I wrote something here right after I finished my first set of interviews, and I’m going to delete and edit most of it right now. Not only was it negative it was poorly written and dull. Yes, today was long and stressful and interview-ful (if you’re not aware of my visceral distaste for interviews, I’ll update you), but on my way home from the metro I picked up some custard and it put everything back in perspective. Do you know about this custard? It is a delicious phenomenon that belongs to some geographical area of which DC is a part. If you’ve never encountered this wonder, it’s probably not what you are imagining — this custard variation is like a very, very thick soft serve vanilla ice cream, particularly enjoyable when dispensed over fruit-flavored slushee. Today’s flavor of choice was lime, and it was most perfectly refreshing thing ever. And now I can commence with my recap.

The interview could have gone worse, but I certainly didn’t hit a home run. I first met with the head of the KIDS GO! interactive team and then with the whole team together, about six people. I’ve never been good at interviews or first impressions, so a combination “tell us about your skills plus make us think you’re a funny enjoyable person” session was almost guaranteed to give me awkwarditis. Sure enough, I couldn’t come up with the coolest children’s toy (Legos, duh). I couldn’t think of anything I did in my spare time besides play World of Warcraft — I know what you’re thinking, but I do still bike and dance and climb and write stories. I guess those are forgettable activities? They asked me what my favorite TV show right now is, and despite the fact that I’ve been watching about 10 episodes per week I couldn’t for the life of me remember “How I Met Your Mother.” After 20 seconds of awkward silence I said I was just starting “The Wire,” which met with general approval.

Good grief, Anna! You’d think these kinds of cognitive lapses would disqualify me from basic workplace responsibilities, but it only seems to happen when I’m trying to make people like me. Instant and involuntary system shutdown. Since I usually couldn’t care less whether people like me (and generally tend to be liked as a result) this is only ever a problem during interviews. Gah.

Other than me coming off somewhere between slightly confused and moronic, it went pretty well. I mean, my stammering could pass as nerves. My biggest legitimate weakness was my lack of familiarity or experience with children’s programs since David the Gnome went off the air a bazillion years ago. I really should have given that some thought before the interview, but it’s been a frantic week. Other than those gaffes things went well; the team asked good questions, and my jack-of-all-trades resume seems like a good match for the position. They helped me along when I got stuck so I didn’t ever totally freeze up. They’re interviewing other candidates through the week, so I won’t hear back about it before Oregon, which is too bad. But I’ll deal.

If I don’t get this job it’ll probably just be a personality thing. My resume is strong, but it’s a small team and they’ll want to select someone they mesh well with. It’d be too bad since I do think we’d get along better than my first impression let on, but then again they are certifiably cooler than me. As Brendan pointed out, I’ve designed exactly zero Threadless t-shirts, and their designer created one of the classics. Jeannine has already offered me some work freelancing for some communications projects in the fall, anyway, so if worse comes to worst I’ll have money rolling in while I figure things out.

Later in the afternoon I met with the head of interactive, Sara, who was unable to make it to the group interview. She was very nice and seemed interested in my resume. Since a good chunk of the job would be helping her out with video pitches, my relative sanity throughout that meeting was definitely a good thing.

At first I closed this entry to comments, but I’m going to open it again. I only ask that you don’t say anything like “oh I’m sure it went well” or “I’d hire you.” That drives me nuts. I am sure it went ok, and I am personally confident in my abilities. I do want to be working on kids’ content with a fun group of people, but maybe this is the job and maybe it isn’t. I could end up at Discovery or as a private contractor for Jeannine or any number of other things. If I freelance for a while I could spend more time writing and riding my bike and remembering all the other fun things that I forget about under pressure. You know, everything works out for me when I keep my options open. And tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the young couple that owns the condo I looked at last week, so hopefully hopefully I’ll have a cute little apartment of my own! A place to sleep is even better than a job (not by much, but it is).

The owner of 2100 Crystal Drive, the office building where PBS is located, treated all of his tenants to free ice cream today. After a lunchtime presentation on how great PBS is (did you know that public broadcasting has been ranked as the most trusted American institution — even before the courts — for five years in a row??) my cubicle-neighbor Jen and I headed outside for the ice cream feast. A whole smorgasbord of Baskin Robbins ice cream and toppings was laid out before a quickly expanding line. There must have been 20 flavors. I picked mint chocolate chip smothered with hot fudge and chocolate sprinkles and whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. I feel like I’m being horribly spoiled by PBS’s image of a “real job” where the work day is punctuated with stuffed animals and free sandwiches and children and ice cream.

For the rest of the day I worked on skinning the HTML pages I made for the usb wristband promotion. The theme is “young explorers,” so I put together “field guides” with suggestions for exploration-themed activities for 6-8 year-olds. Now I am decorating the pages with clouds and blocks and cartoon characters. The CSS was easy, I did most of the layout work last week before I had the pictures, but the surprisingly hard part was dropping them into nice printable PDF’s. The existing PDF’s were made with an Illustrator template that is totally out of control. I’m not sure my computer read it correctly, but it rendered every single letter of the text document as a different vector. I pretty much had to delete most of it and start over. Still not a terrible way to spend an afternoon, and I made myself a nice clean template so tomorrow should be a breeze.

I was making great progress so I just kept working until 6. The metro is half fare off-peak, so I thought I might kill half an hour and save a couple dollars if I explored the strange mall that our office is embedded in. I don’t know if everybody is aware of the classy mall / crummy mall phenomenon, but I find that quite often cities will have two adjacent malls. One will fall in the decent-to-good category, like the Galleria in Poughkeepsie, and the other one will be super lame. Like the South Hills mall. Crystal City is definitely the crummy mall to Pentagon City’s class. I stumbled upon all kind of weirdo shops including a puppet store, a store full of ugly stuffed and ceramic animals, a wilted flower store, ugly faux-fabric dresses, a cheap shiny things boutique, etc. etc. I did find some intriguing food options — sushi, Annie’s pretzels, ice cream, a grocer — that may prove useful at a future lunch break. Overwhelmingly, however, my mall was a little depressing and it was worth $1.50 and a subway transfer (the yellow line goes directly between Crystal City and Columbia Heights only when it is not rush hour, which is silly) to quit my lingering and head home.

Dropped by Washington Sports Club on the way home, but there was a steady stream of people flowing in the door and the staff at the desk seemed stressed. They ignored me as much as they could. When I asked for registration info they handed me an irrelevant slip of paper. I asked how much membership cost per month and they took the slip of paper back and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Finally I left without a gym membership or any useful information. Kind of frustrating. Overall, however, it was a pretty darn nice day. I’m making this week a true four-day (the original plan was to take Fridays off, but I’ve gone to work for the last two), which makes tomorrow at 5pm the beginning of the weekend. Going to have to plan some plans! Smithsonian folklife festival?

I got caught in a rainstorm today on my way home from work. I thought I was going to make it back in time, but a few steps out of the metro the sky began pummeling me with water pellets. Hugest rain drops of all time. It smelled like wet trash the whole way home, but it was nice, too, to have water on my face. It reminded me of Oregon a little bit.

Today at the office featured a kickoff for a new PBS Parents blog called Super Sisters. It will feature parenting advice written by three sisters. There are seven children between them with one on the way, and when I came downstairs to meet the bloggers I found myself in the midst of the whole hollering crew. The moms and bosses went into a meeting so two other interns and I stayed with the kids and the dads. On one hand I felt like folding cootie catchers and paper airplanes was a poor use of my valuable PBS-funded time (and I was free to leave) but I enjoyed getting to know a couple other interns and it was good to be reminded about kids’ boundless energy and miniature attention spans. It reminded me of the squirming hordes at Camp Kiwanilong and the years when my little cousins still qualified as little, and it was a nice perspective to have going into a project for PBS Kids.

Because my next task, after I finish pulling together the content for the promotional USB drives (due at the end of this week, so soon), will be to create a digital press kit for the PBS Kids Go! site and its soon-to-be broadband channel. “Broadband channel” is the name that’s been given to television programming that is released on the Internet. I really think digital is the way to go for public broadcasting because PBS is such a strong and warm fuzzy brand. I feel like people are interested in consuming PBS content, just not passionate enough to figure out all the local channel details and tune in at a specific place and time. Offering these shows online will fix this laziness gap and deliver great programming to way more eyeballs. Anyway, I will be overseeing the production of a website to post all the press releases and video clips and logos and images that journalists can use when they report on all these new exciting things that are happening with PBS Kids.

So work is still going busily-but-well. I’m actually more productive when I have lots of things to do. My friend Kirsten, from Norway, is in town this week so I got to see her. We grabbed drinks at the Wonderland Ballroom (a divey and endearing nearby bar) and talked about culture shock and mutual friends. It was good to hear that she and Jeff received and enjoyed my food donations (they are both staying in Oslo another year or more). All the effort that I (and mostly Norway Alex) went to to keeping my pantry out of the trash was definitely appreciated. She and her friend Lauren, who was with her, had some great suggestions for things to do in DC. Apparently there’s a park right next to Reagan airport where you can lay in the grass and have airplanes thunder right over you. They also suggested visiting Eastern Market and the Folklife Festival, when in season.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Brendan, and I’m pretty happy there. I thought it would feel different to be dating, but he’s just the same old very close friend he’s always been. I can have a pretty obsessive personality, but I don’t think about him constantly or even worry about it. He just appears every other day or so and we grab drinks and make dinner and poke fun at each other. I’m just living my own life and he’s in it. Dad was probably right when he said I overthink things. I had so braced myself for passion or heartbreak that it never really occurred to me that things would just work out in a pleasant everyday kind of way.

That’s pretty much my life at the moment, and I don’t see much jazzing it up or dulling it down in the near future. Owen wants us to go up to his cabin for the 4th, but it’s at least 13 hours by transit and 8 by car. We don’t have a car. It would be nice to be surrounded by friends in a quaint cabiny setting, but spreading a blanket in the grass under the Washington Monument to watch the DC fireworks doesn’t sound so bad either.

I downloaded Firefox 3 here at work when it came out the other day, and besides a couple crashes while editing CSS on pages with embedded pdfs (kind of a specific and strange situation) it’s been pretty darn smooth. I love the “awesome bar,” which looks like the normal type-your-url-here bar except that it REMEMBERS things. They also made the “back” button 50% bigger. One of those little details you don’t realize you want desperately until you have it. In other tech news, I headed over to hulu.com this afternoon, and guess who was featured on the front page? That’s right, you can watch PBS shows online! Now what’s your excuse?

Even more exciting, I was browsing through Time’s “50 best websites of 2008” and found the food blog that Robyn works for, Serious Eats. It’s not doing too badly in the vote count, either, I think it’s around 29th right now? For all the websites in the world, that’s not too shabby at all. Head over there and vote for them if you feel like it. I have no idea why I’m plugging for my friend’s bosses except that it makes me feel all popular in the bloggy world. I mean, seriously (haha), it’s not every day that somebody you know makes it onto a shortlist of awesome things alongside the Penny Arcade boys.

I guess Kirsten is in town, which is strange because I could’ve sworn she moved to Norway. Well, she did, but apparently she’s back in DC for a week. Have I mentioned that nearly all the Oslo Fulbrights last year either had lived or planned to live in/around Washington D.C? Very strange. I guess this is just where all the cool people congregate. If we’re going for statistically odd correlations between Oslo Fulbrights, we were all older children, too. Coincidence?

Brendan and I have all kinds of plans for the coming week. We want to play tourists for a day or two and hit all the monuments. We’re also pretty excited about going to the zoo. We’ve also been hitting happy hours in different neighborhoods so that I can get a feel for where I might want to live next year. I’m afraid it’s going to be a difficult (at least research/time intensive) trade-off game between how fun and safe these neighborhoods are, how gentrified and how affordable. Luckily, there are still gems out there and the streets seem to be getting safer. I should probably nail down a job, though, because I have a feeling unemployed young ladies don’t get to sign leases…

Sometimes I can’t remember whether I’ve blogged about a topic or simply repeated it ad nauseam to my friends / bombarded my parents with emails. When I get into a sleep, eat, read, eat, read, nap, read cycle just about everything triggers deja vu. Especially if it involves words. But…I’m quite sure this is a new topic! Or mostly new topic. Even if I’ve already pestered you about my summer/life plan indecision, I’m sure I haven’t shared my wonderment with the web archive. Because it just happened.

So it does start with an overcooked topic — the fact that I haven’t been accepted to or rejected from graduate programs yet, which is making the whole uncommitted summer feel a bit wobbly. It’s really a silly thing to obsess over since I’m having serious doubts about investing more money into my education at this juncture whether or not education will have me. Anyway, this is where it started, when I turned back to the grindstone that is summer internship applications and I realized…why am I applying for crummy summer internships? I have three years of project management experience and I kind of speak three languages and have been working terribly hard on original research that could possibly get published. I think I’m qualified for a real job. NOTE: If you happen to be a giver of internships, please understand I’m just being sassy and I would be happy to discuss summer options.

Which brings me to the internet archive. Eventually. After I wrote a bunch of cover letters and reflected on all the cool projects we did at the Cloisters — I mean, the Django Ride Board was pretty sweet — I started feeling especially glum that there is no trace in cyberspace of our efforts. After Ken took the job at Columbia, Cloisters life devolved into a frustrating power struggle between computer services and our independent creative space (with its independent budget). CIS “kindly” moved all our web content to their fancy blade servers, which crippled our ability to sudo our own stuff. They replaced our Plone site with a bland static brochure page (I mean it’s pretty, Alex made it, but it’s not useful or representative of our efforts in any way) that is still up today. I’ve tried to contact the new curator, but he doesn’t seem very interested in reinstating an archive of past Cloisters projects (something I already did…in Plone…)

The whole thing was pretty ugly and depressing, but all of those frustrated feelings erupted into joy when I discovered the wayback machine! I mean, I’ve known it was there, I just never used it before. And it’s magic! I entered our web address and all those years of web development washed right over me! Designs I’d nearly forgotten about, that weird block of faces, typographic choices we spent forever debating, color schemes from that little color book, flashing before my eyes as I clicked from one date to the next! It’s not a perfect solution. The Plone site, with all it’s back end machinery, is designless and garbled. But at least it’s there, proof that it existed.

On another note, my website was brighter then. Simpler, better balanced and with its own image gallery. This is terrible, I really don’t have the free time to dwell on a redesign.