I'm never sure which I dread more: getting a job or not getting a job. On the one hand, I do have bills to pay and so having a job is just swell. On the other hand, starting at a new job can be totally nerve-wracking: new people to meet, new responsibilities to master, new soul-crushing and mind-numbingly inane conversations revolving around Lost or American Idol. Who the fuck is Sawyer and what the fuck does he have to do with me?
Yes, I know that Lost is over. Office gossip takes forever to shift, and workers will be talking about it until sometime in 2012 when, hopefully, the world ends.
In theory, I should be taking a few days off and just collecting myself instead of diving headlong into a job search because now, instead of breathing deep and thinking rationally about the sort of job I'd really enjoy, I have to thrash around like a drowning man and take the first thing that comes along to stay afloat, be that office drone, bartender, pizza cook, or jizz mopper.
You never know though, sometimes you get lucky. In between all the Craigslist ads for "$$$ Human Test Subjects Needed $$$" and "Free Couch - Not Too Many Stains" I hold out the hope that I'll find something good. Something that pays a decent enough wage that I can stop staying up all night freaking out over how I'm going to afford a package of Meijer-brand hotdogs, but also something that won't consume my life like a lurking, slurping parasite burrowing into my brain and making me the puppet spy of Khan Noonian Singh.
Khaaaaaaaaaaaan!
I don't have any conclusion on the matter just yet, just a slinking optimism that things will work themselves out as they always do, and that I've got my priorities back in the right place. The writing comes first, the writing must always come first, and I feel pretentious enough even to say that given the volume of literary tasks I have undertaken, the writing can come second, too.
It's also important that I maintain a healthy sense of gamesmanship. It's very easy to despair and lament, but it's infinitely more rewarding to roll up the old sleeves and dig into the mess. If that's unconvincing, let me offer a better example than that of me possibly having to make pizza again:
A world of fascinating smells
Last night I was watching Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on the travel channel. Andrew Zimmern is a big guy with a slack made-up-drunk sort of face, and apparently those pudgy jowels and baggy eyes are the result of years of hardcore alcohol abuse, but I digress: the guy goes anywhere and eats anything. Dude eats live spiders and poison fish. Dude eats chicken feet and hickory smoked horse buttholes. Dude sat on a rickety old vietnamese boat and ate broiled bottom-feeding scum fish that had been "rinsed clean" in doo-doo water. Literal doo-doo water, like from people in the river boat houses just sticking their butts over the side and doing their business. They rinsed off the fish in that and then ate it.
I figure if that loveable old fat guy can do that, risking dysentry and death, then I can pick up my chin and have some fun with this whole thing too.
Update: Interviewing at the Mt. Clemens Elks Club tomorrow - this is NOT a full time job, this would just be bar tending experience and something to don on weekends. Still, it's a start!
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