freed of the mulch.

Continuing in the theme of home renovation projects, next, we converted our guest room into an office space for me. It was already functioning as one, but lacking the appropriate feng shui necessary for my personal spaces. Rooms are like jigsaws, they finally feel right after coming together.

Manuevering some of the furniture around and adding my organization style, I now have a functioning art studio containing all of my painting and sketch supplies on one side of the room, and a rolly chair at a desk with personal effects on the other side. It is like they are designated zones where the two different halves of my brain can operate uninterrupted in.

Last we spoke was about...December of last year?! That was when I was back at Marist for an improv show. We have a tradition, as I probably explained, of alumni returning and getting to participate at a segment at the end of the show. We keep coming back until the youngest person we performed with while a student graduates...

...I'm so sorry, I really should be better at keeping in touch!

Think I mentioned starting a podcast with friends from home, to you. Was trying to figure out what it would be about, what the angle would be, what would make it interesting and set it apart from everyone else's typical "shootin' the shit with their friends" podcast.

We recorded a couple times. But it didn't exactly pan out. One of the friends who was editing it - he had a background in audio engineering - moved away for a job. Not that that could really stop production. We could have easily recorded over Skype, I swore to learn how to edit it myself. We slowly forgot about it.

One of those situations where you're really excited about something, but the weight of everything else going on in your life takes priority. And it's like, "Oh gee, another passion to have. Lemme see if I have room to sub-let this idea among the rest in my daily routine..."

I still have the recording equipment available, so I have a couple ideas of what I want to produce. I just need a proper schedule and routine to content creation.

So a majority of my quiet, free time has been directed towards tinkering with my personal website. I developed it to house my writing portfolio, resume, professional experiences, and a blog where my short bursts of inspiration seem to never last long enough for the text document to open up.

Check it out at: [ if you are reading this, you have succeeded & are already there ]

Let me know what you think! [ actually let me know what you think, y'all ]

That's what I've been up to - aside from sometimes getting to see my friends occasionally, when social distancing/small groups allow. The drive-in movie theaters in the Hudson Valley area make for fantastic social distance hangouts, both Hyde Park and the Overlook. Typically do double features once a night from Friday to Sunday.

I still need to follow that Anthony Bourdain New Jersey eatery trail you sent to me, of all the restaurants in N.J. approved by the "Original Culinary Gangster" himself.

Apologies for throwing so much information at you all at once, but I was wondering if you could take a look at my resume?

I feel like I have been on this job grind for so long, my gap in work experience has been becoming increasingly evident, my resume potentially stale. I reached out to a journalism mentor I met at a conference I flew out to senior year, and his constructive criticism and examples pointed me in the right direction for models to design my website and resume off.

Just this past month, I overhauled all my job-site profiles. Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, and even Zip Recruiter. And after so long, I am finally seeing the jobs available in my field. The professions I'm genuinely interested in. It only took a few minor adjustments and choosing incredibly vague job preference titles.

Coming out of undergrad, I was so afraid of applying for jobs or updating my resume. It actually crippled me. A non-physical sheet of paper and a dating profile for careers would decide the paths I'll be allowed to wander down. I constantly discounted my own skills and experiences from Marist College. They were never enough for the "iron-clad" qualifications featured on the job posting (we all know those are never definitive, just a mere guideline for applicants). If I wanted to venture into an industry that most likely required introductory experience, such as production work in film/TV, I felt I was at a loss for not having it in my background.

I was trapped because of my lack of experience and disqualified myself because of a perception that the quality of my combined experiences were substandard.

Goes without saying, my job-site settings had only perpetuated this feeling of inadequacy. Only sending me jobs out of my experience range. LinkedIn be damned because people only post non-speak, positive energy vibes, talking-in-circles there.

I am in a much, much, MUCH better place now than when I was coping with post-graduation blues, quite literally wearing a bathrobe akin to Quentin Tarantino's character in "Pulp Fiction". The only difference was that I didn't drink coffee yet and we had none to make.

Now, I'm unafraid of taking action to work towards something in the job market. Montainous cover letters have crumbled, reduced, broken back down to the mole hills they always were. Watch me soar through creating and filling in an account on large, corporate job sites. I have not one, but two resumes, tailored for which industry I am applying in.

All of this precaution only to have follow-up emails go unanswered, application statuses reading "Under Review" months past, personable phone interviews with an editor from a previous internship gone to waste after my editorial performance review was crud (God, it was so long since I used my brain to construct anything of critical value in writing, I really wish I had my office space for that instead of the small couch and table in my bedroom).

What causes me the most grief, is that I'm nearing almost two and half years out of undergrad, with very little post-graduate experience or big risks to show for it.

[ i already tried a podcast, and am only just now starting a blog; i'm still playing catch-up in terms of post-grad creative outlets for the unemployed ]

"Where's the travel blog, what about the essays from all your 'interesting thoughts', any further going-on's with your artwork?" is what they'll ask. I can write a tweet, but being this unambitious (a polite way to say "lazy") is a new type of unacceptable mediocrity. Which is downright unfashionable these days.

The closest thing to employment is that I have been dog-sitting for my sister and my neighbors, when they need me to, for the past year. Only now am I finally getting job posting notifications that align with my skills, experiences, and preferred industries. Really wish had the courage to hop ship and gun for the first out-of-comfort zone, abroad job I could find after graduating, two years before moving out of the country is all my dad moans about because of the election.

But I sometimes get this feeling that it's beginning to be too late for me [ to get the careers i want, or even get noticed for entry-level slots ].

It is the state of apprehension that follows the excitement upon seeing and opening a listing.

It is the hesitance in the back of my throat after seeing the number of applicants already applied.

It is doubt's bile, uncertainty's little league coach, and ambition's undoing (though typically that's the folly of man who are overly-ambitious, i.e. Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Sharknado creators).

Hyperbolic, yet I think it summarizes the anxiety a lot of grads, young professionals, and people still figuring it out in my generation undergo. Let pass through them. And it stuns them. Freezes them. Makes them think up is a direction they can't go; down is failure, left and right accepts the new fate they submit themselves to.

Regardless of all that, I'm good. I know I'm good. I have good friends, good family, good health. Only thing missing is a vocation, a foot in the door of living an examined life.

The job market could be completely different in two more years, but I'd like to think I'd be a different person, in a different place, having met different people, in two more years. Everything different, even the job status.

What's your advice on all this?

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Also, here's my resume!

Best,

[ me ]