Tell me About Yourself

I start my mornings drinking coffee in front of my computer monitor. First I check my two email accounts---one is for what I call 'better mail' and the other is for sites that send me newsletters: CNN's Five Good Things, historian Heather Cox Richardson, a few political groups like Red, Wine & Blue. Then I check my blog for comments and I end up on Facebook where my feed shows me a mixture of family posts, video posts from the cast of Saturday Night Live and late night hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert plus posts from the five Mahjong sites I follow. If I have an hour to kill---which I usually do---I'll watch Facebook 'Short Reels' where I'm liable to see just about anything related to kittens/cats, puppies/dogs, furniture flipping, people saving wild animals in dangerous situations and science solving environmental issues like they do in Poland using clams that monitor the quality of city water. A city in the USA uses mussels, too. You could compare them to canaries in a coal mines only the mussels don't die when the water is bad, they just close up and set off alarms attached to their shells.

One of the Shorts I saw today was posted by a guy who was a former Stanford University Admissions Director. What he said gave me an idea for blog fodder and God knows I needed something to inspire me today or I'd go off on another tangent about how our post-election country is on the crazy train to hell.

Mr. Interviewer said one of the first questions they ask is one of the most important and they ask it in an off-handed manner that you don't think is more than just chi-chat. The question is: "Tell me about yourself." The answers come in many forms and often in a rambling way---kind of like I write---and that doesn't rate the students very high. He said the correct way to reply is to say, "There are three things you should know about me." Typical of Facebook Shorts you had to find your way to part two to learn what kinds of things you should list and typical of me I couldn't find part two.

But, still the video got me to thinking about how would I answer that question. How does anyone pick out just three things about ourselves that's going to make an impression on someone you just met? It's a given that your answer would depend on whose doing the asking. A college admissions interview is going to be different from a job interviewer or a stranger at a party saying, "Tell me about yourself." In the deep, dusty corners of my mind I recall asking that very question in social settings. It was probably in the late '60s when I was on a search for a significant other and I read a lot of self-help books. Back then I might have answered that question something like, "Oh, my! I love to laugh. I have a passion for art and I take a lot of night classes." 

Can you believe it, I was in the work force from 1958 to 2001 and I only had three job interviews in my entire life. One was for the telephone company and---dub!---dyslexic me failed the test involving looking up numbers. Those where the days when you could call an operator by dialing zero and the operator was expected to know how to sound out the spelling of surnames. Another interview was for a wholesale floral company and the interviewer tried to put his hands up my sweater. I ran out of that place, too shocked and scared to look back. 

The third interview I must have had but I don't remember it. It's enough to say I got the job of selling clothes in the boys department in a large, upscale department store. I stayed there a year while I built up my own floral design business enough to quit. I left on good terms and the store's owner frequently bought flowers from me because he liked to support, "new businesses." He was a great employer who appreciated his workers where my former employer thought floral designers "were a dime a dozen." He got that idea from silly women who'd tour our greenhouses, retail shop and design rooms and would say things like, "I'd work here for free." Ya, they'd have loved the 12-14 hour days we put in around all the holidays. They'd have loved a boss who paid women a third less than the guys doing the exact, same jobs because "they had families to feed." It was the sixties and I'm shamed of our country right now because we're going to have to fight the same Civil Rights and Woman's Rights battles all over again or we'll find ourselves living in a chapter of The Handmaiden Tale. 

And don't get me started on tariffs. 45/47 said Denmark is getting one too, "until they cede control of Greenland." Sometimes watching him speak it's hard to tell if it's really him or one of the cast members of Saturday Night Live---the words coming out of him mouth are so ridiculous. Like him saying the terrible plane/helicopter crash last week was caused by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion hires, which was his way of drawing attention away from the fact that on his second day back in office (at Elon Musk's direction) he dismantled the Federal Aviation Administration and put a freeze on hiring more air traffic controllers at a time when they are known to be understaffed. Rich boys playing tit-for-tat and this 'tit' came because the FAA fined poor little Elon's SpaceX twice for failing to follow licensing protocols when he did his rocket launches. And now Musk and his band of young tech nerds---one isn't even out of his teens yet!---has unlimited access to the U.S. Department of Treasury's payment system! One of the ways we need to fight back on 45/47's Shock-and-Awe or Wrecking Ball approach to 'governing' is to support/subscribe to a trusted news source or two because 45/47 is now going after the free press and public broadcasting with a vengeance. And once they're gone we're doomed.

Back on topic: How would I answer the 'three-things' question today? If you couldn't tell by the paragraph above, I've been stalling because I really don't know. But let's assume I'm not being asked because I'm looking a job or going back to college in my old age. In a social situation, after all these years I could still naively list that I love to laugh and I still like art but it's no longer in the top five loves in my life. I still enjoy taking classes but I no longer drive at night…and I'm not crazy about daytime driving either. Any classes I take are here on campus or from YouTube. Still stalling…

It just dawned on me that answer to the 'three things' you should know about me came conventionally in a fortune cookie that I got at our celebration of the Chinese New Year buffet. It said: "Your mentality is alert, practical and analytical." Everyone at the table agreed that the fortune fit me. Of course, I also got to laugh too because one of my table mates made us all read our fortunes a second time adding "in bed" to the end. ©

Until Next Wednesday.