WWAD?

What Would Amy Do?

I have wit, I have charm, I have brains, I have legs that go all the way down to the floor.

So. Ok. I am a massive, unapologetic West Wing fan. To the extent that the end of the series made me curl up in foetal position and twitch for about four days. But this post isn’t about the time I stuck my own face on a picture of President Bartlet or my encyclopedic knowledge of the fabricated careers of the characters on the show. This is about my motto: WWAD?

Amy Gardner isn’t my favorite character on the show. I’m more of a C.J. woman myself. Plus, I was an avid Donna/Josh shipper (yeah. I said shipper. So what?). Her character sometimes seemed a bit too polished – a bit too unnatural. But for some reason, when I reach for a woman role-model, I keep coming back to Amy. Sort of like admiring that pimped up blue ride with wheels the size of a small elephant, while driving a volvo.

Why ProGrad = full of FAIL.

The advertisements are innocuous enough.

Looking for:

• Fresh graduate. Hey, that’s me!
• No experience necessary. I’m listening…
• Funky CBD location. Keep talking.
• Starting salary from $45,000, with the possibility of earning more. What’s the catch?
• No catch! Holy shit, I can’t not apply. Where do I send my resume?

I hope to God that's the key to my future and not the janitor's closet.

I received a callback from ProGrad after applying for a communications job on Seek that was too good to be true. They invited me to an Assessment Day that Thursday. I obliged. I like to believe that I have a healthy cynicism when it comes to, well, everything, especially recruitment companies that promise you the world and use fake advertisements to lure possible placements. So, I did what any tech-savvy individual would do with a prospective employer: I Googled them to do some ‘research.’ I undertake my employer research two ways; first I visit their website to understand their company culture; and, second, I look for experiences of previous employees and recruits. With the Internet as your oyster, you’re bound to find at least one person who was either happily-satisfied or irate enough to share to the world wide web their experience. I was lucky enough to find this thread in an IT forum, through this website, which outline what the ProGrad Assessment Day is like.

The comments in both the thread and the website piqued my curiosity, but I took every criticism with a grain of salt. After all, ProGrad have been in business for quite a while and so they must be doing something right. Right? Besides, I thought, it would make for an interesting blog entry. I kept in mind what I had read, anyhow, until Thursday’s Assessment Day. I was soon to find out, however, that there may have been more merit to the experiences of the participants from the thread than I thought.

The Fortress of Solitude

Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: “With great power comes great responsibility.” This is my gift, my curse. Who am I? I’m Spiderman.

Whenever I hear those solemn and prophetic words, the same thought comes upon me: Fire out Peter Parker was a tight-ass wanker.  Sure, receiving your destiny and learning that it is your fate to wander alone across the cold face of the earth is a bit heavy, but come on.  Last time I checked, getting bitten by a spider usually came with dettol and a band-aid, rather than a bunch of super-powers designed to be a shot of heroin to your flaccid social life.  Also, most people whose cells are altered by an aggressive outside force usually call themselves cancer patients, rather than Spiderman.  So all in all, Peter Parker should stop bitching and start saving my train from plummeting off the side of a cliff.

That spider altered the fuck out of my DNA

There’s a party in my fortress…

In case it isn’t obvious from the preceding rant, I count myself as one of those part-geek, part-human creatures who enjoy the under-appreciated subset of the canon known as the sci-fi, comic-book, super-hero genre. And yet I have several things going for me that your average acne-scarred trekkie-cum-hacker does not: my literary and cinematic tastes are more varied then re-runs of Kyle XY, I have occasionally been known to talk to members of the opposite sex, and (this is the real kicker) I am a woman. So I’d really appreciate it if you kept these things in mind while reading what I have to say.

What the Korean romantic-drama-dy has taught me about love. (Or, why crunchyroll ate up all my bandwidth.)

In 'My Sassy Girl' the doormats get the girls.

For some odd reason there was a time last year when I was addicted to Korean romantic comedies slash dramas (because their films can’t belong to just the one genre), I don’t even know why or how I got hooked on to them. And, no, it wasn’t because of the re-make of ‘The Lake House’ which had just been released, nor was it because of the buzz surrounding ‘My Sassy Girl’, which I picked up from reading blogs about J-Pop (don’t ask). Actually, I think I stumbled upon a link on YouTube of a trailer in English for ‘Ditto.’ You know how it is, you just keep clicking links on the Internet and suddenly it’s 2 in the morning and you find yourself watching reaction videos to 2 Girls 1 Cup, and then curiosity gets the best of you and so you actually watch 2 Girls 1 Cup, and it’s from that moment on that you realise you have a stomach of steel because you managed to sit through the whole thing without being affected.

Trove: dedicated to my one, true, trove Joel.

I left my heart in Robert Downey Jr's pants.

In a small hotel room in Pisa, after missing our train to La Spezia, and after haggling for a better price for said room, Joel and I were lying in bed talking about stuff. More specifically, falling in love whilst overseas, and whether it was actual attraction or love, or whether the conditions of the situation heightened everything, and put it all on fast forward. It was different to all those random hook-ups you had on your trip. What is this feeling called, we asked ourselves. After a few seconds of silence in the dark, I finally said: Trove. (Three guesses how I came up with that.) Joel replied by laughing hysterically.

A break-up letter to Agyness Deyn: Style Maven or Style Satan?

Dear Laura Holl she who dresses like a spinster catwo Agyness De Agy,

I don’t know how to say this. I like you, I really do. Seriously, you’re a really cool and happening kind of chick. I like the way you embrace retro and modernise the 80s. No, really, I do. I see what you’re doing there. White dress, denim jacket and purple tights, fabulous – really, it’s great. You’re having fun, I understand that. Designers probably throw clothes at you because you’re pretty ‘right now’. You’re the model of the moment. (Your Young London Burberry advertisements with Lily Donaldson – you made my heart melt. And your runway work, totally fierce.) I get that, really, I do. I know it can be difficult, sometimes, trying to appease all those designers by wearing the clothes they give you. It’s a tough job, I can imagine, posing during the day and vacantly staring at a camera, being waited on hand and foot, then coming home to boxes full of free clothes that plebs, such as myself, wouldn’t know what to do with. But you, you really make it work. I don’t know how.

Paris is Burning.

The birth of Vogue-ing.

Dir. Jennie Livingston

Released in 1991, Jennie Livingston’s ‘Paris is Burning’ is a documentary that focuses its lens on the lower class GBT community in the late 80’s and the elaborate ‘Balls’ that were held in the back alley dance halls of New York. The members of this community are thrice marginalized: they are gay, poor, and ethnic minorities (either black or Hispanic). As society has no space for the marginalized, Balls create this space for them to exist and to perform.

The film documents the Balls, the slang and jargon associated with them, the ‘Houses’ which are often metaphors for the homes in which many of them were no longer welcome at, and key characters who make up the narrative of the film and provide different perspectives and insight in to a world and experience that is foreign to the mainstream.

It offers an empathetic and non-judgmental lens to a community and sub-culture that, today, is often caricaturized.

All my friends are getting married. I’m just getting drunk.

Financial Liabilities

There’s a group on Facebook I’ve joined titled, ‘All my friends are getting married. I’m just getting drunk.’ It’s crazy, really, that this should be relevant to me. I’m only 21. In my high school graduating class of 2004, Facebook tells me a size-able percentage of these girls are in long term relationships, are married (or will be soon), and have kids (or will be having them). For someone who considers kids as dream-killing, money-suckers, it truly boggles the mind that my peers could be so, well, ‘adult.’ I question whether this is a matter of their being grown-up, or whether I’m complacent in just being a perpetual kid and being selfish.

Popping the Blog Cherry.

It was special, and there was no bleeding.