Well it’s not quite the workin’ at the carwash blues around here. Mostly because I don’t think there is a carwash around here. But if there were one, I might have applied for the job by now.
I haven’t been really stretching the mileage of my complaint-mobile about being unemployed, except to Stuart, because that’s what For Better or For Worse means. It means For Better, Worse, And When I Sit Around On The Couch Sniffling And Howling Into Your Tee-shirt. Read the fine print on marriage, it’s in there.
So aside from sniffling into Stuart’s shirt weekly, I haven’t been complaining more than a bitter off-hand comment at parties because people, listening to me whine about being unemployed is BORING. It’s boring to ME. And it usually requires this big long explanation about how, yes, I’m actually having my artistic mid-life crisis early this year and no, I’m not looking for full-time work in the field of my experience which is being a magazine butt-monkey. I’m looking for part-time work so I can support my writing! Everyone needs a nasty habit, right? Cocaine, writing, cocaine, writing – it’s so hard to choose. Having to explain this makes my skin crawl with embarrassment, still, since everyone around me is working full-time jobs and probably thinks I’m insane or spoiled or both. (Actually they’re all very nice and none of them think anything LIKE that but hey, welcome to my neuroses!)
I’m breaking my complaining fatwa to discuss my streak. Because I inquired about an interview I’d been on, to a job I might have enjoyed because it involved photography, and the position has been filled. And obviously not by me. I’ve now forgotten all my ambivalence about the gig in the first place – 5 or so too few hours a week, a hell of a long commute – and am sitting around feeling sorry for myself because I broke my streak. My streak!
My streak is that I’ve never been to a job interview I haven’t subsequently been offered. My streak was sort of my little chunk of rainbow inside, that I interview very well and manage to come off as this cool, collected and capable woman, which is a valuable impression of me that this blog usually invalidates. My streak! My precious streak! There was very little left in my box of confidences and that streak was definitely one of them.
So I’m taking offers. Anyone, suggest anything, that you think I should do for a living, 20 to 25 hours a week. Suggest a career course and I’ll probably look into it. Suggest a website and I’ll probably visit it. Tell me to buff alligators with earwax for a living and I’ll tell you I’ve got a pal at the Prospect Park Zoo who could probably hook me up. With the alligators, not the earwax.
To make up for losing my streak, I am going to fill that mostly-empty box of confidences with all your crazy suggestions for jobs in which I’d be totally brilliant. Taking all comers.
I spent a good portion of 1999 making fun of my then-boyfriend Alex for lining up two days running to see Episode 1. I mean, I think he missed some finals. And I think he missed work. He also dragged me to see it when I arrived back in Texas from Cairo, still jet-lagged.
The rock-solid line of reasoning ran that I couldn’t fathom, justify, or even condone sleeping on the pavement to see a movie that will be in the theatre, EVERY THEATRE, for six months running. I think my argument is still valid, although strictly speaking, I’m not sure I’ve got any ground to stand on anymore.
My moral high ground has been lost to erosion, since this morning at 9AM, I lined up for 20 minutes outside the Park Slope Barnes & Noble to get a wristband (!), guaranteeing me two copies of Harry Potter 7 tonight at midnight. I was even given a letter, D if you’re wondering, to designate where in the store I will stand to receive holy communion bounty from on high a book that will be in all bookstores until the very end of time and for two hours after the end of time.
I know! Poor Alex! Where’s that high horse now? But I stand my ground. I’ve just adjusted that ground slightly so that it precludes actually sleeping on pavement to get your obsessive cult object. That’s just going too far.
For the past week I’ve been applying for jobs with ever-decreasing enthusiasm, enjoying the air-conditioning, and my friends, and life in the tank-top and flip-flop lane. I keep reminding myself not to panic about finding a job, because every time I spend useless amounts of time panicking, something comes along and I could have spent all that panic time doing something more useful.
Like obsessing over geekery!
Currently I am obsessed with two things: Doctor Who and Harry Potter. Doctor Who fans, you should get behind me when I say I cried for 20 minutes at the finale of Season 2 for reasons I shan’t spoil here. SERIOUSLY THOUGH WTF. When we went to Jeb and Neela’s to watch the start of Season 3 on their enormous shiny television, I spent most of the first two episodes curled in the corner looking exceedingly grumpy at the whole experience. I even begrudged David Tennant how adorable he is and he IS adorable. I am clearly not over the end of Season 2 yet.
Also Harry Potter! I don’t think there is oxygen enough in the universe for how much geeking out I’m willing to do over Book 7 so I will just point you to one of my favorite people in the universe: Raychul. Her last few posts in the past two weeks – hey, studying for the Bar is nothing compared to Horcruxes – have been full of ideas and theories I hadn’t even stumbled across in the hours of brain-churning I’ve done.
All this geekishness really drives home the amount my tastes have broadened and changed in the past five years. I always loved Harry Potter from the beginning, but Battlestar Galactica? Doctor Who? Firefly? YA Fantasy and cold war spy thrillers and futuristic sci-fi? I’m even reading Buffy Season 8 in Dark Horse comics! Have you heard my opinion on reading comics? I just can’t do it. I can’t divide my attentions between pictures and words. But where Whedon leads, I follow. And space! Have you heard what I think of space? Space is bullshit! And yet here I am obsessing over Kobol and Starbuck and DAMN, how many times can Sharon die?
My whole reading and consuming life – books, primarily, but movies and TV as well – has changed and expanded. I think it’s for the better, although you should see how far back my dad’s eyes manage to roll (which, buddy, you read Sydney Sheldon. Gimme a break!) when I start geeking out like this. Partly, it’s the influence of my friends, who are all delightful geeks, but I like to think I’ve become more open-minded about what makes a good story, and what makes a great idea.
Which is really the black-teeshirt-wearing heart of my point here. There are all these things that make great, soaring, beautiful stories, and they’re not really in The New Yorker or on NPR. They’re not in the traditional places I used to look to inspiration, places that are starting to seem positively RGB compared to the million points of color and madness you find when you give reality the slip.
It’s refreshing and enlightening and absorbing to look into uber-realities and sub-realities and alternate realities and still see humanity and struggle and beauty. Which is still my requirement – I need to see people. Or even alterna-people. But they need to have lives and struggles and souls and needs. And they do! Even when it takes place on the seventeenth moon of Gool or has tentacles in its forearms.
So I guess from several miles into the border of this strange and hypercolored land, I’m looking back and yelling down the tracks to any of you that are still stuck in the (admittedly wonderful world of) Penguin Modern Classics: you should set aside some of those easy-to-carry preconceptions and go exploring. It’s wild out here on the frontier.
Some facts!
1. Stuart and I are thinking of getting a cat.
2. We are both mildly allergic to cats, with eye-itchy/sneezy type reactions.
3. We are also foolishly optimistic people and you will note that most of our combined foolish optimism (i.e. let’s get married! and let’s buy an apartment!) has tended to work out pretty well, which means we will doggedly (or cattedly) pursue our foolishly optimistic plans. We suspect that our foolishly optimistic plans have a way of working out simply because we remain foolishly optimistic but the scientists are still working on this theory. No FDA approval yet.
So! Given the above set of facts, wherein we are considering cat ownership but are mildly allergic, we do what every blogger worth his domain fees does. We turn to you, knowledgeable friends and readers. Are you allergic to your own cat? How do you get around it? Does this built-in absurdism contribute positively to your healthy appreciation for the absurdism of Life in general? Because there’s something deliciously idiotic about bringing your own allergens into your house. Something about the Dread Pirate Roberts and iocane powder.
Addendum the First: We’re not going to rush to North Shore tomorrow and get a cat, as tempting as my “let’s just go to recon!” idea was, since we know that one visit with no plans to get a cat will actually entail us coming home with little Snickerdoodle yowling in the backseat. We are aware of this. But we want advice about cats from cat people! We don’t want meaniehead negative advice though, you pooh-poohers out there with your pet-hating ways. Pooh-poohing has its place but don’t try and convince me I don’t want a pet at all, you’ve never met me. I say hello to pit-bulls.
Addendum the Second: And those that know me really well who want to point out that um, I’ve always wanted a DOG, well, suffice it to say that you’re right. I have always wanted a dog. But I’m willing to cross over to the dark side of catdom. We would raise this cat like a dog, obvs. All the fetching and none of the walking or barking.
Stuart and I have a great tradition of summer adventures where we get in the car and drive someplace we heard about once, without spending too much time planning it out.
Yesterday found us driving to deepest Brooklyn (and a little Queens), wandering around the abandoned hangars and airstrips of Floyd Bennett Field and the deserted sand of Jacob Riis Park Beach. It was beautiful, exciting, relaxing, communing – all the marks of a good adventure.
A good friend of mine from Kenya once noted that there’s nothing wild left in the US – we pave and sign-post and renovate and captivate everything here. It’s mostly true. In a way, it’s the mark of a well-run country. Marnix was comparing it to Kenya, where whole swathes of the country exist outside any organized overseer not by choice, but by default.
Although FBF and Jacob Riis are both owned by the National Park Service, they had that feeling of graceful abandonment, of land and structures given over gently but irreversibly to nature. Hangars with broken ceilings and opportunistic vines. Cracked, sunken tarmac on wide, sweeping runways. Lots of little organizations taking over little parts of the Field for their own esoteric purposes – model planes, WWII aircraft enthusiasts, community gardeners. It reminded me of what Marnix said, and although for the most part I appreciate our ordered landscape, it was nice to break into a little abandoned corner of the world without anyone politely directing your attention.
The weather was showing its own independence, veering away from the glorious heat of July into an altogether more Septemberish day. It was windy and grey, with high, swift clouds and a damp chill edge. Not the sort of summer day people write home about. But for picture-taking, and fast driving, for crosswords and sandwiches on the beach and digging of toes into wet sand, for holding hands in companionable solitude, well, it was just what we needed.
And it didn’t even rain until the minute we got home, where we curled into the couch for quesadillas and Doctor Who while the storm raged on outside. A perfect adventure day all around.
click here to see the full set in regular old flickr.
I was never one of those people for whom Mondays were calamitously painful. Mondays were just another day in the week, usually bettered by the accomplishment of having gotten through them and rewarding yourself with a nice weeknight meal and some DVD action.
You’d think, unemployed, that Mondays would bring some sort of illicit joy. I don’t have to go to work! Ha ha suckers, right? Wrong!
Never let it be said that I don’t recognize patterns in my own life, albeit a little too slowly. The past three Mondays have been, in their own little domestic ways, squalls of unhappiness. I can’t install something right, I can’t get through my to-do list, I don’t make it to the gym, dinner’s wrong – any of these things or all of them set me off a-wailing.
I finally put my finger on it today when I burst into tears over another recruiter calling me for another cadre of jobs I’m not looking for. I also burst into tears because my wonderful parents called to talk and offer upbeat support and I was so morose and depressed that it was an effort to sound as cheerful and confident as I know I should be.
Mondays are bad lately because over the weekend, I can sort of pretend that I’m weekending just like everyone else is weekending. But I’m not like everyone else. School is over and it was a highly unsatisfying experience and year. I’ve gone wading back into the job market looking for that elusive part-time job I can do well enough and then leave when I walk through the office doors on my way home. Again, I feel like a penguin thrown from a plane and told to fly simply because she has wings. I don’t FLY well!
Mondays are also bad because I haven’t been doing the thing I’m supposed to be enduring all this humiliating unemployment and part-time work in order to DO: WRITE. Hi, Stuart, Mom, Dad, Luiz, Shana, all you denizens of goodwill and encouragement! My name is Krissa and I haven’t written in over a month.
So I stopped crying eventually today, when I realized that perhaps Mondays are just always going to be hard and the only antidote is to stop, as my dad pointed out, finding palliatives for my angst like dishes and housework, and instead, get down to the business of writing and regular job-searching.
And don’t forget to throw in a little faith. A lot of faith.
So belatedly, I did just that. I wrote for a solid hour, saying hello to my beloved pages again. And all you denizens of encouragement were right. Nothing else quite compares to the validation I get when I write. The balance that throws me off when pawing through endless pages on Monster can only be found in a quiet corner with my laptop and my story.
I think I can do that, keep the faith going. But if you’ve got any spare, Mondays are good days for sharing it.
