I had never been to Connecticut before. I find the entire East Coast unsettling; everything about it is just a little bit wrong, like the landscape in a nightmare. I had to be periodically reminded of the location of (what seemed to me like) perpetually shifting city-states that continually switched positions on the map as soon as I glanced away (“Boston is north of New York City?”). The ocean was on the wrong side. How could I be heading south with the ocean on my left?
Without looking at a map, I cannot tell you with any certainty if Connecticut (whence that hidden c? What is its dark purpose?) is in fact south of New York City; maybe I was heading north. But I believe it was south. South I went from New York City; south I rode the train.
I was going on a lot of informational interviews in those days. I didn’t know exactly what an informational interview was, and I still don’t. Probably more than anything else, it is the professional equivalent of that “Sanctuary!” scene from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It’s an attempt at sympathetic magic; the hope that having coffee near enough successful people will somehow turn into success for yourself. You seem like you have a home and a place to go all day. Tell me how. Tell me the incantations. Midway through the journey of our life, I have found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been lost. Rub your employment all over me.
I’d lost my first job right out of college on the same day my girlfriend lost hers. We compared notes and concluded it was almost certainly because one of my coworkers had found out we were dating, but that it was impossible to prove and anyhow there wasn’t anything we could do about it now.
I was conscious for the first time of a rising sense of panic over an irreversible decision. I’ve made the wrong choice, and I can’t take it back. I had always been able to take things back before. I shouldn’t have gone to an evangelical Christian college. I shouldn’t have gone to an evangelical Christian college with a five-times-a-week chapel requirement and strict rules against homosexual conduct. I shouldn’t have gotten a job and a girlfriend from that Christian college at the same time. It wasn’t a good school. I hadn’t learned anything. I’d made a bad decision, and now it was over, and all of my prospects had vanished. The only job leads I knew of were for youth pastors and graduate school.
In the face of adversity, I did not acquit myself becomingly. I panicked in slow motion and without a plan. I was so used to things happening to me that the possibility that I was going to have to make something happen by myself was paralyzing. I sold my stuff on Craigslist. I applied to every job in the world. I went to In-N-Out and hid the garbage in the Dumpster so my roommate would still ask me to go to In-N-Out with her for dinner, which she wouldn’t if she knew I’d already had it for breakfast. It was 2009, and the world was not interested in a theology minor with some waitressing experience. I was not interested in her either, to be perfectly honest.
The money ran out, and the jobs never came, so I broke the lease and broke up with the girlfriend and rode up Big Sur in a U-Haul with my mother.
“You can live at home for up to a year after college,” my parents had always told us. “To save money for a house or for grad school or whatever else you want, but after a year you have to leave.”
So I lived at home for a year after college, and I waited tables, and I recapped The Vampire Diaries for a website based in Washington D.C., and I worked at a hyper-conservative think tank in Palo Alto four days a week, to save money for what I wanted (which was “to have money”) and after a year I decamped for a studio under the freeway in San Jose and an editorial assistant’s position for a college textbook publisher forty-five minutes up the 280.
There were many nights when I would worry myself out of a dead sleep and think Christ, I’m not doing it yet, and I’d think, doing what, and I’d think back, the thing I’m supposed to be doing, the special thing, I’m not special yet, and I’m going to die if I don’t do it, and I’d think well what is it but I refused to elaborate.
So I went on a lot of informational interviews. Anything not to be paralyzed, anything to not go to In-N-Out, anything that would help me find the thing that would help me not feel like I was dying if I did it. I wanted to work every minute I was awake, or at least go through the motions of working — getting dressed and making phone calls and returning emails.
This is what we in the business call setting the scene. It feels pretty set now, so I’m going to take us back to Connecticut. I was in New York with a backpack full of honey-peanut Power Bars I’d stolen from my dad’s office (he always keeps a Trader Joe’s bag full of them in his closet) and little else, and I’d asked around in the vaguest of ways for informational interview leads. (“Does anyone know anyone who’s good at their job?”)
Someone knew someone who did, and sent me the name of a man. The man in question was presented to me as a sort of career counselor; I later found out he was more of a CEO headhunter for high finance. I received a hastily-tossed-off email forwarded from the woman I sort-of-knew in common.
Have you ever received an email from an important man over the age of forty? They’re tremendous. It’s the least professional thing in the world. They spell your name wrong, they spell at least four other things wrong, one of the sentences just ends without finishing itself. It’s a mess. But he said, “Oh, you’ll be in New York, come down to Greenwich, it’s very close, [Common Acquaintance] will meet you at the train station.”
Greenwich did not seem very close to New York to me, but then I also didn’t expect it to be pronounced “Grehnitch,” so the day was full of surprises.
The first thing I noticed, when she brought me to the office, was that the walls were covered in oil paintings of yachts. The second thing I noticed is that every man in the building was at least 45 and had an office overlooking the bay (or the sea, or the river, or the inlet, or whatever it is that’s in Connecticut), while every single woman was under 25 and penned into an open-plan set of cubicles. Just like in the past, I thought. Then: But I’m a woman under 25. This does not bode well.
The Important Man was not ready just yet. I was led to an inner room with more oil paintings of boats on the walls, and also a photograph of the Important Man with Ronald Reagan. I was offered a soda, and I demurred, which is the one mistake I will admit to having made. I should have taken the soda. Do you know how often in life you are offered a free soda? Elderly financiers do not regularly proffer free sodas to pleasant-faced bloggers; this offer has never been repeated and I have regretted my choice ever since.
The Important Man entered the room; the Important Man shook my hand; the Important Man sat down. A woman brought him a Diet Coke in a glass, with ice and a red-and-white striped straw, just like in Diet Coke commercials. He never once touched it. Perhaps it was a power play. She seemed only to exist to bring him Diet Cokes. It made me wish I had a Diet Coke of my own, but I dared not ask now.
“The best piece of advice I can give you,” he said in a broad and cheerful tone, “is to find a rich husband.”
“Oh,” I said, in absolutely no tone at all.
“Yes, that is the best advice I could give you,” he said again. “Find a rich husband, and then you can work at whatever you like on the side, and it doesn’t matter, because you already have money.”
The goal of the informational interview was no longer to glean what wisdom I could from someone with a different life experience from mine. The goal now became to agree with him so readily and so blandly on all points that he would release me from this boat-festooned room and I could return to California, where people behaved normally and women were allowed to have offices and Diet Coke handmaidens were allowed to run free. I could not argue with him. I could not laugh, no matter how outrageous his advice became. I could not betray a moment of independent thought; this was the most serious improv exercise of my life and I was going to “Yes, and…” my way out of this windowless prison.
I was going to live through this.
“The first thing I noticed about your resume,” he said, “was that it needs to be longer. Four or five pages longer.”
“Of course,” I said. “Four or five pages.”
“You should put your height and weight on it, and mention that you never get sick.”
“Never…get…sick…” I wrote it down.
“You look healthy. They should know you’re a healthy person.”
“Height and weight…resume…” I wrote that down too. I focused all of my energy on becoming, if only temporarily, the exact kind of person who would agree with this. If I smiled even a little, the act would crumble, and I would laugh until I died, and in his anger he would leave me to rot here in his dungeon, and I would never be set free.
“You should put down your father’s job. What your father does is very important. People will have heard of him. You should put down his occupation.”
“Should I put that with my height and weight, or…?”
“Put it at the beginning. But again, I really think your best option is take an internship at a firm in the city for a year or two and find a husband there.”
“That would be ideal,” I said.
“That’s what my daughter did. She’s married to a man who handles other people’s money for a living. They live in Northern California and she writes books about horses that no one reads. It’s a perfect situation. He makes all the money and she gets up at five in the morning to write for a few hours before she takes care of the children.”
“Maybe I should ask her for an informational interview too,” the person I had become said to him.
“Yes, that’s a good idea. Here’s her card. No one reads her books. It’s ideal.”
“Truly ideal.”
I learned a great many things that day; I learned that the Important Man and his wife were married for many years very happily, which was genuinely sweet. He apologized for implying that I had had premarital sex when he went on a bit of a tangent about how people today cohabit before getting married (“I don’t mean you, of course; I know your family”), which was still sweet, if enormously misguided. I learned which of his sons he liked more than the others (although his daughter, who wrote the unpopular horse books, remained his favorite). He never touched that Diet Coke, even once.
“Don’t forget about that rich husband,” he said again, smiling, before I left.
“I won’t,” I said, smiling with my mouth. He was only trying to be helpful. He was a war veteran, and a real person, and it was genuinely kind of him to take the time to meet with me. I wrote him a thank-you note on the train.
I learned that nothing was going to happen to me. I went back to New York; I went west on a plane. Eventually I quit my job, then another, then another, until I had a job I’d invented for myself and I didn’t want to quit anymore.
I now live and work in such a way that I have little to no professional contact with men; I can go entire days without having to consider what a man — any man — thinks of my work.
I am drinking my own Diet Coke as I write this.
Tags: employment, informational interviews, life, rich people, weird true tales
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Oh man, I haven’t even read this yet but it’s one of my favorite Mallory stories and I can’t wait to hear it again.
Yup, still a great story.
ban all men
ban Connecticut while you’re at it
ban me
banh mi
srsly i am a die-hard east coaster and fuck connecticut
it’s pronounced patheticut.
As far as I am concerned, Connecticut only exists as the place where I get stuck in traffic when I’m trying to visit New Hampshire from NYC.
Grew up in NJ, family still in NJ, and I went to college in MA and still live there. I do the drive across the entirety of Connecticut several times a year. Connecticut can die in a fire. All my least favorite relatives live there and I almost died there once.
srsly i am a die-hard east coaster and i lived in connecticut for 7 years and fuck connecticut
Omg, I thought I had some bad interview stories but this is the absolute worst. Also I worked in Greenwich, CT for almost a year (thankfully in an environment that was 90% ladies), and it is the absolute worst place. An overly manicured hellscape.
This is wonderful and amazing. And this is not the point, but YES, wtf is up with all those small states??? It’s like they’re arranged with no particular eye for order in the slightest! What the hell, boston is up by maine?! It’s craziness. East coast = worst coast.
I live on the east coast, have all my life, and I am still enormously confused by the Northeast. Nothing north of Maryland makes sense. But then again, I live in North Carolina, which culturally stops being East Coast and starts being The South.
I moved to NH, and I was like, “good life.” Come to find out, I’m in the Boston metro area. I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THAT. Who knows that? No one. No one but the people already ensnared by Boston’s gravitational pull and distorted by its gravitational lensing.
My brother went to school in Connecticut, and his girlfriend is from there, and I still have no idea where it is. My map of the Northeast looks like: Pennsylvania ~ scribbles ~ okay, Maine. I fly into New York for work occasionally, and it’s like being dropped from a space portal into a world where there is no true north.
I lived in CT for four years, and my best friend still lives there and is from Buffalo, and I still don’t really understand where New York State goes. Somehow it is near Pennsylvania, and also Vermont, and also Canada???
It is in between all those three.
At least you can get places! There are large sections of the rest of the country where you can drive for hours and hours and you pass nothing and there is still nothing there, and I do not understand that.
Connecticut is awful, though, and we should dump the whole state in the ocean (after rescuing Joanne Woodward and my friend from college from the impending doom) and move Massachusetts slightly further south.
As a person who was born in the midwest and moved progressively west, I have only lived in large open states, and I LIKE IT THAT WAY. States SHOULD be large, what is this business where you drive three hours and you are in four different states? Literally INSANE.
Yeah, I’m from the flat middle section of America where things are drawn in rectangles as logic dictates, and you don’t have to think about where other states are because the answer is just “pretty far from here.” Now I live in the confusing weird-shaped part and I feel so discombobulated all the time.
But in the western part of the country all the states are squares??? How can you ever tell any of them apart if they’re not their own specific squiggle shape? I am being mostly facetious but also a tiny bit honest. THEY’RE ALL RECTANGLES.
You tell them apart based on where the mountains are. Because those squares are actually really different when you’re in them, due to GIANT MOUNTAINS EVERYWHERE.*
Unless you mean the midwest, which, is that place even really a place?
*Side question: does anyone know whether that story about the Idaho/Montana border forming due to some mountains being pointier and meaner than other mountains is apocryphal?
Ah, you didn’t immediately read my mind in which I clearly stated that I was thinking of on a map? How foolish of me, my mistake. I was thinking about on a map, because my brain defaults to (non-topographic) maps for all spatial things always. (maaaaaps!)
But I kind of agree that the midwest all seems a bit the same, from the very little bit I have actually seen with my own eyes. Sorry, midwesterners!
Native Coloradan here, with some map reading tips! Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona touch at the Four Corners. Colorado is perfectly rectangular. Utah has the hat. New Mexico has the tail. Arizona is the other one.
Up top, Montana is kinda long with a jaggedy left edge. Wyoming looks almost like Colorado, but a little smaller. Nevada is pointy like a dagger. Idaho looks like a chimney.
The midwest, I cannot help you. They are all weird rectangles stacked on top of each other.
Here, this handy little man will help you! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMAL
whoa, that does help! unfortunately for MIMAL’s neighbors to the west, NSNKOT doesn’t have quite the same ring to it…
I used to play this online game where you had to drag and drop the states into their correct locations, which really helps you learn a lot about where states actually go.
Stack the States! Best game ever. Also Stack the Countries. My 12-year-old has an uncanny mapbuilding ability due to those two games.
I am a Coloradoan too! Anything east of the mississippi or north of the carolinas, I’m like “what even?” I mean I can recognize which state is which but I cannot place them in a meaningful way. I legit thought that boston was practically down by maryland, not even joking.
Unless you mean the midwest, which, is that place even really a place?
You think meth makes itself?
(I kiiiiiiiiiiid. I’m sure it’s lovely.)
Are you talking about the story of the surveyors following the Continental Divide for a while until they turned off and followed the (very pointy) Bitterroot Range by mistake, thus messing up Idaho’s borders forever? In which case, yes, definitely apocryphal according to this, but an excellent story.
I drove over the Bitterroots at Lolo Pass once to take a new route to college in northern Idaho at the start of my junior year, and I have to say that they make for a very obvious natural border. I never took the route again because that highway is frequently closed for the winter, but it was a GLORIOUS drive.
That story exactly! Thanks for the awesome find.
Of particular entertainment to me: the line speculating about “how did these states get by without a border for so long”. Um, because there were TWO GIANT MOUNTAIN RANGES between the (dozen or so) people living on either side.
And I haven’t actually visited the Bitterroots, but I’m off to Google image search it, which is the same thing, right? 😛
Solution: You haven’t gone far enough west. Keep going until you hit ocean, then there are only three states with fairly unique shapes (OK Oregon is pretty rectangular).
Incredibly confusing! I have been to Rhode Island on a train, and it didn’t occur to me until I went and looked at a map after reading this story that it is, in fact, not an island.
Surprise!
We do have multiple islands though. You just can’t see them on a map of the states because the state is so freaking small.
You also have the longest state name: State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. #funfact
And something ridiculous like 400 miles of coastline because of all the weird craggy ins and outs. Plus the islands.
When you get kicked out of Massachusetts for not wanting to be a Puritan, obviously the next best place to live is directly in Massachusetts’s armpit.
don’t worry, we have no idea where your states are either.
EAST COAST BEST COAST
That doesn’t even rhyme, so obviously it can’t be true.
hdu
Right? At least you can tell which states are which based on shape. What even is the West? Just a bunch of indecipherable rectangles.
YES I just said that thing, east coast spatially-minded twins?
And the shapes are based on rivers and things, which is a totally reasonable thing to base a boundary on!
[River streams shift paths over time but don’t tell them that…]
It is the most functional part of the train systerm, WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY TO THAT, MALLORY.
People were meant to live in the deciduous forest, not the desert or scrubby no-season land or pine trees or whatever they’ve got going on over there on the west coast!
IT’S SO DRY THERE
I MEAN REALLY
HOW ARE THEY ALL NOT PRUNES??
WE ARE PRUNES.
Also, there are no real seasons here and lemme tell you – that messes with a person’s mind and sense of time.
There are seasons in (Western) Washington: 2 months of the most pleasant weather ever, 10 months of clouds and / or rain. May also apply to Oregon.
There, there Oregon and Washington. Maybe someday you too can be part of the west coast.
BEAST COAST
rrrraaaahrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
yessssssss
Oh yes perfect thank you
OVER ON THAT OTHER COAST THEY THINK “FOUNDED IN 1975” IS HISTORY
THERE ARE WIDE SPACES TO SWALLOW YOU UP
THE SEASONS ARE TOTALLY JACKED
THE HIGHWAYS DON’T LOOK RIGHT WHEN YOU DRIVE DOWN THEM
ENGLISH NAMES ARE PRONOUNCED THE WAY THEY’RE SPELLED (BORING) AND ORIGINALLY SPANISH NAMES–WELL GOD HELP YOU
IT’S A NIGHTMARE
VAYA CON DIOS MOTHERFUCKER
Give me Worcester or give me death!
I lived in Worcester for five years and if you don’t use the buddy system those are basically the same thing
“That’s the way I’ve always heard it should be,” as Carly Simon said.
Not a single one of those is a downside.
This entire thing is amazing but my eyes widened hugely when I read this line: “Have you ever received an email from an important man over the age of forty? They’re tremendous. It’s the least professional thing in the world. They spell your name wrong, they spell at least four other things wrong, one of the sentences just ends without finishing itself. It’s a mess. ”
BECAUSE IT IS SOOOOOOO TRUUUUEEEEEEEE
Duuuuuuuude my job (scholarly publishing) consists largely of emailing with mostly older, mostly male academics who are not actually very important but THINK they are the most important people who have ever lived, and YES this is the truest thing I have ever heard.
I know someone who does this deliberately to seem as busy and important as the execs above him. It is an actual Thing. It’s affected.
Holy shit D:
Brow so furrowed I can barely see.
WUT.
IT’S MY BOSS. I couldn’t say that earlier because I was commenting from work. His emails are completely impossible and he won’t elaborate when questioned. I learned from a colleague who he trusts and works more closely with him that he accentuates on purpose because that’s what the “big dogs” do at our very hierarchical, bureaucratic organization. But given that the dude is probably only semi-literate to begin with, I don’t think he realizes that he doesn’t need to try so hard 😐
god i can’t wait until i’m important enough to just not give a shit about email manners
See #1: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/11-awkward-things-a…
Yes! This is so true!
Echoing the ‘so true’ sentiment! It’s like the ‘I’m too cool for tv’ folks only it’s ‘I’m too important to learn how to use email.’
oh god it really is and it is so infuriating.
my worst job ever (right out of undergrad) was as a file clerk at a law firm and they printed all emails that were even tangentially related to a case (which was ridiculous), and we had to file them. from that sample of about 30 lawyer dudes, I can confirm that their spelling and grammar got worse the older and more important they were (this didn’t seem to happen to women).
Plus side: I did once file an email from a partner to his paralegal that just read “Are You mad at me?” with the standard thousand-word legal disclaimer, of course.
“Plus side: I did once file an email from a partner to his paralegal that just read “Are You mad at me?” with the standard thousand-word legal disclaimer, of course.”
Which was a stupid question because I can tell, without knowing either of them, that the answer was, “Yes. Always.”
the amazing part is that he may have actually realized it that time
I once had a job – in a university – digitizing staff records, many of which were screeds upon screeds of printed out emails, often in 24 POINT COMIC SANS, IN THEIR PERMANENT EMPLOYMENT RECORDS.
Imagine if you will, the pain of having to take these printed out emails, de-stapling them, scanning them, and processing the images.
Of emails.
Creating a digital backup of a printed backup of a digital communication.
IN 24 POINT COMIC SANS
of course, because first you have to make it real by printing it out (because things in the computer don’t really exist) but then you have to make it efficient by putting it back in the computer. of course!
“Imagine if you will, the pain of having to take these printed out emails, de-stapling them, scanning them, and processing the images.”
You just explained nihilism to me.
Every email/missive we get from our soon-to-be-former landlord is completely lacking in capital letters, punctuation, and most vowels. Like, this is really how you’re going to present yourself?
I am a lawyer and a major issue in one of my cases currently is the meaning of an email my boss (white, rich, beloved and now deceased) wrote in 2010 in response to a complex settlement proposal that read “I AGREE”.
Insular academia equivalent — The Semiotics of Professor Email Signatures http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comic…
In my experience, that’s true for important women over the age of forty as well.
I’ve spent a lot of time as a temp writing basic freaking memos/emails/etc because over a certain age, apparently, people just cannot function. Even if you create templates and forms for them.
hey, you know what’s super fun? When your boss writes a long involved document with weird-looking personal names, then PRINTS IT OUT (& doesn’t save it, of course) for you to edit and re-write. Why would you forward an electronic copy which takes 2 seconds when your peon could simply retype the entire thing???
Yes! And the people with no sig blocks! Sig blocks apparently are for admins and other lower orders of beings. The real power play is to simply end an email at the end of the last period without nothing following it at all. I get so many emails where I can’t tell if they’re from the the founder, the CEO, the board chair, the VP of finance, or what. But if there’s no sig block and no indication, I can be damned sure it’s at least one of the above. God forbid anyone includes a title, a mailing address, a link to the website, and an office phone number so I can research and llegitimize them and not wonder if I’m emailng back and forth with a hacker purporting to be a bigwig. Hackers, take notes.
My father is a Vice President of Something in a finance-related field and he has dyslexia AND HE’S FROM CONNECTICUT and I have been receiving these emails since I was young enough to have email, is what I’m saying.
It was good training for my current job, which is taking stuff engineers write and turning it into writing. It pays well but NOT NEARLY WELL ENOUGH.
He was only trying to be helpful. He was a war veteran, and a real person, and it was genuinely kind of him to take the time to meet with me.
Ahhhhhh, yes, why. You are trying to be helpful but everything you’re saying makes me want to die! Anyway. I am so grateful to have this job (where I am currently writing this comment, WHOOPS, it’s slow today) and to be out of the informational interview hellhole for a while.
My parents moved to California from Connecticut in 1972. My father never went back, not once, not for anything. I have visited to meet family and each time I feel like my lungs have been compressed to a quarter of their usual size and I cannot breathe.
This is the correct way to live. Connecticut is a nice place to visit but a horrible place to live.
(and by visit I mean a stay equal to the amount of time it takes to travel into then out of CT with minimal bathroom breaks. )
As a native of eastern Connecticut I apologize for the Stepford hellscape that is western Connecticut and assure you that our geography makes a bit more sense. There are still a lot of oil paintings of yachts, though. No way to avoid those.
As another eastern Connecticut native, I agree with this. Especially the part about the paintings of yachts. The best is how there’s suddenly one more painting of a yacht in your living room than there was yesterday and you have no idea how it happened.
Of course, I’m also from a town in Connecticut that even people from Connecticut have not heard of, so something clearly must be done about all the tiny towns.
I am ALSO from a town in Connecticut that no one from Connecticut has ever heard of! I love it, but admit I do not live there now, and likely could not again. But it was very nice! And normal! And does not have too many terribly important people, which is probably why it is great. It actually does not have too many of any kind of people. My graduating class was 90, and that was three towns, so…visit that kind of Connecticut, disbelievers! You might like it!
My graduating class was 110 and it was also three towns!
Scenic as hell! Could not imagine living there, but I sure do like visiting it and remembering that in some places, night is actually dark and not just sort of orange.
There is at least a 25% chance we went to the same high school, which would be amazing. Go small town CT!!
Valley?
What a small world it would be.
HA! Yes. Go Warriors. Class of ’97
Nice! Class of ’02.
They have lacrosse and a football team that’s not hilariously bad and a stage ceiling that doesn’t fall on the percussion section. It’s like it’s not even the same place!
Amazing! What a small world.
Valley is so worldly and advanced these days. I just went to the website (a working website! I am so proud of them!) and I recognize about four of the teacher’s names.
Good old Valley. Good times.
Yeah, my class was last one to have the principal that had been there FOREVER. He randomly left about a month before graduation.
As long as Mr. Lefevre never leaves. That guy is a riot.
Dr. Baron. That guy was a dick. (I can’t remember if I am spelling that correctly. Serves him right.)
He suspended someone for blowing up a balloon and then letting it go in the cafeteria.
My friend’s older brother (who I think may have been there at the same time as you) punched him in the face once.
Might your friend been one of three brothers?
Nope, she’s one of two younger sisters of the puncher.
God, did EVERYone punch Baron in the face? Because that would not be…all that surprising, actually.
My husband and I lived in Ashford and Mansfield while he was in grad school. It’s beautiful out there, and nothing like Greenwich. (That being said, I’ve been in Boston for 15 years, and I don’t really miss CT.)
omg I just spelled it “Greenwitch” and now I’m imagining the Greenwitch stalking around Darien, terrorizing rich people.
But you also have Abbott’s Lobster, so that more than makes up for yacht paintings.
I am sorry, there can be no East and West Connecticuts, the whole place is the size of a quarter. I think it’s like, Right Connecticut and Left Connecticut.
Really what it is Fairfield and Litchfield County Connecticut and then All Other Counties Connecticut.
Bravo.
Also, this guy is bonkers.
MALLORY YOU ARE MARVELOUS I CAN’T EVEN AGHHHH
California, where people behaved normally and women were allowed to have offices and Diet Coke handmaidens were allowed to run free
how dare you tempt us with this vision
also i read this essay gaping like a fish that an actual human person in the 21st century can look another human person in the eye and say, “you have to find a rich husband. you have nothing to offer this world but what a wealthy man is willing to shell out for.”
New England is the best but Connecticut has been warped by its sad proximity to NYC.
The East Coast is not Wrong – California is Wrong and Warped and Strange and people HUG you at job interviews and dentist appointments and everyone expects you to SMILE all the time and there’s NEVER WEATHER WHY DON’T YOU HAVE WEATHER HERE.
I am all for excising Connecticut from New England. Once an acquaintance was driving from NY to MA (we were all spending the weekend at the beach), and he arrived over seven hours after he left NYC. We asked him what happened, and his answer was simply “Connecticut”.
True fact: Connecticut has tried to kill me on no less than four separate occasions while I was driving through it to get to Maryland.
You meant Delaware, right? Delaware though.
Come on, you know Delaware is just an urban myth.
Dangit, I wish I could give this comment more likes…
If you’re not paying attention, you will literally miss that you even drove through Delaware. It takes like 15 minutes.
Not true. Delaware is unmissable and unforgettable, because that is where the East Coast keeps 95% of its tollbooths.
our weather is SUBTLE and NUANCED and you wouldn’t appreciate really good, low-key weather if it SWEPT YOU AWAY IN A TORNADO
Ah yes, the delicate nuanced variations of “parched” and “about to burst into flames” …
All fire and earthquakes.
Excuse you, we have hurricanes, not tornadoes.
Except for that one time in Western Massachusetts.
I was raised in NE and I live in SOCAL and BOTH ARE GOOD AND SUPERIOR PLACES. Let us stop this endless war and agree that people who do not live on a coast are godless monsters living in a hell place.
This description of CA gave me a good, hearty chuckle!
This is not to say that CA is not full of fine, good people (with an inexplicable affection for In&Out). I just Do Not Belong. I need to go back to the land of Creepy Old Graveyards.
Yes! My boss and her husband are buying a house (northern VA) and asked nervously if I thought it was weird that it was next to a cemetery and I was like, “What? No!” and then, upon reflection, noted, “But I’m from Massachusetts where our cemeteries are also tourist stops (Salem) and public parks (Mt. Auburn) so I guess my perspective is skewed.”
I once lived across the street from a cemetery and my friend and I would just go visit for fun. <3
Half of my current town in Maine is next to a graveyard. We spent our first year here playing “spot the surprise graveyard.” Little clusters are by the donut shop, sprinkled among houses, pop up around corners, etc. They’re everywhere.
That sounds delightful.
It is! They’re all hundreds of years old and look all mysterious and ramshackle.
But if you wanted to not live near a graveyard, you would be SOL.
I would love to live by a cemetery. Also, the one time I was in VA I stayed in a curch with an awesome cemetery right outside the door. Loved it.
Thumbs up for cemeteries! A million thumbs down for Northern VA, WORST PLACE ON EARTH. Maryland suburbs of DC only please.
NoVA is like having a minor but incurable disease that won’t ever stop making you feel just a little bit shitty but every single person I’ve known who tried to move to Maryland became needs-a-team-of-doctors-to-live depressive within the year, WITH REASON.
Oh god, NOVA. Each time I try to either go to or come back from Northern Virginia, I end up in the Pentagon parking lot. Always. Without fail.
All roads in NOVA lead to the Pentagon Parking Lot, like some sort of magnetic hellmouth.
The accreted evil runoff of defense contracting sort of builds up and warps space in that little pocket, so you get weird anomalies like the GW parkway, which has hundreds of onramps from everywhere but no means of ever, ever getting off.
I should rain down contempt on this comment as I’m from Northern VA, but I can’t because NOVA has lost any of its original charm and is now terrible. However, the MD suburbs are no better.
We used to go to the gorgeous cemetery near my house to make out. In our defense, it was really beautiful with the added people couldn’t see the car you were making out in from the road.
Was it Riverview? If so, in addition to going to the same high school we also pretty much lived on the same street.
It was indeed, though I am using “near my house” liberally. I am actually of the Deep River variety of Warriors. That cemetery was great though.
Ha, I always went to Blakeslee Pond to make out because apparently you cannot make out within town lines.
Mt. Auburn is the best. My family and I once went and had a picnic in it and did a reading of Arcadia. We are that awful.
Real talk: Mr. Billingham’s family goes to Mt. Auburn for a stroll on Mother’s Day every year. I gotta think that to non-New Englanders, this would be incredibly morose and creepy, but if you’re from the area, it’s like, “Sure, why not?”
…I think we did that once, too. IT’S JUST A REALLY NICE PARK WITH PRETTY AND ELABORATE SCULPTURES THAT HAPPEN TO MARK THE LOCATIONS OF CORPSES, OKAY
My senior year, college friends and I went and had a picnic on John Rawls’s grave, complete with strawberries, champagne, and readings of A Theory of Justice. It is a beautiful place and we are also that awful.
In live in DC, and the Congressional Cemetery nearby (where “important men” and dead congressmen are buried) doubles as a dog park, which is AMAZING. You get to wake up and tell your dog, “Let’s go shit on John Philip Sousa.”
HUGS at JOB INTERVIEWS? My stomach churned.
Santa Barbara is a profoundly weird place.
And I didn’t even GET the job.
Santa Barbara weather report: Coastal morning fog, clearing by mid-afternoon with highs in low 70s. Winds at sundown, lows in high 50s.
350 days a year, plus one week of rain and one week of highs over 80.
Except when it’s on fire. 😉
It’s weird for California too. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be NorCal or Southern California, and that’s bothersome.
Officially it’s Central, thankyewvurrymuch. Bless you Jack McConnell for convincing the CA legislature to designate it so.
I’m just saying when the California revolution comes, they’re going to need to make a decision: North to the overpriced hellpit I love with the best Chinese food and birthplace of the best burritos, or South, land of LA and LA smog. Choose wisely.
I predict civil war at that point. SB can’t even decide which baseball team to root for.
I have been in many arguments over exactly this. CENTRAL.
[yes i grew up there]
I work in publishing and one of my authors said she doesn’t like to use the word “but” in her writing because “the vibrational energy is wrong.” She is from Santa Barbara.
D:
um wut
Ahahahahahaa, omigod. That sounds like my town, yes.
I live in Santa Barbara. But I promise I have no aversions to conjunctions. Or, uh, whatever kind of word but is. Grammar is not my strong suit.
Oh dear that is horrible. Never talk to me, never look at me, I DON’T EVEN EXIST OKAY NO SHUT UP. God bless New England for (mostly) respecting this.
And Connecticut is really just a place you drive through to get to other, better places in New England, anyway.
RIGHT???
I am sitting on this bus with a book open because I want to read my book and NOT TALK TO YOU, FRIENDLY STRANGER.
I got an OkCupid message from a guy who had just moved here (Boston) from a Southern state and the email was basically, “You seem nice! No one here is NICE. They don’t talk to strangers, so I’m the better person and I talk to strangers whether they like it or not because sometimes being different is the right way to be.”
It took everything I had not to go into this whole diatribe about how this sort of thing is regional and here we think it’s nice if you just LEAVE PEOPLE ALONE instead of stopping a random stranger on their way to wherever they’re going to have a ten minute conversation about how the weather is.
I would just like to speak up here for Seattle, which is a West Coast city that is Not Like That. You cannot have a single conversation with people you’ve just met without them bringing up the “Seattle Freeze” and how people never talk to strangers, and I’m always like, “yes, we leave strangers politely alone, as right-thinking people do.”
Yeah, I’ve noticed it much more in Southern states than in the West Coast. And, oddly, in New Hampshire, where this one group kept greeting us in such a friendly manner that my friends and I spent the whole weekend wondering if we had met them before.
New Hampshire is like the weird pseudo-Southern Libertarian hellscape outlier of NE for some reason. LIVE FREE OR DIE etc
Sorry? Sorry, did you say “hellscape”?
Senators: Kelly Ayotte, Jean Shaheen
Representatives: Carol Shea-Porter, Anne Kuster
Governor: Maggie Hassan
Notice what’s missing from our leadership? DOODS.
OKAY THAT IS PRETTY COOL. (We have Liz Warren, who is objectively the best, but we also somehow elected Scott Brown AND Mittens at different points, so I dunno)
I did some canvassing in NH during the last election though, and encountered an alarmingly high number of people who seemed like they might have a secret apocalypse bunker full of guns. Y’all got some CREEPS up there.
Granted. (ALTHOUGH I have been on your roads, and y’all have some creeps down yonder too.)
I shake with impotent rage that Scott Brown is running and MIGHT WIN here. So many reasons.
In New Hampshire’s favor, it does have nice roads. Literal roads. Very well-maintained.
Yeah, my friend’s older brother lives in New Hampshire and he has an arsenal. Including guns buried in the yard! In case…Al Qaeda invades New Hampshire and for some reason he cannot access his giant gun safe but has time to dig a hole to get his yard guns. I don’t even know.
what what what
“yard guns”
Traditionally the bury guns aren’t for al Qaeda, they’re for when OBUMMER finally sends out his ATF BLACKSHIRTS to CONFISCATE ALL THE GUNS and usher in SOCIALIST DICTATORSHIP
The ones stashed in random locations all over the house like Easter eggs, those are for al Qaeda.
You would think, but he buried them in, like, 2002, explicitly in case of a terrorist attack. I had SO MANY questions, but as a rule I tend not to question people with yard guns.
Probably a wise policy.
Maybe it’s like a squirrel thing, every autumn he instinctively buries caches of guns to help him through the spring, and the ones he forgets how to find grow up to be beautiful guntrees. ~the circle of life~
BTW we need to get your friend’s brother in a cockfight with my old coworker who used to brag about hiding guns in the couch cushions, freezer etc. so he could “be ready” for an action movie to break out at any moment, no matter where he happened to be in his whitebread suburban house.
Really the only way it could end is with them both accidentally shooting themselves in the foot.
In 20 years, his yard will be full of lush penis trees, and nuns shall gather under them.
Except Kelly Ayotte is an anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-background checks for gun purchases climate change denier, so I wouldn’t brag too much about her.
The others are pretty great though.
I ain’t sayin’ I would vote for her,
just that she’s a lady in the legislature.
(It fits into ‘Gold Digger’ if you try hard enough)
So many guys in cowboy hats and pickup trucks, and that’s just in the Seacoast region!
The Seabrook, NH Wal-Mart is a place of wonders and terrors.
SEACOAST. It’s like an anthropological study visit every time I go there.
Nobody talk to anybody ever and also never, ever, make concrete plans.
Hello fellow Seattlite! And yes, this is very true.
Why is everything so slow over there? Don’t they have places to be?
As a native of California and a many time visitor to the east coast, lemme just note how happy I am in fly over country aka the midwest.
People are like…..normal.
It’s a Good Thing
Yes! It’s possible to be friendly and nice when you interact with someone without having a 10 minute conversation.
We are not terribly huggy here in the Central Valley! AND we have weather. Such weather that sometimes the freeways start to soften and melt.
Seriously, Connecticut, add some more goddamned lanes to 95! And stop sucking up to NY, you are part of New England!
As a native of the ag town just south of Santa Barbara and a current resident of New York: yes, we have a high concentration of white women who say “namaste” in California, but, on the other hand, we also have the concept of personal space, the ocean which is not only on the correct side but also worth swimming in, highly superior Mexican food and sushi, and a much lower concentration of men in suits on missions to make you feel inferior.
Also, I miss Santa Anas, and it is unnatural for this much water to fall from the sky; no good can come of it.
The men in the Bay Area may wear tee shirts, but they are still on a mission to make you feel inferior.
Oh, well, the Bay Area. I deny them inclusion in California; they have ridiculous ideas about burritos and I hear it rains there sometimes.
NO RICE IN BURRITOS EVER!
Ugh, the hugging. It freaks me out. “WHAT IS THIS what is your ulterior motive, huggy stranger.”
I had a roommate from CA once. She told me my aura was forest green. That is probably the correct color, but nonetheless: NO.
I recently moved to California from the Midwest and one day I was hugged by 2 strangers in a Barnes and Noble AND I LOVED IT
I started dying laughing at “Of course,” I said. “Four or five pages.”, and didn’t stop laughing until the end. This was awesome.
“I can go entire days without having to consider what a man — any man — thinks of my work.”
The happy ending makes me *slightly* less interested in finding this man in Greenwich and giving him what for.
LIVING THE DREAM.
YES YOU ARE LIVING THE DREAM NO MEN TALK TO YOU.
I am also resisting the impulse to write: “i am taller than you. i can destroy you. i have no father, as i was spawned in the lesbian hell zone” to my professional resume.
Well, now I want to put “the lesbian hell zone” as my twitter location.
The best thing about being tall is being able to intimidate people just by standing up. WHAT IS IT YOU WANT, LITTLE MAN?
“spawned in the lesbian hell zone”!!!
You win. (2nd place, only after Mallory).
2nd after Mallory is a treasured place. She’s pretty damn great + have you seen her hats? She is a hat queen of the first order.
High five, as I WAS ALSO SPAWNED IN THE LESBIAN HELL ZONE! People ask “what does your father do”, and I laugh as I devour their face and their heteronormative gender concepts.
Reading the sentence about finding a rich husband made me feel like a still pool of water that’s just had a stone dropped into it.
My university finals start in two days: I am going to write about how men in the early Tudor period make themselves look foolish when they try and edit women and then I am going to purchase and drink a diet coke. I suppose what I’m trying to say is a sincere, hearty and dangerously caffeinated THANK YOU for this!
I guess what surprises me the most about this is that it didn’t happen in Texas (or any other so-called “backwards” Southern state.) I am trotting this story out the next time anybody tries to tell me that East Coasters are sooooooo much more enlightened than people from my part of the world.
Oh man, THAT attitude (“we’re from the EAST COAST, obviously we are SO LIBERAL AND WONDERFUL”) is the total pits, and usually covers up naive closemindedness.
Anybody who bases their assessment of someone’s enlightenment level on their geographic location should be pelted with sticky spaghetti and have sand sprinkled in their bedsheets.
hahahaha love this.
i’m glad you were able to forge your own path.
please throw a girl a life vest or a life line or maybe a teleporter out of here.
For the record, it’s:
5’7-1/2
170
Excellent
Pastor/Author
Hmmm, far too tall for finance.
Pasthor!
I am inordinately excited that we are height and weight twins.
Mal I’ve said this before, but I really do love you. I would give you all the Diet Cokes you wanted and then some. I’d have Coke Zero myself, though.
Were you talking to my father in law? It must be a law that all men this age have pictures of yachts, Reagan and poodles on their walls.
I hope he also tells men to put their height and weight on their resumes.
I love you. I love this. I still somehow do not believe the height/weight suggestion was real. I know that it is real. I am writing this response from CT.
THIS HAS THE HAPPIEST ENDING!!!!!!!!!! This is very inspiring. The kids at Rookie should read this.
1) This is great and a balm to my directionless post-grad soul. I’m sending it to my mother right after I type this comment, who will love it because she is now an established journalist, but went to a small, insular university in the South and spent a lot of time freaking out about that choice after she graduated.
2) YES YES YES to the tremendous, downright impressive carelessness of emails from Important Men Over 40. I have a long-cherished dream to start a submission-based novelty blog called “Boss Poetry,” which would present email missives received from superiors as post-modern poems. An example from my own boss (who is an Important New York Man Over 40):
“can you plz rpint it out
so I can see it on
Tuesday
Did we send it in already>”
YES. Please do that. I just hopped over to my Outlook and pulled up a random email.
Subj: pls send me
Email: Pdf link of: <link that is already in pdf format>
pls
can you talk to them
what do they want
<end>
I REALLY WANT TO but I have a feeling it might be legally sketchy to invite people to reprint private emails on the internet, even if they’re anonymous. And I work for a big scary lawyer. So there’s that.
But while I’m dreaming here’s another classic:
Yes
good plan.
Put them in an organized location
Unliek the way I would do it
If I were doing it/
FIN.
This one is the BEST.
The hopeless, helpless puppy-ness of it all.
Am LOLing here.
Nearly spit out my coke at that!
My landlord sends almost incomprehensible emails, generally in a reply to whatever our last email exchange was (always on a completely unrelated topic).
PLEASE start your Boss Poetry blog I will read it
Hatfield –
Screw machines r down
No prod
Tools of cent
Call when alind
911911
No bullshit
(Dear Ms. Hatfield,
We have had to halt production in our screw machine department. An unknown number of tools have become misaligned. Please call me to let me know when the problem has been correctly diagnosed and a solution has been implemented to allow us to resume production. This is a matter of great urgency, so I would appreciate you making this your number 1 priority.
Sincerely,
No Bullshit,
A Very Important Man)
What’s PTSD when it’s triggering the trauma of your present life? TSD? That’s what this is giving me. I LIVE in Connecticut and was in the middle of a happy and creatively rewarding career running my own theater when my husband had to go and get his dream job in fucking Boston. Now I’m going on these informational interviews for precious lack of any real ones and applying to every job vaguely related to my field and fearing I’ll never do that special thing I’m supposed to do, whatever the hell it is. UGH
“Connecticut (whence that hidden c? What is its dark purpose?)”
Best not venture too far into Massachusetts, then, It is the land of Glosta and Peeb’dy.
I tried several times to escape the East Coast but did not succeed, other than a four-year adventure in the Midwest and an internship in Alaska. My life is not yet over, though, and I still hope, since I am about as typical a denizen of Portlandia as any character on that show.
In Massachusetts, don’t forget, you must go through Aaaahbun to get to Webstah from Wishtah. (Auburn, Webster, Worcester – no kidding). It took me years to understand the locals. I had to to see for myself before I understood my neighbor’s comment about some “wee-ud mwoth” in his yahd. He was right, the moth looked supah wee-ud. Wicked fun, though.
Haverhill = HAYvril.
it’s Wahl-tham, not Wahlthum. My cousin and her husband recently moved to the Boston area and whenever they refer to town next to Newton it’s just painful to me. RESPECT BOTH SYLLABLES.
Cayuhful at the rotaries.
(Also: anyone who pronounces the Ts in mittens, mountains, buttons, etc. is getting weird looks from me. Any and every time.)
A fun game is to identify which of the Hams are pronounced which way.
Waltham
Chatham
Framingham
Stoneham
etc.
Land of Billerica
pronounced “bill-rick-a”
I am always tempted to send the bill to Erica
Note: I once went to interview w a firm w oil paintings of boats and dogs where the 45+ men had all the offices with doors and windows and the under 25 yr old ladies in cubicles were also ONLY BROWN SKINNED MINORITIES obscenely deferential to the (only white; only male) attorneys. I am a brown skinned lady person. I interviewed for over 2 hrs during which one man told me about his ulcer and complained about his daughter. I was not offered a law job.
Oh god, that is TOO MUCH.
I was talking about this with Mr. Billingham the other week. I like being in Boston and DC and other East Coast cities because I can drive for under two hours and be in an entirely different major U.S. metropolitan area. I live within 45 minutes of THREE separate airports. I don’t know how people live in the midwest or those huge expanse states like Texas or Montana or (areas of) California where you can be literally hundreds of miles from a city (or an ocean). Gives me chills to think about.
I feel claustrophobic just thinking about driving two hours and going from one major city to another major city. Where is the SPACE? Where do people go? It would remind me of a beehive where everyone just mills mills mills constantly and no one ever goes anywhere and breathes.
They go to Maine/Vermont/New Hampshire. Which is also only a couple of hours away and blessedly devoid of humans and full of TREES GLORIOUS TREEEESSSS.
I think I’m forever spoiled by Canada because the provincial park I went camping at this weekend is a quarter the size of Belgium.
ahhhh blissful distance from people
I love you kooky Canadians, with your Belgium-Fractional system of measurement
Canada’s population is roughly 3 Belgiums!
We are going to PEI this summer, where there are approximately 12 1/2 people and a provincial park every half-mile (sorry, half-kilometre) or so. It’s going to be glorious.
The wilds of West Virginia are about the same distance from DC as NYC. And Tenneessee and Maine are both about 8 hours away. We have options, is what I’m saying.
And if you’re originally from the Midwest (and accustomed to actual Long Drives), native east coasters will think you are a Witch when you say you’re willing to drive More that 2 HOURS? for a weekend trip.
Wow, when I was in high school we would drive 12 hours each way for a weekend in Denver. I should have known that was Witchy!
But 2 hours on an open road is so different than 2 hours on a traffic-congested 95. (or more than 2 hours)
I don’t really see much difference. You’re in a car for the same amount of time either way.
But you have to make so many more decisions in traffic, and at the same time be denied the right to make other decisions, like how fast to go. It is more mentally exhausting.
Yes exactly. Plus you add in frustration of having moved 1 mile in the last 30 minutes… it’s taxing.
Once my husband and I drove an hour and a half just for dinner, on a whim, because we were bored. And it was a gorgeous ninety minutes through rolling farm fields and gorgeous lakes and huge forests, and then on the ninety-minute drive back we took a detour along the lakeshore and it was beautiful.
So I suppose rural living does have its advantages. I think traffic would kill me.
But in Los Angeles you can drive for two hours . . . and you’re still in Los Angeles. I <3 L.A., but the traffic can suck up your life.
You don’t know claustrophobia until you’ve spent a couple years in the Midwest, which is composed entirely of tiny towns of 300 people and two retail establishments and vast, impenetrable oceans of corn in between. Like one of those crummy cartoons about the two guys on a raft in the middle of the sea arguing in circles about who gets to eat who, only with corn, and the blessed release of death will not come for you.
I mean I guess it depends on whether you want to get to the nearest major city via two hours of sitting in traffic or two hours of cruising on the open highway
I felt as you do when living in a row house in Philadelphia. But I also lived in central Massachusetts, on an acre of wild meadows and groves, out of sight of all neighbors.
Now I live in wide-open central Texas, in a large house – get this – on less than a quarter acre, only feet from neighbors on both sides. With lots of empty land on every side of the town. Everything is big in Texas, except the house lots.
I went to college in Amherst, MA–major farm country. Our house was next to a hundred acres of conservation land. I appreciated that I could enjoy nature but I could go to Boston or Hartford (ok, no one wants to go to Hartford) and back in a day.
HARTFORD EW
come back to the Valley and be my friend please
Haatfud
I did not participate in this thread because I was on a bus back from the Pioneer Valley to Boston. And maybe sniffling a little at doing so. WOE.
I am with you on the cluster of small states confusion, but also mostly because I don’t understand why America needs so many states to begin with. They are, like, four variations of state personalities, plus Alaska and Hawaii, and it seems like some sort of criminal offence to force small children to memorize the names and capitals of FIFTY states like that’s twice as long as the alphabet you MONSTERS.
This is why the song Fifty Nifty United States was invented, and the only reason today I can still recite all the states. (Also in grade four there was a song about all the presidents in chronological order but my brain saw that and went LOL NOPE and it’s all forgotten.)
Me too! Why is that presidents song so hard to remember, while Fifty Nifty gets stuck in my head at the slightest provocation?
Like now.
You learned the Fifty Nifty United States song up in Canada? Why?
(There should be a song about the provinces. “Hey there, Sorry to Bother You, but We’ve Got Provinces.”)
There is totally a song about provinces! But it’s short and I don’t think it has a name.
NEWfoundland and PEE EE AYE
NOOOVA Scotia And New BrunsWick
QUEBEC –
ONTARIO –
from there you’ll see
ManitobaSaskatchewanAlbertaBC
Also conveniently leaves out the three territories for no reason. Now I kind of wish we had the Fifty Nifty United States.
I mean, here in Canada we have even more land, but we’ve still managed to fit it all into thirteen provinces & territories. And that includes a nice group of small ones on the east coast.
Dear Mr. President,
There are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three.
P.S. I am not a crackpot.
(Sorry, I had to.)
“There were many nights when I would worry myself out of a dead sleep and think Christ, I’m not doing it yet, and I’d think, doing what, and I’d think back, the thing I’m supposed to be doing, the special thing, I’m not special yet, and I’m going to die if I don’t do it, and I’d think well what is it but I refused to elaborate.”
This is me. So much.
Me too.
I just spent half an hour wrangling wordpress and intensedebate to get a new password that would function, and I came here to ask this:
HOW DO I GET MY HANDS ON THE UNPOPULAR HORSE BOOKS?!
I get that you can’t tell me now, because you will be outing this guy, but at some point, in a few days or weeks or months, please do a review of the horse books? Because I bet they’re fantastic.
i would *totally* read some unpopular horse books.
it’s not like, books about horses with personalities, it’s books about raising and showing expensive thoroughbreds for the horsey set, but i can do that for you, no problem
ALL HORSES HAVE PERSONALITIES.
Thank you for saving me the trouble.
Love,
The Horsey Set
Little known fact: If you try to go from New York to Connecticut by heading south you will go back in time.
It’s called the Ronbledore Express.
Fantastic post. Love it. A lot of parts made me cringe and laugh. But this line killed me, “the person I had become said to him.”
Despite the insanity of some of the details (the East Coast is awesome (don’t be a Pirate Who Doesn’t Do Anything, do visit Boston in the fall); the conservative businessmen who give me unsolicited advice have never overtly told me to marry rich; the Christian college I went to for a couple years had only a twice a week chapel-ish assembly requirement; etc.) a lot of this sounds painfully familiar.
The last three paragraphs really hit home. “I learned that nothing was going to happen to me.” Touche.
Ha, I’m from New England and liberated myself to Los Angeles, so the intro paragraph is sort of the opposite of my experience. “You mean I’m STILL IN CALIFORNIA? I drove for an HOUR I’m still in the same state? HOW???”
This whole “find a rich husband” plan is really not working out for me at all
Also reading this made me want to cry for you. And then for me, because I don’t have a rich husband OR a rich wife and I never will because it turns out that if you’re a broke-ass piece of garbage like me you don’t often encounter rich single folk who find you charming and can overlook your plain looks and monstrous failings in life for long enough to open their bank accounts to you.
I HAVE TRIED THOUGH. So hard.
Here’s Plan B that he didn’t tell Mallory about: seduce the wife of the rich husband, who will think you’re just her BFF when really hahahaha and take all the money and gifts and dinners from her outstretched hand and then when you’re old she’ll divorce him (it will be a healthy move for everyone, don’t worry) and the alimony will come to you and her and then you’ll have a rich wife after all.
That is a long-game plan that sounds brilliant.
He married me because my dad told him I had money. My dad said this from his tiny house, the entirety of which my mother can vaccuum from one electrical outlet. I was living in an apartment over a funeral home in a building constructed before the civil war. The carpet was almost as old as I was. My car was 20 years old. Yeah, money.
Oh, and I married him because he’s smart.
Can you hook me up with that horse book author, though?
I love California. West Coast is best coast.
“I learned that nothing was going to happen to me. I went back to New York; I went west on a plane. Eventually I quit my job, then another, then another, until I had a job I’d invented for myself and I didn’t want to quit anymore. I now live and work in such a way that I have little to no professional contact with men; I can go entire days without having to consider what a man — any man — thinks of my work. I am drinking my own Diet Coke as I write this.”
AMEN AMEN AMEN AMEN.
Amazing. So proud of you for not laughing or glaring (which is how I’ve reacted to such things), Mallory! Also, so much truth in the emails of “important men over the age of forty.”
Reminds me of the time I went to an interview for an internship. When I mentioned my grandparents were visiting from India, the boss told me they had been trying to guess my race based on my name. They’d discussed Afghani, Indian, Iranian….
I still get paranoid about my job applications. because of that.
Also,
Mallory I am going to send you my 7!!! page resume which will list even my eye color and my mother’s maiden name, because you will need to know that to look into my financial history which is so crucial to hiring people, I know. And I will include a letter of reference from my landlord/husband and also page 1 of my passport.
I love this and wish I could have read this 12 years ago.
I could write about being laid off in 2001 and sent into a fathoms that eventually pooped me out to the year 2009 when I decided to take a risk and jump into the world of writing for other people. It’s not going to have horses in it, but it could!!!
Standard Tuber, you and I should run a series of workshops (working title: From Pooped out by the Fathoms to Present-Day Success!!!). To be fair I’m not successful yet and my layoffs were in 2009, but still: Good excuse to wear a headset mic and point authoritatively, plus get paid for it! Cart, horse, eh.
This … cannot possibly be the story of how you met Nicole, because she’s from Kingston, but… this… could be that story?
I am that old white man. I am also the Diet Coke.
I too was totally horrified to discover that Boston is north of New York City. When did this happen? How did I spend many decades thinking it was to the south? I still cannot understand this, unless some night while I was asleep the geography of the northeast rearranged itself? Maybe?
Perhaps you were thinking of Philadelphia? People often confuse the two cities because they were both important in the Revolutionary War and then not so much afterwards. Here, have a helpful mnemonic device to distinguish them.
PHILADELPHIA = lovely, delightful, possessing a scrappy underdog charm, Mural Capital of America!
BOSTON = blah, disgusting, filled with hoity-toity snobs, The Worst
Perhaps you were thinking of this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scrambled_States…
This is why God gave us the board game TransAmerica: relative position of major US cities, important lessons on the inefficiencies of monopolies.
As someone who grew up in CT I still have a lot of residual fondness for it, but can admit that the fondness lies mostly with how lovely the Long Island sound looks from there and how invigorating the smell of low tide can be- not with the people and the culture. It’s ultimately not a place I could belong in (I live in Philly now, which suits me far better). You’re simply too awesome for it.
WAIT CONNECTICUT IS NEAR AN OCEAN?
EXACTLY
We have a whole coastline! Complete with mediocre beaches and an absence of sharks!
But a plethora of jelly fish…
This whole story is really wonderful, but all I can focus on right now is that MALLORY WROTE TVD RECAPS WHERE ARE THEY, because I am a dysfunctional woman-child of a human being.
NO BUT ACTUALLY THOUGH
https://twitter.com/mallelis/status/11518485852
::runs and hides::
lollll oh my god please do not hold me accountable for whatever i wrote at the time
This is all I need in life.
But again, I really think your best option is take an internship at a firm in the city for a year or two and find a husband there.”
“That would be ideal,” I said.
AHAHAHAHAHAHA
That would be ideal.
I felt the strangest sense of vertigo imagining these words coming out of Mallory’s mouth.
I love this story. I lived in Connecticut for four years, and I could have lived in worse places, it’s true, but I do not look back on those years with any fondness at all. I’ve never lived in a place where it was so hard to make friends (and I’m a diehard Don’t Talk To Me On The Street, Stranger east coaster!), or where people were so weirdly judgey about anyone whose life differed from theirs in the smallest respect.
When I moved to New York City — home of legendary levels of brusqueness and impatience — I was blown away by how much friendlier people were. That should tell you something.
Get rid of your Connecticut, it is revolting.
Oh man, given how terrible my job search has been going lately (last week I went on an interview for a job that didn’t exist yet? I’m not really sure what the fuck was going on there, it was the weirdest waste of my time ever), that sometimes I do want to pack it all in and find a rich husband and pop out his hellspawn even though I have no interest in a human being coming out of my body ever.
I just want to register my awe at how utterly perfect this was.
Also, people debating the merits of wide-open-space vs two-hours-between-cities, come to England. You can’t move without tripping over seven villages, and roads are so rarely straight that when we find one we nod all sagely and tell each other the Romans must have built it. Because no one’s attempted straight roads since.
1500 years, and everyone is too frustrated to build straight roads. My heart, it quails within.
Oh, and also: Gallup poll says 49% of people in Connecticut would move to another state, if they could. Possibly because of all the yacht paintings.
More Mallory origins stories please
Wait, Boston is north of New York City??
West Coast Best Coast
This is the commencement address I want every woman to hear.
my alma mater is involved in a huge bruhaha over commencement speakers and uppity female students protesting in Not The Right Way (probably extremely easy to figure out where I went and how I feel about this ~controversy~ from that one sentence). I would like to submit that to save everyone a lot of hassle in the future, we invite Mallory to give this as the commencement address in perpetuity.
This is one of my favorite pieces you’ve ever written for the site, Mallory.
Okay, team, Mallory is dropping little hints about her vampire diaries recaps; we must pick them up as we go and follow the trail to all the gold in the land.
ok just kidding I found them
What’s with those informative-interview-but-not-a-job-interview-things? I got set up on a whole day of those when I was unemployed. It was horribly awkward and featured a lot of oil paintings of Irish Setters. Most of the people weren’t even in my field but the lady who set up the meetings was so nice and kept saying “It’s good to make connections!” Which it is. But not with weird oil tycoons and hospital grant writers I never saw again!
I find the entire East Coast unsettling; everything about it is just a little bit wrong, like the landscape in a nightmare.
oh, my god, truer words.
and I wish I had only been to Connecticut once. alas, my in-laws live there, and so I have been there too many times to count.
brb going to look up these Vampire Diaries recaps IMMEDIATELY
I grew up there, and it still seems like a nightmare to me. The Very Rich People who you Dare Not Offend, the ghetto where everyone else lives, the shabby neighborhoods in between, the young woods, studded with the ruins of failed mills and factories, the stifling air, like breathing lukewarm ghosts.
It’s been over a year since I moved out to Washington State and two of my professors are from Massachusetts and spent some time in Connecticut, and one of my favorite things is that finally someone out here gets how utterly fucking awful that state is. You can describe the horrors of living in New Britain and working in Farmington all you want, but nobody who hasn’t grown up in the caste system of New England is going to understand you at all.
And don’t even get me started on the vampires.
I have been extremely lucky in my encounters with Important Men Over 40, it would appear, as my dad is one and has excellent taste in peers. The only truly sloppy email I’ve ever gotten from this class of person was sloppy in a charming and surprisingly youthful way, exchanging capital letters for a liberal dose of swearwords.
I am changing from a professional environment where I very rarely interact with men professionally and those I do interact with I am either more powerful than (like as a person. Powers not really the right word.) or they need me to do computery things for them so they are somewhat obsequious to me to a professional environment that will be filled with male engineers and this post is making me feel very panicky at the prospect.
“I now live and work in such a way that I have little to no professional contact with men; I can go entire days without having to consider what a man — any man — thinks of my work.”
This is the opposite of my life right now. You’re living my dream, Mallory.
I love how you are so incredibly sharp, yet remain compassionate and respectful of the people you write about. I really love reading the things that you write!
I am 44, 5′ 7″ 120lbs and my father is deceased but he used to sell books. Can I work for you? At the moment I have a middle-class lesbian husband who keeps me while I write queer historical fiction that no one reads and homeschool our two daughters.
I left a job last week, and spent the past weekend up north thinking it would be quiet and relaxing and that it’d be a good place to write. Most of the trip ended up consisting of unwanted job/life advice from Good Ol’ Boys and Grandmothers Stuck in the ’50s, culminating in “wear your hair down tonight, hun; it’ll be easier for you to find a man if you distract from your face.”
This piece was amazing and made me cry for two reasons, 1. because people are like this and they are like this EVERYWHERE, and 2. because there is hope for life outside of these pockets of backwards thinking. Thank you.
YOU WROTE HIM A THANK YOU NOTE ON THE TRAIN?! I strive to be as classy (and possibly made of ice?) as you.
FYI even if you’ve lived on the East Coast for 30 years it is still wrong and feels like a nightmare land, it’s not just you.
Fucking A, Mallory. Would you please go back in time and post this on a bulletin board so I’ll see it before I turn 21? I only ask because I think you are actually capable of such things. Nailed it to the wall. Thank you.
I WILL BRING YOU ONE HUNDRED DIET COKES
I was born and raised in Massachusetts, and I feel the same way about the west coast as you do about the east coast. It’s all askew, somehow. And disorienting. I now live in Chicago, so Lake Michigan is always to the east, and that makes sense.
I really know what you mean about bouncing around and worrying about not doing the thing you want to do, the special thing. I know that so well.
That interview, geez. I went for an interview in a music shop once. I wasn’t ever going to get the job because I didn’t play the piano well enough at the interview (in hindsight, I should have known that this would be part of the test) but then the manager asked me if I were married, and I said I wasn’t. ‘Oh, well. This would be a good job for you if you were married.’
WHAT. HOW.
Then he asked if I had a problem working Sundays, and I said no, and he said, ‘well, the Asians all come in on Sundays. They come in with their families. All the Asians, on Sundays.’
Yeaaah.
I believe it was one of the few times in my life that I was speechless.
I won’t lie – I came here just to hate on Connecticut.
Also, let’s talk about how inappropriate it is to ask someone what their parents do in a job interview. I am not at all ashamed that my dad is a field tech for a phone company and my mom is a food service worker, but interviewers at Big Law firms are Not Impressed when they hear that. I am certain it’s worked against me.
I definitely didn’t start bawling while reading this
Because I have been in the same situation so many goddamned times just…talking to Important Men who Mean So Well but I need the money and I can’t stab them not even once.
This is so great. Thank you.
“There were many nights when I would worry myself out of a dead sleep and think Christ, I’m not doing it yet, and I’d think, doing what, and I’d think back, the thing I’m supposed to be doing, the special thing, I’m not special yet, and I’m going to die if I don’t do it, and I’d think well what is it but I refused to elaborate.” —-> every single moment of my 20’s. HOO BOY I do not miss that. I mean I’m still as lost and directionless as ever, and reading that kind of brings back the panic, and I am still ultimately convinced I’m going to die if I don’t do it (that special thing) (what thing)…but I wore myself out panicking for a decade so now it’s just a low-grade background dread I barely even have to side-eye into submission. Much better.
Some facts about California
1. California cuts off any young people that leave for other lifestyles. I’d say they don’t pick up when those young people call, but technology after 1900 is forbidden. I guess they just burn letters?
2. Actually, California sends young people out to experience other states for, like, two years. They can try those other states out and it’s totally fine, but if they don’t return to California when their time is up, they are made anathema to their families.
3. Many young people leave on mission trips to spread the Good News of California. They inevitably end up on the East Coast, where they are baffled and sometimes hurt by the natives’ sarcasm. Recently, California has allowed women to take part in these mission trips, although traditional Californians have had a mixed reaction to this positive development.
4. California is the best, you guys, because you can drive an hour in one direction and be in the mountains and you can drive an hour in ANOTHER direction and be at the ocean!
5. California is the best because people of all races are friends there.
(Note: two of these comments have actually been uttered in my presence.)
Oh, man.
Ohhhh, men.
…And I’m now curious which hyper-con-religious school you went to, Mallory, since I too, went to a college that required multiple chapel attendances per week, and considered Biola to be extremely liberal.
“I shouldn’t have gone to an evangelical Christian college. I shouldn’t have gone to an evangelical Christian college with a five-times-a-week chapel requirement and strict rules against homosexual conduct. I shouldn’t have gotten a job and a girlfriend from that Christian college at the same time.”
What the HELL…write about this! I went to one too, I’ll contribute stories. They’re such subcultures full of good material.
Also,
“So I lived at home for a year after college, and I waited tables, and I recapped The Vampire Diaries for a website based in Washington D.C., and I worked at a hyper-conservative think tank in Palo Alto four days a week, to save money for what I wanted (which was “to have money”) and after a year I decamped for a studio under the freeway in San Jose and an editorial assistant’s position for a college textbook publisher forty-five minutes up the 280.”
This is SO MUCH MORE than what I accomplished in 2009. Editorial assistant? In 2009? At like age 23? You rock.
I was raised in Greenwich, that Disney-esque illusion of happiness with the peculiar aroma of freshly cut grass and Giorgio perfume. I didn’t realize how terrible it was until I was 45 years old. I guess I had to turn into one of the horrible 45-year olds we hear so much about. There I was, at the height of my career making six figures and miserable, medicated so I was totally numb and leaving the office once a week to visit my shrink. Eventually some religious nut jobs flew into the World Trade Center and I lost most of my clients. After that I lost all of my sanity and had to be fifty one fifty’d. Shell-shocked, I relocated to the Bay Area and became “a homeless person with money” as my friends now joke. If I become a vice president ever again, someone please shoot me.
Wow. Just wow. It’s hard for me to process the authenticity of this clearly authentic experience. Running through my mind, “The Important Man is a real person. But he can’t be. But he is.” Thank god I work in an environment where sexism is at least veiled, and I have a reasonable sense of security that the mere threat of making a stink would probably get me promoted, not fired. But maybe that’s because I’m called “bitch” when I leave the room and just don’t know it.
I grew up in Connecticut, a few towns east of Greenwich and she’s got it about right. I escaped right after college, if only to New Jersey and then Pennsylvania but they both seem more “real” than southwestern Connecticut (“Stepford hellscape” indeed!). I’ve only been to California (the Bay area) once, on a long ago business trip. It was all very nice if a bit dry; people all smiled and wanted to be helpful but then they didn’t actually DO anything. I missed the East Coast impatience,lack of forbearance and quick if erratic responses. And I missed the green, leafy trees of the “water logged East Coast” to borrow a phrase from John Updike.
My sister lived in New Canaan in the 90s. Her immediate neighbour would put on special designer outfits to drive to the mail box at the end of the driveway. Her disapproval of my sister’s low status habit of walking to her mailbox without wearing a special outfit was palpable. One time my sister’s neighbour crossed over the street to avoid my sister because, as she later explained, my sister clearly hadn’t had her hair professionally blow-dried that day and her neighbour assumed she would be too ashamed to speak to anyone. Eventually, my sister’s neighbour’s rich husband left her and their 4 kids. He still loved her and the kids but he said it would look like he was no longer cutting it at his job in Wall Street unless he had some 25 year old arm candy to accompany him to work events.
My sister is British. We are world-renowned for being uptight. She now lives in Switzerland, which outdoes Britain for uptightness by a factor of 10. But, as it turns out, there is literally nowhere in the entire universe as uptight as Connecticut.
My sister lived in New Canaan in the 90s. Her immediate neighbour would put on special designer outfits to drive to the mail box at the end of the driveway. Her disapproval of my sister’s low status habit of walking to her mailbox without wearing a special outfit was palpable. One time my sister’s neighbour crossed over the street to avoid my sister because, as she later explained, my sister clearly hadn’t had her hair professionally blow-dried that day and her neighbour assumed she would be too ashamed to speak to anyone. Eventually, my sister’s neighbour’s rich husband left her and their 4 kids. He still loved her and the kids but he said it would look like he was no longer cutting it at his job in Wall Street unless he had some 25 year old arm candy to accompany him to work events.
This made me wanted to stand up and cheer for Mallory, and because I work for myself, I did. Mallory, you are a national treasure.
Also, I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut (which used to have a lot of sweet and charming things about it, not so much anymore), so this was hilarious^10.
But seriously, people, the Connecticut hate here is bizarre. (Also, the plural of anecdote is not “data.”) The state legislature legalized same-sex marriage before even New York did (Greenwich was the epicenter of town-hall, same-sex weddings for about a year because it’s the first town you get to coming up I-95 from NYC; also: CT wanted same-sex marriage to be legal, they didn’t have to have a court tell them to stop being jackasses). It’s also abolished the death penalty, legalized medical marijuana, and decriminalized the possession of small amounts of pot. It’s a very progressive state, with a lot of wonderful people, and small enclaves of rich assholes don’t change that.
Or: not all nutmeggers
What’s left unsaid is that there are LEGIONS of women like this throughout the U.S. They have little ambition other than to marry a man with money. And then they can devote time to their book (or nowadays fashion/style/interior design blog) that few people will ever read. All while spending their man’s money.
And, let’s face it, buckets of jobs that can only exist based on this expectation.
(I assumed this was fictionalized just because it is so rarely said out loud, though.)
I have lived in CT my entire life. I would like to point out that Fairfield county, where Greenwich is located, would be, geographically speaking, the dick of the state. (Go look at a map. CT is basically a box with a tip sticking out to the left. That would be the part I am referring to.)
Greenwich, being the town located at the very end of the tip, would in this case be the tip of the dick of the state of CT.
There might be a reason for that.
ALSO, BOSTON IS NORTH OF NYC GOOD GOD YOU PEOPLE
I worked in Greenwich a few years ago. Your description is accurate.
You have such an enjoyable writing style. Great post 🙂
You have such an enjoyable writing style. Great post 🙂
I grew up around this sort of world, and now I never ever have to explain it to anyone ever again, because I can just point to the majestic horror that is this tale. Well done.
I grew up around this sort of world, and now I never ever have to explain it to anyone ever again, because I can just point to the majestic horror that is this tale. Well done.
The thing about putting your height and weight on your resumé reminds me of that scene from Airheads where they demand 64 copies of Moby Dick and naked pictures of Bea Arthur so that they can plead insanity if they have to go to court.
The Slate article about Mallory as the new Dear Prudie sent me here and I am so grateful to read this. And horrified. Mostly horrified that I find this completely believable as I tangentially work with men who would give similar advice. Good job, Mallory.