Another day of job searching in New York

Outside My Window.

A little background. I guess if you're here, you already know that I moved to New York this summer. We had just taken Alexis to Texas where she is attending UT Austin. Olivia had the opportunity to audition for the top two performing arts high schools in NYC. We took the risk, established residency and she auditioned. We couldn't have been more shocked when she got accepted into both of them! Zach was along for the ride, so to speak, and he was accepted into an art & design school. Later he reconsidered his choice, and returned to the Midwest to go back to his old high school. He's living with his dad, back in the cornfields.

The job situation in St. Louis was precarious at best. So I left it behind in hopes of finding new employment in advertising here in New York City. So begins my adventures in job-hunting in the time of major economic depression, recession or whatever you would call it. Unemployment recently topped 10% in NY. At this point after three months of job searching, I have applied for every conceivable type of job imaginable. Okay, I have my limits. A friend suggested I could do phone sex, but I'm saying "no" to that. And I really don't like dogs, so I'm trying to not apply for dog-walker positions.

I've made some great contacts in advertising. I met a guy who's a partner in a major ad agency, where layoffs continue month after month, despite recent new business. Budgets are slashed. Freelancers not allowed. Not hiring for any positions. Another person who used to be a VP at a big agency lost his job, was downsized, fired. Luckily he's able to freelance as a writer. Some people jealously guard their contacts, but mostly people want me to succeed, to find work.

So I look for jobs, scour ads, update my work site (coroflot.com/LisaWillard), apply, call, follow up, write a new letter, revise my resume again. I'm trying to be creative. Certainly I can write grant proposals for MoMA, but they don't respond to my application. I can answer phones or manage an office. Nope. Certainly I can be someone's nanny? Hmmm. Guess not. No one replies to anything.

Ah, the 'outside my window' part. I'll add some photos. It's quite beautiful outside my apartment window. Sometimes I'm not sure if I live in New York City. I could be anywhere for all I know, sitting here at my computer, looking out a window all day long. I see apartment buildings across the street. Brown brick, white painted brick, red brick, ornate embellishments, fire escapes. Balconies with meager, usually half-dead plants. I really noticed all the air conditioning units in the windows at first. You just don't see those in my old neighborhood. The street here is wide and has lots of trees. They are rapidly turning the colors of fall—yellow and orange. The colors are intensified today because it's been raining for a couple of days. People walk down the sidewalks with their variations of umbrellas, mostly black ones. I think that's because the guys who sell them on the street for $5 only sell black, no patterns, no colors. Black. The universal, stereotypical color of New York.

When we moved here this summer it was very hot, and the first apartment building in Harlem was noisy outside the window. I grew to like the street sounds. Okay, well, not the rap music played loudly during the day from oversized speakers in the trunks of cars. But you really do get used to the sounds of the cars, honking, trash trucks, people talking, laughing, music. The only sounds outside my window on Barrett Place were birds during the day, and crickets at night.

Oops, maybe you are freaked out that I moved my little family to Harlem? Haha. It's okay. Really. It's cool. It was a largely Muslim population on the blocks around us. Just families, kids, people trying to get by. WE were the minority for the first time in our lives. Something to ponder.

Now we're at Central Park North. For those of you who don't know the grid of the city, we are at the top of the Park. While we don't face the park, we are just across the street. It's quite beautiful. Almost, kind of, sort of, like the woods in my backyard. We are still a minority, but there is a mix of Spanish, Asian, Blacks—like in the city at large. Our apartment is a sublet. A very nice lady who had lost her job last spring. She could no longer afford the rent, so is off to stay with a series of friends, presumably sleeping on sofas and staying in spare bedrooms, hoping to find employment. It's a common story. We are here until the end of January. It's really great, and quite big by NY standards. Some of the places we looked at were literally the size of my walk-in closet back home. And double the cost of my mortgage.

Next post I'll try to stick to the topic of outside my window.