Salocin

Graduation, Jobs, Movies

I'm well aware that it's been a while since I wrote something, but I've been busy. Quite a few things have happened since last I wrote - graduation from the Wharton School being the first, the achievement of my fourth qualification and final ascension to the ranks of professional student. That, however, was just the first step.

I then found myself looking for a job. This is something most MBAs manage to do well before they graduate, but the kinds of things I was looking for didn't really come up until later, and anyway, it took me that long to figure out what I wanted to do that I needed the time. This is also a nice way of saying that European-style cover letters and modesty don't work so well in the US job market, and that the Fulbright 212-e two-year rule has a way of getting in the way of looking for a job in the US. Don't let me get started on that, although it looks like - at least in my case - I might be able to demonstrate that I'm not subject to it. Now I just have to wait 90 days for the Department of State to process my application for an advisory opinion.

So then I went to the movies, usually with people I care about. The problem with going to the movies with people that you care about is that it always results in your either being happy about the fact that you saw the movie together, so that you can talk about it, or it results in a sense of deep embarassment that you went to see so terrible a movie together. I'm not in the mood to write movie reviews these days, so I'll summarise them quickly for you here.

- Van Helsing : Oh my God so bad I could cry.
- Shrek II : Fun and funny, good for a laugh - lots of jokes for the adults
- The Day After Tomorrow : Fun action film, not badly executed.

On the subject of The Day After Tomorrow : For those imbeciles who can't seem to help themselves, it's a movie. Movies use this thing called "artistic license". This leads to a phenomenon known as "Willing suspension of disbelief". In other words, if they were to make an action film about climate change and keep it realistic, we'd be watching the screen for a century before there was any noticeable action, and all the characters would be dead by the time the temperature had dropped 1 degree. It's not a documentary, that's why the movie doesn't conform to every scientific theory ever seen. If you have problems with the realism of The Day After Tomorrow, then you must hate the likes of Mary Shelley and her ilk, who wrote Frankenstein's Monster, the original Dracula, or Dr. Jekylle and Mr. Hyde. Get over yourselves, science fiction and horror have long been staples of the literary and performance arts, and have been accepted as classics (Star Wars, Gattaca, The Shining, for example).

I prefer to think of films like The Day After Tomorrow as the modern jesters. They say what the leaders do not wish to hear, and they exaggerate their message to the point of the ridiculous because that gets them an audience by depoliticising the message itself.

Anyway, so that was good, and I'm still looking for a job, and fighting a war to prevent myself from sliding into the Odd Todd lifestyle. Although there's not much risk of that. I do, however, get the same strange sense that every time I send a resume to an automated system of some kind, it disappears into a form of black hole designed specifically for the purpose of absorbing online applications.

I think the monster.coms of this world have a system that doesn't necessarily make it easy to either search for jobs to apply to, or search through the qualifications of those who are searching for jobs in a meaningful way. I think this is intentional, because if we could do this, we'd quickly see that there's a real lack of mid-level and more senior jobs. There's this gap between "Administrative Assistant, must know how to type and spell" and "Senior Derivatives and Rates Trader, must have 17 years experience in a top investment bank's derivatives desk" in which the other 99% of the world resides, and which somehow doesn't seem to match any point on the employment demand curve.