I'm watching "Casino" on TV. I have no idea why. I hate these sorts of movies--these guy movies that get critics all hard yet have no real moral and very little artistry, but involve vague sense of brother-in-arms, gratuitous violence, and superfluous women who sit in the background like furniture. Oh, let me lounge on the "Naive Supportive Girlfriend." Here, rest your cup on the "Manipulative Stripper." Don't forget to turn on the "Histrionic Wife" before you go.

I'm not even on a feminist kick at the moment. "Casino" is mostly an annoying reminder that women aren't allowed to question these movie aesthetics without being labeled socially retarded. It's taken over 4 years for women to finally stand up and admit that maybe, just maybe Judd Apatow is a sexist. I still get scolded by women who think feminine cinematic nudity is the highest form of beauty, and surely my distaste for it reflects my own self-loathing.

In a similar vein, This has made me resolve to never buy American Apparel again. As a woman I simply can't justify supporting that company.

But on and on we go. Most of the time I'm not thinking about anything other than work. After 1 month and over 70 applications, I came to the not-so-revelatory conclusion that landing a job in advertising is literally an impossiblity without networking. So I've been restrategizing my approach, contacting friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends. People have been suprisingly cool with my ham-handed attempts at networking, for which I am only too grateful. I might have one interview, and I'm waiting to hear back from some people, so fingers crossed.

Oh gosh, is Sharon Stone going to hook up with Joe Pesci? This movie really is insanely awful.

In other staggeringly-boring job front news, the one area of my professional life which is going surprisingly well is my freelance work. I'm freaking out at the moment, because I was awarded 4 projects in the space of a day, and I literally have NO TIME to do them. I'm also doing data entry 9-5 until September 12, so I have to do all the projects at night. I'm hoping to finish the majority of the work this weekend. THEN i need to get back to networking. Still, work is work, and I'm incredibly happy doing it. I would just like to see more money in my hand instead of escrow, and maybe a proper job interview.

Laura Terry, recently moved to Vermont, came down to visit me. We went to the Brooklyn Zoo, sketched in the park, discovered a diner at Broome and Orchard, had dinner at an amazing Japanese/French fusion restaurant (Upstairs at the Bouley Bakery. They had chocolate creme brulee with spiced plum and candied pears!), bought some bullion, talked about investments, and hit up the Barney's sale. It was a pretty interesting visit, as always. Plus I learned about nightshade vegetables, a family I was hitherto unaware.

I have to give a talk at church tomorrow, so I'm going to sign off. Wish me luck boys and girls

My birthday is coming up (Sept 6th), and in case any of you want to buy me something nice, Keds has a deal where you can custom design your own shoes. Best Week Ever had some example of possibilities in case you need inspiration.

My life sounds a lot more glamorous on paper than it actually is. Observe the last week:

So my ex-model boyfriend flew up to surprise me when he heard I was stressing out about jobs. While I was temping and doing freelance work for various international corporations, my boyfriend cooked and cleaned and bought me lunch at work. We went to Coney Island and ate hot dogs on the boardwalk next to the mango vendors, walked on the pier among the crab fishermen, then sat in the sand and watched Russian immigrants play Frisbee. On Sunday we had a dinner party for the manager of Belle Fleurs (she had done Jay-Z and Beyonce's wedding, and brought over some extra striped orchids from the shop) and a Goldman Sachs hedge fund manager. Thursday I went to the MOMA with an actress and a statistician to check out the prefabricated house exhibit and look at the "Dali and film" collection. Afterwards we went to the Upper West Side and painted our nails while we watched BBC's "Transvestite Wives" documentary. Last night my cousin, a gallery manager, invited me to go see Holy Ghost spin at a club in Greenwich. We met up with a fashion designer friend of ours, and her 4 male model friends. I talked with one of the models about "Hamlet 2," then we started a dance party on the upper floor of the club.

Wow, that sounds totally important and glamorous, right? Parts of it are, I suppose, legitimately awesome. It was super sweet of Benjamin to fly up and take care of me, though in fairness it was just as much about his need to make out with me as it is about taking care of me. And I spent money I didn't have, which made me upset. But the Coney Island thing was just as awesome as it sounded. I have photos, which will be uploaded with the rest of my photos when I get an effing second. But the most exciting and New York-y section of my week--the male model clubbing experience--was in fact totally anticlimactic. My cousin Brooke and I meet up with Sarah, a fashion designer and mutual friend. Sarah's been hanging out with Bradley lately, who's a model/stylist/art scene kid. Bradley was wearing an oversized striped sweater with no shirt, cowboy boots with chains and bandannas, cut off white shorts, gold chains and a fedora. That gives you a taste for what I'm working with. The other models were all standardly beautiful, except for Sam, who was so shockingly gorgeous I couldn't talk to him, but they were all standardly gay, which meant they were more into flirting amongst themselves than with us girls. Which, you know, is fine, they were sweet enough, but it meant they were all into impressing each other, so when we went to the club and things weren't jumping, they didn't want to dance. They were all grumbling and wanted to look for another club, which is something about hipsters that's beginning to annoy me. Why we gotta bounce to three or four clubs to find the coolest goings-on? I mean, providing the place isn't terrible, why can't we just make our own fun? It's exhausting to me.

I've been rolling with Anna lately. She's sort of acting as a mentor for me, since she works in advertising, and she's giving me a lot of advice. She also loves BBC shows and bad teen comedies, so its a match made in heaven. She's the only good friend I've made in New York that I didn't know before I moved here; I dig her because she's a bit like me (crazy ambitious, hard working, penchant for high living and travel) and a bit like my sister Julia (high energy level).

The career thing has slowed down a bit. My money crisis is slowing down, as I've made roughly $200 freelancing in the past 2 weeks, and another $400 temping as a filing clerk. Just to keep myself a float, I need to be clearing $500 a week, though, so until I'm pulling out the big money, I'm going to be tense. But I'm averaging around $250 a week at the moment, and I've got some leads on how to look for work. I'm just worried I won't find a job until Christmas or something insane. I want a job now. I've begun to feel a huge amount of stress, however: I work from 9-5, and I have all of this freelance work in addition to the 9-5, which means I can't look for jobs, because I'm always working. And to make matters even worse, people keep stopping by to visit me, which means I have to take time off of work or cut back on freelance work. Wow, that sounds really ungrateful, it totally isn't meant to be. It's just that until I get a permanent position, my life sort of isn't my own, so friends and family visiting just reminds me that I have no life.

What I learned from the fashion section of Brides (in an article about the new trend in "soft, easy wedding dresses" that are "at home in the tropics"): impoverished foreign children make a great prop for your wedding photos. Your $1700 dress will really pop against the background of abject poverty. Try to find the saddest, most dilapidated clapboard home you can as a backdrop -- but be careful, you may have to wander off your beach resort! Colonialism at its finest! Thanks, Brides!

Mark and I are wondering if our photographer will provide the foreign school children or whether that's extra.

Atrocious.

I bought the latest edition of Brides magazine yesterday. It is hilariously awful -- everything I could have hoped for and more. I'm sure I became stupider reading it.

Here's some of the amazing advice I came across in an article about how to get your groom-to-be involved in planning the wedding ("Six Sneaky Ways to get him Jazzed about Menu Cards").

- Embed Tasks: help him warm up to the process by placing it in a positive context. My fiancee called my best man and offered to treat us to an upcoming ballgame. Then she sneaked in the idea that it would be great if we could get measured for our tuxedos on the way to the ballpark -- turning an otherwise annoying chore into part of a memorable day of male bonding.

...

- Introduce Competition: Men are indifferent toward a project until it involves the chance to declare victory over someone else. "Jen played to my competitive instincts," says Justin, 32. "She'd never say anything like 'have you gotten the limo yet?' Instead she'd drop little asides like 'You know, Caroline's husband booked their Escalade four months before their wedding.' She knew it would get me every time."

- Motivate Him: Bribes are perfectly acceptable. Proven options include golf accessories and blatant sexual favors.

...

- Zip Your Lips: Metrosexuals notwithstanding, most of us still feel the need to maintain a certain macho image. By promising you won't leak the fact that he had a hand in the planning, you'll be more likely to enlist his willing assistance. "I struck a deal with Tracy early on," says Brandon, 25. "I'd help with anything she wanted as long as we agreed to tell people she did it all."

gender stereotypes + dated lingo (metrosexuals wtf?) + conspicuous consumption (booked their Escalade??) + bottom-of-the-barrel womens mag writing = BRAIN-MELTING HILARITY.

Law school is now, finally, definitively over. (That is unless I failed the bar or the MPRE, which for the sake of my present sanity, is a possibility I am not going to consider).

Mark took me on a very relaxing vacation leaving directly after the MPRE ended on Friday and returning on Monday night. We stayed in a log cabin in Ephriam, Wisconsin on the Door County Peninsula. Wooden trolls greeted us when we arrived late night, armed with a huge batch of pamphlets courtesy of the amazing 24-hour information station at the bottom of the peninsula.



I woke up on Saturday feeling very strange. No headache. No knots in my stomach. No cryptic checklists written on my left hand. No pile of index cards demanding my attention. Strange indeed.

Mark and I did some hiking in the woods, relaxed in a hot tub, and explored the little vacation towns nearby. For dinner, we checked out a traditional Wisconsin fish boil. Earl, a chef/actor in a ship captain's hat, talked to us tourists about Door County traditions, explained the complex mechanics of the fish boil, and told charming (if somewhat blue) jokes about fish and fishing. The real show was the huge fire.

A man comes home one evening to find his wife wearing a sexy nightgown. She says 'tie me up. you can do whatever you want.' So the man tied her up and went fishing.

That evening we saw a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in an outdoor theater in the woods.

On Sunday morning, we went walking in the woods behind the cabin. It was a really pretty day with sunlight filtering through the trees and the kind of warm breezy air that feels soft and enveloping.

We stopped to take some pictures in a meadow.



After that, the path got relatively narrow, with trees on each side. I was walking ahead of Mark.

From behind me he says: "Hey Adelly. Check this out."

I turn around.

Mark is on one knee holding a shiny silver box with a fantastic ruby ring in it.

"Holy shit!" I (very romantically) exclaim. Not what I would have said if I could have planned it, but that's that.

"Will you marry me!" Mark says. It doesn't sound quite like a question -- it comes out more like something you'd exclaim at the end of successfully completing a big task -- "we did it!"

I say yes like 10 times. I cry a little. We sit on a log and grin at each other for a while.



That afternoon we went to take a tour of the Eagle Bluff lighthouse. The tour guide was an earnest and matter-of-fact Wisonsinite. She seemed quite devoted to the lighthouse, although she had a somewhat tenuous grasp of facts and figures regarding it. It was cute.



While waiting for the tour to start, I did a "we're engaged" cartwheel.




On Monday, we took a ferry ride to Washington Island. We rented dangerous bicycles (coaster breaks!) and took a long, long ride through the country. We met some cows along the way.



On the trip home, we meandered slowly down the peninsula, checking out some pretty scenery along the way.

So I've been temping and freelancing my heart out, and if I get everything done this month, I'll be ok. I'm making some money, and that's good. And I have some good contacts which I'm going to be following up on.

It was hailing the other day. Hail in august seems opulant.

"Tropic Thunder" was hilarious. Hilarious.

My boyfriend flew up to help take care of me while i'm working. He's so sweet, it's really adorable.

And OMG congrats Adele! I'm soooooo excited for you!

I wish Mark was here tonight. I went to a modern dance performance (Armitage Gone!) which can only be described as "techno African Ballet," and it's something we could have totally chewed on over a couple of drinks.

I swallowed my pride and emailed practically every friend I had on myspace to ask for help/hints/leads in the job search. Luckily everyone has been really supportive and sweet so far, especially my old hockaday friends (SaraGruen especially) and the odd northwestern chum (tonyrella being the most darling). I normally wouldn't clog everyone's inboxes, but temp agencies aren't giving me ANY work, and I can't even get companies to hire me as an intern. I'm not having a crisis about my worth or anything--my resume's very good, my online portfolio is very good. Obviously these things could be stronger, but I really feel like I've done my best work, and I'm trying my hardest, and I'm not getting anywhere. A couple of freelance gigs, and that's it. I understand getting a job in an ad agency might be terribly difficult, but I figured a Master's would at least give me the dignity of a personalized rejection letter instead of silence. I'm hoping August is just a slow hiring month. I really don't know what i'll do if this continues. I only have enough savings to last me 2 more months.

Outside of this, and my family's financial trouble, I'm loving new york in the summer. I go dancing and see movies in the park and I get to see free african techno ballet at the met. Things could always be worse.

One thing that is kind of amazing about my job is the way the setting sun fills the office with a heavenly pink-orange light. You don't get that on the second floor, know what I'm saying?

It occured to me that if I wait for an opportunity to blog about what I've been doing for the last few months, I would never update. So rather than put it off until forever, I'm going to try and update every day, or every other day, and try to update about my trip when I can. Short of it: Graduated in May, went to PE Island as a graduation trip (saw Anne of Green Gables' House), flew to Chicago to visit Adele and Lakshmi, ran into dearest Will Butler, flew to Dallas, helped my parents with their business, flew back to New York, loved Batman, and now I'm unemployed and can't seem to get anyone to return my calls. I've been unemployed for 3 weeks now and I can't even get interviews with Temp or Staffing agencies. I mean, I know I'm not perfect, but you'd think a masters would at least get me a decline by email.

But I did get a sweet freelance job with the Great New Zealand Christmas Cake Company. So...progress?

Who's with me? Theron -- I'm looking at you.