NEW EXCERPT, "You'll Never Interview in This Town Again"

ONE WEEK FROM RELEASE, PEOPLE!
And in honor of the upcoming release, here's s little snippet titled, "Sometimes You Are Your Own Worst Enemy."
Remember when I confessed that I fell in the gray area of being “detail-oriented?” Here’s the perfect example: a top company in Austin needed a technical writer. After reading about the position, my heart went into excitement overdrive. Cool company, awesome product, great location. I meticulously filled out the online forms and attached my resume. I spent hours working on the Cover Letter to End All Cover Letters, revising it over and over until it was a perfect blend of professionalism and wit.

It was only after I pressed “send” that I realized I had misspelled the company’s name.

I’m sorry, good people at Spredfest (not Spreadfest). It would have been really fun working for you. But I promise, no hard feelings. Your instant rejection was well-deserved.

Other factors outside of the random typo might have crippled my chances too. Like attitude. Not on the surface (I could schmooze with the best of them), but perhaps a hint of my true feelings leaked out from underneath the strategic alignment of my words; appeasing answers betrayed by the subliminal wanderings of subconscious gestures. A blink. The nervous crossing and uncrossing of legs. The clearing of the throat. Alone they were nothing; combined, they held up a mirror to my interviewer's probing eyes, exposing my lies.

Not that I lied about anything big. I certainly never lied about my work experience (although in hindsight, maybe I should have). It was other things. My feelings about Austin, for example.

“How do you like Austin?” was a popular question, and one, I came to realize, that was not only aimed at discovering how well I would fit into a company's "culture" (more on that later) but also helped the interviewer determine my longevity in the city, and by proxy, with them.

I tried being diplomatic with my answer. “I liked it better ten years ago,” was my standard reply, and sometimes I expanded on that and sometimes I didn’t need to. If the interviewer was over thirty (and occasionally they were), he or she would usually agree with me and we'd become engaged in a long discussion, airing out the usual grievances: population overflow, the closing of historic landmarks to make way for skyscrapers, the untimely death of Leslie Cochran, and of course, the traffic.

The younger interviewers would greet my answer with a raised brow or a flippant laugh, as if saying, "Yeah, that's what all you old-timers say," and move on to the next question.

But I wondered if, on more than one occasion, my answer, although acceptable (if not necessarily preferred), had been the only proof they needed to hold me back from advancing further—that the interviewers, even the youngsters, could somehow sense the true extent for which I had fallen out of love with our adored city, sense my detached joylessness at its mention, and thought to themselves, no way.

She's over it. She's looking to leave. Flight risk!

I wasn't looking to leave. I couldn’t. I shared custody of my children with my ex-husband, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Still, I dreamed about it: a place with four seasons and a decent transportation system. Intersections where I could stare straight ahead without being confronted with my unwillingness to feed a hungry person. Grocery stores where I could ask for plastic bags without feeling like a nihilist. Events I could attend without wearing a wristband or 800-SPF sunblock.

Logically I knew that within a week of living anywhere else, I'd probably kick a nun in the teeth for a P. Terry's veggie burger, but on some days in my private "grass is always greener," world, I swear I would have traded the moon just to see my children play in the snow or thrash about in vibrantly colored leaves.

In some ways Austin suited me. I was, after all, a left-leaning, vegetarian white person who listened to Band of Horses. But in other ways it didn't. I wasn't what you called outdoorsy, for one, and concerts weren't my thing. I didn't enjoy listening to music around others mainly because I had terrible taste in music. I only listened to half of the songs on my iPod. The rest I added as if they were conditions in a provisional peace treaty, sacrifices for the hipster gods to keep my Austin zip code. The White Stripes’ complete discography, for example, existed merely as a sort of weighted equation, negotiating the existence of the "Best of" Whitney Houston tracks listed just beneath.

I currently rented a place in SoCo, in a tiny shotgun house nestled between a McMansion and a meth lab. The location was ideal but it had its drawbacks. Grocery shopping, for instance, was a scary experience, being that it was mostly done at the HEB circus freakshow freakfest at the corner of Congress and Oltorf (which was only outdone by its freakier freakshow freakfest cousin on Riverside). Also, the increasing crime rate meant my kids couldn’t play in the front yard. Shittier people kept moving in, and yet the rent kept rising. And there were cockroaches. Tons and tons. Every morning, I’d wake to find a new cockroach on the rug, face-up, shell-down, antennae still moving like flags waving their final farewell to friends waiting inside the walls.

SoCo never felt right to me, but neither did anywhere else. Each time I found myself driving around a residential area in a different part of Austin, I tried to picture myself living there, but my imagination refused to follow. Nothing fit. Even if I could afford buying a decent home in the gentrified inner-city neighborhoods, I’d have to pick between a maimed fixer-upper or one of those modern-wannabe abominations with their hexagon windows and wire staircases, their trendy minimalist designs regurgitated from other cities.

I could move east, but it depressed me, how cemented the poverty seemed to be, unfolding in all directions.

I could move to the northwestern suburbs, with their Edward-Scissorhands neighborhoods of a thousand houses and only five floor plans, but they depressed me too. Sure, they had safety appeal and blue-ribbon schools, but I have lived in them before, had been sucked into their regime of fresh-cut grass worship and wine therapy preambles, a meta heaven soundtracked by the high pitch voices young mothers used to correct their children, and had learned the hard way that crime was not the only form of violence. Downtown and the East Side were dangerous, but the suburbs wielded their own violence too—more subtle, more gradual. Both could can harm you in different ways, I think. Guns and knives were deadly, sure, but barbeques and playdates, book clubs and carpools—maybe those could kill you too.

Perhaps that was why I was having a hard time finding a job. I wanted too much in my workplace the same way I wanted too much in my neighborhood. I longed for a neighborhood in a great location where I could shop at a non-scary HEB; a little slice of heaven devoid of cockroaches and crime, where my children could play outside, but where the quality of their childhoods didn’t hinge on how well I got along with their friends’ mothers, just like I wanted a workplace that was traditional but innovative and fresh but not pretentious. I wanted the best parts of different places to come together and join into one utopia. I wanted it all, and so I had nothing.