recent happenings

DISCLAIMER: This post has nothing whatsoever to do with cooking. I'll get to that later, but for now, I need to get something off my chest.

Some people may or may not know, but I recently applied for my dream job. Or my dream job of the moment. Or a really good job that I was really looking forward to having because I would have been writing about food. Or something.

As it turns out, I didn't get the job.

At first, it burned. There may or may not have been selfish, "always the last kid to be picked for dodge ball" tears. And then, very quickly - more quickly than I expected - there was pure and total acceptance. As it turns out, what I thought was the perfect opportunity really wasn't so perfect. Not for me, anyway. I would have been an assistant dining editor for a local magazine's website/dining blog. I still consider myself to be new-ish to Dallas, but it didn't take me long to nail down the audience for this publication: wealthy, pretentious social butterflies. I am none of those things. So what made me think I, of all people, would be picked for this team?

The position required someone who could take long periods of monotonous data-entry type work. I can.

The position required someone with an eye for detail. I have it.

The position required someone who could adapt her writing style to that of the blog. I can and did (I assume that if my writing test hadn't illustrated that, I wouldn't have made it through the two rounds of interviews).

The position required someone who could come up with new and different ways to expand the blog's audience and readership. I did, and was told that my ideas were "really good".

Dandy. Right?

Well...hold up, sparky. Not so fast. From what I could gather with my hindsight goggles, these may or may not have been the reasons I wasn't offered the job:

• I have no real experience of the journalistic nature (which I know would not have been a problem for me. I'm a fast learner, but oh well. In their position, I probably wouldn't have been comfortable taking the chance, either).
  
• I could not, on command, name drop the best chefs in Dallas.
  
• I could not, on command, name drop the founder of a specialty food store, founded in Dallas.
  
• I follow more cooking blogs than dining blogs, and am, frankly, more interested in cooking than having others cook for me.
  
• I have the appearance of someone who would be a "cutey-cute" writer, and one of my would-be bosses said that she hated "cutey-cute".
  

Fair enough.

So, my readership of six may be wondering why I was upset at not getting the job, based on these factors. First off, no one likes to be rejected, for any reason. Secondly...again with that hindsight stuff. I think that with maturity comes the power to get over things more quickly, to see things for what they are, and realize that maybe it's better that things don't work out the way you want them to. At least, that's what it seems like to me. As an early twenty-something, this kind of rejection would have sent me into a week-long couch-parking, pizza-eating, wine-drinking frenzy. As an early thirty-something, though, I gave it one night. A night filled with national-chain/totally not artisan pizza, cheap wine, and spontaneous eruptions of statements like, "F*** that magazine!" (Maybe the "f-word" will stop appearing spontaneously when I'm in my forties.) And I worked up to the conclusion that I was actually happy to have been rejected. Happy to have not gotten the job.

Why?

Because that wasn't the best opportunity for me. And here's why.

• The position would have required me to eat out at trendy, hip restaurants three to five nights a week. That's not me. I actually enjoy cooking meals at home, look forward to it even. Cooking helps me unwind and is a creative outlet I cherish.
  
• The position would have required me to schmooze chefs at press dinners. That's not me. I'm not a schmoozer. I don't kiss anyone's ass, nor do I want to.
• The position would have required me to care about and track the kinds of people who eat at certain restaurants. That's not me. I mean, people-watching has its place. But the kind of people-watching this publication requires seems overly pretentious and judgmental.
  

Only three reasons, yes. But those are big reasons to me. See, not getting this job was, I think, the best thing. It gave me a much-needed dose of motivation to start doing the things that I want to do. There are several aspects of food culture I'm interested in, and dining out - at least the way this publication reports on it - doesn't even rank among my top five. Chris and I have big ideas and plans for something, a very exciting foodie-type thing, that we're both passionate about seeing through, and me not getting this job made us both all the more interested in getting started on that project as soon as we can. The best part about this project? It's all us, and there's no one to tell either of us that we're not capable of making it work.

I think that by only reporting on dining trends, you exclude from the conversation entire subsets of food-driven people - those who actually a) enjoy cooking at home, b) enjoy dining out and then trying to replicate what they eat in those trendy restaurants in their own kitchens and c) would love to dine out three nights a week but simply can't afford to do it. And ignoring all of those people...well, that's just not good business. Not in my opinion, anyway. I don't want to report on high-end restaurants doing the "farm-to-table" thing or the "nose-to-tail" thing or the "locally-sourced" thing because those are the new, hot trends. I want to write about those things because they're important to me, and to a lot of other people, who are interested in cooking that way at home and making it part of a lifestyle.

Maybe I'm not a journalist, but I'm a writer. I'm a damn good one, too. Thankfully, I grew up with a mother who taught me that I could do anything I wanted. What I want to do is write, and I've made a life doing that. But instead of writing for a corporation that doesn't appreciate/takes advantage of my work ethic, I want to write for me, about the things that matter to me. And those things matter to a lot of people. Getting this job wouldn't have allowed me the freedom to focus on those things. Instead, it would have required me to focus on the superficial aspects of a superficial dining culture in a city overrun with superficial, spoiled, snotty, pretentious people.

So, good riddance to you, so-called dream job. Not getting you was the best thing that ever happened to me and my food-writing career. Because I will start from nothing and build something that maybe one day you'll deem important enough to write about. And maybe I'll think about returning your call.

(P.s. readership: be prepared for blogging with purpose, and a new direction, in 2012.)