Lloyd Dobbler Philosophy of Occupation

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.