THE SCIENCE OF TEENY TINY ANTS / MY MOM THINKS I’M COOL

By admin | Published: August 13, 2009

I pay $825 a month of my parents’ money to live in a very cozy basement apartment that I share with my boyfriend and about thirty three million teeny tiny ants. We live well and have grown accustomed to our small, smushable roommates. When we first moved in, I found the ant situation to be problematic. One night I left a peach pit, still slightly juicy with the fruit’s meat, sitting on the coffee table. The next morning pandemonium had most certainly ensued. Ants from far and wide had been summoned to feast on the glorious nectar. As they festered and scuttled, I watched them with unease. My garbage was their party, my mistake was their miracle: a great gifted peach pit from above. Oh, it was hideous.

It occurred to me that this was the perfect opportunity to do some mass killing. The ants were baited and assembled– now all I had to do was pull the trigger. And by trigger, I mean blow their bodies apart by spraying them with heavy-duty 409 kitchen cleaner. I learned this trick from my mom, who by the way thinks I’m really cool (did you see the comment she posted on my first PYRAMIDROME entry? She totally dug it). 409 is like this phenomenal insect annihilator– its human-scale equivalent would be to spray ascorbic acid directly into a huge crowd with a fire hose. Anyway, the point is basically that I made the mistake of leaving out some tasty garbage, which allowed a large quantity of ants to have a big party. But then, in the end, they all had their limbs ripped off and then were tragically drowned in a sea of poison. I’ll bet they didn’t even see it coming, and as they were chemically turned to dust in front of my very eyes, I reached for an extra-absorbent paper towel. I felt really bad for a second, but then I didn’t care anymore. I mean, they’re ants… right?! Oh, what a moment of sheer PYRAMIDROMIC elucidation.

bernal hill art

You see, basically, we’re all just like these teeny tiny ants (my dad once told me that ants were smarter than humans, and that they may one day rule the earth). Last night I walked up Bernal Hill and watched the sun set over Downtown San Francisco. Just as the streetlights were turning on and rush hour traffic was beginning to die down, the sky turned into a terrific RGB radiation of color. I looked out over the city while people all over were coming home, entering their tiny houses, heating up canned soup with even teeny tinier pots and pans. Little eensie weenie Chihuahua dogs were barking and babies were drinking their itty bitty baby bottles of nighttime milk, and hobos were jingling their even smaller coin stashes in their little pathetic Styrofoam cups. Everything was going on at a normal speed of the earth’s rotation, cars were moving up and down the streets, stopping at red lights and beaming their headlights across tree tops like little meaningless Broadway moments. It occurred to me that once I went back down there, into my own little tiny basement, the ants would still be there, teeny as ever. It was like, OK, so I’m just an ant down there, killing even littler ants. But up here, I’m big, and I can have it all! I guess this observation is one of those cliché “I lived through the 60s, man” type of sayings… you know, “we’re all just pawns in the cog” or whatever. But it’s true! Size is so relative. At the top of the world, nothing can take you down. The scale of the earth is infinite, and though the possibilities are not endless (don’t ever trust anyone who tells you this), they are certainly there.

GET AT ME!

twitter: @willak

Posted in Willa | 3 Comments

MEET JILLIAN GARCIA, media studies major, criminal at large

By admin | Published: August 13, 2009

Jill Garcia, otherwise known as Jill the Killah, graduated alongside Liz and I from Vassar College. She’s currently living in San Francisco, searching for that great pyramidrome in the sky, applying to jobs and wondering what the fuck is wrong with everyone who won’t hire her (aren’t we all?). Read about it, and get psyched for more posts from her… cuz next time she’s gonna talk about her <em>true</em> calling, SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY!

Everything’s Coming Up Jill’s

I always wondered if “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” was a good thing or a bad thing

When I imagined myself applying for jobs out of college, I never imagined that it would be too much to ask for a position that utilizes my degree.  Apparently, I’m being an idealist and reaching too far by applying to entry-level jobs, administrative positions and even internships (I gather this from the rejection emails I get that tell me my two previous internships in publishing and marketing as well as years of administrative experience are not enough).  I’m so glad I went to an elite liberal arts college so I can get a job in retail.

Despite the RECESSION, I was confident that I’d be able to find a job, especially because I was going back into the bosom of my mother city, San Francisco.  I figured I’d be helped by my network of friends, family and past employers…NOPE.  The job market is a soul-sucking vortex of bitchslap, and— as I’m told by most places I’ve applied to—  hundreds of people are applying to each singular open position.

Jill Goals: As Represented by this Shitty Trianglejills triangle

Note the unintentional similarity to a pyramid.  These are the fields I’m interested in, and would like to get a job in any of them (as I say in the schpiel I whip out in interviews) .  But I can’t.

My game plan had been to get entry-level jobs/internships to see what it is I want to do, and if I need to go to grad school to get to where I want to be.  Seems reasonable to me, to want to explore various attractive fields, but it taint happenin, it TAINT.

Jill Stats

Jobs applied to: over 50

Interviews (past): 5

Interviews (future): 2

Job offers: 0

Top 3 reasons I think I’m not getting a job:

  1. Self Sabotage:  when touting my writing and editing skills, I realized it’s best not to write “edition skills”—similarly, I learned to not misspell the name of the company at which I am seeking employment.
  2. Curly Hair:  it always looks unruly…especially since I got it cut like a week ago and can’t put it back.
  3. I am too AWESOME thus am a THREAT:  when interviewing me, people recognize how amazing I am and know that I will take their jobs.  All of them!

For my next post, we’ll take a look at my Media Studies major- what it means and why it’s getting me nowhere.

Posted in Jill | Leave a comment

Back to School, Oh, Back to School?

By admin | Published: August 13, 2009

drum

BY LIZ G.

Since I left college, I have been having dreams about it at least twice a week. Last night’s was particularly easy to analyze. It was move-in day, and my parents and I made our way to room 329 loaded down with my stuff. When I got there, though, there were a bunch of girls already in the room. “Yeah, this one’s full,” one said, and I turned to go.

Yesterday I realized that in two weeks I would normally be going back to school. I think this dream was my recognition of the fact that I couldn’t go back, and even if I could, it wouldn’t be the same. My freshman dorm room was 429, one number off from the room in the dream, which was filled with strangers.

I have a friend who graduated in 2008 who had just as much difficulty finding a job as I’m having. He got turned down for a position at American Eagle because he didn’t have manager experience, even though he did have a degree from one of the best colleges in the country. When he found out that that college went need-blind, he figured out that he, newly independent and broke, might be eligible for a free ride. He called the admissions office to see if he could pick up a second degree. “Sorry,” they said. “We don’t accept people who already have degrees.”

“Would you really want to do college all over again?” I asked him when he told me this story. “All your friends would be gone, and the kids would be so much younger than you.” He confessed that he didn’t know. He’ll be starting his second year teaching English in South Korea soon.

I don’t think I would want to do it all again, but damn if I don’t miss it like hell. September 1st is my scary deadline. I told myself it would be okay as long as I had a job and an apartment by then. This is because for the past four years I’ve been back at school by then, reconnecting with all of my friends, buying books, reading syllabi and gulping at the work ahead of me. Now it looks quite likely that I’ll still be here, in my parents’ house, working my way through Craigslist and The Sopranos. When you compare the two it doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous that my friend wanted to make like Billy Madison and go back to school. I’ll let you know how it goes, my first summer in eighteen years that won’t end with new pens and new teachers. Maybe he had the right idea after all.

TWITTER LIZ: @lizgalvao

Posted in PYRAMIDROME | Leave a comment

ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN… ONE HUGE PILGRIMMAGE FOR A FLEA.

By admin | Published: August 10, 2009

rainbow pyramidHello, there.

It is Sunday night, the great period of time during which life comes to a cadence, as candles burn to the ends of their wicks and the witches of the weekend go back into their weekday hideaways. Tonight is the first Sunday in a while where I’ve had that little voice in the back of my head that says, “Hey! YOU have to get up EARLY tomorrow!” Yes, it’s true. No more sleeping ’till lunch, because Willa got a job!

I’m not sure how it happened. Mostly, the sun and the stars aligned with my lucky number (236) to create a powerful swell of good luck. I don’t know if you believe in magic, or if I believe in magic for that matter. BUT, all matters aside, my grandmother’s opal ring cracked and fell apart last week, and since then it’s been real smooth sailing around these parts.

(FOOTNOTE: Opals, birthstone of Libras, are known to bring horrible luck to those non-Libras who sport them glamorously upon their finger limbs)

Suddenly, a vague list of “things I need to do” has evolved into a more detailed schedule of “places I need to be to accomplish various tasks and receive monetary compensation.” GASP! I am on my way towards true participatory citizenship in this gr8 capitalist nation.

If everything happens for a reason, I’ll definitely update as soon as I know the reason why I suddenly got a job, just after starting a blog about not having one. But, let it be known: this is not a blog about being unemployed or poor or lazy. No, no, no. Alternatively, it is about the job of living a purposely aimless life, where all sensationalism aside there is really no other goal besides feeling good. And God, sometimes that’s the hardest job of all.

Posted in PYRAMIDROME, Willa | Leave a comment

INTRODUCING: Liz Galvao, Private Eye

By admin | Published: August 10, 2009

So, this is exciting! When I had the idea to make a blog about pyramidroming (OK, so back then it didn’t have a name yet, whatever), I knew I’d need a fabulous friend to take on the beast with me. I was thinking of people I know who are smart, artistic, hilariously sarcastic and (yes) FUNEMPLOYED, and my good friend Liz Galvao immediately jumped to mind. Liz writes a great blog that I read all the time, and YOU can read it too! It’s here: THESE MODERN SOCKS.

Liz graduated with me from Vassar and currently lives in the great state of New Jersey. As a fellow “I majored in something super fun and completely irrelevant to the real world” type of person, Liz shares a lot of my sentiments. In her post, she contemplates the road ahead and gives the thumbs up to all the dirty Jersey drivers she passes on the highway of life:

SO, WHAT’S NEXT?liz

Recently, my neighbor across the street called out to me as I was walking out to my car. “Did you graduate?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, with a forced smile.

“Oh, congratulations,” she replied earnestly. “So, what’s next?”

“I don’t know.”

She gave me the thumbs-up and said, “Sounds good.”

No, it didn’t sound good, but I can’t blame her for not knowing the appropriate thing to say. I’ve been known to involuntarily throw a thumbs-up or two out of sheer awkwardness myself. The truth is, I’ve had a harder time accepting the congratulations I’ve received since graduating college than the uncomfortable responses to, “No, I don’t have a job.” It was never my idea to leave college in the first place. Sure, after four years, writing term papers and drinking foamy keg beer got a little old. But who’d want to leave an environment where you have almost all of the freedoms of adulthood with hardly any of the responsibilities?

I certainly didn’t. But, of course, reality and my student loans came knocking, and I begrudgingly graduated with the rest of the class of 2009. In all the photos from my commencement I have a look of sick terror on my face. None of us had jobs. Oh, the occasional well-connected kid had a paid internship, and a few were staving off the inevitable with graduate school, but the vast majority of us were flung out into the real world with the future completely blank. For a group of people who’d up to that point had a step-by-step plan for their lives laid out for them by guidance counselors and parents, it was overwhelming to be told, “Good luck!” in a way that meant, “It’s all up to you now!”

I majored in film in college with an emphasis on production. This means that many of my assignments basically consisted of a group of us being given equipment and told to go make a short film. It was as good an approach as any to teaching a medium best learned from experience. The results varied from hilariously self-important to surprisingly beautiful.

But like I said, film skills are best acquired through experience, and in graduating college I realized how much more of that I needed in order to actually call myself a professional filmmaker. At graduation my brother asked me, “So now, could you, like, direct a TV show?” Well, no. I could maybe direct a viral YouTube video, if I had my own camera, which I don’t. What a great idea, developing a passion for the most expensive medium outside of bedazzling human skulls with diamonds.

What can you do when you have almost no real industry experience and the economy is the worst since the Great Depression? For one thing, you can write for your friend’s blog about being alternatively employed. Another option is to do unpaid work. Directly after graduation I worked on a professor’s extremely low budget short film with several other recent graduates. It was a strange experience shooting on our now-empty campus and breaking into parts of buildings I’d never been in four years. It was even weirder staying in a dorm again after a year in senior housing. Ultimately, though, it was a fitting goodbye to my college years. The twelve-hour days kept me from thinking about my friends scattering all over the country, and being a part of a project so saturated in earnestness cheered me up considerably. There were other ways of becoming a filmmaker besides instantly getting hired by Harvey Weinstein.

Currently I’m living in the oft-mocked state of New Jersey with my parents and trying to live and work in New York City. In my writings on this blog I hope to chronicle my growth from amateur to professional, and share some of my friends’ experiences making their ways up from the bottom in this difficult economy. My parents have given me a great deal of (unsolicited) advice since graduation. In hearing how they’d approach looking for a job I’ve realized how different the process is now from when they were new graduates in the late sixties. I look forward to finding out more about what sets my generation apart as we enter the workforce. I still have no idea what’s next, but figuring it out in a whole new way sounds good to me.

Posted in Liz | Tagged | Leave a comment

THE FIRST PYRAMIDROME.

By admin | Published: August 6, 2009

pyramidrome

PYRAMIDROMING INTO REALITY: THE GREAT LIFE-QUESTS OF THE 20-SOMETHINGS

Here in America in 2009, college-educated youth represent a unique group of people. Our hopes are high, as we have been taught since the beginning of our existences in the importance of the “American Dream”. We are (for the most part) hard workers, knowledgeable in the arts and sciences, interested in politics and the weather. Some of us like to cook, and are even good at it, while some of us are talented at microwaving and shoveling plain noodles through ketchup. Regardless, the 20-somethings of the early 21st century are an astounding bunch. Computers have connected us in ways that allow most of us to presume we have about 300 or so friends… maybe more. Anything we want to learn about we can find instantaneously on the Internet, and we’re used to fast pay-offs. This is our culture, this is our breed: we are successful before we have accomplished anything, and we know more than we could ever hope to figure out. Many of us are depressed or depressing; many of us search the stars on clear nights to feel smaller than our egos, to get perspective, to feel better. We all want something; we want to find what we want. In my words, we are PYRAMIDROMING– we are slowly and accidentally forging our vaguely structured lives into something like adulthood.

So what, per se, does it mean to pyramidrome? Well, let us start with the pyramid itself, an ancient motif symbolizing structure, spirituality and accomplishment. Probably most of our minds jump quickly to the ancient pyramids of Egypt, built by millions of slaves over the course of hundreds of years. In essence, the Egyptians were doing (much more slowly and pompously) what each of us must attempt to do in our daily lives: build something of meaning– a symbol, if you will, for our own accomplishments. Our pyramids are what we build during our lives, starting with a flat and unimpressive foundation and ultimately becoming a pinnacle of light, shining majestically from a zenith of achievement.

According to a completely random and unreliable source that I found on the Internet: “When building a pyramid a certain sensible sequence of events must be maintained. The large stones can only be placed at the bottom. The foundation must be built before the top.” Generally, this is the way we are taught to view our lives–one step at a time, one foot in the right direction. We all went to college to build a really thick, massive and bedazzled block to serve as the cornerstone of our pyramid’s foundation. The first layer is more or less built, and we have a little height now from which to gaze about at our surroundings. Looking out, I see a vision that has all the color and all the vagueness of a late impressionistic painting. Ah, it’s beautiful, but what the hell is it?

According to the same unreliable source that I already quoted, one of the main risks while building your “pyramid of development” is what might happen if you take the wrong course of actions in your life, i.e. your pyramid develops a defect. The site (ok, fine, I’ll tell you the URL.) also features a really nice graphic to help explain what might happen if we fuck up and do everything wrong and build terrible, horrible looking pyramids. The graphic is a black and white pen drawing of a half-built pyramid with jagged chunks of rock crumbling solemnly to the ground. Oh, it’s so poignant–really the perfect representation of exactly what we’re all afraid of: TOTALLY FUCKING UP AND FALLING APART!

Okay, so now you get the pyramid part of pyramidrome: it’s all about the basic structure of our lives and the ways in which we work from the ground up to construct something meaningful over time. Yeah yeah yeah, so what about the “drome” part? WELL, I am really just SO glad you asked. As a little but of a self-acclaimed scifi lover, I have to go all out and draw everyone’s attention to the movie Videodrome by David Cronenberg. If you haven’t seen the film, I’ll sum it up in one sentence or less: a sensationalist TV producer figures out how to psychologically fuck people up by getting them addicted to this hypnotically weird, sex-torture show. In essence, the movie leaves you with one of those creepy “what the hell?” feelings where you start to question everything you’ve ever known about media, the government and everything in between. So yes, the “drome” part of pyramidrome is a bit of a reference to Videodrome in the way that we are all controlled by this weird quest for the perfect pyramid, even though we don’t have any idea where it is or what it looks like.

Ultimately, PYRAMIDROME is intended to exist as a blog about existence, most specifically in the sense of building our futures, one day at a time. Many of us are currently in very weird transitional stages, and our pyramids are looking very hazy and haggard. I think we should stop caring about this so much, just a little bit. Every day I am trying to look at the big picture, and allow my pyramid to be built with many small blocks of enjoyment rather than huge, thousand-ton blocks of money, fast cars and rock stardom. I want to collaborate with other people as we work to be happy pyramid builders, sharing good moments and the things we’ve learned through one of our weirdest places of interaction: the Internet. Also, art is central to the general aesthetic of PYRAMIDROME, as I believe making art is really one of the only sure activities that helps our pyramids look good in all types of weather. So yes, here we go, let us PYRAMIDROME ourselves into the FUTURE! We are all doing things, and maybe if we write about it enough, we’ll figure out why what we do matters.

To contribute, please e-mail submissions to willa.koerner@gmail.com.

Posted in Willa | 1 Comment