Queen of the Digital Playground?

Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. Guess I'll go eat worms.

First is was a pity party nursery rhyme. Last summer it was my anthem.

As I mentioned, I was a touch click-happy ... am  a little click-happy, and have been since freshman year.  I am a marathon job searcher, compelled to get ahead and get my foot in whichever door hid the magical real world behind it.

So the time had come. Most internship positions require junior or senior status and last summer was the gap between the two.  I'd applied to what felt like a million internships online (it turned out to be about fifty applications "penned" through these online drop boxes -- more on these to come).  I was well qualified, I'd taken very few courses below a 300-level since first semester of my sophomore year and I am a fast learner.

To my delight, I got to the interview stage with a golf product marketing company, the Federal Reserve's human resources department and (slapstick irony) snagajob.com, a site that connects hourly jobs to job seekers.

The golf marketing company internship would have burned me from the inside. I'd spent the summer before my junior year as a pro shop manager at a golf course. Translation into Elizabeth: I wasted away at a place where "boys will be boys" transformed into full-fledged chauvinism (I was an anthropologist half of the time, observing the natives) as an independent woman who would lose her well-paid job if she said what she really thought about their overcompensating arrogance.  Reliving this with the added pleasure of the Office Kinko's 10k sprint could never be the end to my means.

After they offered me the job, I said no to something for the first time in my life.

I did not get the Federal Reserve job because I didn't have enough web experience. The copy writing job at snagajob would have been ideal, but I did not "have enough web experience."

Up the new media river without a digital paddle, looking back at the job that involved only paper and copier machines (and golf--nope), I wish I could have seen my face.

But John Donne, Aldous Huxley, Mary Shelley: I survive so well in their world. Here, there is more I need to teach myself. It was back to the playground for me.

Do you smell your new books when you get them? Prefer your novels in paper form? Looking for a solution because you're sharing this paddle-less canoe?  The only solution I can articulate is stubbornness. My stubbornness pushes me to continue to do what I love and educate myself when I can with those other things "they" require.  

I refuse to settle because I want to respect myself. If that means I have to work harder to get the jobs I want, bring on the big kid bullies. Sticks and stones, my friends.

Since the summer of "you are headed to Nowheresville next May," I have jumped at every opportunity to hone skills and beef up my resumé.   It has worked and it is the only path I can recommend.  

So there. Nee-ner-nee-ner-neeeeee-nerrrrrrr.