2013, the Year of Failure and/or Monsters University

At the end of 2012, after graduating college and returning home, I saw a career counselor, who I don't think actually helped me that much. Around this time, I also signed up with two job recruiters. The only thing I know I got from any of this was a one-off gig at a Nordstrom Rack in East Palo Alto, checking inventory from 6pm to midnight.

The career counselor almost got me a job, though it was kind of a cheat, as it would have involved working for one of his other clients. This client had an idea to hire veterans to build wooden chicken coops and veggie beds and the career counselor had, without asking me, given him my information and talked me up as a real go-getter. I got a call from the chicken coop guy and we set a time to meet.

I tried to google the business just now to see if it'd gone anywhere and I couldn't find anything, but I did discover a longstanding program in Indiana called Coops For Troops. The people who came up with it had a 9-season TV show called Coop Dreams (I would have gone with Sans Solegg or The Sorrow and the Poultry, but Coop Dreams is a good documentary/chicken pun, I guess). Fourteen years later, I'm discovering I interviewed at a knock-off chicken coop veteran org.

On December 20, 2012, I drove to Oakland to speak with the chicken man. He excitedly showed me around his piece of a huge warehouse, explaining he and his business partner worked full-time jobs and couldn't be very involved in daily operations, so they needed somebody who would turn their idea into a functioning company. He said I could get really creative with it and try things out, which may have been enticing if I'd already had any experience making coops with troops. As I did not, it sounded like I'd spend a few months in constant stress until the money ran out, and then I'd be fired.

Whatever I thought of the business' strengths, the meeting was worth it because this warehouse was mostly leased out to machinists and sculptors preparing for Burning Man. I imagine it's weird to see this stuff in the desert, surrounded by glamping anarchists, but it's probably much weirder to encounter a trio of 20-foot-tall praying nudes on the edge of West Oakland as you're getting a hard sell on how this could be your future.

Showing me another stall in the warehouse, the chicken man pointed out an Airstream camper and told me he was pretty sure its owner was secretly living in it and running a grow lab to pay for his Burning Man adventures. We rounded a corner and I watched a person in safety goggles emerge from a massive steel vagina.

On the way home, I drove 5-10 minutes out of my way so I could pass through Emeryville and get a look at Pixar's front gate.

I don't know why I wanted to see that gate. I liked Pixar's movies– as critical as I've been of the studio, I used to truly love their work– but I wasn't going to catch anything from the road. Steve Purcell wasn't going to be leaning against a stop sign, sketching concept art. Buzz Lightyear wasn't going to drive out on his way to a lunch meeting.

In middle school, my family took a trip to New York, and I badly wanted to see a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre or, barring that, to just see the theatre itself. At that time, in 2005, the theater was underground and the most you could see of it without going inside and down a staircase was a door and a window display with the company's logo.

We ended up seeing two shows, but the window was big on its own. At that point in my life, the window might have been enough for me. My dad related that when he had been a kid and his family had taken a trip to New York, he'd asked my grandfather if they could go see the building where Mad Magazine was made. My granddad didn't get it. It would simply be a door in a regular building you could look at for a minute. What could you glean from that?

Here's what the Mad offices would look like on The Simpsons a few decades after my dad's visit:

Here's what they looked like in real life:

"I don't know," Dad had said. "I just want to see it."

I drove by the Pixar gates.

After my meeting with the chicken man, I took a day to consider my options, wondered if I was being too unambitious by passing up the opportunity and ultimately sent a polite email declining the job offer. The chicken man was nice enough, though he'd soon email bomb me, cc'ing the career counselor. The first email in the string:

When he says "If you wanted to write for a video game company you wouldn't be seeing [career counselor]," he's referring to another place I'd interviewed, who I was waiting to hear back from. I wouldn't get that job. When he says I wrote a good record review musing on being nearly 40, I have no idea what he's referring to. The blog I had at the time is long-deleted and anyway I was 23 (and this guy was in his 50s, not "almost 40"). I wish I knew which thing he was so badly misunderstanding. The idea that he liked my writing so I should reject writing for a living and become a guy who facilitates the creation of chicken coops is wild. Whatever the case, I never became great, so maybe I really did fuck everything up by passing on the chicken coop/veggie bed business. Apologies to the universe.

Interviewing at that video game company, Telltale, was its own thrill, even if the job went to an internal candidate. Sitting in the company's lobby before the interview started, I waited until I was alone and quickly took these two pictures of little displays Telltale had made for trade shows:

I didn't see much of Telltale, but I thought being there was special. The Telltale lobby and the conference room where I was interviewed, the UCB window, the Mad offices, the Pixar gates, there were things happening behind these facades. I just had to get in.

Half a year later, Monsters University came out. This was Pixar's prequel to Monsters, Inc. The Monsters stuff is, to me, easily Pixar's best work. It's the only franchise they've got that doesn't rely on characters in a kids' movie dealing with trauma. It doesn't have Bing Bong vanishing forever, forgotten or Jessie The Cowgirl being abandoned or Nemo's mom dying as she fails to protect her 50 children, who also die.

Monsters' central relationship, between Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman), is as well-written as any friendship in a Kelly Reichardt movie. I'm not saying Monsters University is as artfully made as Old Joy or First Cow, but the Mike and Sully dynamic is as solidly, truly written in its own way. The film's central conceit is that the Mike/Sully odd couple from the first movie don't get along when they first meet, but maybe by understanding the ways they're different, they can find the ways they're the same. That's every prequel, every multi-cam sitcom, etc. It's hack and generic in theory, but the characters are strong enough to make the whole thing work. The writers do a good job making one one guy a clear asshole and then slowly easing in the idea the other guy is also an asshole, just in a different way (this is the heart of Arrested Development, where you eventually realize Michael Bluth is more connected to reality than his family members, but he's still selfish enough to feel entitled to betray any of them in a second). In the first five minutes, you proudly think "I'm like Mike" and then halfway through you think "Aw shit, I'm like Mike." Plenty of Oscar-winning dramas don't properly convey that nuance. Train Dreams the movie had to significantly sand down Denis Johnson's Train Dreams the book to make to make its lead character likable and worthy of grief. Marty Supreme's main kid is a twerp who, by design, doesn't transcend his twerpiness. Monsters University evolves Mike and Sully into friends and better monsters in a smart, organic way that doesn't feel forced.

At the end of Monsters University, Mike and Sully get kicked out of college but start on the road to their dream jobs by working in the Monsters, Inc. mailroom, and we know they hit their goal because we are not the impossible person who has seen Monsters University but not Monsters, Inc.

If I really wanted to stretch this whole thing to an even more annoying place, I'd figure out how to artfully mention the prominence of doors in this series, and maybe that'd be a metaphor for something.

Shortly after watching the movie, I randomly had dinner with my parents and one of their friends, and when this friend asked the kind of place I'd like to work, now that I was a year out of college and putting in time at an internship I didn't love, I said I hoped to end up at a place like Pixar. And this person had a friend who'd spent a decade at Pixar and had just worked on Monster's University. He very generously put us in contact.

It was a terrible time to talk. The Pixar friend had what sounded like a miserable time during production and after however many 7-day work weeks, now that Monsters University had hit theaters, he was taking at least 3 months off. After we talked for a bit on the phone, he said he could put in a recommendation for me, but that he'd be practically off the grid after that and couldn't help further. This was still a huge deal.

I'd looked at Pixar's job listings and everything required an engineering degree or a decade of experience with Pixar's proprietary RenderMan software. But they were hiring a security guard and a Post Production Assistant. I applied to both. If I got the security job, I'd be like David Berman and Stephen Malkmus at the Whitney and then I'd get in at the bottom of another department when an opening appeared. I talked to the Pixar employee one more time and he told me my idea of working up from security, just as the characters in Pixar's latest movie had worked up from mail, would not work. They'd never brought somebody from security into another department. My faith in the Disney corporation and cartoon monsters for toddlers was perhaps misplaced.

I didn't get either job, anyway. I'd have taken it. In a sense, it's encouraging to be rejected despite having a vague "in," as I am a person who largely doesn't have connections in any industry, and it's nice to know that wasn't the only thing holding me back.

Even before we found out about John Lasseter, it'd been foolish of me to think a Pixar movie's moral would translate to its corporate structure. It isn't that different from a kid who loves Power Rangers and hopes someday a big hologram head will give him a power suit and a robot dinosaur. I was an adult watching Snow White and wondering when my prince would come. I was hopeful and naive. If I can be generous with my past self, I think I was trying to play Pixar's game, getting cute with the security guard idea in a way that might catch their eye, dressing for the job I wanted by planning to mirror the plot of their latest movie. I can't hide from it too much, though– I was and am the kind of person who'd drive by a company's gates.

I'd never connected these before now, but I just remembered something. A little later, after I'd been working an unpaid internship in San Francisco for 6 months, I had a conversation with my boss about getting hired full-time. When I'd started, he'd said if I stuck around that long, they'd bring me on board in a real way. I worked at least two 7-hour days in this company's offices and then filled the rest of the work week put in 8-hour days from home. It was a full-time job and I received nothing. It must have been illegal. I was also working three days a week at a bookstore, and if that job scheduled me for a weekend, I just wouldn't have a day off that week. If the store scheduled me for a weekday, I'd check-in with the internship in the morning, go work at the bookstore and then come home and do internship stuff.

So I was in the internship's San Francisco offices and I Skyped my boss, who was at his home, and my boss said they wouldn't be able to take me on as an employee, despite what he'd promised 6 months earlier. It was defeating. My sense of FOMO was already immense– it took me an extra year to graduate college, as transferring led to me losing a bunch of credits from my old school and getting a string of new required classes from the major at my new school. For example, I'd taken an astronomy class for a quarter at University of Washington to satisfy a gen ed science need, and then when I moved to American University, they didn't have an astronomy class and wouldn't convert the old credit over to anything but elective credit, so I needed to take Computer Sciences for a semester to satisfy their similar requirement. And I don't have any shame around my five years in undergrad, but it did mean many of the people I went to high school with had entered the workforce a year before I did, and I was getting Facebook notifications where old acquaintances were celebrating their second year at Indeed or their promotion at Nest while I was working an unpaid internship with what turned out to be no chance of sticking around.

When my boss said he couldn't hire or pay me, we wrapped up the phone call, I packed my stuff and walked out of the office. I spent some time at a Garry Winogrand exhibit at SFMoMA and wandered a mile to see the outside of the Double Fine Productions offices. It was simply a building I looked at for a minute. I'd applied to a half-dozen jobs at Double Fine over the past few years, had been met with total silence, and just wanted to see the place. And then I took the train home.

The internship did hire me a few days later. I was a Project Coordinator with the same 9-4, M-F schedule and I was paid $1,000 per month, which sounds somehow less legal than not paying me at all. And then I was laid off. The myth of the mailroom was again disproven.

Thirteen years passed and my wife and I watched Monsters University with our preschool-aged son. I still love it. I think it's one of Pixar's best, even as my tolerance for their emotional terrorism has peaked.

Monster's University is a very silly movie. The Monstropolis setting means every character looks and moves differently. Some of them have two arguing heads, some have suction cup tentacle arms, one's a pair of arms with a face, a couple are building-sized. The movie keeps introducing new scenarios to bounce its characters around and my son cracked up at most of them, which means I cracked up at most of them, even as I kept thinking about the last time I'd watched the movie, back in 2013.

I never got through any of the doors that mattered. I don't suspect I ever will. In 2013, every day felt like a failure built on top of the previous day's failures. I don't feel that way in 2026, and that's worth a lot. The world is unquestionably getting worse and I have not been made great by a chicken coop entrepreneur. I haven't even been made good by a chicken coop entrepreneur. If things marginally better improve between 2026 and 2039 at the same rate they did between 2013 and 2026, or if they stay where they are now and I'm in a quality-of-life stasis from here to the end, and if you and I can live long lives, I'll be thrilled. And that will have been a victory.