Katie Moves from Austin to Boston (and throws a pity party)

I moved into my new place in Brighton (right outside Boston) on September 1^st. It’s a really cute two bedroom apartment that I’m sharing with one of my good friends from college. She’s going to law school at BC, and I’m…sitting around writing blog entries because I have nothing better to do. Seriously, I’m trying to find a job, but, in case you haven’t heard, that’s really hard to do right now. The economy is bad, people are getting laid off, which means that there are a lot of people with more experience than me out there applying for the same jobs. Now, I had no intention of writing a blog entry where I whine about my current situation because if you have talked to me in the past month or so, you’ve already heard it all. It has been my number one whining point for a while now for a few reasons. First off, I have no money. I’m trying to survive on the small amount of cash that I’m making from selling my textbooks on Amazon (so…maybe $50 a month if I’m lucky?). And it has been like this for a while now. Really ever since the beginning of the summer. Believe it or not, they quit giving you student loans to live on after you’ve graduated, and I think they might want me to pay them back at some point. I think that perhaps some of my friends out there who have never really had a moment where they’re struggling financially might not realize how hard it is, not just economically, but also mentally, physically. It’s draining! Every time you go to buy groceries, you have to determine what you can actually afford and what you just have to wait on, which means no desserts because there is no reasonable argument for spending your money frivolously on food with no nutritional content. And you can forget buying new clothes or new shoes because really you already have shoes and clothes you can wear, and you just know that if you get another credit card bill that you can’t pay, you’ll feel awful.

But, secondly, not having a job means you have lots of free time that you can do almost nothing with. Because you have no income, you feel bad going out and doing things that cost money, which is pretty much everything when you have to take public transportation. There are only so many walks you can take in a day, and most of those end up at places where you spend money, so it just defeats the purpose I suppose. And yes, readers, I have been to my public library, I know that is a good suggestion of something free and fun to do. I walked there, I checked out a couple books, I walked back, and now I can just sit in my apartment all day reading them because there is nothing better to do!

The real issue with not having a job, then, is that you feel bad about everything you do. You feel bad if you spend your time doing free things like watching TV or reading a novel because that means you’re not writing cover letters every moment of the day. And, honestly, you can’t write cover letters every moment of the day because it just doesn’t take that long! I’m trying to stick to jobs that are actually in my field or at least related, and in the past two weeks, I’ve applied for nine, which means there are some out there. There just aren’t billions and billions of jobs in the arts in Boston that I’m actually qualified to perform. And the ones I’m qualified for I can’t get because there are other people out there more qualified than me applying for them. Which means I have to look for jobs that require a little less education than I actually have if I want to get an interview. And then I might not even get hired for those because they think, “Hey, she’s sort of overqualified for this, there’s no way she’ll stay for very long.” It’s the catch-22 of trying to get a job in an economic climate like our current one: you can’t get the jobs you’re qualified for and you can’t get the jobs you’re overqualified for.

I’m not saying it’s never going to happen. I’ve gotten a few nibbles. But it does take a while and it is very tiring and trying. It crushes your self-esteem a little bit more each time you don’t get a job or you don’t get an interview, especially if you stupidly thought it would be easier than it’s turning out to be because you have a bachelor’s from a great institution and a master’s degree to boot, plus six years job experience.

Oops, I’m sorry, didn’t I say I wasn’t going to write an entry about trying to find a job? Poop. Ok, well here are a few things that I have done around town. I’ve been down to Newbury Street, which is essentially the gallery area here in Boston. I’ve explored Trader Joe’s, which is my new favorite grocery store because of how cheap and tasty everything is. I’ve been in the touristy part of town and rode those famous swan boats. I ate a grilled cheese sandwich at the oldest pub in America. I found a new great place to run (Chestnut Hill Reservoir) that allows me to just walk out my front door and start running (which saves a lot of time)…and I accidentally kicked a chipmunk during one of my runs (made me very sad because chipmunks are so much cuter than squirrels. But if I had kicked a squirrel, I probably would have freaked out because they seem like rats with fatter tails to me so I would have thought I had a disease or something). I got a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks (dessert + caffeine + starbucks card your mom pays for = ok purchase) in celebration of the beginning of fall and being in a place that actually has fall. I went on a booze cruise with a bunch of law students, and then I had to explain to each one of them that I wasn’t in law school, I wasn’t in school at all, and I had no job. Oh, and then one of them asked me how old I was, which just made me feel more awkward for some reason. I got drunk on a booze cruise off of two of those tiny individual bottles of wine (classy). And then I had to pee really bad the entire hour it took us to get out of downtown.

And that’s about it. That’s Boston in a nutshell. Well, at least so far. Don’t get me wrong, I really like it here, it’s a fun city and the weather is great (so much better than Austin’s…although the Mexican cuisine is not, obviously).  Hopefully my next post won’t be such a downer. It will be more along the lines of “I have a fabulous job and I get to spend money again on really stupid purchases! Oh, and I can pay rent!” Until then…

Katie Wants to Take You to…H-Town

Ok, I’ve been remiss in my bogging duties, I know it. And what’s worse, it’s been about two months since I visited Dallas and Houston, so I’m starting to forget everything I saw there. But I promise I’ll do my best with this post. Hang in there.

The day I went to Houston was the same day that one of the many hurricanes this season hit the Texas coastline, so it was raining cats and dogs. Not fun weather to drive in, but definitely ok weather for hanging out in a museum all day. My first stop was the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Huge, absolutely huge. And it had this really weird floorplan because I think it was technically two buildings that had been linked by an underground tunnel (transformed into a Turrell piece, of course). Anyway, I wandered through pretty much all of the museum in about three or four hours, I think. There were some good shows going on, too. One was “In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet” which had some really great landscapes (uh…yeah, Katie, we got that from the title), some of which even involved sheep. I like sheep. You’re just going to have to trust me when I say that my papers on art for classes don’t sound this ridiculous…Read my thesis if you don’t believe me (hint, hint, family members). So while I’m wandering around this exhibit that is a mixture of photographs and landscapes from about the same time period, mid-1800s to late-1800s, I overhear a conversation between a grandmother and her grandson, where she explains to him that there are painted landscapes because people didn’t have photography back in the day. I’m not the type to step in when someone is clearly making a mistake in the education of their children, but I was wondering how she thought the little display of a mid-nineteenth-century camera beside an easel and paints fit in with the whole exhibit. Odd, very odd. Check out the dates on those exhibition stickers, lady.

I was a little disappointed by how few paintings and sculptures the museum had from the modern to contemporary time period. They had about five or six rooms of modern art, and pretty much just the one for contemporary. Granted, they had a really fun Oldenburg in the contemporary section (ok, aren’t they all fun?), some nice Rothkos, etc, but I needed more! Especially since my two Texas museum trips clarified for me that it is not really modern art that is my first love, but contemporary. I had no idea! Seriously, during one of the Greenhill symposiums at UT, a PhD student in modern art made an ill-advised comment at the end of his presentation about how contemporary art didn’t make any sense to him and seemed superficial or something like that, and I was thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t have announced that thought to the entire art history faculty and students, but I agree.” But now, NOW, I think that I’d much rather look at a Rothko or a Jasper Johns than a Picasso. And, really, it wasn’t that big of a leap for me, since Duchamp was obviously my favorite artist, and he had a huge influence on art from the late 1950s and on to the present. Ok, back to the story…

I explored everything in the first building, ate lunch, and then walked along the little Turrell tunnel installation to the other building, which seemed to be where they kept their non-Western art and temporary exhibits. One of the exhibits on display, “End Game: British Contemporary Art from the Chaney Family Collection,” was truly morbid. Other (better) bloggers have written about the dangers of censorship, but I have to say that watching a dad hold his child up so he could see a Model Village of the Damned was a little disturbing. I mean, yes, this model included figures not unlike the little toy soldiers that boys often play with, but some of these were missing body parts, hanging in trees, covered in something that looked like blood, tiny toy vultures poking at their carcasses. There were heads on stakes. You get the idea. I had a hard time believing that I would have wanted my little, sweet, innocent nephew to see art based on such horrific, although human, situations. The show also had several Damien Hirsts, including a canvas covered in housefly bodies, a bull’s heart with a dagger through it, and a medicine cabinet.

The second part of my day in Houston involved a trip over to the Menil Collection compound. This is in a really pretty part of Houston, but don’t ask me to get specific, because Houston is a quite large city (fourth in the U.S.), and I basically only knew how to get where I was going and back out again. The Menil Collection is made up of several different buildings spread out over a small area. There is a main building, containing most of the collection, then there is the Rothko Chapel, a Cy Twombly gallery, a Flavin installation, and a Byzantine fresco chapel. I had visited the Menil Collection one other time with my icons class, so I had seen the main building, the Flavin installation, and the Byzantine chapel (of course). This time I skipped Flavin and the icons and went to the main building, the Twombly gallery, and the Rothko Chapel. The Menil might be one of my favorite museum-type-things that I’ve ever been to. It’s right up there with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and MoMA. It’s small, so you can easily spend time actually looking at things rather than feeling like you have to hurry to see everything. And it’s mainly from the modern period on up, which suits my tastes. They have an amazing Surrealist collection, more Magrittes than they know what to do with, I think. When I visited with my class, we were taken back into their storage spaces, which had walls that were just littered with fabulous paintings. It was almost shocking to look at. I mean, you hear about how much art is kept in basements or warehouses because museums simply don’t have the space to show it all, but it is just truly remarkable to see it all grouped together in one place. Really overwhelming. And that’s why you should want to work in a museum—the access!

I think my favorite part of the Houston trip was the Cy Twombly gallery. Honestly, I was a little disappointed with the Rothko Chapel. I mean, Rothko is certainly not one of my favorites, but I do like his work. I guess I just wasn’t expecting what I got. It was so dark and all of the paintings were a variation on black, really. The Twombly space felt more like a place of contemplation to me, perhaps because I got stuck in there by myself during a downpour. The hurricane weather really kicked in while I was inside, and I seriously was the only person in there, the museum employee having his own little space outside of the main gallery. So I walked around the entire space, looking at huge paintings in every room, and then finally ending up in this one, long room, with a painting that took up the entire wall. It was amazing. I just sat there, looked at great art, and listened to the rain beat down on the ceiling.

And so my trip to H-Town closed, leaving me to head out of town during rush hour with almost no gas left. Seriously, I thought I was going to get stuck on the highway, surrounded by cars, with no way of getting home. I’m really glad I don’t have to make a commute from there everyday.