Girl and City

Things I love about December, in no particular order:

• Christmas lights on people’s houses and lawn ornaments that turn the entire neighbourhood into an enchanted fairyland.
• Taking advantage of holiday sales to buy presents for others and myself.
• Wearing boots. Every day.
• Gourmet chocolates. Every holiday, I can count on some distant colleagues to give me boxes of gourmet chocolates. By the end of the holidays, I’m sick of them, but after the holidays are over, I find myself looking forward to the next round of gourmet chocolates in gift-wrapped boxes.
• Hot chocolate, Starbucks’ peppermint mocha, and other winter-themed drinks.
• Christmas trees and tree ornaments. Putting the Christmas tree up is an annual event that involves the entire family.
• Wrapping presents. I always spend one night wrapping all my presents and it makes me feel so satisfied to look at the pile of wrapping paper, tissue paper, bows, and ribbons under the tree when I’m done.
• Presents, of course. Although my family hasn’t done a proper “Christmas morning present-opening” ceremony in five consecutive years. I wonder if it will ever make a come-back now that I am moving away from home.
• Ample excuse to drink a different bottle of wine every night, which includes champagne and ice wine.
• Curling beside the fireplace with a good book, a rug on my lap, and my dog sleeping soundly beside me. This sort of picturesque postcard moment only seems to happen in December.

Happy December, everyone!

PHB and I met up for our ritualistic Christmas shopping trip this past weekend. We have been doing this for nearly seven years. He is one of those random friends I have on the side, who isn’t really involved in my life, but who I’ve somehow managed to keep in touch with for a long time. We meet once or twice a year and spend a day together, just the two of us, shopping, eating, and catching up.

Like his name might suggest, he is a perfect gentleman. He has never been in a long relationship because he is too nice and, as we’re all too familiar with, nice boys finish last. Most of the time it seems, girls use him when they need to be comforted, but at the end of the day, pick someone else to be their boyfriend.
I can’t say that I’m not entirely guilty of the same, considering I have never been attracted to him and yet I have let him take me out on these day-long dates for seven years.

We started the day off with shopping and ended the day off with shopping. In between, we had an amazing all-you-can-eat sushi lunch where we took our sweet time catching up. After listening to his ex-girlfriend woes, commiserating on the challenges of falling in love dating, and basically bringing each other up to date on our life stories, I realized that he has grown from a boy into a man. He’s become more cynical about women, become less of a “nice boy”, and I hate to say it but, more attractive as a result. He was proving his own theory about attraction between men and women; women are more attracted to nice boys who act like jerk boys than nice boys who act like nice boys (I have asked him to write a guest blog on this matter so I won’t go into depth here).

After lunch, we drove around aimlessly north of The City. We kept the GPS turned off and just drove, without an inkling of where we were going. It was great to sit in the car and chat and watch the farmland go by, a completely different side to The City I know and love. It was like a mini road trip. Suddenly, out of nowhere popped a mega-mall. We were pretty shopped out but at the sight of a Forever21 sign, I convinced him we had to make a stop.

Forever21, to me, is basically heaven. If I could, I would make that store my closet. I spent a long time in that store trying everything things on, and he was patient enough to wait for me and hold my coat and purse. I am guilty of totally enjoying his coat rack services while I pranced around the store with an idiot grin on my face like a kid in a candy store.

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Last Thursday, I went to New York for TheConsultingFirm’s “Sell Day”. It is basically a dinner that they invite all offerees (everyone who got an offer) to, and try to convince you to accept the offer. There were also some people there who had already accepted their offer, like me.

Most of the offerees there were vying for the New York office, but I did meet two girls who were also going to Singapore (and had also already signed their offers) < -- potential roommates!

TheConsultingFirm had booked out the second floor of Country, a restaurant in mid-town New York that has received considerable praise since its opening in 2005. Unlike the name, the restaurant was not "country" at all, it was very much the height of cosmopolitan sophistication. The finger-food that came around during cocktail hour was impeccable. There was a particularly memorable lobster pastry that makes me want to go back to New York just for another bite.
After some cocktails, finger-food, and mingling with the consultants and other recruits, we got down to dinner.

The dinner consisted of a butternut squash appetizer, which was smooth with the subtle hint of autumn ingredients. For my entree, I chose the mushroom risotto, which was creamy and very flavourful. For dessert, there was a hazelnut chocolate mousse cake, as well as miniature chocolate fruit cups and dipped chocolate "kabobs".

For everyone who had already signed their offer, or announced that they were going to sign, the firm had prepared an expensive bottle of French champagne. Several consultants hinted to us that we should open up the champagne right there and then, but I wanted to save mine and share it with my parents. After all, I am the most indebted to my parents, and they are the least likely to ever have expensive champagne, whereas I will probably have plenty of opportunity to be wined and dined during my consulting career (in fact, later that very night, some of the partners bought us several bottles of champagne at the afterparty).

At the dinner, one of the consultants who interviewed me in the first-round came up to congratulate me. From her, I learned that not only was I the only one from my school, but also the only one from Canada. There's nothing like the weight of your nation's reputation sitting on your shoulders to make you drink faster. All the other recruits were from top American universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, UPenn, Cornell, MIT, and so on. Ironically, I became the center of attention for being the only Canadian and for coming from a school that few had heard of.
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Every time I do not get a job, I wonder what I did wrong. It’s not unlike being rejected for a second (or third or fourth) date, except in this case, “It’s not you, it’s me” doesn’t fly¹. Sometimes I think it’s because I didn’t prepare enough for the interview, or I wasn’t energetic enough, didn’t let them see how passionate (read: desperate) I was about getting the job. But most of the time, I settle on the idea that they saw right through my charade, that I wasn’t really in it for the long run, I just wanted to be paid for the summer.

But is it really that bad to not know what I’m meant to do when I’m twenty? I mean, isn’t that the point of these summer internships – to figure out if it’s really for you? And yet if you tell an interviewer that – that you’re not sure if this really is what you want to do, you’re just testing out the waters – they’ll be yelling out “Next” before you can say “Give me a chance.” So, I play by the rules and pretend that I have wanted to be an accountant/financial analyst/marketing specialist/advertising assistant since kindergarten, when every other (normal) kid wanted to be a policeman/woman or a firefighter.

So, inspired by Jamie Ann, I have decided to put together a list of jobs that I know I would enjoy:

• Ice cream/gelato taste tester. With my abundant experience (over six years) in consuming ice cream of varying flavours (from ginger to hazelnut to strawberry rhubarb), I am sure I can discern what will be a hit or a flop. Although, how could anything sweet and creamy be a flop?
• Food critic. Dining at fine restaurants and then ripping into their cooking skills? I can do that. I practically do already. I just need to be paid for it.
• A permanent judge on the Japanese Iron Chef. I’d be much better than those amateur foodies (actors/actresses, voice actors/actresses) they bring in.
• Personal shopper for Carrie-Bradshaw-esque girls. Buying beautiful clothes and shoes and accessories with someone else’s money? And getting paid to do it? Hells yeah!
• Part-time driver. You know how cars don’t function as well if they’ve been sitting idle for a long time? This is of particular concern to people who own fancy little sports cars or expensive manual cars of the European variety. I can drive them! I mean, these people never own less than four cars, so once in a while, I can come by and take one of their cars out for a drive.
• Exclusive purse promoter. Need me to subtly introduce your new limited-stock high-end purse to society (in other words, wear the purse to select shopping meccas in the world)? I can do that. Fab purses, airfare and accommodations to international locations, and the potential to meet some very good-looking people included.

Know anyone who’s hiring?

1. Except when they tell you you’re over-qualified, which hasn’t happened to me yet since I do not even have a bachelor’s. [↩]

I did not spend Me Day unproductively. Are you surprised? I’m not.
As soon as I finished writing that entry, I received a call from the CEO of Not-A-Real-Job asking me to do stuff for him. My direct boss, the Director, had not given me a lot to do. And I couldn’t very well tell the CEO I was taking a Me Day after having been rejected from an interview I never told them about. Which is entirely their fault, actually, because if they were paying me for this internship, I would not be looking for another job so desperately (or at all). But I did not want to tell him what I was doing because I did not want him to think that my getting a full-time day job means I am not committed to his job. Which is the truth. But I did not want to tell him that.

He wanted me to make some marketing materials for a new product, and he wanted it by the end of the day. Kind of a ludicrous demand, since I had not heard anything about this product until he emailed/called me¹. I think the Director purposely did not tell me about this new product launch because he wanted to work on the marketing materials himself. And/or he hates me. My Director must be quite petty if he is competing for projects with his UNPAID INTERN. I mean, honestly, he has nothing to worry about. I don’t want his job. I don’t even want to work for this company. I got roped into this unpaid internship mess before I could say “bite me.” So really, he has nothing to worry about. I’m not sticking around. But I do not tell him that.

Needless to say, I spent the rest of the day trying to put together a brochure and various other materials for the product. They sent me what they had already – which looked like garbage – so I sent everything back looking nothing like the original (a.k.a much better). But even so, the CEO ignored some of my suggestions. For some reason he really likes gray, despite what I keep telling him about it looking incredibly dull on printed media. Since I’m not in charge of writing the content, I couldn’t change that, but I honestly wanted to (ok, I admit, I did change it a bit. A lot). Because the slogan and the product descriptions and everything on the brochure was just not attractive. The product is targeted at my age group so I should know what’s appealing and what’s not. And their brochure contents were not. But the CEO didn’t take my suggestions. I think this product is going to flop. But I am not telling them that.
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1. He always emails me and then calls me right after to make sure I received his email. Even if I respond to his email. He is one of those people that are constantly on their Bluetooth headsets yapping away, so I think he calls me just so he can prove to the world that he always has someone to be on the phone with. One time, when he was on the phone with me, he was in the car with his wife and turned to yell at her about something. WHILE I WAS STILL ON THE LINE. Another time, I thought I heard a car accident in the background. I think he’s crazy. Another thought I do not care to tell him. [↩]