Yahoo, she cried

I've got a new post up on my Forbes blog about how I went through three interviews and didn't get a job at Yahoo. It was a full-time blogging job. It would've been cool to get it. I was sad I didn't.

"How Not to Get a Job at Yahoo":

I rocketed out the front door in search of better reception. I think I was wearing a T-shirt from the day before and a pair of sweat pants that were falling down, so I had to hold them up while I was speeding down the courtyard walkway, veering around the corner, and attempting to answer his questions at the same time. I took a seat on the curb. A cat approached, meowing loudly. I waved it away frantically.

This month has been one of those months. Where everything is in transition. Where things you think are going to turn out one day don't, and the things that you think aren't going to happen do but only at the last minute when you think all is lost. So, it's different.

I neglected this blog for a while, something I wrote about last week. But I like doing it again. So much of my life is spent doing what other people tell me or what other people want me to do, and this is one of the few places where I can do what I want, and say what I want, and not have to think so much but just do.

Sometimes I get emails or comments from people who are like, Wow, you have a great drive, and I'm like, Ha-ha, you missed the part where I impersonated someone in a coma for several days. The other day, someone was like, You should write something about people who aren't as driven as you, and then I was like, Oh, but I do, but then I thought maybe I didn't. Maybe I write more about people I want to be like, or people I admire for some reason or the other, or people who have a lot of tenacity, or grit, or whatever you want to call it.

I don't necessarily write about the depression, or the anxiety, or the doubt, or the failures, or the confusion. Mostly, people don't want to hear about that. They want the American Dream, and Conflict Resolution, and Overcoming Obstacles, and I Did It So You Can Too, and Happy Endings. But my depression and anxiety and various other pathologies -- maybe they are a part of the success. Can you hold these two seemingly contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time -- that one's failure can be the same as one's success?

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How to do this

This week was a bear. A lot of work. A lot of stuff.

This was the highlight. My favorite panel is the biking-to-the-store one. Her tiny, thin legs. The determined face.

Today, I wrote about how to be a journalist:

I’m standing in the dressing room of a strip club in Texas interviewing a stripper herpetologist. There are two giggling girls crammed into a toilet stall that isn’t a toilet stall, really; it’s a gold curtain hanging in front of a toilet and that’s it. A girl with long brown hair wanders around, looking for something; she’s wearing glasses and jeans but she’s topless. A girl in a pink and black polka-dot bikini preens at the mirror. Nearby, a girl pulls up her black lace top to put on deodorant. A makeup artist applies makeup to a dancer’s upturned face; “Full face with lashes $30, no lashes $25,” the sign reads. It smells like perfume and strawberry lotion and a lifetime’s worth of Aqua Net hairspray. On the other side of the wall, the music is thumping for the girl on stage.

That made me realize I need to do some real journalism soon, or my head is going to explode.

In other news that is great, I'm doing another interview for The War Project next week.

I am ready.

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Strip the sausage

I've got another installment of my journalism sausage series online. The series focuses on the strip club economy.

"Why I Go to Strip Clubs"

In an email, a strip club patron offered a poignant peek at why he goes.

"The primary reason that I go to strip clubs is #7 on your list: loneliness. In the dead of night, alone at home, the loneliness sometimes becomes unbearable. There aren’t many places to go in the middle of the night, and most of those choices don’t necessarily ensure any kind of reasonable human interaction."

I really love that email. Incidentally, the man who wrote that email also wrote a letter I published on Letters from Johns.

To be perfectly honest, this series has interested me more than anything I've done in a while. Sometimes, I write these in my opinion somewhat cheesy posts on my Forbes blog about, golly gee, making it through the hard times, and, oh, no, I had a really hard interview but this is what I learned, or some crap about some other tripe I don't care about.

I suppose unsurprisingly, those types of vapid posts are rather popular. To be frank, I find most of them rather stupid. They feel weak, and now that I look back on it, fake. Like some kind of person holding your hand across a busy street, when secretly they're more interested in what would happen to your body if they shoved you in front of a car.

If you want to get at the meat of something, you have to get out a cleaver, and writing tripe on how to perform better in a job interview is only going to get you a surface layer of fat, and who wants that?

This email I got from Mr. Loneliness -- that's like the first soul-baring email I've gotten in a long time.

Everything else is bullshit.

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Why do you go to strip clubs?

I'm working on a series on the strip club economy on my Forbes blog. Now, I'm asking my readers to tell me why they go to strip clubs.

"Why Men Go to Strip Clubs"

Some men go to strip clubs because they’re lonely, and they want someone to talk to who will be judgement-free. Some men are single or not having sex or the sex they want with their partners, and strip clubs are a way for them to explore their fantasies. Some men go to strip clubs to conduct business meetings, or because it’s easier to find a woman to spend time with when you’re paying her than when you’re with your friends at a nightclub, or as an escape from the grind of work, of monogamy, of being whatever a man is supposed to be in the 21st century.

At the end of the post, I ask readers to tell me why they go to strip clubs. Email me your thoughts. I may include them in an upcoming post. They will remain anonymous. 

I also mention in the post Letters from Johns, a very popular series I did in 2008 wherein I asked men why they paid for sex.

The project generated quite a bit of buzz when, a few months after I launched it, Eliot Spitzer was caught up in a prostitution scandal. I wrote about the letters in Newsweek, it was mentioned on TIME.com, and Susie Bright called it "riveting reading."

Here are some of the most interesting letters from that project:

"I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done"

One can try to hang a sign on us, the collective john, as perpetuating the global conspiracy of sex/slave traffic, and I'll grant that my Thailand trip may have/probably did contribute to some sort of thuggery. But in the end, I am ashamed of nothing I have done. 

"I'm a State Investigator"

I keep a coded diary, in case it's discovered. 1 dot is oral, 2 dots is vaginal sex, and 2 connected dots is anal sex. In the event that someone questions the dots, they are associated with good/bad days: no dots are normal days, 1 dot is a good day, 2 dots is a great day, and 2 connected dots is the best day for that week.

"I Have a Physical Disability"

I am now a regular customer, although not as regular as I’d like to be. This is mostly because my brother has moved overseas, and it is hard to find people who will willingly accompany me. However, each time I go, I no longer feel like a cripple. I feel whole.

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Grace under disaster

A while back, by which I mean, like, this spring, I started doing this series on my Forbes blog about the stripper economy. Then I got bored with it. But then time went by, and I got interested in it again.

More recently, some things have happened on Forbes that have made the traffic to my blog there slump. I mean, slump. It really blows. If I don't have a huge influx of traffic before the end of this month, I'll be out a quarter of what I usually make there monthly.

I don't totally understand why this is the case, because it's not just me, but it's been frustrating. But here is the good part of the frustrating. I kept trying to make the situation better, and it wasn't happening. And then, I just, like, gave up. Like, fuck this shit.

That was freeing. Because then it was like, I'll just post whatever the fuck I want. I'm sure there are some people who think I'm tarnishing the Forbes brand by writing about strippers, but whatever. I'm interested in this series, and these days there are days when it takes a lot to interest me, so I am glad to be interested in anything, anything at all.

How Much Do Strippers Make?

In January, she worked eleven days and made $3,952; in February, she worked nine days and made $4,402.

"I literally picked up dollar after dollar off of my stage, did some sort of boobies-in-the-face magic or waved my [redacted] at someone, and put those dollars on my garter. Those dollars are tangible. They aren’t numbers. They’re actual singular pieces of paper, and I think that makes a huge difference. What I was worth as a dancer was tipped to me, and I held the paper for it."

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