A Quieter Life

I’ve taken on a life of solitude. Not in the traditional sense, I do speak to people occasionally and I haven’t taken any vows or signed any pacts, but as it stands much of my human interaction as of recent has been over the phone or telling people which line to sign their names on. Between bouts of office banter and friendly service well-wishes, I do a great deal of waiting. Waiting for jobs to come up, waiting to feel hungry, thirsty and waiting for an opportunity to have a short-lived conversation with a total stranger looking for a coffee shop, the post office, a public restroom or spare change. These consist of most of the human interaction I experience Monday through Friday. Now, you’d think that this kind of cold-turkey silence would evoke more outbursts of random conversation with those immediately available, however, in my case, it has caused the opposite effect and I have little interest in small-talk for banter’s sake. Instead I do plenty of thinking, pondering attempting to interpret and understand physical attitudes and their meanings. I try to read people’s gestures and walks, I read their shoes, their clothes and their passing odors. I read their eyes, their accessories, their urgency and their immediate companionship. I watch and I learn.

Now, you may see this as being unfair, I’m on the outside, I never speak to most of these people, I don’t know much about psychology, I don’t know much about philosophy, I don’t know much about biology, I don’t have any business doing this at all and it makes me an jackass for admitting to it. However, bare in mind that my intuition is rational, my investigations are based in scientific fact and previous years of study. How do I know you’re upset? Because you look upset, because your voice is labored and broken, because you look disheveled and beaten, because you’re upset. That kind of thinking has helped me develop a scientific method for understanding people and the more I watch, the more I learn, the more I can begin to hone the process to which I understand all things.

I was speaking with a friend about driving habits, about how we know how to navigate around other drivers, pedestrians, roads and such. It brought us to a conversation about instinct, about how we come to be able to assess certain situations and read the atmosphere, navigate. He chose the example of bicycling in urban areas. Now, this isn’t to marginalize mountain-biking which has it’s own follies and pitfalls of living danger, but this is the example he chose. The more you ride through urban areas, the more you become accustomed to the habits and actions of cars and pedestrians. (Pedestrians are impossible to read by the way, it may take the gentle breeze of a set of handle bars between their thighs to wake them out of their office slumber) You can read the gestures and intentions of cars, I can’t explain how, or why this is possible, but you can. Get into enough accidents, have enough close calls and your subconscious mind instinctually tells you when to put your risk to the wayside and push forward or when to slow down and see the situation from a distance, study what the possibilities were and the ramifications of your rushing into them. The same applies to social interactions and stations, I know people, I’ve known people my entire life, the more people I know and get to know, the wider my knowledge of people grows. I’m not psychic, and I’m not some great neurological scientist, I’m just someone who knows people and often times understands them, we all do, through sheer experience and instinct.

So how far is the gap between being able to understand and read the people you know and understand, and people you see passing on the street. Well, it’s vast, the truth is, you could attach archetypes of such and such type to each person you meet based on people you already know, but their paths to being themselves are ultimately different and thus they do not fit into existing archetypes that you create. (PS I effing hate Karl Jung and his own self-righteous categorizing of people so I refuse to take part in his pseudo-scientific, self-indulgent, masterbatory tripe) The only method you can hold true to are what you can see. The obvious that can be rationalized by sight and mind, it’s real because you saw it, not because you heard it, because many times people in public will tell stories or prostrate themselves for attention or to present a certain air of what sort of person they are. What you can see; are their shoes worn? They may spend a great deal of time on their feet. Are they dirty? Maybe they are shoes reserved for leisure activity and we worn in the mud, possibly for a run on a rainy day, maybe the dirty look is a fashionable alternative to clean, maybe they’re on their way to buy a brand new pair, maybe they can’t afford a new pair, maybe they’ve had the same pair since law school and are superstitious about discarding them. These are questions you ask, so what’s the right answer? They’re all right answers, and, they’re all wrong answers.

It is not my intention to explain how to read people’s minds, or to understand complete strangers with a simple glance. Rather, it’s to understand other people’s lives to some degree in order to navigate through your own. If you see a man who looks suspiciously nervous looking around, hugging himself occasionally and eyeing passersby cautiously, you know that meeting eyes with him would not be prudent or wise, as the likelihood of his taking offence or being suspicious to your stares would provoke a confrontation and possibly and altercation. If you see a couple holding hands down the street in the dead of night laughing raucously and making loud, inappropriate commentary about the end of their evening, you know that warning them about the atmosphere of slumbering folk and gentle ears would only serve to create a moment of dismissal and annoyance or simply a few feet of silence between your intercedence and their state of mind. And if you see an expensive-looking car barreling down the street with reckless abandon and a badge of battered fender nearly changing the landscape and aerodynamic design, be sure it’ll peel out, barrel ahead and hit something else, so make sure it isn’t you.

It's a New Day For Old Jobs

I used to have a saying for the direction my life was heading in, ‘Apparently I’m on a destructive path, so get out of my way.’ I was working as a bicycle messenger and every turn presented some kind of danger, risk of death and worst of all the prospect of being out of work. Every time you embark on a new job, your brain is plotting a path, navigating around known obstacles and preventatively planning around the possibility of new obstacles. Every package is a fresh start, a new dawn, an instant of starting over and improving on your last endeavor.

Starting a new job can be like going to the movies, hearing a live band play, or going to a reading by your favorite author. It’s a new experience, it’s exciting and your time is filled with wonderment. You hang on to every moment not knowing what’s going to happen next, what will be introduced, what will tickle your senses and pave the way for new things and validation. But what if you start an old job, a return to a bygone career you promised yourself you’d never return to, either to prevent ruining prior experiences or because you have been deeply soured by the first go round. Either way, your deepest instincts tell you not to go back. You can’t go home again, so why would you think you’d be able to go to work again. Similar principles apply, the you that was you then, is no more. The life you lived then is not the life you live now. For the mass populous living in the moment, it’s difficult to see yourself tuning into your favorite television show sometime in the future without any reference between what you saw last and what is happening currently. You’re lost, disinterested and worst of all, something that had a memorably lasting impression on you is now completely ineffectual and boring.

I was a bicycle messenger in college, for those of you who don’t know what that is, there are people, like myself, who ride a bicycle through busy, dangerous city streets nine hours a day five days a week carting around everything from rolls of architectural drawings to fully-potted house plants. It’s the science of finding the shortest route around the bumps in the road, the daunting hills of completion and the traffic and congestion of everyday obstacles. Any tangible item of urgency and impression that cannot be faxed, emailed, relayed, phoned or whispered, is generally carried by messengers. Think of UPS drivers who pick things up and deliver them one at a time on a bicycle, that’s what I did, and that’s what I do. I had a wonderful experience in college, splitting my time between scholastic pursuits, extracurricular endeavors and working downtown, dabbling in the corporate infrastructure. I was sure that once I finished college, I would move on to better jobs, more important positions that utilized all of my various talents. What I found instead was a workforce I was in no way prepared for, a string of jobs that possessed redeeming attributes at arm’s length, but without any actual satisfaction or fruition. So I began talking about it, musing, if I couldn’t find anything else, that would be my fallback job.

Many people have fallback jobs, for some it’s waiting tables, tending bar, others work in bookstores and movie theaters, some end up working in offices as secretaries or personal assistants while others start a career at the bottom, never to rise an inch. It is with these fallback careers that many people are fording the flood of unemployment. With a sour economy and rampant joblessness, it is natural that people will come to accept what comes their way, what is available, familiar and open. As we trickle back to our fallback careers, searching for more meaningful ones begins to seem farther and farther away, job security sounds like a distant island where everyone is perpetually on vacation and they can’t spend their money fast enough. Tough economic times call for tightening of belts, reigning in flagrant fiscal flippance and favoring flagrant frugality. Though our future appears bleak, I’m grateful to have a job to come back to, a skill that can carry me through, and a position that though insecure at times, is always in consistent demand.

Can we perform to the degree of what is demanded of us? How much compromise are we as a hollow workforce willing to make? Often it is easy to see oneself walking out the door with famous last words drying at your lips and into a search for a better life. Some say finding a job is a full-time job in itself. My grandfather always said, ‘It’s easier to find a job when you have a job.’ Who’s right? I’ve been looking for work off and on since May of 2007, I worked freelance for a short while, but the open-ended nature of work and payment scared me and I decided to pursue what I could as an employee instead. I worked for artists, making art, building structures, painting, but that too, was open-ended, had no future, and ultimately had no permanence. Should I have left? Probably not, but it was only a month later that they laid off their entire workforce, who weren’t eligible for unemployment anyway. I had an advantage of starting my job search early, before more consequential layoffs. Did that help? Not really, I was out of work for five months before I decided to go to my fall back job. So does having a job help you get a job? It might, the appearance of being in demand, an employee of value who holds the structure of a company together is far more attractive than the last person picked for a sports team. Not working presents you as the slow kid, or the kid without aptitude, or who isn’t physically fit. You become the outcast of the workforce, unwanted by any team regardless of how uncomplete or uneven the teams are, they’d rather play without you. So, does taking a step backward in your career really prepare you to enter where you left? No. It doesn’t do much more than keep you afloat, paying rent, feeding yourself, before someone even takes notice of you.

The economy has got to get better, promises were made, motions are in action, things are happening and will happen. But until then, I feel obligated to fall back on what I can, trip over jobs I said I wouldn’t do again. Make new experiences, new lives with what is available to us. Wishing and hoping and praying and dreaming is great fun and it keeps us going, but we have to mobilize what we have available and complete something, bring something to fruition, or by the time our dream jobs are being offered again, we won’t have the luster left to take it.

Being a bicycle messenger is very satisfying work, you work as hard as you can, you’re paid for the work you put in and you gain a sense of accomplishment every time you deliver a job. Not to mention lots of fresh air and exercise. The problems come from the same places they appear at every job, from the top. Working in hierarchical environments usually produces the trickle effect, the idea that poop rolls downhill and some days you feel less like a person and more like a freight elevator, people riding you up and down all day carrying the weight of the masses from one floor to the other and being cursed when you don’t work exactly how they please. Mostly though, you’re your own boss, you hang out with other coworkers when you’re not working, and the whole world is your office, one big, open maze of buildings, loading docks and offices where you work. But that’s not what I want to do with my life, that’s not how I want to spend my 30s, I don’t want to wake up 40 wondering what I’ll do in my old age with bad knees no retirement, health care or social security (because it’s all gone). So I’ve decided to work nights, not in a liquor store or a restaurant, not mopping floors in a research facility, but from home, writing, researching, applying for jobs that were posted the previous day, keeping my skills sharp and my mind wound, keeping my inner clock from losing it’s numbers and clouding the future I can see. If you already work nights, your days are your nights, and you’ve got the jump on those who work days. But don’t lose sight of the future, don’t lose sight of your hope and your goals.

As long as you can see yourself in motion, as long as you can perceive change in your life, you can hang on to some kind of hope. So long as you still have enough time to live your life, you’ve got time to change your life. We have many careers over our lifetimes, and it’s never to late to start a new one, it’s never too late to learn a new skill, it’s never too late to shift course, to re-route to move away, travel. It’s never so late you can’t decide, don’t wait for the bottom to hit you on the ass. I promised myself I wouldn’t go back, I said it was too late, I was too old. Maybe I am, maybe it is too late and maybe I am too old, maybe these young bucks who’ve shown up in my place are where I was and I’m just reliving a bygone moment in my life. But I’m making a new memory, a new life, as a new me with a different perspective, whether it’s a good thing, a productive thing, I can’t say. But I’m back, I’ve returned, I’ve rejoined the workforce, navigating through the toil and roadblocks, meandering through familiar surroundings that have become new and unfamiliar and I’m finding my way to put a little money in my pocket, some positivity in an uncertain future and another route around the bumps in the road, the hills of completion and the traffic and congestion of everyday life. Apparently I’m on a constructive path, pave the way.

Proverbial Jerks

An old proverb says, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It’s fascinating to listen to other people publicly express their own political views, opinions and ramblings. For an essence of such a public conversation almost purposely overheard by passersby in a hopelessly indulgent manner, it’s purpose is seemingly to feed their rampant egomania. In specific the far leftist community of Cambridge, MA think of themselves to be particularly educated and astute being of the opinion that they are not only the shapers of their own future and the catalyst to which past indiscretions were smothered but the endless masses of past policy-changers and world-molders whose own action seemingly single-handedly quashed the conservative right until its resurface and rise. To this end they then place the blame on subsequent generations of young adults for not exacting their own brand of vengeance upon policy makers and corporate indulgence. It is with my own responsibility and action that I seek to deconstruct the casual conversations of burned out politicos, long since soured on their own soda of change and malleable governmental input. It seems strange to have so many of a single, bygone generation running the country with so few of them who have interest in public discourse and upheaval.

It is a fairly simple task to criticize, to lay blame and question the methods and motivation of those re-experiencing a resurgence of republican conservatism. It’s an even simpler task to do nothing, to stand idly by while the evil specters of corporate control creep over the proverbial ridge, to wipe out whatever social structures and reform that may be in place bathing itself in the plentifully available bounties and swimming in the valley of fiscal embezzlement. It exists in the current socio-political climate a questioning of motives, direction and intent with the express aid of proven flux with the annunciation and commencement of a new dawn in American politics. The election of an idealist, one of incorruptible diligence has given purchase and voice to a fallen generation of motivated activists who have taken a resurgence of interest in change and deformed an accomplishment of prolific proportions and in its most malleable form shaped something ugly, cutting directly to the source material, the very foundation upon which the ideals and ethos of this country were formed.

That said, it is with an open mind that I myself question the past political decisions and their last-minute spicing of the early boiling cauldron. A meeting of minds yet to evolve and understand the country that they created, corpses rehashing the creation of their own policies around a fallen castle of idealism. The inherent nature of born Americans is to fight back, to rise in dissent and cast off all manner of oppression. Based on the oppressive qualities on which our current political system sits, it is our nature to desire change in all forms and from all directions. However, to change every facet of our political and cultural traditions simultaneously would only achieve a level of uncertainty and turmoil that we as a country would not, could not recover from and in such a weakened state would give rise to all manner of extremist tendencies and subscription. We would line up to whole-heartedly sign up for a variety of trivial causes with assaulting aims and tumultuous ends.

Rather, we as a country must exact our changes piece-meal, in incremental ammendements of subtle, effective twists of our national fate and the future of our collective consciousness. We must address each issue as they collapse, economic system first as we have seen it’s considerable demise recently and the exposure of it’s endlessly corrupt infrastructure of capitalist ladling and double-dipping in the face of the poverty-stricken masses. The age of pulling ourselves up from our bootstraps is over, no longer do hard-working means justify the hard-living means. Ours is a life left up in the air, consumed by our own uncertainty. The system itself is designed to elevate those already in power born of privilege and opportunity so that they may take their own liberties, be they liberating the funds of our economic system or allowing their mouths to criticize events, states and elements of our shaped environment that they have no interest in changing, only to deconstruct and create an intricate web of complacency.

Voices like those of Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, though appropriate and important for specific instances and discourse, are unwanted and unwelcome in a moment of obvious change, simply because the statements that they make are positioned specifically to criticize rather than exact any sort of correction or iterations. It motivates, though negatively seeking specifically to rile the rabble-rousers and create a mob mentality of a different demographic. Though useful if applied positively, it is seldom the initiative and aim of the commentators and becomes self-indulgent soliloquy of entertainment of network televised proportion.

Once a year hundreds of able bodies cram into an auditorium at MIT to hear Noam Chomsky deliver his own state of the union address in which he discounts any efforts of anyone in action and creates a dystopian deliverance of detrimental dissidence. Once every four years environmental advocates, nay-saying, negligible ne’erdowells haplessly cast their votes for Ralph Nader, in favor of the liberal Democratic incumbent serving only to empower the conservative hold on the American psyche. Even the past election, in which our current president was elected, Nader himself refused to remove his candidacy from the general election and had it been more of a landslide, I’m sure his stubborn, self-righteous subjugations would have come into question. However, this is not the case and record store owners and Harvard professors alike continue to soak themselves in the ocean of their own meanderings.

I suppose I should be thankful that intellectuals and academics have kept the traditions of discursive thought alive by reading endlessly dry political theory and criticism, that I haven’t the palate for. I suppose I should be thankful, for without the constant drone of nit-picking critical thought, my own inspiration of discourse could not be assuaged or pondered. I suppose I should be thankful that my own positivity and hopeful nature leads me away from similarly embittered assertions and into other stations of alternate futures and renewal. I suppose I should be thankful that I was able to overcome my own negativity and bitterness and witness a justification of upheaval and unraveling the tightly wound ball of twine in which we have trapped ourselves momentarily. Mostly I’m thankful that I can’t bring myself to feign an interest and subsequent conversation based on the shared ideals of a gaggle of old codgers with nothing nice to say, and in fact nothing to say at all.

Finding My Den of Intrigue

For the last couple months since my triumphant return to Boston, I've stayed in the comfort and warmth of the houses of friends who were good enough to put me up (and put up with me)until this point. During the course of a conversation with my friend Tiernan about my expectations for finding a permanent living situation, it occurred to me that I was holding out for something unreasonable, irrational and sometime in the future, who knows when. This kind of mania was an unfair burden to place atop the shoulders of the brave souls who took me into their homes. So I've decided to find a place, possibly a sublet, something to get me settled until I know more about what my life back in Boston will entail. In the course of my perousing, meeting, and exploring I've found cute French grad students, musty houses that have their own names, reluctant roommates all due respect, and recently enough an older gentleman who sounded like Richard Nixon on my voicemail and turned out to be some creepy disbarred lawyer/ sex offender. How can one even begin to figure out where the right place for them to live would be? How can we, in the desperation of impermanent dwelling and flux in the face of unstable financial markets find what we are looking for at a reasonable price. Well, I'll tell you. In the course of a conversation with friends I was staying with, I decided it would be really fun to live with two international spies who were constantly trying to kill each other and subsequently cleaning up after themselves, it would add a dimension of weight to the atmosphere in the house and never would there be a dull moment. So I decided to post an ad on Craigslist, actually two ads, because one is in Cambridge and one is in Jamaica Plain. Each ad expressing specifically what I was looking for in a living dynamic. The ad is as follows:

Den of Intrigue Sought (Jamaica Plain)
Reply to: hous-1052346906@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-02-26, 11:23PM EST


Ideally I'm looking for a room in a house with James Bond and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, possibly Inspector Clouseau and Kato or failing both of those Spy vs. Spy, the everyman living amongst international spies, subtly and cleverly attempting to do each other in, and promptly cleaning up after their rubble. The perfect morning routine would entail my exiting the bathroom and nearly tripping over a lit cluster of dynamite that I would promptly douse under the spigot in the bathtub, diffusing the situation before I leave for work. Then I would have my morning coffee entertained by all the subtleties of a knife fight and promptly make my exit as a shootout begins in the common area. If your household fits any of this criteria, is a den of international intrigue or simply cycles through roommates as the information they have been put in charge of carrying becomes obsolete I want to live there. Or if you appreciate a wry, sarcastic, non sequitur-laden, fatalistic sense of humor I want to live there. I am a fun, considerate, respectful roommate and I would love to live in an atmosphere constantly laden with non-soiled-dish-related crises. By all means send me an email, be sure to mention which breakfast cereal has the odorless poison powder, and please don't kidnap me in a van with no windows, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

So far, I haven't received many responses, but alternatively, the responses I have received have all been positive, interesting, educated, fun people with great personalities and great houses, not to mention that I have not been contacted by any government agencies. Though it troubles me slightly that two separate people have replied with the sentence; follow the clues, and attached their ad or a synopsis of their property. Yet I still believe in the effectiveness of personal exploration bourne out of necessity, a notion born in my mind, appreciated mostly by people who know and understand me, it's natural that like-minded people would respond, and in some cases be excited to live with such a person, not to toot my own horn, but bizarre non sequiturs are a part of my regular routine.

That said, if you're a financial planner dying to fill their life with some good old fashioned death metal kids, post the ad. If you're a maitre'd at a swanky restaurant and all you want to come home to is a bottle of bourbon and the Swedish bikini team, post the ad. And most importantly, if you're an out-of-work neerdowell looking to be entertained by the subtle drama of clandestine operations carried out exclusively in your common areas, post the ad, some people are as starved for an audience as you are a venue.

Ear Waxed

I’m going to be honest, I don’t know much about science or anatomy but I do know a fair amount about the ear, or to be more specific, my ear. I don’t much care for loud noises, heavy metal, hardcore punk rock, vacuum cleaners, cuisinarts, when growing up in Southern California, the favorite pastime of teenage ne’erdowells was driving around in a small car with big speakers and driving the passengers to the brink of decibel threshold. I was the backseat driver, yelling for the volume to be turned down. I was the guy who called shotgun and upon planting myself in the front seat, carefully turned the knob down a few clicks to the dismay of the rest of the car.

But I like what I like, the rhythmic hum of drum beats, the careful drone of the voice of urban youth poetically bounding off the walls of selectively cropped samples, the din of a grainy guitar keeping pace with the bounding wooden sticks on animal hides. I even enjoy plugging my ears from the sounds of everyday life, closing out traffic noise, the chatter of strangers, the calculating beeps of checkout stands at the supermarket and creating my own personal soundtrack with the aid of musical mastery reworked over the landscape of my travels.

But too much volume and I’m soured, too much reality to snap me out of my musical trance and I’d rather hear the sounds of car tires bounding over the same pothole in a seamless rhythm, the repeated siren of emergency vehicles urgently rushing someone off into the night.

I share a room with a bird, a love bird specifically, who’s attitudinal chirps are often endearing, and though she and I do not speak the same language we can have an exchange of demeanor and temperament. But at times, even her volume can seem like talons on a chalkboard, the shrill cry of dismay accompanied with crashes, bells and booms from within her cage.

Often times, my mind feels like a caged bird, flooded with sounds and sights that I cannot interpret, that my brain does not understand. Daily I’m bombarded with things that seem to be of the interest of the populous, but do not appeal to me. Specifically the way pop music has evolved over time. In my own teenage evolution, I can remember tuning the radio to a specific point on the dial, waiting anxiously for the DJ to play my ‘jam’. More and more frequently I find myself out of touch with popular culture, being unable to understand the appeal of the music that has become the product of digital culture but without the influence of a wealth of symphonic calculations readily available via the internet.

In it’s ultimate irony the pop music of yesteryear and the bygone practice of instrumental mastery is its missing connection to the sounds of today, whilst commercial products, clothing and textile patterns remain nostalgic, cyclically borrowing from ideas, color combinations and shapes from a past still within reach.

An ear is the way I determine, balance. An ear is the tool I use to understand. An ear is how I set my own mood, the way in which I understand sound. It seems so simple, it’s become part of who we are as people, but does our ability to understand sound evolve as we grow older, or does it become less able to interpret what it hears. Does our preferential differentiation of sounds or music make us more evolved and tell us what we enjoy, or does it simply serve to make us miss the golden days of us waiting with bated breath for our ‘jam’ that may never travel radio waves again?

It’s confusing that I cannot palate the loud drone of the vacuum cleaner, yet, the steady grind of garage bands from the 60s never cease to gratify me. Is it my preference to hear one over the other, or does my mind simply not appropriately interpret the sound of the vacuum. I don’t know much about science or anatomy, but I know what my ears tell me and more often than not, they tell me what I like.

Interviewed For The Shampire

Being out of work is nerve-racking. It’s the process of enjoying all the free time you coveted while you were working, but with the added pressure or knowing you haven’t any money coming in, the added pressure of knowing that you’re going to have to find a job, and the added pressure of those around you simultaneously judging you and envying you for not going to work everyday. Finding a quality job, really is a fulltime job in itself. I don’t care what anyone says, you put more effort into it, you weigh more factors, your cover letters are less non-committal and sincere when you’re out of work. Daunting tasks become manageable, you house is cleaner, you get more sleep, you’re more personable, the world seems far less daunting when you don’t have to confront it with balled fists five days a week.

However, once these initial benefits become part of the overall structure of your life, once you have grown used to the benefits and reaped them to their fullest potential on a daily basis, once again our inherent human unhappiness of complacency starts to jab at our ribs and not always, but occasionally, a finger will slip through and poke at our heart, making us feel useless, without societal contribution, purposeless. So the job hunt becomes a calling, a mission, an expedition into the rear-end of the corporate infrastructure. The land of back-door politics known popularly as human relations.

So you make past the initial interest phase, they like you, they want you, they feel you may be qualified for the job. An interview is scheduled, you have anxiety and/or excitement leading up to said event. You go, they like you, or, they don’t, you don’t really know. You wait a week, they liked you, they schedule another interview, you have anxiety and/or excitement again leading up to it. You go, they like you, or secretly hate you but feel you are a good fit and need you. They’ll be in touch. You say thank you, you thank everyone, because that’s what you do. You show them how much you appreciate them even considering you for the job. Then you wait, they say they’ll be in contact, will they? They sweat you out, you sweat it out. You wait, and wait and wait. The end result means your future, either you work for them, they who like you, or secretly hate you and need you, or you’re back to being self-employed, gainfully driven and exploring the endless possibilities of the job market with your limited skill set. You start thinking, well I COULD do This, or I COULD do That thing, and even I guess I wouldn’t MIND doing something like THAT. But you won’t do it for long, don’t lie to yourself. Tell all your friends and strangers you meet that you’re freelancing and secretly live off of the savings you told yourself you’d never touch. Pay for things at hand from the earmarked funds for your future whatever that was, because the future is now when you’re unemployed and dangling in the wind. So you wait, you bide time and bate your breath. You sweat silently and let your stomach eat itself wondering, pondering, floundering. When will they call, when will they write, will they?

You listen to the radio and hear about how many other folks are in your position, lost their jobs, got laid off, cancelled their health plan, behind in their rent, calling public radio stations to justify their lifestyle. Calling strangers to validate the unfortunate state of the world, the unfortunate state of the economy. We find it far less daunting in trying times to be truthful with strangers about our situation than with loved ones, who seemingly would have a better perspective on your situation. However, strangers have a completely objective view, a long ways, farsighted, telescopic vision into our estranged bereavement with society’s failings and short-comings, our inability to speak up when the screws were being put to our futures, and the ease with which we replaced our tormentor with a savior to whom we weigh challenge with the shouldering of our collective burdens, not to mention his own possible performance anxiety because of the connotations his presidency brings not to mention the proxy benefits he brings to this country by simply being brilliant and idealistic.

The question of whether or not you’ll get that call, that demand for a weak mind and strong back for minimal compensation and cut-rate benefits, depends largely on people who are at the opposite end of the spectrum, it’s also pivotal upon the relative demeanor of said people and their own approach and attitude towards their positions. Those in short-term, dead-end positions they don’t plan on staying in and can’t see a future in will be quicker to offer a position than those who love their jobs simply because they don’t envision themselves sticking around to see the ramifications of their actions reach full fruition and therefore are likely to hire the best-looking candidate rather than the most qualified. Whilst those who love their jobs, their co-workers(in a plutonic capacity), and their work environment will be extremely careful and meticulous as to whom they staff in the open position based mostly upon not upsetting the careful balance and equilibrius synergy they have achieved in their office. You don’t want to BE the chainsaw in the abattoir. So you play it cool and calm, just like the interview itself, minimal contact, with maximum enthusiasm.

The truth is, it isn’t a decision that’s up to you, you can’t fake you. You can’t completely misrepresent yourself, especially in multiple visits, you wouldn’t be able to fake it twice the same way, you aren’t that good. So you’re real, you’re you, and at least you don’t fuck up being yourself. You’re nervous, you’re edgy, you’re trying your best to answer authorities thoughtfully and not dodge confrontational corners of questioning. It’s a bit like being accused of a crime, being accused of ineptitude, misrepresenting your abilities and your capabilities. Are you qualifications what they say, they assume you’re lying, they just don’t know what about, and if you’re totally honest, it confuses the hell out of them, because they start to assume everything is a lie, even though you know what you’re talking about. Hubris, that’s what hits them in the face, appropriately placed gallbladder oozing across the line into lines of quandary that qualm queries of quote and quickly quips into quixotic quelch, which is a made up word that means you drank a lemon-lime soda of medicinal resolution. It’s a decision out of your hands, it could be in the stars, the planets, the fates, but at the end of the day your career belongs to working people, folks who themselves must resolve that you will be around, a cog in their machine, and they want one with sharp teeth, not a squeaky wheel. So you’ll just keep rolling along, no matter where your gears turn, your wheels will spin and your machine will keep on working, at work, out of work, working on it, working it out, it’s an active part of your lifestyle, even just the thinking, the pondering, notions of working, earning, a return to joyless toil or the bubbling basis for all creative wellspring embodied in an office, or a cardboard cube and a fluorescent glow, it’s patience that defines progress, the patience of searching, the patience of finding, the patience of waiting itself, because the decisions are bourne out of patience, so everyone will wait, and see.

Wait Up

All good things come to those who wait, but so do terrible things. If you wait around long enough, terrible things catch up to as quickly as wonderful things. The only difference is, you’re patiently waiting for them to overtake you. You’re waiting for fate to step in and take control of your life for you. It’s an avoidance of making a decision, getting involved, making an impact on your own future. You’ll let the planets decide before you know what’s for dinner. The only problem is, the planets could care less, and while you’re waiting, you starve to death. Me, I’ll eat something small and then see what the planets are dishing out, usually orbits, I don’t eat orbits. While you’re waiting to hear about a job, an examination, that clunking noise your car makes just before it overheats, while you’re waiting, the outcome doesn’t change anyway, if you’re leaving it up to fate, it’s already pre-decided anyway, you aren’t going to change the outcome by being less vocal or by feigning apathy or suppressing your anticipation. Really all you can do is move forward, get busy, put in some work, because all things may come to those who wait, but personally, I’m hoping to avoid some of them.