Ain't Lookin' for a Job 'cause there's No Job Lookin' for Me

It seems like just 8 months ago I was blogging about my furtive quest for employment, and now here I am again - furtively seeking employment.

I've got about 2 more weeks of working off my contract for the book editor, and I have no idea if that's going to mean that paying work is right around the corner.  In the meantime, I've sent out a few resumes to places in the private sector and every university east of Lansing and south of Flint has my CV on file. I did not send a CV to U of M Flint because I do not want to be murdered.  Really, really, really don't want to be murdered.  In Flint.  Where they murder people.

Flint, Michigan - The graveyard of hope

However - corporate and institutional wheels are slow to turn, and there's a lot of rent to pay and booze to buy before anyone picks me up, which means that my Bukowskian plan to do something low-stress, low-pay, and low-profile for the summer is going right along as planned.

Sadly, this means that I'm going to be pretty poor through the month of August, at least, and I can probably kiss my weekends goodbye - if you want to land a gig at a bar that pays anything above a contemptuous insult, you've got to have 100% availability.  Do they want you for a quiet Monday afternoon shift?  No, they want you on Friday and Saturday busting your hump alongside all the other English majors, serving people who were smart enough to get college degrees that earned them a job. 

And generally, I think this is okay. I mean, I like nothing more than bro-chilling with my bro-dudes duding out bro-style on the weekend, chasing tail and downing whatever's on special at the bar, but - weekends are such a nice, normal thing that frankly, sometimes, they just don't fit me. What I mean to say, in part, is that I identify in a very superficial way with war veterans in that I don't really know how to get along in "the world."   Regular schedules, commutes, weekends, coworkers - these things have become strange and foreign to me. 

At least I didn't major in sociology

Not foreign like an exotic East Asian whorehouse / cockfight ring where what's for sale isn't really flesh, but your sanity - more like strange and foreign in a Christian Metal sort of way, or a corporate training video sort of way, or in a low-budget esoteric B-movie sort of way: something that makes a sort of sense, yes, and obviously seemed normal enough to the person who made it, but when you think of the person who made it you think of a tall, blonde, 40-year-old single white male who wears loafers and a lot of pastel colors, and whose every utterance is met by a bewildered silence and a sidelong glance for the exit just in case this last crazy utterance was the last before..it happens. 

 What is this I don't even...

If that didn't make any sense, here's some perspective;  I've spent the last 7 years drinking whenever I felt like it, partying whenever I felt like it, and under no real pressure to show up to anything at any time ever (unless, naturally, I felt like it) all while studying deep intellectual crap that most people can't even pronounce and beating the tar out of creative and academic challenges with the spiked baseball bat of my own raw wit.

Now, per the societal norms of "the world," I'm supposed to go to one place and do one thing five days a week, all while sober?  I mean, sober? Really? 

Presumably, a good job would offer new and creative challenges every day - this job I've had was not that job and I think it's embittered my feelings on the matter.  I'm like the heroine of a romantic comedy, and that last guy was such a JERK and I really do deserve better, so let's go to the club and dance - come on girl, shake your booty and drink a Cosmo until...it's...could it be?  Could he be the one? 

It is - it's him!

The upshot of this is that I've got a pretty bad case of academic PTSD, and due to my dire financial circumstances, I've not dealt with it properly.  In my attempt to hit the ground running when I left Las Vegas, I never quite re-acclimated to my surroundings. Thus, for 8 months, I've lived two bleeding double lives - one in which I attempted, poorly, to work a straight job and the other in which I, successfully, drank my face off and threw caution to the wind.

I don't know how to reconcile these things, but I'm learning.  I only wanted to write this as a commiseration and maybe a consolation to any other disaffected grad school survivors out there - you are not alone! We are the resistance!  We will find you!  Somehow we will make it so that you can earn a salary and still write your novel or paint your pictures or, I don't know, take a crap on a picture of President Ford and call it "The Crucifixion of Mickey Mouse."

If you're like me, you're still looking for a way to have your cake and eat it too - you want all the trappings of a successful salary man: a house, a car, nice suits - and meals that take more than 30 seconds on high to prepare - but you also want to hold on to your muse and create, and to stay free to do so whenever the mood hits. If I had the solution to that dilemma, I would just come out and say it - but watch this space:  I'm going to be spending a lot of time trying to figure it out.

Rejoice now - soon you will envy the dead