In applying for dozens of jobs, I realized a few things. Here they are, with bullets.
My laptop's software is severely out of date. I'm not entirely certain that I'm not working with the same level of technology as I was in 1996, borrowing my roommate's Brother word processor.
Dramatic reenactment
There are a surprisingly large amount of people who wander around downtown in my neighborhood in the middle of weekday afternoons. I mean, allowing for some staycations and students, overall, doesn't everyone have jobs???
I have to start giving myself props for my ability to speak and write eloquently, even when I am talking utter and complete bullshit. I am honing this skill in spades throughout job applications and cover letters. Truly, this is one of my gifts. If I were a sociopath, I'd be remarkably successful. Normally this kind of self involved thought would disturb me but I'm just glad that I'm good at something. I literally just came up with a teaching philosophy statement that I pulled from the nether regions of my butthole. Or maybe I gleaned it from various online samples, I don't know. Related question: Why is it not possible to answer questions honestly on job applications? Instead of employing my mad writing/lying (wrying?) skills, I could simply say, "I am not in any way passionate about this part time job I'm applying for but rather I am desperate for a source of income and would do a good job under those Pavolvian circumstances." Frankly, that should be good enough. Too much emphasis is placed on the expectation of "passion" on the part of the employee. Can't you people just be happy that your applicant NEEDS MONEY and will work as hard as they can in order to get money?
Even in bulleted format, I am capable of going off on tangents.
I just spent 3 hours, I repeat THREE HOURS filling out an online application for a PART TIME JOB. I get the vetting process and that they won't hire just anyone but I feel like a significant part of my brain has died.
I really advise against job seeking and online dating simultaneously. It is an exercise in masochism.
I need to go outside to take a walk because my butt hurts and I feel deflated. I just realized that butt and deflated were used in the same sentence. Maybe I need a nap.
I am still unemployed. However, despite this uncertain, cloudy sensation of SO MUCH TIME PASSING, it has in reality only been 20 days. Thankfully, my freakouts have become intermittent as opposed to constant and gnawing. As of today, I've applied to 48 jobs. I have gotten no callbacks. If I wanted this kind of silent rejection, I would have gone into acting. Or been a real writer.
I've been doing my ever loving best to fill up my time in such a way that I don't feel like an utter dirtbag with no job. It helps that I have a part time job to fill up the hours on certain days. I've started an exercise program and I finally got around to getting rid of that old laptop that has been in my possession since 2007. I took a bike riding class last weekend and I have been practicing singing at the top of my lungs during the quiet afternoons in my apartment. The conversations I have with myself have progressed from scintillating to slightly disturbing and Facebook has become a tether to the working world. (You guys are just like me, always online but at least you are getting paid for it!) I'm all caught up on Orange is the New Black, Law and Order SVU, Kroll Show and Inside Amy Schumer. I've read like, four books and endless piles of magazines. I have enrolled in a thumb twiddle workshop and gave myself a part way decent pedicure. I take 6 supermarket trips during the week instead of my usual 3 and my emails to friends have become luxurious, self indulgent opuses that I usually get so embarrassed by that I end up deleting them and sending pared down versions with the bare minimum of "I'm doing just fine, yes. I am totally NOT daydreaming that I'll sprain my ankle but have no health insurance to fix it properly and walk with a limp the rest of my days, no. But yes, I'll totally take you up on your offer of dinner and lunch and drinks." (I honestly have the BEST friends ever.) I'm spending way too much time poring over job ads that say things like this:
"Comfortable in an agile environment of rapid iteration and experimentation, prototyping at various levels of fidelity."
as a requirement. And asking myself "AM I comfortable in an agile environment of rapid iteration? Should I put THAT on my resume?" I've been hanging out for hours with Jeff Buckley and Frank O'Hara and Wes Anderson, wondering if it is at all ironic that back in those not so long ago days when I was working 6 days a week, 13 hours a day, ALL I dreamed about was the ability to do exactly what I'm doing now which is a whole lot of bullshit nothing and doing it with abandon, accompanied by a cloying worry that I'll start talking to myself in public like Jasmine, only not as blonde and in a decidedly less designer homeless outfit.
Future me?
I'm tempering my free time with invented tasks of decluttering, organizing, writing, wining, channeling, planning, driving, walking and oh dear god I just need a job. I'm getting all Colonel Brandon up in here. "Give me a task or I shall go mad." My career is like Elinor, thrashing around on the bed of a really bad head cold.
Before he was the Governor, he was Colonel Brandon. Either way, he had jobs.
Look, all I'm saying is, please hire me. Is that too much to ask?
There are times in my life (lately with alarming frequency) during which I'll realize what date it is and find my brain in a groggy, disconnect, as though I have just woken up from a late afternoon nap, confused at the darkness outside. It could be morning, it could be evening. I feel panicked that I am not doing something I should be doing or meeting someone I've made an appointment with and in complete disbelief that I've arrived at such a late date in the year, utterly without ceremony or even an x-ed out calendar square to mark the days that came before.
If we are friends on Facebook or in real life, you'll know already that I was let go from my full time job after six years. Well, about 5 years and 361 days. The rumor mill was on hyper grind the past six months or so and each day as we got closer to the end of the semester, the more broken down and piecemeal our futures seemed to get. People were stressed, nosy, snarky and back-stabby. On more than one occasion, I heard tell of people crossing the great divide of that great divided building to come into the library to speculate about how we should all look for jobs. We were dunked, forcibly inside an ice cold tub of speculation. I tried to allay it by staying in my little windowless office for six months but it came to me. It floated on the echoes of all those gossipy sirens, marooned behind their desks with their little singsong desires to see people crash into the rocks with all their belongings in a lidless cardboard box. Toward the end there we may as well have started a pool; at least the ones who got voted off employment island could have had a monetary prize to take home and cry into.
In the end, I was one of ten who got called up to a room with two young executives who had business cards and business suits and business eyes. I saw them and just thought "You are the Dischargers." They could've been comic book villains, thwarting everyone who is too comfortably settled in their job with separation agreement and a cackle. They wore grey suits and wedding rings and slick hair and clean-lensed glasses. They spoke in hushed tones and, had my life been the movie I've always suspected it was, the song playing in the background of this scene would have been "Karma Police". It would begin at the most appropriate lyric:
Karma police, arrest this man
He talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge
He's like a detuned radio
And, after just one jargon filled, initial here and here, we're really sorry but it isn't you it's us hour, I walked out of that room with an escort. It was a long walk. I'd been punctured in a small but significant way and I felt myself deflating in the silence of the elevator. I threw all six years of my things in a box and as I said goodbye to my coworkers, I cried, but only because loss is always unexpected, even when you see it coming.
I suppose it is a rite of passage of sorts, getting laid off. I hope this works on a quota system because mine is filled. I'd love to expound upon the next phase of my life but there is only a big old TBD stamp on its face, obscuring all the relevant text. I've sent out a million resumes, gotten in touch, lit the fires. I still have my part time job which is populated by the nicest, most generous and caring people I've ever worked for and they have given me extra hours and expressed concern about how I'm doing on a daily basis. Long term, I just need a job. It doesn't even have to line up with my career, such as it is/was, it just has to line up with my direct deposit. And now I wait.
It is early in the morning and I'm in the midst of trying to form new morning habits. Naturally this means cramming in some blogging/writing time in the tiny corners of free moments. I've been reading a book called Daily Rituals by Mason Currey which details the creative habits of writers, artists, composers, philosophers and other people throughout history who became immortal through their work. I love this book. I love the glimpse into the human behind the creative genius of so many creators of art, not to mention how it satisfies the voyeur all of us has about other people when we observe them and think, "Just what the hell is it that you DO all day?" Am I the only one who thinks these things? Some of these artists were morning people, some had 9-5 jobs, some had no jobs, worked at home or in their studios or in cafes. Some of them drank booze all afternoon and night and worked like demons through the early morning, some slept a full eight hours, dressed and fed their families and managed to squeak out masterpieces while their children were at school and their husbands at work. Some of them worked for 12 hours a day, others for 2-3 hours a day. Some of them had truly bizarre habits. Friedrich Schiller comes to mind as he had a need to have rotting apples in the drawer of his desk at all times because the smell inspired his creativity. Patricia Highsmith bred snails. (Ew.) What ties them all together is that they put in the work, they sacrificed time and effort and they completed something. I find it inspiring that someone like Wallace Stevens could work his entire career at something as dull as processing insurance claims during business hours and then go home to write. Same with T.S. Eliot.
This book got me thinking about my own habits and routines and in doing so I hoped to understand why and how I went from writing every day and finishing things in my early 20s to only ever writing about beginnings and endings and/or writing about why I can't write. I don't have definitive answers yet but I'd love to be able to blame the internet and adult responsibilities and my delusional perception that time is on my side (despite knowing that time is never on anyone's side, ever and never will be.) In recent years, I've come to understand that I am thoroughly a morning person and am trying to form morning habits that will foster and fuel my creativity the rest of the day. This isn't terribly easy with such limited time and two jobs and all that other crap one is supposed to do as one becomes an adult. Yet I can no longer deny that I'm best on a freshly awake brain. The sunlight erases everything from the night before. So that's when work needs to be done.
I know my body will rebel against me on this most mornings. But frankly, if Toni Morrison can take care of her 9-5 corporate job and raise two children as a single parent and STILL manage to crank out her body of work, well that just proves it can be done.
And on another note, I would just love to find out the daily rituals of people I know. There is something so satisfying to me about knowing what all everyone gets up to on a typical day. I'd love to someday come to discover that someone with whom I share an office keeps a drawer full of rotten apples in their desk drawer at home or that the genial guy who serves my coffee at the local bagel shop is a ghostwriter for James Patterson. Until that day, I suppose I could just make it up...
I've been playing a game on my iPhone that is causing my brain to shrink. Or at least as I'm driving in the sunlight after longish bouts of playing this game I get this odd sensation of something constricting just behind my eyes and somewhere near the top of my skull. I can envision my brain's wrinkles. This could be deemed "a headache" but I prefer to call it "avoidance pains". I've never been a video game person, apart from that one summer circa 1992 when I played Sonic the Hedgehog in between trips to the library for more reading material. I never aspire to reach the next level or rescue the princess or find a beating heart in the middle of the statue of liberty (wtf is up with video games?). I can only surmise that this is because after a short while, well, shorter for me than most people apparently, all the colors and constant movement make me feel the wrinkles in my brain and not in a good way. In case you are wondering, there IS a good way to feel that.
Someone logical would say to me at this point, "Just stop playing the game." And I would just counter, "You are absolutely right." I'd definitely say that. And during the waking hours, when I'm up to here with things to do, menial tasks that need completing, people to watch and observe and frozen yogurt to eat, "just stopping" is easy. When it is 2am and I cannot sleep and everything is terrible in the half dark that dulls the edges of everything and my glasses are off and what I can see of the world is amorphous and I feel that dread creeping up on me with not one other person to distract me, it is less easy to just stop. It is a really stupid game but it keeps my hands busy and my eyes active and its clear, two dimensions are oddly comforting. And sometimes I just want to do really stupid things. Even if they shrink my brain.
Not helping my brain shrinkage sensation is the fact that I have some kind of blockage in my ear. It is a feeling that never strikes until after Memorial Day when the pools open and I'm overzealous about the amount of time I spend floating in chlorinated water or jumping waves in the Atlantic. It arrived early this year. What makes it different is that it is disturbing, since I have yet to go swimming and haven't dunked my head in any water that I can remember (I've cut back dramatically on my alcohol intake.) I tried that Debrox stuff where you put drops in your ear and then do your best "Detective Goren" while you wait for magic to happen.
I always expected him to keel over.
The process did nothing for me this morning, apart from being orgasmic and pleasurable. The "water" remains. I feel like I'm getting half the sarcasm of the library patrons today. Just as well, I'm working with a small amount of sleep.
I've been streaming entire series of shows, been cooking elaborate meals for one, been taking walks through town and drives around the block, been cleaning my closets, shredding old documents and giving things away and I want things emptied out. It's my mantra of late: Empty empty empty! I have scoured my kitchen and bathroom twice this week but there are little black, round bugs that sneak in on warm days and scatter, unafraid on the kitchen floor and sit immobile, in defiance of mortality, even as I approach them with a paper towel of death or a spray from the pesticide bottle. I am repulsed and humbled by their tenacity. Mostly I just want them out of my kitchen. I spend a handful of moments at work or driving in my car thinking about those stupid bugs. Wondering if they've gathered for a summit in my ear.
I'm definitely avoiding something. I just can't figure out what it is and the game, the water/bug summit in the ear, the incessant streaming of several seasons of shows at one time the cleaning and getting rid of...are just a freshman survey class in Avoidance. I've become so adept at this that I'm convinced that should I take the leap and strip away all the distraction I'd just end up hearing and old man's heartbeat under the floorboards. No one wants that.
I have felt the spring come on and cradle me each morning when I leave my apartment, but just a hint of it and only on every other morning. While this makes it impossible to dress appropriately (I alternate short sleeves and freezing ankles), I am grateful in a way that is louder than bombs for my ability to leave my winter coat at the dry cleaners to fester for awhile. I want a time gap big enough to allow me to misremember winter and all of its bullshit.
However, it must be spring; I've been dreaming of babies and wanting to take care of things. Sometimes if I squint hard enough, I can just make out an outline of what I'd be like as a mother. Mostly I think I'm just subconsciously absorbing all the fertility in the endless amount greenery peeking out. Then again, I'm rounding the last lap, taking the last gasp before things become fallow. Look alls I know is that seeing little buds peek out from their hibernation is making me weepy. I don't know what to make of that.
Though it seems like months have passed (9 days) I do know I had a ferociously pleasant Easter. I think Jesus might have been pleased. He just strikes me as the type who would have enjoyed the happy hour cocktails I had on the Friday before, and the Easter family BBQ on Easter Sunday. I think Jesus could have been vegetarian though. I don't know why. I also get the feeling, if he were around today, he'd work in a food co-op and have really great recipes for kale. He'd definitely be into yoga.
I've been at work a lot less than I used to and my brain still pulls at itself, trying to contort itself around this notion of free time, that elusive ruby I've been chasing after for a handful of years. I've been productive in ways I never could have been before when I was keeping a steady pace on the hamster wheel. So that feels good. I have to make sure to be grateful for things that feel good.
And speaking of good, I had a good weekend this past weekend. The movie theater where I volunteer threw a Volunteer's Appreciation Brunch in the theater which began with me walking in the door and being handed a mimosa almost immediately. I ate a bagel the size of my face with locks and cream cheese and I'm salivating in the memory of it. I got to know some of the other volunteers who are almost invariably middle aged to older women, all intelligent and organized and mothers and wives or ex wives. Their lives all take place on the other side of that invisible line that separates the nuclear family from the single person. I felt a bit outside of myself as I sat among them, listening to them talk about friends they unexpectedly had in common, the woes of home ownership and their hopes and dreams for their 20something sons and daughters. I felt a little like I was listening to a radio news program about a foreign country: interested, but wholly disconnected. You know, like this:
I can see your well manicured lawns from here.
One of the founders of the theater, a man I have met at least six times yet has never once remembered me went around asking the group to introduce themselves and to say what movie truly got us interested in movies or what movie really left a mark on us. It was a toss up for me between The Princess Bride and The Godfather, both of which I saw during my 11th year, both of which I will never, ever forget seeing. Well, I didn't see the entire Godfather at that time. I only snuck downstairs while my parents were watching it one night because they expressly told my sister and I not to. Naturally, I had to see why. Unfortunately, I arrived at the part when Sonny gets all of the bullets.
All of them.
It was the first time I had ever seen anything like that. I still remember the sick uncomfortable feeling I got in my stomach, watching the first instance of violence I'd ever seen. (I was really a lucky kid.) But all of that seemed too long to go into at this brunch so I said "The Princess Bride" which is not a lie. It is the first movie I ever truly loved. I remember watching it on my bunk bed after begging my parents to rent it for me. I watched it three times in a row that night and countless more times ever since. I have had lifelong friendships based on a mutual love for this movie. I'm secretly still looking for my Wesley. So yeah, The Princess Bride is an important film in my life.
I know this scene by heart. Even the musical cues.
I was going to write more in this entry but I really just feel like watching The Princess Bride now so to be continued...
"I've been here now for some days, groping my way along, trying to realize my vision here. I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. I've come to find out that it's not the vision, it's not the vision at all. It's the groping. It's the groping, it's the yearning, it's the moving forward." --Chris Stevens, from the Northern Exposure episode "Burning Down the House."
I know it is wrong, but sometimes I'm so damn relieved that I feel no real need to hold myself accountable to my own goals. Before you think me lazy (as true as that might be, I am loathe to be perceived as such) hear me out. It isn't that I don't see things through...well important things...well consequential things anyway. It is just that I silently (or quietly) make these demands of my future time and effort, particularly when it comes to writing and I rarely fulfill any of them. Here's a classic "me" example: last Friday, after getting out of work early, at the same time as I have done every Friday for the last six years, I actually wrote quite a bit. I came close to finishing something I started which is quite notable for me. Pathetic? Sure. But I had promised myself a cocktail in reward and I was going to write like an alcoholic so I could earn it. (It was a kiwi caiprinha in case you care and it really was worth every keystroke).
And while it was happening, I tried not to think ahead or say or think anything that might interrupt the flow but I'd be lying if I wasn't boosted by my usual notion of "I can do this EVERY Friday! Fuck I can do this EVERY DAY!" I had a breakthrough about a future breakthrough, it is my M.O. I get so ahead of myself but I do it in such a quiet, no one knows kind of way that there is no one to talk me down from the ledge. And while that is good for my ego later on when I fail to do what I spontaneously plan, it is really terrible because I have no one to talk me down from the ledge. I can usually be stopped from doing something stupid with even subtle cues from someone else, a glance askance, a distinct clearing of a throat, for example. But the dumb thoughts, the silent goals...they no a stop.
And,when I find myself still in my pajamas, playing a video game on my phone or watching the umpteenth marathon of the umpteenth show (even if it's bad) on one of a million websites, I usually think of this one janitor that works at my full time job. He's been working there, doing that job for as long as anyone can remember. And his job is to clean and do general maintenance, both things at which he fails spectacularly. To wit: everyone in my office has caught him vacuuming in the dark. There have been reports of him eating food from the garbage and I have seen him take the garbage from the pail in my office with his bare hands. He touches it all, my apple cores, my snot tissues. (When asked about that in particular, why he never wears gloves when handling garbage, he responded that he has a strong immune system. I can only assume he also has the ability to ignore everything disgusting about everything he does in life.) He's famous for showing up right smack in the middle of parties we have in the office and parking his huge garbage pail and accouterments right in the center of the room where everyone is gathered, chatting. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Anyway, periodically he'll talk about how he's going to get his doctorate. He's never been to school past high school but he's routinely said he's not even going to bother with community college...he's just going to go all the way right away. He's never clear about what course of study he'll pursue but he's going to do it, any day now. Someone in my office once found out that he ran for mayor of NYC one year and even found proof on video that he had officially announced his candidacy. That guy. I feel like that guy on days like today. Instead of organizing my thoughts and finishing one single thing, I'm vacuuming in the dark, sucking up all the little bits of I don't know what to store in the bag with the rest of dirt, dirt I'll sift through later with my bare hands, avoiding the extra work, ignoring the disgust. And that will exhaust me and whittle what's left of my own confidence that I can write anything at all, that I'll just skip right to the caiprinha without earning it. Until I get bored of living without vision or chronicles to remember it all by and the cycle starts over again.
Sigh. Nothing to see here. Just some more of my neurosis, getting out the front door before I can close it.
And then I take to the blog to write about how I can't write. I write to distract myself from the fact that I'm not writing. But really, that's all I feel able to write about: not being able to write. Groping through the brambles, looking for a vision. And along the way I make these dramatic proclamations (to myself), hoping that if I do that, it will stick. It will take. As of this writing, it's all still apple cores and snot tissues.
