So you're laid off? Now what?

I've tried to write two posts providing job-hunting advice and deleted both, because they sounded incredibly not sure what the word is - smug? bossy? pretentious? This may fall into those categories as well.

Also when I was hunting for work, the thing I started to hate the most was unasked for job-hunting advice. I felt overwhelmed by it. If one more person told me what to do with my resume or how to interview or how to write a cover letter, etc - I was going to kick them. The best advice I got was from someone equally annoyed by the process, the_red_shoes - who sent me to a site that does a rather decent job of explaining how to write a successful resume and cover letter.

Go here: http://kenshi.livejournal.com/109519.html

I can tell you a few things I learned from my own grueling experiences in the trenches.
( What I've learned from the Trenchs )

(no subject)

Just finished watching Suburban Girl with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin. It was okay. Not great. But okay. Better than Definitely Maybe - which made it into theaters and was yet another of those romantic comedies told mainly from the male point of view. A current trend right now is telling the story from the male point of view. Made of Honor, Enchantment, Definitely Maybe, Last Chance Harvey, and Knocked Up are all from the male point of view. Sort of annoying. If we have to have male chick-flicks, can we have female action flicks?

Suburban Girl which is told from the female pov, never made it to theaters. I saw it on WE.
And it's been on DVD for a while now. The reason it never got released is - poor timing. It was up for distribution at the same time Alec Baldwin's custody dispute with Kim Basinger made headlines. Or Alec Baldwin's questionable behavior towards his daughter in the dispute.
Which unfortunately - is shared by the character he plays in the movie. He's playing an older man, with two ex-wives, dating Gellar (old enough to be his daughter), with an older daughter of his own who won't speak to him.

Baldwin is good in the film. Charming and restrained. But he's always been an excellent actor.
Gellar is okay. I found her grating at times and her performance a bit forced. To be fair, she didn't have much to work with - the dialogue is a bit cheesy, and the story somewhat formulaic. Here's a sample line: "A girl has to lose her father, and leave an Archie, to become a woman."Sigh. Please. Can we be anymore obviously Freudian? It lacks subtlety, making me miss the Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock romantic comedies of the 80s and 90s.

Also watched BSG back to back last night. The second episode, The Oath was quite good. Amazingly so. Actually I liked both of them. The Adama/Roslyn relationship is turning out to be one of the more layered relationships I've seen on-screen. Apollo/Starbuck - which I like a great deal, is admittedly a bit more cliche and fits a certain trope - which is a kink of mine. Both were in clear display in the second episode. I'm not really a shipper though - but I do enjoy the relationships - both of which have been intricately developed over the span of the series. Also, the series is really turning into a socio-political indictment of war, and race relations in our current society, particularly the Middle East. Although you could hold it up as a mirror for any war that is currently going on around the globe at the moment. If anything begs for socio-political analysis - it is BSG. But, I'm not going there, will leave that to someone else on my reading list.

Lost is turning out to be my favorite show of the week and one of the few I make a point of watching live. I'm loving the time-travel trippiness. The twist at the end of last week's episode explained so much. Also, it may be the only series I've seen on TV that has actually explored the consequences of time travel from a biological and scientific point of view. It's not just a fantasy reset that we see in so many shows. Lost has a hard science element to it, that is lacking in most tv sci-fi. Plus it has layered characters who continue to change and evolve. I'd say more, but would have to do a cut tag to avoid spoilers, and really don't feel like it.