Ups and Downs

The warm summer breeze has been exchanged for crisp autumn air, the hundreds of window shopping tourists have vacated the main streets of the Hamptons, and nothing is as lively as it once was.  It is officially fall.  And it came out of nowhere.  I thought September was going to be my beach month; not too hot, not too cold, perfect for warming yourself on the white sand beaches.  But everything good must end at some point I guess, right?  You become so excited about something and then are devastated when it's stripped away.

While waiting in the Hamptons, I have been applying for jobs in addition to my waiting tables.  Some opportunities have been local and others have been more farfetched.  For example, the latest job I applied for wanted to potentially hire me, but I unfortunately could not afford to take time off and travel south to ANTIGUA where the job was based.  Okay, so I'm surfing CaribbeanJobs.com for fun, because how awesome would it be to live in the Caribbean, right?  So, it seems like it's fate.  They are in need of a talk show host for a sports network!  Me, having my own TV show?  My one and only dream come true.  So I apply for the position, not thinking much of it.  The worst they can say is no...or so I thought.

About a week and a half later, I get this call from a woman with an accent I can't particularly place.  She asks for me, and I tell her she is speaking to the man she's searching for.  Apparently, she was a producer or something and she said she was very impressed with my resume and writing skills (which shocked me because my resume includes nothing TV-related and the only writing sample I gave her was a link to this blog) and she asked me to come in for an interview!  She told me she had narrowed down the applicants to just a few, and I was one of the chosen!  Ecstatic outside my mind, I'm totally gung-ho for an interview.

Then she asked me what my current location was.  I told her New York.

Oops.

She then said, "Oh (very disappointingly).  I guess you can't come to Antigua for an interview tomorrow then?"  Antigua?  Well, no, I regretfully informed her that I was unable to fly down to Antigua for the afternoon and meet with the CEO of the sports network.  I know I'm in the Hamptons, but I haven't really made it to that jetset status just yet.

However, I told her I was more than happy to do a phone interview in the meantime until I was able to travel down to the Caribbean.  She told me she'd be in touch.  Ouch.  So I began researching plane ticket prices from JFK to Antigua and I didn't like what I saw.  The tickets were upwards of $500.

A couple days passed and I called the woman with the accent back and asked her if a phone interview was possible.  She said no, understandably so.  I mean, if they are putting someone on TV, they want to see their face, I get it.  I just wish there was some way they could have seen mine.  I then inquired if maybe the network would compensate either a partial or full amount of my plane ticket if I indeed made the journey south.  She told me she highly doubted it.  And that was it.  An official rejection.

Rejection is a part of life and I think I handle it pretty well.  I can't even say I'm that upset about the circumstances because it's so funny and ridiculous now.  But hey, that's my life.

I feel that life is full of that kind of rejection.  You get your hopes up about something and then you unfortunately are let down.  In the restaurant, I'll get so stoked because a very nouveau-riche looking couple will be seated in my section, and then they end up tipping me $30 on a $300 tab.  Very anti-climactic.

However, I also believe that great things might fall apart or not work out so other things can come together and provide better opportunities.  I recently had an article published in the East Hampton Star, the local newspaper, which was great exposure.  It may not have been a TV show in Antigua, but it's a start that hopefully will lead to something else down the road. I don't think we are set up for things that will skyrocket us to success right away. Because if we are, where's the journey? Where's the learning, and making mistakes, and finding ourselves through our experiences that's supposed to happen in our twenties? If we all received six figure jobs right after graduation, life would be pretty bland because there would be nothing to work toward.

So this seems to be the time in life when there are ups and downs, invitations and rejections, clear headedness and confusion. Later in life though, when our life's journey has led us right where we are supposed to be, we'll look back at this time and understand that everything happened for a reason.