SST: Teeth Look for a Job

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

I rejoined the workforce yesterday. After several years of working only sporadic hours as a graduate student instructor, I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to make it through a full 8-to-5 day, but the day actually flew right by. The first day on the job is always a little strange with training and tours of the facilities and whatnot, so I won't really get a sense of what the job is actually like for a little while. However, based on today I think I'll survive the baptism by fire just fine.

The application process for teaching positions is still in full swing, but I'm really glad that I can take a break from the search for an immediate position. I was getting pretty tired of this:

Year of Songs: January Jams

I had a fun time putting together my "Obliquely Christmas" playlist and just after Christmas I came up with a similar project that might become a monthly feature on my blog for the next year: a playlist for every month of the year with songs that either explicitly or passingly referenced the current month. A lot of obvious selections sprang to mind: "November Rain," "A Long December," "September Song," etc., but like the "Obliquely Christmas" set I wanted to mix in some out-of-left-field choices as well.

I was all excited to launch the series at the beginning of January, but I ran into a snag: January doesn't seem to be a very inspirational month for songwriters. At least not inspirational enough to assemble a full-length playlist. So here we are, nearing the end of January, and I have only a few songs to offer, but even if I only have 3-4 songs for a particular month, by the end of the year it will be one big, healthy playlist. I hope these selections add to your enjoyment of the final days of January:



CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: February is looking to be a pretty paltry month for songs as well, so I need your help to fill out the playlist. If you have a favorite February jam, please tell me about it in the comments (or if you have any January suggestions to add to this playlist).

Yahoo!

Monday, 5:39 p.m.
Right before shutting down the job search for the day, I hit refresh one last time on the Portland Craiglist "All Jobs" page. Curious, I check out the most recent entry on the list: "Bilingual Client Advocate." It's unclear what exactly the job is, but the pay is good and they're looking for someone with 1-5 years of customer service experience (check), with a bachelor's degree (super-check) who is fluent in Portuguese (check). I send off an email with a resume attached.

Wednesday, 9:39 a.m.
Having not received a response, I send another email about the job.

Wednesday, 10:50 a.m.
I get a phone call from Liza, who works for an employment agency. It was she who placed the Craigslist ad. She says the job is with Yahoo! and she is going to send them my resume and a few references. She says that she'll probably know by the end of the week if they want to schedule an interview.

Wednesday, 1:46 p.m.
Liza calls back and says that Yahoo! wants to interview me out at their campus in Hillsboro the next day at 1:00 p.m.

Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.
In preparation for the interview, I get a disastrous haircut at a beauty college.

Thursday, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
I have an interview on site with Giancarlo (American) and Fabiana (Brazilian). They ask me some standard interview questions in English and Fabiana and I chat in Portuguese about my experience with the language and my experiences in Brazil. They tell me what the job entails: every Yahoo! page that allows chat or comments contains links that say "Report abuse*," which leads to a form where users can explain their objections to another user's comments. All of the reports filed on all of Yahoo!'s Portuguese-language pages go to a team of seven Brazilians located in Hillsboro, but one of them is shortly going on maternity leave, so they need to bring in a replacement ASAP. The interviewers then give me a document to translate into Portuguese. The title is something like, "The Role of Webcasting in Emerging Markets." I can't recall ever having a conversation in Portuguese about webcasting or emerging markets, so my vocabulary on the subject seems a little thin, but I plow through it and at the end am fairly pleased with my work. After nearly two hours, Giancarlo then wraps up the interview, saying that they still have a number of applicants to interview on Friday, and that I will hear back from them sometime next week.

Thursday, 5:00 p.m.
I get a call from one of Liza's co-workers from the employment agency, informing me that Yahoo! would like to offer me the job. I accept.

**********

I've been looking for a job for so long that I was amazed at how one could go from having almost no prospects to having a job so quickly. I had had a number of close calls and after I while I felt like I'd always be a bridesmaid, never a bride (is there a masculine version of that expression?).

This Yahoo! job is remarkable because it pays better than most any other job I for which I had been in contention, it sounds like more interesting work than other positions (hooray, it's not a call center!), it's geographically close to the place where I'm going to be teaching a few guitar lessons (more on that another time), and since I'll be the only non-Brazilian on the team I anticipate that my Portuguese is going to go to the next level. It's only a contract job (filling in for the woman on maternity leave), so it will only last until mid-summer, but hopefully I'll be ready to move on to a voice teaching position somewhere by then. But it's the perfect solution for right now and I feel very blessed that it all came together so quickly (despite the bad haircut).

*Ou seja, "Reportar abuso."

"I shouldn't have stopped for that haircut!"

Have you ever been at the barbershop and as the stylist is working you have the realization, "Wait a minute, I know what's going on here - I'm getting a bad haircut!"

Tonight was the first time that I was aware of a bad haircut while it was in the process of becoming. Since I have to remove my glasses I don't normally find out whether a haircut is bad until the end when the stylist says, "So how does that look?" But this time, even in the blur of glasseslessness I could tell immediately that a bad haircut was brewing.

I went to a beauty college where the students cut your hair for the fabulous low price of $5. I've had mixed results from beauty colleges, but usually I end up looking at semi-respectable at the very least. I gave the stylist-in-training the same simple directions that usually result in a successful haircut: short on the sides and back, a little longer on the top and front. However, her definition of "sides" apparently means "every part of the head except for a one and a half inch strip down the middle of the skull." She went straight for the clippers and buzzed me all the way up the right side of my head so quickly that I wasn't able to stop her until it was too late. "Hey!" I cried out as I put my glasses back on to survey the damage. "Let's stop for a second and make a plan, shall we?" But it was buzzed so short that she had no choice but to replicate her work on the left side as well.

When she finally got the scissors out I could feel how unsteady her hands were as she held my hair between her fingers. I don't know if she is normally that shaky or if I destroyed her confidence by speaking up, but I was on edge for the rest of the haircut. Several times she asked with finality "So how does that look?" with the implication that the haircut was over. And each time there was some glaringly obvious patch of wild hair that I had to point out to her, to which she'd mumble, "Oh... yeah, uh, I was going to fix that... I was just seeing if... uh.. yeah, I was gonna....." Together we neutralized the most egregiously bad spots, but eventually I just didn't want her to be near my hair anymore so I forfeited the fight and surrendered my five dollars.

A few days have now passed since the infamous haircut and each morning as I comb my hair (what's left of it, that is) I discover several previously unnoticed flaws, including some really obvious ones like in the picture on the right.

This experience has helped me realize three things:

1) A good haircut is a miraculous thing. The internet tells me that the average human head has 100,000 hairs and it is quite amazing how apparent it is when just a few of them are different lengths than their immediate neighbors.

2) I was much better off in the past when I found out about my bad haircuts after the fact - it's much less stressful than watching one evolve.

3) Maybe it's time for me to stop patronizing beauty colleges.

P.S. - 1,000 nerd points to whomever can identify the Simpsons episode from which I have taken this post's title without googling, plus 1,000 bonus nerd points for knowing who is credited with writing it.

250

This is my 250th blog post and just like an old sitcom, I think we need to take a look back at some of our favorite episodes. So pretend that you've lost your memory or gone into a coma (à la ALF or The Simpsons), 'cause it's a CLIP SHOW! (Well, more like a clip show with the director's commentary track playing.)

Ready? Cue the wavy screen effect!

*****

Favorite Overall Post: "The Curse of Sports Night"
A no-brainer for favorite overall. I knew I had to post something on my blog about breaking my arm, but I delayed writing it for several days because I didn't want it to be another straightforward injury story (see the "Most Helpful Post" winner). I finally came up with the idea of turning the only photograph of the incident, which was taken after the drama had played out, into a structural device for the narrative, and then, like most of my favorite blog posts, it practically wrote itself.

Honorable Mentions:

• The 'Leaving Ann Arbor' Series ("Five Days," "The Unmovable Bank," "This is Where We Used to Live," and "Saying Goodbye")
• "Busy Schedule" - I liked the conceit of this one - TV commitments as college courses. (The locker in the picture is number 2009, chosen because I wrote it at the beginning of 2009. Not that anyone noticed.)
• "Young at Heart," "Shout Out to My Roomies," "Home Alone," "Why the Jazz Matter to Me," "NERD!"
• "Free Stuff Finds Me" - One of my quickest posts, written while waiting for the bus at Pierpont Commons. I loved it because I saw the two cashiers in question a few days later and they each told me that they had made the photo in the post their profile pic on Facebook and they had written in their respective statuses about how jazzed they were at being featured on some random guy's blog.

Most Helpful Post: "Injuries Afoot"
The picture of my lumpy foot in this first Sports Night injury-related post led to an intervention in the comments section, without which I might not have gone to the doctor and learned that my foot was broken.

Honorable Mention: "The Glasses Menagerie"
I was so glad to get input from so many friends, and I really did factor it into my eyewear decision.

Wackiest Post: "The Ties that Bind"
One of those posts where you hit publish and then wonder, "Did I seriously just publish that?" I started working on this right before bedtime, but I ended up staying up ridiculously late (read: 3 a.m.) as I feverishly "photoshopped" (read: "MS Painted") the tie on to dozens of famous figures from the past - I seem to recall doing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, President William Henry Harrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe among others (unfortunately, the location of the unused pictures is unknown). I limited it to just four pictures for the sake of brevity, but also because I wanted someone to try and breath some meaning into the pictures that I did select.

Honorable Mention: "Draft Night Thoughts **Live**"
My most stream-of-consciousness-y post, including thoughts on the draft, Michael Jackson's death earlier that day, mixing ice cream and cereal, and a "course evaluation" for Breaking Bad season 2. I even took a jogging break and returned for more live blogging afterward. I tried it again during the next year's draft but I couldn't capture the magic and it remains unpublished (although it did have some good material about Mathnet.)

Favorite Poll: B-Vitamin Poll
Not that I do a whole ton of polls, but I loved this silly poll to determine which B-Vitamin would make the best band name. As I imagined, Riboflavin won handily (63%), followed by Folic Acid (27%) and Niacin (9%). I feel bad for poor, voteless Thiamine.

Favorite Post Title: "How I Gave My Student a Panic Attack"
Honorable Mention: "Eets makelijk!"

Favorite Picture Post: "Saving Fish From Freezing"
Honorable Mention: "In This Home on Ice"/"In This Home on Ice II: The Meltdown"

Favorite Music Clip Post: "To My Dad on his 64th Birthday"
Honorable Mention: "Star of the East"

Favorite Sesame Street Tuesday Post: "SST: Name That Food"
Without Sesame Street Tuesday, I wouldn't even be close to this landmark - SST accounts for 59 of my 250 published posts posts. Sometimes I'll just throw a clip up just because I like it and want to share it, but most of the time I try to use the SST clips as an angle to explore what's going on in my life, such as my road trip to the South.

Honorable Mention: "SST: The Magician's Diary"
This SST post shows me at my most economical. Concision is hard to come by on my blog - just look at this post.

*****

The final wavy screen of the clip show reveals us all back sitting around the fireplace wearing wool sweaters and drinking hot cocoa, laughing warmly about all the shared memories. Roll credits.

Seriously though, thanks for sticking with me through the first 250 posts*. I get a tremendous amount satisfaction out of sharing my life, my thoughts, and the things that I love with all those who follow Brian Presents:**. I hope you'll stick around for the next 250.

*I have published 250 posts, but I must acknowledge that only 249 of them were written by me - "The Jazz Suck" was written by guest author/account hacker Jessica Allen.
**I do have a second blog, What Dreams May Come, but at my current rate of 11 posts in 22 months, it should take me roughly 40 years to reach 250 posts.

SST: Bad Luck to Be Born a Duck

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

The moment I crossed the border from California into Oregon I could feel that the state was in the thrall of Oregon Duck Football. For months I have seen countless cars with Ducks flags mounted on the top, stores with the big yellow 'O' logo in the window, and people everywhere sporting the vast array of head-turning (and headline-grabbing) Nike-branded Ducks apparel. It's been fun to be along for the ride as Oregon surged into the national championship game. Last night we had a game viewing party with Emily and the boys (Brad was notably absent - he was attended the game in person with his team from work, which is ironic since he is the least football-crazed person around here) with Emily's homemade taquitos and some Ducks green-colored rice crispy treats.

The game went down to the wire, but Auburn scored the winning field goal as time expired. Talk about bad luck to be a Duck:

Obliquely Christmas III: Final Christmas Music Thoughts (I Promise)

Editor's Note: This is the third and final part of a series (Part One, Part Two)

I was in Times Square on the night that Michael Phelps won his fifth gold medal in Beijing. The city was hectic as usual before the race began, but everything stopped as soon as Phelps strode up to the pool. People on the sidewalk stopped walking. Cars pulled over and the passengers got out and joined the pedestrian onlookers. Every eye in Times Square was fixed on the huge screen overhead. When Phelps touched the wall at the end of the race, the place just erupted. The square was filled with an amazing energy - for four straight minutes, thousands of individuals forgot about whatever was happening in their own lives and celebrated something that everyone could relate to.


(Footage not taken by me, but similar to my experience)

This year I've done a lot of thinking about Christmas music (in case you haven't noticed). A few days before Christmas I awoke to the sound of Burl Ives' "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" leaking faintly through my bedroom wall. Later that day I was at the mall and heard the likes of Brenda Lee singing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," Dean Martin singing "Let It Snow," and of course, Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas." You know, the exact same recordings of the exact same Christmas songs that you hear everywhere year after year during the holidays. Against that musical backdrop I suddenly felt something akin to what I felt in Times Square during the Olympics.

I feel like the world has become a very niche-y place. I am reminded of some remarks that President Obama offered at my graduation ceremony at the University of Michigan earlier this year:

Whereas most of America used to get their news from the same three networks over dinner or a few influential papers on Sunday morning, we now have the option to get our information from any number of blogs or websites or cable news shows... If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we will become more polarized and set in our ways.

He was referring mostly to political insulation, but his comments could also apply to musical insulation. Two of my nephews have little MP3 players and they recently asked me, "What's on your iPod?" I had to think for a minute - hmm, they're not gonna know Regina Spektor or Caetano Veloso or Arcade Fire. Talk about musical insulation. The most universal band I could think of was the Beatles. They said that they thought they had heard of them, but they probably hadn't heard their music.

As universal as the Beatles may be, they can't touch the universality* of something like "Silent Night." So just like I love the way that the Olympics make me feel connected to the whole world, I have come to the realization that underneath the music I have formerly described as "cheesy" there is something very powerful: a spirit of mutual understanding and shared experience seems right in line with the Spirit of Christmas.

*Yes, I'm aware that not everyone in the whole world celebrates Christmas or is fluent in its traditions. Pardon my overgeneralization, but this is an overgeneralizing kind of post.