Again – http://blog.brand-yourself.com/2009/your-personal-brand-best-interview-tool/

My boss was totally cool last week and gave me a few days off so that I might fly home to Michigan and pack up my room. It was an interesting trip home. It’s really hard to pack and get things done once everyone finds out you’re there. They all want to hang out and party it up and whatnot. Me, being the kind person that I am, obliged to most of these offers (sorry Amber and family and Carolina and her hot sister). I ended up packing my whole room up. It made me wonder, how in the universe I fit all that junk in there in the first place. I’m sure it was easier than it seemed but I chose to pretty much stop thinking about after the initial thought once I realized that I really didn’t care all that much, so I moved on to more important matters. Like sleeping and eating and then sleeping some more. Good times…good times. I am actually contemplating doing that this very moment, but I’ve got work to still do after my break of sitting here writing this to you all.

As much fun as Michigan was I was completely ready to go back but apparently the airline Gods had other plans for me and they weren’t very nice ones. *shakes fist angrily* I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why check-in wouldn’t work at the airport only to come to realize that the online program had glitched and now I had a ticket for sometime in October. I made a couple calls and of course it was my fault. I’m not sure how it was since I searched for hours on the same September date. Why would I want a ticket to go back in October? This I do not know. Thankfully the lady at the ticket thingie was quite nice and even though she charged me to switch the ticket it wasn’t too much. The bad part of this was yet to come and a time and a place that I really would have rather not been. Baltimore. It’s boring there. The airport is tiny with nothing to do. Now I know airports aren’t the entertainment capitals of the world or anything but there was even less to do (and eat…that was horrible as I was starving since I spent my food money on a new plane ticket) than most other airports. Lame! When trying to claim my boarding pass in Baltimore they couldn’t find it and apparently that fee I paid to change my ticket, they failed to unlock it to the new airline and was lost in limbo. Long story short. I ran around the airport, literally running, dead sprint style, with tons of bags weighing quite a bit, got the workout of a century, only to have to hunt down some head of the first airline that didn’t give two shits either way what was going on and taking his sweet as time despite my telling him that my new plane was leaving soon and ending this run on sentence to start a new one….now. I had told this guy every minute just about that it was leaving soon and the doors were locking. He didn’t care. Even when I told him at one point I have approximately 45 seconds till they lock the door. He finally gave me a ticket. Guess what? It said OCTOBER!!! Fuck I didn’t care I just ran as fast as I could 20-30 gates to get back to where I needed to be. The lady there decided to be ultra nice when she saw it was for October and said “screw it, I have extra seats on this flight, just go!” She unlocked the door for me and let me on. She’s awesome. I thought I had ran enough, but they seemed to think differently. I had to now run across the runway. So not cool. But, whatever, I was now on a plane to New York. I arrived in New York an hour later and it was amazing. I missed this city.

Now I’m back to life in the city. Working a lot. I love my job, we have lots of fun there and it’s been super busy lately so that’s always fun. Make sure everyone in the area tried and come out to check out ANT Fest 2009. Go to http://arsnovanyc.com for details. We’ve put in lots of effort for this, so make sure you check it out. You’ll love it, I promise. If you don’t, you suck!

Lastly, tomorrow is Brooklyn Book Fest. I believe I’m heading there with Megan and Alex. It’ll be fun times. Say hi if you’re there. Say hi later if you’re not. For now, I’m signing off as I have nothing witty or fun or even slightly boring left to say. Unless of course you want a whole post of just this:

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But my guess is you don’t want that. So I won’t do it. Peace y’all.

Crazy free hugs people and random location for this image. Sorry, no free hugs for you...

As I sit here drinking my delicious drink of icey cold water amazingness, I am thinking about last weekend and all of the fun stuff I did while relaxing and having a ‘personal’ day. I chose to spend the day with nobody but myself and it was wonderful. I feel as though days such as these are lost to many, as I find most seem to feel they have to have the constant presence of another individual or even groups of people. Days to yourself are relaxing and in my case, often enlightening.

I woke up and made myself a delicious breakfast, waffles in case you’re curious. Granted they were frozen waffles but they were still delicious. (Man, I miss the old Belgium waffle maker). Now that my belly was full I decided it would be a good day to do some more grocery shopping which I did. Thankfully, the Food Bazaar was far from backed. Which, I found extremely odd as it was a Saturday and typically you can’t move around that store very well on the weekends. But I made it and after taking my grocery shopping workout back home I ventured out to the city for some fun stuffs. After I took a nap of course. Come on now, I can’t go do this all unrested.

Adventures in the city commence…*waits on seemingly forever long train ride to the city.* Okay, finally there. I decided since it was a wonderfully nice day out I would just sit around the park and read the book I had just started (have since finished in a matter of a week), Christopher Moore’s “A Dirty Job.” Great book, highly recommended. It’s disturbing, it’s odd,

Creepy yellow spandex bendy guy...

it’s funny, it’s captivating, it’s everything you need a in a book. Or did I just describe a girlfriend? I don’t know either way, it’s something that was worth investing time into. When it started getting too dark to read anymore I started wandering around only to find a crazy weird street performer. Let me tell you, people were not meant to bend this way and if they were then umm someone forgot to give me this level of flexibility. If anything, nobody should wear tight yellow spandex in a public setting. As creepy as he was he was really a true showman. He was able to captivate a rather large audience and was super entertaining. He did some crazy super flexy break dancing as seen in the picture to there. There were other variations of bendy dance but I didn’t feel the need to take 8 trillion pictures of those particular movements along with everyone else who I don’t think their cameras stopped going off. You would think though watching this guy do his breakdancing would get boring after a while, and you are right, it does. He knew this as well so thankfully he would switch it up a little and do other fun stuffs. Like let his beat maker do a little solo act for everyone to watch. This guy could play the buckets better than many of the drummers I’ve seen in my life and I’ve seen a lot of drummers in my time. It makes you wonder though, with all of these mediocre bands being famous for all of their immense “talent”, how this bucket player isn’t doing more with his real talent and the ability these guys have to put on a show randomly in the middle of the city that is used to

The Beat Maker

street performers and ignores them most of the time. Now as you can most likely see these pictures are of amateur quality and I would apologize for this normally, but I really feel this gets the point across just as well. Maybe some other time I’ll do all the fun artsy photos for everyone. Back on point this is where the super fun stuff started to happen. Break dancing and bucket drumming solos aside, now it’s on to flips, yes this was a very diverse show. He pulled out a random from the crowd, proceeded to make her feel like the prettiest girl on the planet, oh how nice of him, then go the beats going and prepped to flip over the top of her, then finally, delayed it more to build some suspense. Jerk! Long drawn out suspense aside he finally did the flip it was pretty much awesome. Very impressive, actually. I don’t know many people that can perform a full front flip over a person. Here just watch the video, all 5 seconds of it…

He then did the same thing only like this…

7 and a half people...

Then he got money from the crowd. I mean you can’t have a NYC street performer not asking for money.

This is like 1/3 of the crowd. Imagine $1-20 from every single person in this crowd.

Night filter on for those of you who like that crazy lighting look.

After I all of this I decided to go home, as I was getting tired. But not before running into free hugs and skateboarders. The skateboarding definitely caught my attention since I do love to do it myself. But, these guys are good…really good. So I watched for a few minutes before leaving. Now that I was bored with the festivities of the day, I went home. Bet you can’t guess what I did when I got there either…yeah, you guessed it. I relaxed. I designed. I thought about stuff. It was amazing.

This was truly a day of enlightenment. By enlightened I mean more on the mind and soul cleansing aspect of things. We all need it, I just chose to actually do it, which most people don’t seem to do. I enjoyed it and I hope you enjoyed reading about it. If you didn’t, then I’m sorry for your loss of however long it took you to read this, but I can’t give you your time back so you can yell at me later through comments or e-mail or other various forms of getting a hold of me. Odds are however, I’ll just ignore you. Peace y’all.

Ars Nova

So you all are reading the blog of the new Web Marketing & Design intern at Ars Nova. You can check out who they are at http://www.arsnovanyc.com. Lots of social media marketing and some web updates and some design, yeah I know! Sounds awesome! So for all of you wondering when I’m coming back to Michigan, I’m not. If I do it’ll be for a couple days to grab more stuff then disappear into the big city once again. Sorry about it, only not really. (Seriously, you all have my phone number, you can call. That and I’m a member of like every social media network out there. If you can’t get a hold of me, you’re not trying.) Anyway, I start to rule the Interweb on Monday. So be warned. It’ll be fun. Oh, and on a random sidenote, I need to find a place to live soon.

Also, keep your eyes and typing fingers tuned in for some other awesome stuff, there will be news on a sweet new blog about some sweet new stuff (but not about sweets) and some other awesomeness in the realm of skateboarders, BMXers and a square we like to call Union.

Sorry I’ve not updated much, as I have been extremely busy. Job hunt news on the horizon as well as a new project with my friend Mark Messing. As always, I’ll keep you posted so be sure to check back.

Frank Turner - Love & Ire Song

Saturday was a fun day. It wasn’t near as hot as it had been in previous days, which was nice. I ventured to Best Buy to pick up a CD that I really wanted. However, people traffic was absolutely horrendous. There was some sort of street sale going on in the Times Square area so traffic on both fronts (car and people) was constantly being redirected, this made for getting from point A to even point A.5 pretty dang hard. Upon arriving at Best Buy I was surprised to find how it was setup. Yes, it was magical. Actually, I lied; it was exactly the same as every other Best Buy I’ve ever been to. So, I just picked up my CD and left. I thought it’d be a good idea after Best Buy to go and do a little walking around Union Square. There was some music festival going on and it was a gridlock of people traffic, so I just gave up on adventures in the city and headed back to the apartment to make my stomach happy, as I was starving at this point. When I got home, I made myself some chicken fried rice with red pepper, peas, carrots, onions and corn, delicious! Then I went out for the night.

E = EPIC FAIL!!!

I started the night about by heading to a place called HK where my roommate works to have a few drinks and meet up with my friend Megan. We hung out there for a while and headed out to another bar. On our way to the second bar we had the most interesting train experience ever and by interesting I mean I don’t think it could have gone more awry. We were going to take the E train down town and it kept going one stop and then would head back uptown, I was unaware that trains could do that on the same track. This happened about 3 or 4 times and then we decided to switch trains. The next train we tried didn’t even stop at our stop so we found yet another train. Once we were close enough to our destination we just decided to walk the rest of the way, as our luck was not in the train department. So we finally got to our bar and it was fun. There was a girl in a cape there that was oddly intriguing. The guy in the cape there, oddly creepy. We decided after our drinks to head back to her place where we just chilled up on the roof and drink some homemade sangrias and enjoy the nice cool breeze of the night and chit-chat about all sorts of random stuff.

Sunday was a typical Sunday for me. I pretty much relaxed all day. I worked on a few things but for the most part I just chilled and listened to some music, made myself dinner and worked on a few work-related things, like getting my materials together for the interview I had on Monday. It was a fun, chill day.

Today (Monday) was pretty good other than the immense heat and humidity. I woke up relatively early and got ready for my interview at The Gates. I trekked across town in the sweltering heat to my destination (sidenote: Wearing a suit in this heat, so not cool.) Overall, the interview I felt went extremely well. She seemed to like what I had to say and was seemingly impressed with my resumé and said I would hear back within the week. Also, this morning while getting ready for the interview, I got a call and now have an interview tomorrow and also got an e-mail to send out more portfolio materials to sample. Like I said, it was a pretty good day minus the sweltering heat. Now it’s off to enjoy the night perhaps.

I did tons today and by tons I’m referring to the very little that I did. I mean don’t get me wrong, I did spend a good chunk of the day applying for jobs. So cross your fingers on that, actually no, don’t. I’m betting that has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on whether or not I get a job and since I’ve told you to cross your fingers before and have received nothing, I’m going to say this time don’t, maybe I’ll get something.

Well, now that you’ve been updated on my relatively uneventful day, I hope this in fact makes your day better in some way, shape or form. If not, I’m sorry. If so, then sweet.

Until later days.

Cross your fingers everyone, I’m pushing hard on prospects here. Yesterday was a very memorable, fun, yet extremely busy day. I woke up relatively early so that I might get ready in time to make a few pit stops before venturing out to meet up with a guy for a job possibility. A really awesome sounding job too…but we will get to that in a little bit. I left here, looking all snazzy in my suit (I’ve been told I look pretty darn good in that thing.) *insert picture here if I had one to post, but I don’t so use your imaginations*

Conveniently Placed, Easy To Read, Map - Sans Graffiti

Upon arriving in Union Square, I went to get some fresh resumés printed. When I went in the building I was greeted with outstanding service and by outstanding, I mean merely mediocre to poor. For having had worked in a print shop for more years than I can count I feel as though if you were to work in any form of copy center one would have a basic understanding of paper and maybe even a color combination or two. Oh well, I have the knowledge to save myself; it’s the clueless ones that have to ask for help that I feel sorry for. I ended up getting a paper that I pretty much didn’t want, but it still looked pretty sweet so I went with it. Now I had my snazzy resumés in hand and it was off to the meet. Oh yeah, one last obstacle, the guessing game that is the train system. I’m finding I’m getting pretty good at it (actually not really I just use the conveniently placed, easy to read, maps.)

As I had gone to meet up with the person I was supposed to meet with, he informed me that he had been sucked into meetings all day and we’d have to reschedule for later, which I was content with of course. So I walked, walked, walked and even, just for funsies, walked a little more, mainly to kill time. I then decided to go home and relax for a bit. It was amazing. Except for a nap it had all my current needs, a comfy cushion to sit on (the couch), a machine that conditions the air, food and free water which was much needed (only moments away from getting more than I bargained for.)

Now, it was off to see the guy I needed to meet. Little did I know I was walking into a typhoon, or hurricane, or something of that nature. Fine, heavy rains, that works. Thankfully, I had my trusty tiny umbrella that I keep in my man-purse. Best $3 NYC street corner investment I’ve ever made. Although, now that I think about it, I may have been able to talk him down to $2, but that’s another story, one that I’m sure will never be told, as it’s not really all that important and I’m sure nobody cares to hear. Anyway, after being soaked from my feet, al the way up my legs from the massive puddles/lakes I had to tread through, I got to drop of the resumé. It turned into an impromptu elevator speech, that I had in fact never practiced. Overall, I feel I impressed him or at least that’s what I’m hoping for.

It's Famous And I Was There...Probably Going Back Too

Yes, It's Really That Busy.

Today was fun times as well. Woke up and went to the gym. Did a 45-minute cardio class. Intense! It makes you sit make and realize how not in shape you are. Then to have it followed immediately by a yoga cool-down, yeah, I’m not as flexible as I though either. After the intense workout, went shopping. First time being there but man I love Trader Joe’s. I mean, who doesn’t love super cheap wholesome foods? I know I do. It’s amazing going to New York City and going grocery shopping and paying less than I do back in East Lansing (Michigan). The food tastes better too.

On to more pressing matters. If only I had some for you, but alas, I do not *le sigh.* I took it pretty easy for the rest of the day and started it off by after the gym and shopping, napping. I do love my naps, check the front page of my senior yearbook, it’s proof of how much I love them. Then, before wasting my entire day away. I went back into Manhattan to drop off a “Thank You” card for that guy meeting with me about the job. Man I hope I get it.

Currently, I’m being the master of multi-tasking. Which, when you think about, the term “multi-tasking” is odd, considering your brain can only do one task at a time and just bounces back and forth between whatever multiple tasks you are confronting. I’m chit-chattin it up with friends from back on home via my lovely iChat, working on finalizing some graphics I’ve been working on, watching Bloodsport (horrid movie but you can never go wrong with Van Damme), reading various other blogs in between whatever I’m writing in here and learning more stuff about Web sites that I never knew before (thanks Chris.) So now that this blog entry is coming to a close, I do believe it is time for some dinner. Yes, dinner sounds nice. As does finishing these graphics. Oh the choices. Don’t worry I’m sure I’ll find more stuff to add to the choices list in a matter of minutes, but before that happens I’m going to attempt to get food in.

Yesterday, I wandered outside for a little bit. I went to get my new iPhone as the other one had decided it be all fun-like and stop working, *shakes fist in anger*. Well they were really cool in there, literally, super nice and they had the A/C at temperatures that I’m sure were far more frigid that any one actually requires. But, it sure did feel nice. I later wanted to go pick up some food and I pretty much made it down the street before deciding the cause was lost and/or forgotten. I think I sweated out any memory of it, it was seriously like 95 degrees with insanely high percentages of humidity. So, while sitting in the heat of all heats I started looking through Web sites and finding all sorts of fun job postings, unfortunately I was under qualified for about 90% of them. What the heck? Why can’t I be the new CEO of these multi-billion dollar agencies? I’m sure I’d be pretty BA at it. So I figured I’d apply for all of the entry-level stuff. For those of you out there that have been wondering what it is I do out here all the time this is it, or at least what I have been doing anyway. I applied for approximately, let’s see…carry the 2, divide by 3, subtract 7…a lot of jobs. Internships, graphic artist, marketing, bartending, whatever it is that I can find that I feel like I will enjoy doing.

Today, has been an equally eventful day. After discovering a bartending job that would be amazing, I realized I discovered the opening a mere hour and a half before they stopped accepting resumés and I had just woken up and was still in need of showering from the sweaty day before. Now for those of you who don’t know this area that well, in order to get ready and get to a place, that I was at the time slightly unsure of how to even get to yet, this was a feat all its own. Talk about fast moving, that was quite possibly the fastest I have ever gotten ready (I’m rather sloth like when it comes to that.) You should see how fast I ran down those streets, the Flash ain’t got nothin’ on me. Now I just kind of guess subways, thankfully I guessed correctly, and made it in time to hand in my stuff, strike up a conversation with the hiring manager (he had a really cool accent southern accent) and be on my way. Unfortunately, it later registered it was hotter than yesterday and all this running caught up to me and I had to make an immediate pit stop to gain some hydration. That water bottle lasted a whopping three seconds. Then it was back to the grind of job hunting. In the midst of this hunt an e-mail came to me it was like Christmas in July only it’s August! I had heard back from someone at Broadway Across America and tomorrow will be heading into Manhattan to drop off my resumé for their recently opened Graphic Artist position. W00t!

Well now I shall venture into the realm of Web code and see if I can’t finally get my Web site to work how I want it to.

Random Note: I am now officially a member of virtually every major social media platform available on the Web. So until later days, I’m off…