For a few years I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, while my then-boyfriend was in a graduate program at Yale. If you're not attending Yale, New Haven is pretty much a depressing shithole. There's a lot of crime, and a vast social gulf exists between the Yale culture and the town culture that you're never allowed to forget. If you stick to the area around the campus it's sort of pleasant, as long as you forget that the Yale people want nothing to do with you. If you go outside that tiny area, it's a toilet.

I worked in the receiving area of a bookstore, with two old quarreling biddies. One time a new position opened up, I forget what it was exactly, but it involved being on the sales floor more. I applied for it and was granted an interview. The human resources manager was an overly made-up, overly scented idiot to whom I took an instant dislike. Her hair had been teased to the point of humiliation. A vapid personnel manager is just a depressing thing, because there's no way you can impress such a person with your intelligence and sharpness in an interview situation if they don't have the mental acuity to recognize it.

Naturally I didn't get the job. Later that week I was in the breakroom idly staring at the emergency procedures diagram of a man fleeing a fire by smartly taking the stairwell rather than the elevator when the human resources manager, who'd deemed me unfit to advance, came in with her assistant. Each of them had the new issue of TV Guide and a yellow hi-liter, and as I sat watching in amazement they shared a table and for their entire lunch hour they marked all the shows of the upcoming week that they didn't want to miss, discussing them with excitement and anticipation. It was obvious this was a weekly ritual of theirs.