(Whine alert)

I hope you’re not expecting an answer to the above question, because I don’t have one.

I’m not very good at job hunting - some people are. I have at least one friend who found a terrific job within three days of having moved to New York. (One works for a law firm as an administrative assistant. The other works for the front office at a boutique DVD distributor.) I didn’t. I spent my first few months in New York doing an internship at Film Forum, which turned into a low-wage position at Film Forum, which turned into nothing when Film Forum passed me up for a better job that a trained monkey could do. As much as I loved the mission of Film Forum and the idea of working there, I couldn’t do so in good conscience anymore. My ego bruised and my wallet understocked, I knew I needed to get out. So I went elsewhere.

I worked for the past year at AZN Television, a now-defunct network that marketed itself as, in a phrase I’ve used with entirely too coy a smirk, “the Network for Asian America.” I think AZN was doomed from the start, a cynical move by clueless executives to grab the attention of am underserved market, where previous, more successful networks aimed at minorities (BET, for example) were founded by minorities who had a deep understanding beyond rote market research of what exactly the lived experience of that minority was like. AZN’s lineup of shows was such a stupid, tone-deaf grabbag of languages, programming, and market-targeting that the network was never able to grab a viewer’s attention for more than 30 minutes at a time. (We actually had one block that led from Filipino baseball coverage to a Korean sitcom to a Mandarin cooking show. Who the fuck is going to sit through that?)

At AZN, I worked as an assistant in ad sales, which is not a job I enjoyed - ad sales simply aren’t interesting to me, and I often felt bored and depressed doing menial office tasks while the network crumbled around me. The network shut down on April 9th, while I was in San Antonio burying my father.

So I don’t have a job right now, and I’ve spent the last month looking for one. I’ve gotten two interviews, one of which went well (but I didn’t get the job) and the other of which went terribly (I haven’t heard back).

I dwell from time to time on my experience with that first interview, because as well as it went, it offered a reiteration of the common refrain I hear from interviewers when I’m getting phone calls at 4:45 on a Friday afternoon: you don’t have the experience we’re looking for. Someone else does. Good day, sir.

But here’s the problem: the only thing I have any real experience in in New York (which is, unfortunately, the only experience that matters) is ad sales. Which I don’t like. I’m not a number-cruncher, I’m not a schmoozer, and I really don’t like advertising in general (sorry, I know that’s naive, but I resent anything that so thoroughly intrudes and permeates and intellectually anesthesizes our culture as the desperate push by media buyers to maximize “individual impressions” - a phrase that sends douchechills down my spine). Which is not a knock on my coworkers at AZN, but better them than me to be pursuing a career in that industry.

So I’m kinda lost. And I need a job. It feels terrible having recently turned twenty-four and not really knowing how to pursue a career, but here I am: I’m willing to risk this sort of alienating overshare if it’ll help set me straight as to what exactly I could be doing better. Ideally, I’d be working in some capacity in film or television, but I suppose that’s not really necessary, since I find that my interest-verging-on-obsession for cinema is fulfilled outside of work hours to at least a manageable level.

And so I’m turning to you, my readers, for advice. I’m not looking for handouts or anything of that sort, but if someone with a little bit of knowledge about this sort of thing wants to take a look at my resume or a sample cover letter and give me some insight into what exactly I’m doing wrong, give me a holler.

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