I'm supposed to be folding two giant loads of laundry that, at the moment, are just dumped in a pile on my living room floor.
Tomorrow they will still be on my living room floor.
Last week I got accepted into the Clever Girls Collective, which is a group that matches bloggers with advertisers and PR people. The other bloggers I know who are part of the collective tend to get free stuff and write sponsored posts. So I applied. And I await further instruction.
I also signed up for House Party, which is a site where you can apply to host a party that is sponsored by big-name advertisers. The idea is that you and your guests would get to sample some free product from the sponsors, and that this takes place in thousands of households across America. It's a little like a Tupperware or Pampered Chef party, except the guests don't buy anything. Anyway, whenever a party is added to the site, thousands of people apply to host, and if your interests and demographics are a good match for the particular sponsor, you get picked to host.
Also, a really fun thing happened this week, and that is that my Google Page Rank went from a 0 to a 3 (out of 10). I've heard people brag about a 4, so I'm almost awesome. (Another random fact is that, according to Wikipedia, it's not called a Page Rank because it is ranking your web page, it's called that because it's derived from a formula invented by a guy whose last name was Page. Isn't that weird?)
Anyway, I think my life looks pretty good, at least on paper. I came to that conclusion this past week when I started to polish my resume and write cover letters. I'm vaguely connected and influential in the blogosphere, at least in the Chicago mom blogosphere.
So I really think I should get this one gig with Nickelodeon's ParentsConnect website. I saw a posting for a humorous parenting blogger (hello, me), and it's 28 hours per week, which is perfect. EXCEPT, the posting says you have to do all your work in the office, which is in New York City. NEW YORK CITY?! So, I crafted a slightly-too-informal cover letter -- I mean, it is for a blogging gig, I figured I should be conversational -- explaining why it would really be to their benefit to have me working from home, where I would pay for my own office supplies and utility bills, versus them paying the uber-costly NYC overhead. And I turned that letter in to an anonymous website, for a three-week-old job posting, and ... I will never hear from them again.
Then, continuing my theme of applying for jobs in cities where I don't live, I submitted an application to another anonymous website that had a posting for a teacher consultant for a textbook company. You would be a person who helped teachers learn to use their textbook series. Having been a teacher, as well as an editor in the textbook industry, I have long been interested in getting into the whole teacher inservice thing. The company had postings in various cities, but none of them was Chicago. So I spent like an hour filling out their online application, because you had to create a whole lesson plan as part of the application, and ... again, not much point in applying for a job in a city where you don't live. But the deal on that one was that I figured that either they might have a Chicago opening someday, or else the whole thing involves traveling around anyway and I could probably go to the places I'd have to work. Again, though, I'd feel like I had a better chance of getting through to somebody if I weren't applying on an anonymous website.
Maybe my problem is that I should start applying for reasonable, undesirable jobs in my hometown, which I might have a prayer of getting. Like dipping cones at the Dairy Queen.
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