Hello! I haven’t had one Big Life Event worthy of a post, so I’ve been a bit slack on updates here. It feels like a good time for some smaller updates, though, lumped together in one hopefully coherent post. Let’s do this.
I’ll start with the most fun update: I bought a guitar!
This is a Daisy Rock acoustic guitar - it sounds the same as any other acoustic guitar, but it’s designed to be easier to play for women. The body is lighter and the fretboard is narrower; the latter is a big deal for me since my hands are quite small and when I tried to learn to play on a regular-sized guitar as a teen it was a bit tough. Also, it’s just so pretty, and if we can learn anything from the summer of Barbie and the Taylor Swift Eras tour, it’s that embracing feminine and pretty things is more fun than being too cool for them.
I bought it secondhand on Facebook, since as a novice player I’m not quite ready to invest in a new guitar (the seller, Mark, was very cool and clearly knows guitars well and took good care of it). I’m taking a few weeks off between leaving my job at GBAO on August 4 and starting at UConn Law, and I’m looking forward to spending some time really learning how to play.
I have no idea if I’ll be any good at playing guitar or not, but I’m trying not to care about that. I want to play because I love music. Listening to music when I’m feeling sad or stressed is one of the ways I take care of myself, but it’s so good to actually do something active when I’m in that headspace, and I think playing a song I love on guitar would be very therapeutic. That’s all I want from this, something to do when I’m feeling low. If I got good enough to play for friends at a party or cookout without embarrassing myself and we could sing together, that’d be incredible (I promise it’s not “Wonderwall,” we’ve probably all heard it enough for one lifetime), but even if I never play for anyone but myself, if I enjoy doing it, that’s a win. I’ve been a perfectionist pretty much all my life, but I’m trying to save the perfectionism for law school classes and embrace having hobbies I might suck at but enjoy doing.
I’m also leaving my full-time job at GBAO two weeks from now, timed so that I leave right after my UConn health insurance kicks in. That probably deserves a full goodbye post when it happens, but in the meantime, I’ve low-key been doing what the kids these days call “quiet quitting.” Most of my clients are currently inactive and have been reassigned to others at the firm for when they start up again. I only have one active project, and though I’m helping out some with training new hires, I really haven’t been going out of my way to find things to do. (I would if my coworkers were struggling, but summer of an off-year is slow for everyone at a political polling firm.) After putting in so many crazy hours come election season, I’d like to think I’ve earned a little slacking off.
I do have to pay rent and feed myself and Molly even after leaving GBAO, though, so I’m on the hunt for a part-time job. To be honest, it’s actually been pretty frustrating, despite all the talk of “there’s a worker shortage” and “nobody wants to work anymore.” I’ve sent out a lot of applications and done a few interviews, but nobody’s biting yet.
A couple things are working against me, I think. One is that my availability is somewhat limited due to law school - I can work any hours Fri-Sun, but only after 5:30ish Monday through Thursday. I initially believed this would work in my favor during the job search, as theoretically I can fill shifts that others might not want to take. However, I’ve been told explicitly a few times that I’m not free enough hours for them to hire me. (One rejection email said “If you find yourself with more availability in the future (EX. evening & weekend shifts), we would encourage you to apply at that time.” and I nearly threw my laptop against the wall.) I’m also a pretty unusual applicant for part-time customer service jobs, and I suspect some places are concerned that I would be bored, want more money than they can pay, or I really fucked up somehow to be leaving a VP role for customer service. I can understand that concern, but it’s also quite aggravating when I’ve been writing cover letters explaining exactly why I’m doing this and it doesn’t appear that anyone’s reading them.
I also had a deeply unpleasant experience of responding to a job ad posted on Indeed, getting invited to come in for an in-person interview, and after making the trip, being told by the manager that they didn’t actually have any openings right then but might have some in August and they’d give me a call. So, so frustrating. I know that places with high turnover will sometimes post ads for jobs that aren’t currently open so they have a ready list of people to call if something comes up, which is pretty bad in and of itself, but interviewing people without a real opening is next-level aggravating. (Plus, I had to resist the temptation to go on a local message board where a bunch of people responded to someone else’s “can anyone help me find a job?” post with “everywhere is hiring, just go look around and apply!” with that story. Fuck those people. They probably haven’t actually looked for a job in years.)
I do have an interview lined up for Monday (for a job that, as far as I can tell, actually exists and is currently open), so perhaps that’ll be the one that works out. Eventually, something will, right? I can get by on savings and the student loan disbursement for awhile if I need to, but I’m really trying to avoid that so I don’t burn through all my savings right away and have to take out extra loans later on during law school.
Fortunately, for this weekend and next I have an excellent distraction from the frustrations of the job search: my favorite Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo is back! AlphaTauri, Red Bull Racing’s junior team, decided things weren’t working out with their rookie driver Nyck de Vries (I don’t take joy in this part, he was really struggling but it still sucks to be dumped midseason) and Red Bull loaned Daniel to them for the remainder of the season after he apparently did very well at some tyre testing laps. This may or may not be an audition for the main Red Bull team, as their second driver Sergio Perez has been struggling in qualifying lately despite the car being a whole lot quicker than the rest of the field and Max Verstappen absolutely dominating. But it wasn’t clear if Daniel would ever race in Formula One again when he left McLaren last year, so even though the AlphaTauri is among the worst cars on the F1 grid (it might honestly be the worst), I’m so happy he’s back.
I watched qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix this morning with very little in the way of expectations. 1 of the 3 free practice sessions drivers get before the race was cut short due to rain and a couple of accidents on track, so he’d had almost no time to get used to the car and driving again while all the other drivers have half a season with their cars under their belts - and, as I mentioned, it’s not a good car he’s driving. But Daniel did so well! He made it out of the first round of qualifying, which AlphaTauri hadn’t been able to do for several races (de Vries was having a hard time, of course, but Yuki Tsunoda is a good and experienced driver getting a lot more out of the car and was still having a hard time getting out of Q1), and ended up qualifying 13th out of 20 for tomorrow’s race!
More importantly, though, he looked and sounded happy through post-qualifying interviews, talking about how he was having fun driving again, felt like he was making good progress as he got more time in the car, and is excited to race tomorrow. I’ve written before about some of the parallels I’ve seen between Daniel’s leaps of faith and career changes and the journey I’m on (in an only slightly parasocial way), and to have him back racing just fills me with joy. I’m being super embarrassing about this whole thing on Twitter, honestly, but I’m good with that.
(A side note: the line I quoted in the title of this post, from the incredible song “goal of the century” by Gang of Youths, should really be capitalized as “the Rabbits are chasing, Ricciardo is racing” because the Rabbits references the South Sydney Rabbitohs, the singer’s favorite rugby team. But when I first heard the song, I didn’t realize it was referring to a rugby team and thought of the bunnies that like to come out at night in spring and summer, which Molly loves to attempt to chase - she is not particularly good at it - and imagined it as part of changing seasons, which fits with the overall theme of the song of time continuing to pass and things changing even after the loss of a loved one. So my headcanon is now that it’s about actual rabbits and I capitalized it as such.)
That’s enough for today, I think. I’ll be back in August with a proper farewell to GBAO and a look at what orientation for law school is like (I bought school supplies!), but in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy my new guitar, F1 racing, and the absolutely perfect summer weather. Hope you’re all having the loveliest weekend!