These things are true:
1. When I was in high school, I was voted Most Likely to Be a Game Show Hostess. I
remember thinking at the time that it wouldn’t be such a bad gig.
2. In college, I worked at the Career Services
office and one of my duties was to administer this career aptitude test to help
students having difficulty picking a major to hone their sights on careers best
suited to them. I took it myself and the results that sifted to the top were:
actress/performer, writer/journalist, minister/chaplain, psychologist.
3. I’ve recently undergone a major life switcheroo
that has, in many ways, left me feeling like I’ve started over from scratch. I
left Columbia at the end of September, left my children with their father to
finish out the school year in Missouri, also giving us time to settle in the
new town and find a house big enough for all of us; rid myself of 75% of my
personal belongings, shoved the remaining 25% (constituted primarily of clothes
and books and vinyl records) into a Budget rental truck, and rolled southeast
to New Bern, North Carolina where I've effectively invaded and occupied my
husband’s geobachelor pad.
Up until last May, my husband
and I still planned on our ‘separate-but-together’ marriage. But when the my
poor-old money pit started absorbing more money than I was bringing in, we knew
something had to change and that change ended with me here, kids still
temporarily there, and my career still somewhere in the ether, undefined and
raw as molding clay.
I have, for the last two months,
four days, and about 14 hours been wholly unemployed. That’s not for lack of
trying. I’ve sent out 39 resumes (as of last Friday), established accounts on
pretty much every conceivable job search website, hunted down employment opportunities
at various levels of municipal, state, and federal government, and still I’m
sitting here on my couch writing. I did a major revision on an old manuscript,
wrote a considerable bit of a horror/thriller novel I’ve been toying with for
about a year, and written a few drafts of an essay about contemporary feminism.
I’ve been a bad blogger for the better part of this year, a disappointment to
my constant readers (the whole handful of you), and I do apologize for my
unpredictable and irregular posts. The forum originally was intended to be an
arena for me to just bitch about things I’d make my friends listen to me bitch
about, but in a slightly more articulate construct, but with no intended
regularity. Now that I’m moved, settled, unpacked (sort of), I intend to remedy
that. It is quite possible to remedy, because I really have nothing else to do.
Here’s another thing that’s true:
4. I don’t want to do anything else but write. I
mean, I really do not.
For the first time since I was
nineteen and started dancing in my underpants to supplement my income (read: as my primary income in many
instances), I am experiencing what it truly means to be BROKE. Not, I really want to go shopping, but I shouldn’t
because I’m broke or Let’s eat
someplace cheap because I’m broke. Legit, way below the poverty line, broke
ass, broke-ity broke broke, ninety-three cents in my checking account, broke. My husband, God bless him, is keeping me
sheltered and fed, but a Lance Corporal’s salary doesn’t allow for my preferred
shopping, travelling, gift-giving, lady-of-leisure status.
Still, despite all of that, I’m
so much happier spending my days writing than I would ever be sitting at a desk
working for someone else, who themselves are working for someone else, who is
ultimately selling or buying or processing something that I really have no
passion for. I’d happily take a job offered to me at this point, just because I’m
broke enough to consider crowd-sourcing my 2000 mile roundtrip way home for Christmas,
but it’s not going to be what I want to do. I would resign myself to doing it. I
would succumb. This is probably pretty blasphemous in some circles, but I would
think about entering into a job in the corporate world as equivalent to
accepting the mark of the beast. Calm down, everyone, I’m not saying that’s how
it is or that I’m some biblical scholar and here’s a reasonable interpretation
of the Book of Revelation, but bear with me:
Revelation 13:17
17) and he provides that no one
will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the
name of the beast or the number of his name.…
I remember as a child reading this and thinking, ‘What about
parents who want to feed their kids and pay the rent?’ And I imagined after
doing all the foraging and trading and underground shit a parent could do to
feed and shelter their families, a moment would come where a man or a woman,
head hung in defeat, would file into some queue at some local Antichrist headquarters
and get branded with a 666, and then they could go to the grocery store and buy
Hot Pockets or whatever.
I know I’m prone to melodrama,
and absolutely accept that this is one of those cases, but in order for someone
to understand me, you have to understand that within the tragicomedy I’m often
espousing, there’s always a foundation of truth. I see myself, shamefully and without
a shred of joy, standing in line for Hot Pockets, holding back tears for
another lost day in the service of a machine.
I’m clinging to the Lloyd Dobbler Philosophy of Occupation. You’ll remember, in the 1989 film Say Anything, Lloyd
Dobbler (as played by John Cusack), who’ll always be a standard by which I
judge romantic gestures, explains to the father of his love interest what his
plans for the future entail: “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or
process anything as a career. I don’t want sell anything bought or processed,
or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything, sold, bought or
processed. I don’t want to repair anything sold, bought or processed. As a
career, I don’t want to do any of that.” I hear those words from Lloyd Dobbler’s
lips and choirs of angels sing, and the clouds part and the sun bursts through,
and George Harrison starts singing ‘Hallelujah’.
There are exceptions to this
scenario. I loved teaching because ultimately I felt like teaching students how
to think and communicate did something good for the world at large. But only
two of the 39 jobs I applied for are in higher education. I’m just not in a
great geographical area for that kind of thing, if there is a good geographical
area for that kind of thing anymore. (see
previous blog Enthusiasm Don’t Pay the Bills, Son).
I remember once making a
thoughtless wish and then immediately retracting it, but it went something like
this: “If I were in prison, I’d write all fucking day.” Of course, this is
bullshit. I absolutely, under zero circumstances, never want to go to prison.
Again, though, despite its melodramatic delivery, the sentiment is still the
same. To some degree, I feel like I’m in prison. I’m bound largely to my house
because I don’t want to waste gas going nowhere. And even if I did go anywhere,
I have no money to do anything. If I want to participate in the commercial
world, I need money, and jobs are how most people get money, and I don’t want
to sell anything, or buy anything, or process anything for a paycheck in exchange
for 75% of my life. I don’t wanna do it. So until I have to hang my head,
succumb, go get in line for my license to survive in the world we’ve
constructed for ourselves, where commerce is king and the arts and philosophy
and the humanities are constantly pushed to the periphery of what society deems
as ‘important’, I’m gonna keep vigilantly taking advantage of my cushy prison
sentence. I have food, I have a roof, I get to leave the apartment for my bike
rides, I get my husband and my kitty cats and the internet and I get to talk to
my family every day, and I will write until my fingers bleed, because that’s
the job I really want.
