“Yeah, well, I don’t intend to pay for it,” he said, somewhat menacingly.

My first interview of the day was with a writer who taught magazine journalism. I was so tired and borderline deranged with anxiety that when he asked me to lay out a plan for an independent news site, I just started yelling smart-sounding phrases louder and louder while waving my finger in the air. “I’m going to make a health site!” I intoned, like Blogger Mussolini. “Where readers can connect with people who have similar health conditions! And it will have audio slideshows.”

Toward the end of my rant, he was leaning forward in his seat and shouting a bit himself. “You’ve got me excited!” he said. “I wanna come work for you!”

Level one down, I thought.

My very last interview of the day was with the journalism school director, whose facial expression could have best been described as “not amused.” She asked me how I planned to get people to pay for news online, given that digital ads were basically worthless, news is depressing, online content has become a race to the bottom, oh, and we’re in the midst of an economic calamity.

At that point, my lack of sleep tugged on me like a whiny toddler. I let out a jumble of words about multimedia. “Uh-huh,” the director said, distractedly.

I desperately spewed a few more sentences about Twitter.

“Riiiight,” she said. She looked like she was gathering her things to leave.

At that point, something clicked in me. It didn’t feel like “you got this,” or any other pseudo-empowering aphorism. Instead, the voice inside me said, “Nothing in the world cares about you. Your career is nonexistent. Your parents hate this journalism plan. Your boyfriend broke up with you because you’re boring. These professors have seen twelve people like you today. Kelly maybe cares a little bit, but she can’t help you now. If you care about you, it’s time to think of a way to save yourself.”

I dug hard in the back of my brain for a string of jargon I hadn’t said already. One that made slightly more sense, or was slightly closer to what these people wanted to hear.

“The thing is,” I ventured, “we have to scale users up the engagement ladder.”

The director paused. She wrote that down. “Hmmm,” she said.

Then she grasped my hand weakly and said she’d be in touch. I was free to go.

The next day, Kelly and I went to the Santa Monica Pier, an old-fashioned boardwalk perched out over the ocean. As we wandered past the arcades toward the water, Kelly asked me how my interview went.

“Eh, it went okay,” I said. “I was honestly so tired I had no idea what I was saying half the time. Plus the other people are like real geniuses. I highly doubt I beat the Harvard girl at this.”