But understanding why job interviews stump us so is crucial to getting really good at them. In my experience I’ve learned how easy it is to prepare for an interview the wrong way. The wrong way includes preparing for the occasion strictly like a test, or an invisible chess game between you and the interviewer. The intention of the interviewer, hopefully, isn’t to devise questions to trip you up. It’s quite opposite of finding reasons not to hire you. It’s to find reasons to hire you, and your best argument will be personality.

So the very first thing you should do before knowing the ins and outs of the company you’re interviewing with, before understanding the appropriate level of eye contact, before clicking through the internet’s vast library of “popular” interview questions (“How much does the ice in a hockey rink weigh?”) and before doing a background check of your own on the interviewer, it’s important to know yourself. Knowing yourself, having your story down will always be your go-to lifesaver in any interview.

One idea I practically chanted to myself during preparation was that any robot or monkey, or robot monkey can walk into a room and spit out the cookie-cutter answer. It is so crucial to present personality, as from this flows the best avenue to communicate your work ethic, morals, beliefs, motivation, your idea of true success, hobbies, skills and ultimately, what you will do and who you will be for this company. Sure, this will be you on your best behavior, but who are we kidding? You’re ALWAYS on your best behavior.

Now, when you’re in an interview and the “Would you be willing to live in Alaska?” question comes up, you can have the confidence and heart to say, “One goal of mine has always been to live near the water. Of course, I’d go anywhere the job needs me, but my preference will always be the ocean.” This might not be the best answer, but it shows that you have a mind of your own, that you’re all about setting personal goals for yourself and that you’d be willing to sacrifice your will for that of the job. On the other hand, if you love moose and frozen tundra, you are just in plain luck.

Yeah, it’s been a couple weeks since his departure aired. I’m not posting the clip as a news flash, but for the little gleam of encouragement Conan gives just at the end of the segment. He came a long way to do what he loved, and all along he used a simple formula of hard work (really hard work) and kindness. Of course, it’s never that easy. It’s not so much the words of his monologue that inspired me, but the utter sincerity in his delivery. That’s what I appreciate, and that’s what enlightens me.

Enough of me harping on what he said. See for yourself (sorry I wasn’t able to embed the video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhKTUPBvqSc

I don’t want to say that I’m keeping an open mind. Something about that sounds too airy and flighty. I will say that I’m interested in several opportunities out there, those I’ve least expected and those least suspected of me. At first I thought more options would muddle the process to the point where I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Yep, I’ve been there, but it’s also a good starting point.

For a while I’ve limited my abilities to a pool of choice careers, thinking there was only one out there for me. Often people have the same tendency in finding romance– the idea that destiny has reserved two perfect people to complete each other like puzzle pieces, an overall destructive mindset that leaves people consulting the cosmos over common sense. There’s nothing wrong with having dreams or being romantic– otherwise I’d be in trouble, too– but it might be healthier to debunk the one-person theory (along with the perfect person theory) and understand that there might be several people you could be with for the rest of your life. However, there’s only one you’d give all of yourself to. That choice seems more romantic anyway.

Such is the hunt I’m in now.  This outlook applied to job searching takes the pressure off myself from finding the unattainable, absolute perfect career (like testing roller coasters and tasting ice cream), and lets me focus on the ways I could be making a living so that I eventually can choose what is best for me.

It you had asked me two or three months ago what I was doing with my life, whether I had any free time and whether I could grab something to eat with you in the midst of my daily mayhem, I would have been tempted to strike you. Ok– not really, but I would have certainly heaved in a great gulp of air while slowly shaking my head, contemplating the easiest way to let you down, like “I really wish I could, but I’m slammed. I’m busier than I’ve ever been, with all the [insert usual task list].”

Things are presently different, whereas then I was praying for precious drops in a time drought, now I’m the one treading and fighting to keep my nose above the downpour. I no longer am an intern at Paste, which not only means that I’m not churning out x number of articles daily, but I also am not spending three hours in a day cutting through Atlanta traffic. A simple nine-to-five in town would still award me fifteen more hours of free-time every week. Right now I don’t know how to manage the excess, other than to tell myself that I’m a professional job hunter. My full-time job is to find work for myself.

No, it’s not a cop-out. It’s what helps me tame my impatience when I’m not getting callbacks. It’s pastoral, a reminder to enjoy where I am without getting too comfortable, and a promise to myself that I will one day do what I’m supposed to be doing.

Does that sound too vague? Yeah, it does. It’s all I have for now.

The Wolf climbed the peak and he howled all his pains to the Moon

I’m ravaged, half-eaten, my blood drips a trail for my doom

I know now what my pack will say of my falter and keel

I’d rather see death than just lick the wounds I know won’t heal

The Moon climbed down and sat on a cloud to see

The Wolf hang low his quivering head over the peak

He said, “Wolf, don’t look at the rocks that you paint as you bleed,

Your wounds will turn to scars that inspire a will in the weak,

Wolf, don’t leave the ones you need.”

The Lighthouse looked upward and lit his bright face to the Moon

The land below fails me, the whitecaps all thirst for my doom

Now the black waters, they swirl through my spiraling stairs

I’d rather be uproot than weather the gusts in the air

The Moon climbed down and sat on a cloud to see

The Lighthouse’ stature swaying and tottering with ease

He said, “House, through the gales bend your body like reeds in the breeze,

Your lamp will guide the captains away from the jagged rocks’ reach

House, don’t crumble to the sea.”

The star twinkled dimly his wrought riddled words to the Moon

I’m flickering faintly, I fear I will burn out too soon

Now all I want is to fly through the dark chasm sky

I’d rather turn stardust than wait for my twinkling to die

The Moon climbed down and sat on a cloud to see,

The faint star pondering, buried in blackness beneath

He said, “Star, though your once brilliant gleam now shies in the night,

Your glow still maps the great constellations, the earth’s ancient guide

Star, don’t shoot across the sky.”

I’ll answer the second question, (why haven’t I contributed in so long?), with another question: Have you ever tried to maintain a steady blog? It takes an unshakeable sense of duty and diligence, something I lost during my daily commute to Atlanta and all the writing I did to further my career, not my leisure. I know, something about that doesn’t sound right, but I’m back on the leisure train for a bit.

So while I’m here, I’ll do my best to keep this site active with posts that might not entertain you as much as they just keep my pen sharp. In the mean time, if you have any job ideas, don’t hesitate to let me know.

The album eventually settles in the solace of the remaining tracks, “Wash Away,” and “Worry.”

The Leamington Spa natives’ second stab, “Make It Happen,” is not the resurrection of lovelorn days,  but a new and complete invigoration of without so much as a backward glance to “Half These Songs…”. Even its sappier songs, such as “Drop Your Guard,” sing motifs of new beginnings.

“Make It Happen” starts in a blastoff with “Start Beginning,” a punch-packed pick-me-up “about spring time and the reawakening of the soul” (even incorporating the London’s IDMC Gospel choir) that sets the brazen pace following through the album’s entirety: “Hello my love/ It’s good to see you/ Shining with the freshness of arrival/ And I see your beauty/ Standing there before me/ And I wonder when we will/ Start this love/ ‘Cos we can start beginning in our hearts beginning/ Wo oh, blooming’ out from all that shit you went through.”

John Parker’s double bass craft shuffles to the forefront of the songs with striking dexterity, coloring in the sense of elation in “Find Me,” a track composed with a buoyancy similar to Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” His beatbox also becomes a familiar instrument. Absent from their debut, Parker incorporated his nearly “one man band” skill in their live performances, received as a light that need be covered no longer for their next record.

Concannon’s passion is divided between bursting, undaunted romance and preachy, rapping bellows for an England reformation, or up rise: less poverty, more generosity; less government, more community. It sounds like a fluffy utopia most could settle with.

Beyond lyrics, Concannon’s jubilation restricts his vocal range that used to mingle up and down the scales in “Half These Songs…” His pitched fixes high, acute in some parts, shrill in others, but still emitted in a splendid touch.

“Make It Happen” suffers only at the hands of Nizlopi’s created monster: their live shows. Like Dave Matthew’s Band, their studio releases are mere shadows of what they can do onstage, but this shouldn’t make their record any less worthy.

It just means that a studio cannot capture the great aura radiating from Nizlopi, but “Make It Happen” is still a decent fulfillment of its own album title.

For guitar players, and likely anyone who plays a stringed instrument, callouses aren’t so bad. In fact, they are lifesavers– or hand savers. They are protectors, shields to the fingertips, time pieces to gauge how often one plays and tiny hot pads when needing to grip a scalding mug.

More than all of these, callouses represent the growing pains of learning to play an instrument. Blisters and bleeding fingertips are the final stages of agony and the first steps to healing. Forming a callous is the process that tests the will and stretches the mental durability before rewarding with the physical. Those who prod themselves to play through the gall are empowered with the thickest ones.

That is why, naturally, I have so much trouble developing and maintaining them myself. I have no problem playing through the pain, but once I’ve made it, keeping the armor on my fingers is another strain all in itself.

At first only days go by when I don’t pick up my guitar. Then days compose weeks, and weeks to months, and the stretch continues until I’m requested to play, or someone asks me how long I’ve played the guitar.

The right answer is four years– my skill set only claims two… maybe. Sometimes I don’t even want to answer the question because I’m ashamed to tell people how far I’ve come in four years, so I usually, briefly, hope to explain away my dry patches in which I forget where I put my guitar and my fingers soften new again. It only makes the days I turn back to it that much harder.

Such is life, progressing in triumph and failure, patterned in good and bad periods, blessed in the leitmotif of brighter days and then darkening, diving and wrought in discord when it hurts too much to play any further.

And then there is the callous, not an end in itself but an aged bulwark to the electric sting of metal strings to throbbing blisters. Like most of life’s accoutrements, they are most appreciated by those who don’t have them.

I will be eternally grateful when I have mine– like when the bell finally rang for Clarence.

He got his wings. I’ll get mine soon.

Why would I look down on these models in the first place? Probably for the same reason we look down on anything, or anyone else in life. They’re different. Not different in the best sense of the word, like when something is set apart because it dims the rest of the world in the shadow of its own artistry. I mean the kind of different that presents the opportunity we all like to pounce on. It is the different we thrust on the vulnerable, to make us feel… undifferent. Accepted. Communally special.

This is what I’ve stooped to when speaking about the Unlimited, allured by the opening to say, “Hey, I may have square headlights, but at least I’m not the weiner dog of Wranglers.” Very few times will a fellow Jeeper pass me by without a wave, or the immensely popular two finger flick, where the driver releases the index and middle finger from its 12 o’clock grasp of the wheel to flash something of a sideways peace sign to his/her Wrangler breathren, but it still weakens me to hear how the YJ is the “bastard child” of Jeeps.

Well, if YJ’s are the bastard child, then Unlimited’s must be their mutated offspring. And don’t even get me started on 4 door Wranglers.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Really, I am speaking out of turn because my former opinion of the two was swayed dramatically by one person’s simple act of ineffable kindness.

It was during my week on Ocracoke Island. We were an audience to the ocean in our sunken beach chairs and sprouted umbrellas, during the threat of a collapsing sun. I parked fairly close to the deepest, most tread grooves in the sand due to the invading high tide, which meant frequenting cars and trucks passed the Jeep by mere inches on their route further down the beach. It made me feel uncomfortable.

I cranked up the Jeep to move it away from the grooves, and in my reckless maneuvering I lodged my front and back tires in the grooves so that I sat perpendicular to the worn treads. I tried to accelerate forward and then slam into reverse, to rock the Jeep out of the small trenches but I only continued the one thing I so often do, even with utmost, respectable creativity. I dug myself into a deeper hole, where the sand shot from the spinning tires and the undercarriage depressed closer to the ground.

I hardly had time to panic, though at the time I was feeling more unwillingly humbled than anything else.

I looked to my left, and in the distance I saw a couple sitting on the beach next to a silver, 4 door Wrangler. I saw the man leave his seat and climb into his Jeep. It rolled in my direction with defined purpose, maybe to help, maybe to circle me like a hunter with its prey. I tried to not look in his direction when his face came into view through his windshield.

My cheeks bloomed red with embarrassment. I forced a glance when he called out to me. He was stocky and masked in dark sunglasses, and he already positioned his Jeep with the back bumper in front of my grill. I accepted his offer to tow me out, and he immediately responded with a “no questions asked” manner, as if working under an invisible code that required him to aid me, only he seemed perfectly content in doing so.

I felt like dead weight when he pulled me from the grooves, like I was the wounded soldier being carried from the explosions of bullet-ripped fray. Me, the JY Wrangler, advantaged with a stout wheel base and classic hard metal tub, was in tow to a 4 door phony. Not only could he plow through the very same trenches that conquered me, but he could do it while giving me a piggy back. I ran a silent applause in my mind, and then quickly killed it when I remembered I was supposed to be humiliated.

When he finished and untied my rope from our bumpers, he shook my hand and assured me it could have happened to anyone since the sand was especially powdery due to the day’s absent rains. I shrugged my shoulders, thanked him and watched him drive back down to his significant other on the far side of the beach. He’d pulled everyone of his 4 doors off before coming to the beach, and it gave his Jeep a raw, big brotherly quality. It was nearly twice my car, proved both physically and aesthetically.

I saw him take his seat beside her again as I skidded, free and cautious, through the wavy dunes. I’d made a new friend, a human friend and friend in a species of Wranglers.  The one who’d truly authenticated the kinship of Jeep owners was the one I’d cast off  as the black sheep. I’ll think of him as the good Samaritan.

After I’d settled my Jeep into a safer spot, I returned back to my frisbee game with Wiley. Out of some ill-formed habit, he’d taken my favorite white frisbee into the tide. He enjoys watching it bob in the frothy bubbles, to be carried back and forth down the beach until it is swept away into the sea. I’d wanted to say, “Fine, Wiley. Frisbee is pretty much the only thing you have going for you. So it’s your loss…not mine.”

But it was so, so much my loss, too. Don’t tell him. He’ll laugh.

Apparently multi-tasking is harmful to the process of pinpointing bands to their appropriate genre. I found this out last weekend at the almost overly-affordable bluegrass festival at the Melting Point, where I arrived just in time to catch the tail-end songs of The Peachtree Station.

Anticipation for The Corduroy Road was thick like humidity, and the last time their sweet melodies graced my eardrums was about four months ago, also at The Melting Point, only then my hands were full trying to film a Listen Up Local episode with a Nokia N95 smart phone while simultaneously jotting down notes to cover their new EP release party.

My efforts didn’t do them justice. I slipped up somewhere along the way– primarily by reducing the band to simple bluegrass when in reality, they are the result of the genre’s creative tweaking.

The woman sitting next to me dubbed herself a Peachtree Station roadie, hardly missing a show and able to articulate the logic in their harmonies and every subtle movement. Before she chased bluegrass bands around the country, her infatuation was jazz– a genre pursued by the truly impassioned. She listens to bluegrass the same way.

I told her she should stick around for The Corduroy Road because they were my favorite bluegrass band. This later gave way to how much I knew about bluegrass, and how I never contemplated a distinction between old and new world bluegrass, the traditional and contemporary trends.

The first instrument set up by The Corduroy Road was their drum set, a scarce element in the traditional “boom-chuck” bands that played that night, where most of the percussion came from a stomping foot and the musicians smacking the sides of their instruments in between strums and plucks.

They began their set with the extremity of an electric guitar. The Corduroy Road has always dabbled in the ways of rock and roll, but only to come as close to this line without actually crossing it. This time, there was no shyness about them– the guitar growled, whined and screeched out its solos, almost one per song while John Cable sputtered clusters of drum beats that all folded into an Old 97’s likeness.

The bands previous to the set lulled the audience into reclusive mesmerization, whereas The Corduroy Road was the spell that woke them out of the trance and lured people to the forefront dance floor– sober people, that is.

More talented bands followed the set, clambering up and down scale after scale, impeccable masters of their trades and probably half wizard (ahem, Mountain Heart, ahem) and never botching a note or muffling a pitch, but they left me with little to mentally chew the cud, and no melody to digest on my way home.

In this sense, they are capricious, fleeting pleasures, allowing me to enjoy their moments before quickly breaking apart songs of other bands, but The Corduroy Road capitalizes through their decadent simplicity and droll cadences (see the song, The Corduroy Road).

Rather than a gateway into traditional bluegrass, maybe this is how it was always supposed to sound.

Ok, just forget I ever said that.