One Fine Day

I am having a good day.

This morning I woke up early, and attended a presentation at the National Democracy Insititute, a major player in international political development/ democracy promotion. They were recapping the November 7 elections in authoritarian Burma, but more than that, they were demonstrating a new project/ platform that combined GIS mapping reported elections fraud with first-person narrative citizen reporting of the events. Rapid, compelling, grassroots, and almost NPRish in its earnestness. The application in Burma - a country with relatively limited communications tech and a highly repressive regime - was only tangentially of interest to me. Mostly, I wanted to know about its application in other, less severe, environments (like those in Central Asia where I am more interested).

After the presentation, I met with the NDI staff responsible for their Kyrgyz programs, and got to talk a little "shop" with him in the lobby. I'm working on some independent research, and having trouble getting access to a few government reports which this new contact, Alex, volunteered to help me locate. Double-plus.

We were interrupted, briefly, by Ian Schuler, one of the panelists and the guy behind the new technology platform. He found my questions intriguing, and wanted to follow up with me about the challenges of application outside Burma and discuss what systemic biases they might encounter. I handed out a few business cards, then had to be on my way. Like I have for the past 2 months, I had 5.5 hours of work to do as a receptionist at the World Resources Institute.

It was raining, so for the first time in almost 3 weeks, I didn't ride a Capital Bikeshare rent-a-bike over to the offices near Union Station. Since joining the annual membership in mid-September, I've saved $104 in metro fare. Minus the $50 annual membership and the $26 I paid for a helmet, and I'm already $28 in the black, with a few weeks of fall and all of Spring and Summer still to take advantage.

At work, I started the day as I always do reviewing news relevant to Central Asia, and posting an item of interest on my new twitter feed - @richardrweber. It's not designed to be a fun, personal kind of twitter. It is very professionally oriented, and almost exclusively designed to get me better connected with other regional experts in the hopes that this leads to a job. Toward that end, it's been pretty successful. Back in October, I also started a new blog - Shashlykistan - which is also devoted to my semi-professional analysis of Kyrgyz and Central Asian political, economic and social developments. Initially, it was a way to force me to keep up with events, and hone some writing, research, and analytic skills. With the holding of parliamentary elections in Kyrgyzstan on October 10, I found myself opportunely positioned to access and write about these elections, and their resulting parliament. Much of what I discovered had not previously been mentioned in other news sources, so I passed it along to some contacts I have in Bishkek, Prague, and professors at Columbia.

Thanks to the beauty of social networking, my posts started being retweeted, and suddenly I had a burst of traffic from people I didn't know inside Kyrgyzstan as well as Russia, the US, and across Europe. The more I tweeted, retweeted, and posted my own material, the more attention I seemed to attract. It's still a very modest endeavor, garnering just 38 followers and less than 200 blog hits per week. But when graphed as an increase over time (from Zero and Zero a month ago) it's darn near meteoric.

Today, I had elected not to write anything new. I was just going to repost someone else's article on the prospect for growing international investment in the small Kyrgyz Gold and Uranium mines. First I tried to tweet it, then to RT with an appropriate caveat - I didn't agree with a few of the author's key assumptions/ predictions. But I just couldn't get it into 144 characters. So I rapped off a quick blog post, capturing the gist of his article, and then responding with my own points. It was nothing ground-breaking, but it was the start of a very positive trend that I hope will continue for as long as I have the time and energy to invest in the project - it came naturally.

Most of my work has involved intense, but not especially rigorous, analysis of elections statistics. It's interesting, and I love seeing what different things the numbers could be suggesting, but the process has been far from organic. It hasn't "flowed," to overuse a term.

And today it did.

I stayed 30 minutes late at the office to finish it. I do almost all of my writing - including this post - while on duty at World Resources Institute. As a receptionist, they need me to stay at my desk, answer the phone, and courteously greet guests when they arrive in the lobby. What I do with the rest/ vast majority of my time - whether researching Kyrgyz politics or playing Sudoku - is apparently of no concern to my supervisors. I like to think that WRI isn't paying me $12/hour to be a well-dressed phone monkey, but instead that they are generously subsidizing my research/writing efforts, like an election policy fellowship, in return for my courteous assistance with basic office tasks.

Late that afternoon - in fact, just shortly before I began my blog post - one of the WRI staff dropped by my desk with some good news. WRI specializes in Ecological, Alternative Energy, and Public Transport research, analysis and advocacy. I think of them as the crucial junction between do-good scientific researchers, technology inventors, profit-hungry corporations, and government legislators. They collect the scientific research as evidence, then convince governments and corporations that a particular technology will be the best (most fair/ most profitable) means to address a serious environmental issue.

This is not a field I'm dying to get into, though obviously it is an interesting one. But I also need a job, and two things I've learned for certain from my 6 months-and-counting of unemployment are:

1. You need a job to get a job (i.e. some 'relevant experience' requires you to have done certain things, even if they aren't especially relevant).
2. Hiring is done by connections, not applications.

So when WRI posted an "Objective Coordinator" position on its careers website I flagged the HR staff and put in an app. My initial interview went pretty well, and while they knew I had no passion for US Climate Policy, they also knew that I could handle the demands of the position. In fact, as many others have pointed out, they were rather put off by my over-qualifications. I explained that I was transitioning careers, and that I understood that would require me to start over at an entry-level job, with the expectation that my mid-level skills will still be there when the times comes to use them again. I think they bought it, and more than that, I think they liked me. It's almost silly how important something as subjective of that is.

It had been almost 2 weeks since my initial screen, and I was worried this opportunity had also passed me by. That's when Kevin stopped by to inform me that they were excited to recommend me for the next level of job interviews - this time with the director of the Climate & Energy Program. I'm still a long way from having a job - and the concerns about my interests and qualifications remain, but in 6 months pushing my Columbia M.A. in the job hunt, it will be only the fourth time that I've made it to the 2nd round of interviews. If I make it to interview #3, that would be a first.

Again the rain, so I had to take the subway home. I like the DC metro system - it's not Shelley's favorite, but I find it logical enough, fast enough, reliable, and clean. More than all of that is that I can do a Sudoku or crossword from the daily Express during my transit - the one thing lacking in my bicycle commute.

Getting home, I got to make Stir-Fry for Shelley, one of her favorites, and then settle in for a sappy Rom-Com (The Ugly Truth - do yourself a favor, and wait for the inevitable post-modern remake). Still, it was better than watching Michael Vick dissect and destroy my struggling adopted Redskins two nights in a row, and that, too, is worth celebrating.

Later this week I have a networking happy hour, another democracy presentation (this time on Saakashvili's Georgia), and of course that interview with the director. I've also been asked by a good regional web news service to write a short article for them on the Kyrgyz parliament, and I'm stacking up with ideas for my own blog topics.

Harry Potter comes out this weekend.

I ordered a 5 lb Greenberg Smoked Turkey for next week.

I find out soon how much longer this idyllic WRI receptionist job can carry on.

The Redskins play the Titans next weekend, then the Vikings after that.

I am having a good day, and it looks like there might be a few more ahead.

Weber

::(lame)Texpatriot