Hire Me

Hire me, you stupid fucking morons.

Bring me on board. Make me part of the team. Give me a fucking job.

This whole job search thing is a crock.

I'm pretty certain that I'll flip out at the next person that tells me that they're sure I'll find a job without actually offering one to me. And I'm positive that I'll flip my finger at the next person that tells me they had a position but it was recently filled by a (choose one) relative, friend, neighbor, relative's friend's neighbor, or relative's friend's neighbor's son's girlfriend. Fuuuuck Youuuu, is what I say to that.

I'm also not pleased that I've spent about twenty bucks in thank you cards and stamps, just to mail all these fake thank-yous as responses to fake interviews. People mask pointless waste of my time meetings as "informational interviews," where the only information they share is that they like you, but they either don't have a job or they already filled it with any of the nitwits listed in the above multiple choice. Every time I write a thank you for meeting with me, for taking the time to talk to me about opportunities that really don't exist (excuse me, existed, past tense, and now exist, present tense, for that stupid relative's friend's neighbor's son's girlfriend), I want to add a quick "And fuck you for wasting my time!" at the bottom. Of course, I don't, because what if, by chance, they do have an opening someday and no relative who has a random friend/neighbor/cab driver who needs a job? I don't want to be taken out of consideration. And so, I just affix the stamp (THIRTY NINE CENTS?!?!) and call it a fucking day.

It is further disheartening - and yes, disheartening is most definitely the word - to see people with jobs that I would really like continuously fuck up. This happens on a daily basis, just walking around in life. The number of morons who are currently enjoying salary positions with full benefits makes me want to puke. Trust me, it's not that I think that I'm so great or special that someone should hire me (BUT THEY SHOULD); it's more that I can't stand that when I'm dealing with people in "management" positions, I want to shoot myself because I can't believe that this nimrod standing before me can go to the dentist without having to pay out of pocket.

Last weekend, by the way, when I went into the Christmas Tree Shop and saw they were hiring for employees, I actually stopped and read the sign.

The other thing that gets me is that some people are actually pretty nice and try to help me out. Like my mother today. She called me and asked how my job search was going. I never realized how annoying this question is, or, more to the point, how incendiary it can be to your sanity and stability. I can be in a perfectly good mood, happy about life, and someone will "harmlessly" ask how the job search is coming. It's like a huge cloud comes right overhead, and it's all I can think of: I don't have a job. In a few months, I'll be completely unemployed. I will sit around in my apartment (how I'll pay for it, god only knows) and I'll eat cereal from the box like Eric on Boy Meets World. God help me.

Anyway, my mother asked me how it was all going. I resisted the urge to eat the phone and told her that it wasn't coming very well at all because nobody wants to hire me and I can't find a job. My mother's response? "Well, if you want to sit and talk about it, we can."

Thanks, Mom. Really. She'll probably flip her shit if she ever reads this and think that I'm giving her a hard time and that I don't appreciate that she was just trying to be nice. The thing is, I am and I do and I get that. But, what is talking about my lack of job opportunities with my MOTHER going to do for me? Next time I'm on an interview, should I say to the guy, "Well, my mom and I were talking, and she thinks you should hire me." Why not just flush my resume for him?

Was she expecting me to say, "Wow, Mom, that sounds great! I'd love to make a time for you and me to sit and discuss in detail about me not having a job. Rather than spend an afternoon playing baseball, going shopping (actually, I really shouldn't be doing that), or just hanging out, I'd like to talk about how depressing it is that I don't have a job while every other fuck around me has gotten one. Great times. Why not do it twice a week, every week, until I either find one or kill myself?" Sweeeeet.

Earlier today, when I got the Sunday Globe (specifically to check out some of the job listings - and found nothing), I took out the Globe magazine. The cover featured people who are donors for people who can't have kids. The payoffs listed were for $15,000, and they listed things that the donors have done with the money: downpayments, bill payments, laptops and opening businesses. I even scared myself when I found that my first thought wasn't "Holy crap, that's insane," but "Holy crap, that's insane, but could I actually get away with that?"

Sometimes I wonder whether I should change my whole approach. Rather than be cheerful and optimistic about life (well, actually now that I think about it, I'm not that anymore anyway), maybe I should just go in there and be dead honest: "You probably don't have any positions available for which I am qualified. You will probably read my resume and think that I have all the credentials and related experience, but since I don't have the specific experience in the specific field, you will tell me that you're looking for someone with actual field experience. Of course, you, like everyone else, will not give me said experience, and so, I will return home to my cereal box after stopping at the 7-11 to play the $1.00 scratch cards and hope that I win enough money to pay for dinner. Thank you for your time." It's tempting.

I also hate how much effort goes into the job search, and so little return. Like a few weeks ago, I had to fill out all this crap on a website with my resume, etc. It took me about an hour to do. Then they let you search for jobs. I clicked on a few things, to get the search going, and then this little line appeared at the top in red writing: "Any jobs for which you are not qualified have been grayed out." Instantaneously, the whole goddamn page turned gray. I scrolled down. And further down. And down to the stupid bottom, all fucking gray. I thought I was going to punch in my computer screen, but it is quite possibly the last nice/hip/expensive item I'll buy in a long time, and so I refrained and threw my shoes against the wall again.

And so, in light of all these job search disasters, I've been trying to think of alternative ways to earn money. Everyone thinks I'm talking about becoming a hooker, but I'm not. I'm actually talking about business ventures. Like I came up with a t-shirt company that I could start that would sell witty sayings. This sounded like a good idea until someone told me that my signature phrase was already being used in a current TV commercial. THAT made my day. Anyway, I might still go for the whole idea. I'd write more, but I'm too afraid of some prick reading this and making the millions for his greedy self. Suffice it to say, the t-shirts would be funny and slightly (okay some of them are really) vulgar. I'm not sure Dad would be proud to read that his daughter was marketing t-shirts that insinuate that someone is a whore for a baseball player, but then again, I'm also not sure that Dad would be proud to read that his daughter was arrested for setting up camp under the Mass Ave bridge.

The other idea was to write a book. This is slightly more constructive, but much more work-intensive and risky. Tonight, I was talking about this with my best buddy Marisa. We were sitting in my room going insane over the fact that I don't have a job. Okay, I was driving the insane bus on that one, and she was coming along for the ride, but the point is, she was going with me. Marisa, who is also searching for a job (with some good prospects though), offered to be my publicist. Though I appreciate her PR skills, I still doubted that a lot of people would buy my book. So we decided, see, that we'd just threaten people at gunpoint to buy the book. That way, they'd really have no choice.

Can you imagine my mother sitting down at a table as we talk about my frustration and I mention to her that my new plan is to write a book and have my friend market it at gunpoint to booksellers?

Someone's got to hire me. I've got to be someone's cousin's best friend's neighbor's relative. Otherwise, my choices are pretty limited: unless people want to purchase personalized "--- is a DILF" t-shirts or Marisa wants to secure a Wal-Mart gun permit, I'm pretty much cooked.

A few weeks ago, I organized an entire storage closet. Two, actually, and I legitimately thought, "Huh. Someone should hire me."

And even though yeah, it's ridiculous to think someone should hire me because I can organize boxes, well, someone fucking SHOULD.

The Dad Files

My dad was sitting at home enjoying a quiet afternoon one summer when I returned from a neighbor's birthday party and begged him to come try a tire swing. See, the dad across the street was an engineer, so he'd built the best tire swing ever, all advanced with a big platform. I told my dad about it, about how much fun we'd had on the swing at the party. The deal was, you get up on the platform, swing, then come back, and the dad grabs the rope and you get off on the platform. The tire swing is obviously held up on a giant tree branch. I thought this was the coolest thing ever. Dad wasn't so impressed. He wasn't coming. I distinctly remember his tone. My dad gets this whiny tone sometimes when you annoy him, so he lets you know that you're being annoying. "Elana," he kept saying, "I'm happy HERE. I don't want to go on a tire swing."

Too bad for Dad, I was as stubborn then as I am now, if not more so, and it was pretty much not up for discussion. So we went across the street.

I thought this was so cool, because my dad was the only dad who came out to try out the swing. My dad got on the tire swing, went once, and loved it. This was great. I felt like I had really brought my dad out for something worthwhile. The real vindication came next: he wanted to go again.

So he got on the swing, lifted off the platform, and on the way back to the platform, his foot tapped it, but he missed getting off. He swung back towards the tree from where the tire hung. He later told everyone that he figured he would just swing back and get off the platform on the second trip. But my father's no engineer, and I guess what he didn't realize in that moment was that he'd thrown off the set course of the swing, and all of a sudden, with a pretty loud thwack, my dad's back slammed into the giant tree.

I stood there, watching in horror, as my father fell straight back onto the ground, face up, and didn't move. In that second, I was sure I killed my father. And if that were the case, I was in a lot of trouble.

I didn't go up to my dad. I stood there and waited as my neighbor's mom came outside and took me and the rest of the kids back to my house, where my mom was getting ready to go out with my dad and some friends. I don't remember exactly what my neighbor's mom said, but I do remember her just going nuts, saying over and over again in her Southern drawl that they had insurance, they would pay for it, her husband was an idiot, and Richard was paralyzed. In perhaps an eerie foreshadowing of later events, my mother finished buttering all the toast she was making before heading across the street. Don't ask me why, but I remember that.

My dad went to the emergency room with his friend Aaron, one half of the couple they were supposed to go out with. They told him he broke his back, and as he had Aaron call home to tell my mom and Barbara (Aaron's wife) that they were going to stop for Chinese food (signature dad move: Chinese food. When I was born, my dad famously left the hospital that night in time to get to the Chinese restaurant), my dad felt like he couldn't breathe and ended up in the intensive care unit. Turns out, he'd cracked a few ribs as well. Sheesh.

I don't remember much of the recovery of all of this, but for a good long time, I felt like it was totally my fault that I got my dad into the whole mess of the tire swing. My mom would tell people, when they'd ask how he was, "Who goes on a tire swing? I mean, you didn't see the other dads out there!"

And the truth was, you didn't. What I appreciated so much about my father - that he got up off the couch, went outside and did it, whether because he wanted to go or because he wanted to shut me up - ended up getting him in a lot of trouble. I don't have much else to say about the whole event, except that I'm glad he isn't paralyzed or anything. I'd have some serious issues to get through.

I don't really know why I define a lot of my dad stories with the tire swing story, but I do. It might be because it combines a lot of the details that I find amusing about my father. He tried to use his logic to outsmart the system, with the whole, "Next time, I'll just get back on the platform," rather than just abandoning ship or flipping out (my dad is notorious for using logic for everything). He also was hypochondriac-ish in the emergency room, but I guess you have to give him a break because if your back and ribs were broken, you might be feeling pretty lousy about life and thinking you might die. And, through it all, my dad was thinking about Chinese food. Probably Schezuan Spicy Beef, knowing my dad.

There are two other stories I really like about my father. The first he told me one time when we were driving to Boston one time. He told me about the time he visited his father in the hospital when his father was pretty sick. He and his dad were playing cards when the doctor came in. My dad followed the doctor out into the hallway. "Level with me," he asked the doctor. The doctor told him that it wasn't good. His father was dying. And I don't know how he did it, but this next part is the part that really gets me about the whole story. "What'd he say?" my grandfather asked his son as he came back into the room. My dad shrugged, said to his father, "Who knows. Doctors, so complicated," and went on playing.

And finally, the last story I just happen to like for no good reason at all, except that it personifies how my father deals with people. When my sister refused to floss her teeth (probably at age seven), as a punishment, my father made her look up gingivitis in the dictionary.

I love it (slash him).

June Swoon

Today is June 1st, which is okay for the rest of the world but for me it means that summer is really happening. It's about 80 degrees already at 9:30 AM, which makes me irritable. Heat makes me grumpy. Add to that the muggy living conditions, 24/7, and I'm a mess. All the freaking time.

I went through this last summer, when I flipped out daily. I seriously had about ten tantrums a day until I limited myself to three: one when I woke up, one random mid-day (you just never know), and one when I tried to go to bed. The tantrums happened becuase I was too hot to breathe, and then I'd get all mad and bent out of shape and pretty soon, it'd be even harder to breathe and I'd be even angrier. The whole thing was a total debacle, but for some reason, getting mad about it made me feel slightly better. (Don't you hate when you get mad about something, and someone's like, "Don't get mad about it, what good does that do?" Listen, pal, I like being mad sometimes because it reminds me that even though every other moron around me seems to think that this is a reasonable situation, it most certainly is NOT. I like that reminder.)

Anyway, I'm hoping not to go insane this summer. I did some research and found out that 17 out of 31 days last July were over 95 degrees, which is absolutely ridiculous and unacceptable. I won't put up with that this year, and I'm hoping that whatever I did to deserve that fate last year, well, that I didn't do anything remotely like that again. Last August, I told someone that because of all the bitching and moaning I did about the heat, I wouldn't complain a bit about the cold. And can I tell you something? I didn't complain ONCE about the cold. And goddamn, it was cold this winter at times, but every single time I was about to think, "Oh my god, this is awful," I SERIOUSLY thought about how hot I was last summer, and I said a little thank-you for the icy frozen-ness that was setting into my bones. You think I'm kidding, but I relished the cold. RELISHED.

Alas, it's that time of year again when it's no longer chilly. It gets hot and humid and muggy. And it's the combination that really gets everyone, I think. Is there a worse word than muggy? When I hear or read that, my anger level skyrockets, even though I try my very best to control myself and remember that words can't hurt me and that mugginess, while it can ruin a perfectly good hair day, cannot kill me. (I think.) I'm thinking about having a running tally for how many days I go without throwing my shoes or yelling about the heat, starting today, but I'm worried that I'm setting myself up for a dismal failure when I realize that I can't go a single day over 80 degrees without a minor flip out.

I also thought about having a tally for how many days until some asshole asks me, as I bitch about the heat, whether I've invested in a fan. This tally will be identical to the one I have going for how many days until I seriously consider killing someone. Probably not a good idea.