When I was in law school, I had a couple of mock interviews arranged by the career center. Neither was particularly successful. During the second, I was distracted by the interviewer’s amazing view from the Sears Tower. I knew I wasn’t giving the interview my full attention, but yet I was powerless to stop staring out the window. I consoled myself that it wasn’t a real interview.

The view wasn’t my problem during the first mock interview: that interview was conducted in a window-less, closet-sized room in the library. I actually had thought everything was going fairly well until, when the interview portion had concluded and the reviewing portion had begun, the interview set down her papers, crossed her arms, and said, “I’ve never had to tell anyone this, but you smile too much.”

I couldn’t even make sense of that. I was sure that I hadn’t been smiling cheesily or vapidly throughout the interview; I was sure that I hadn’t even been grinning nervously. I had been feeling relaxed, and so I had been smiling. I liked law school, and it was easy for me to smile when I talked about it. Didn’t that reflect positively on me? That I enjoyed what I was doing? Nevertheless, I nodded seriously and wrote smile less in my notes.

I thought about it for the next couple of weeks, making concerted efforts to put a serious expression on my face during class. (Unfortunately, I think my expression of “serious thought” with knitted eyebrows was awfully close to my expression of “now, wait, that doesn’t make sense.”) Then I promptly discarded my interview notes. I wasn’t going to smile less. That was ridiculous. If I’m pleased to meet someone or enjoying the conversation, I’m going to smile, even if I’m in a professional situation.

In fact, I would smile especially if I was in a professional situation. When I began having real interviews for jobs, it was my enthusiasm for bankruptcy law that led an excellent conversation with the interviewer from the firm that eventually hired me. I’m obviously not saying that I got that job just on a smile, but the smile certainly didn’t hurt anything.

Read Katie’s blog (the name of which came about from that mock interview) at Perky to a Fault!

In order to fulfill my life science requirement in college, I took a class called “Bugs and People.” The title was misleadingly simple, and it was taught by an energetic, if slightly kooky, woman who was clearly quite passionate about entomology. The class strove to teach me much more science than I had bargained for, but, to this day, the thing that I most recall was the lesson on eating insects. We learned that people in other parts of the world routinely eat insects, and the accompanying lab offered the chance to taste some of these insects. I politely declined, explaining that I was a vegetarian.

At the time, it was true. I was a vegetarian throughout my early to mid-twenties, and, although I was never militant about it, it kept me insulated from having to eat undesirable foodstuffs like insects. My vegetarianism arose my distrust of the cook in our sorority house and my fear of food-born illness, and, once I had stopped eating meat on a daily basis, I lost the taste for it. I stuck with it throughout the rest of college and through a traveling consultant job that found me relying on peanut butter and carrot sandwiches as a main source of sustenance. I was still a vegetarian during a trip to Egypt, in which I struggled patiently to explain to a server that I didn’t eat any shrimp, so just giving me “little shrimps” was not satisfactory; similarly, telling me that there were “no shrimps” in my meal was not acceptable when I could clearly see legs of something emerging from it.

China was what finally broke me. I was able to maintain my diet in Beijing, our first stop, and pleaded vegetarian when faced with the street market of skewered scorpions, starfish, and, yes, insects. Once we were out of the capital city, however, finding meat-free food became more of a challenge. Armed with only a tiny phrase book and a laughable attempt at a Mandarin accent, I was rarely able to explain that I didn’t eat meat. My guidebook suggested I tell servers that I was Buddhist, but I was reluctant to appropriate an entire belief system just to accommodate my entirely voluntary dietary restrictions. I did my best, but meat showed up in the strangest places, including inside my tofu once. I finally gave up. Let me tell you, once you’ve gotten sick from reintroducing meat into your diet, it’s not an experience you want to repeat in this lifetime.

Since I started eating meat again, I’ve eaten all kinds: ostrich, alligator, and even snake. I had never again been presented with insects, though … until today. We were strolling along innocently through the Lower East Side, enjoying the spring day, when we stumbled across a promotion for a certain beer company. They were giving away free street tacos, but the catch was that the tacos all contained non-mainstream proteins. We ended up with one filled with brains and one stuffed with crickets. The brains were not particularly enjoyable. They were wet and lumpy, and it was similar to what I imagine it is like to eat paper mâché. The crickets, on the other hand, were crunchy and salty and not bad at all.

These crickets also had the benefit of being presented with avocado. Somehow, I doubt that the science lab’s edible insects came with such accoutrements.

Visit Katie’s blog at Perky to a Fault.

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