Start spreadin' the news....

Do you ever feel a bit silly when you’re improperly dressed? I don’t mean when you’re wearing a Hawaiian shirt at a business meeting or a ball gown at the beach; I mean when you’re, for example, wearing open-toed shoes on a chilly day in a highly fashion conscious city. Well, I was wearing open-toed shoes on a chilly day in a highly fashion conscious city, and I felt a little bit silly. There was not much to be done at that moment to prevent this minor fashion faux-pas, as I had suddenly been called into the city for an interview, and my only shoes were:
-sneakers;
-tall, black winter boots; and
-open-toed black slides.
I might have worn the boots, but, due to their height and furriness, they looked awful with the particular pants I had on. The pants were another issue. When you’ve spent most of your life as a t-shirt and jeans kind of girl, and when you’ve spent the past 3 years in the kind of work that would tame even the strictest of formal dressers into a casual denim loving fiend, you don’t have a whole lot of pairs of nice pants. Perhaps you have only one pair. And perhaps that one pair looks ridiculous with your tall, black winter boots. And thus I came to the conclusion that the open-toed black slides were the lesser of the two fashion evils.
Dressed and shod and bundled in my heavy winter coat (The coat, at least, I could be confident in. Probably the most fashion-conscious of all the girls with whom I had worked in Romania had told me on several occasions that “it makes me with the eye,” which, when translated a little less literally into English, means “I wouldn’t mind if I had one of those myself,” and so, if she had liked my coat, I could rest assured that it would do.), I made my way from the house in the Bronx to the subway, and then from the subway to 5^th Avenue.
I was nervous. I’m usually nervous when I do new things, and job interviews fall under that category, but my nervousness was directed more towards the prospect of actually getting this job, rather than making a good impression at the interview. If I didn’t make a good impression, so be it. I may never see these people again, and I’d get another job somewhere. But if I did make a good impression, and if I did get this job, who only knows what sort of stupid things I may do while training? Might they regret hiring me?
All too quickly I forget the lesson that worrying will not add a single moment to my life.
As I sat with my potential supervisor while she went over my application, we considered how remarkable it was that:
-I had spent three years in Romania, and her best friend is Romanian;
-my former employer’s address is in Ramona, CA, and she, having lived in California, knows exactly where that is;
-we both live quite near each other in the Bronx; and
-she’s been to, and loves, Maine, my former residence.
By the end of my interview, I was hired as a bookseller in the middle of Manhattan.
Time to go shopping.