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Down and Out:
Annals of Unemployment
Gogol and Dostoevsky, I've found, are the best guides to the world of employment and (in my case, at least) its perennial lack. Not Seven Habits of Highly Efficient People, not Dale Carnegie, oh surely not him. I go out there,thinking this is a Readers Digest world, this is the American century, the want ad section of the paper is full. I go out there with a resume, because this is a world where your resume counts. Everybody says, the resume is important. I go out there with some good shoes, shoes I've borrowed, because that first impression is so important. I get a haircut. I shave. I shave better than I usually shave, god, I'm careful, I don't leave random filaments around the lip area. No! I go out there, I drive in a car to a temp agency. And always, always, Seven Habits gets me nowhere, shaving, who cares, the shoes, who notices. The question quickly becomes not how you can influence people, or what job op you should pick from the panoply of job ops. The question becomes, with an odd, sudden desperation, like some surprising welling up of funeral appropriate tears, it becomes how you can snatch one of those mouthwatering jobs, like, say, word processing old records for some insurance company on a second shift deal, 12 to 9, and of course no benefits thrown in to make you too sassy. Sassiness, in such a job, is a fatal distraction. Carpal tunnel, if you want it, thrown in free. And here is where it happens, every time, because every time I forget, every time I get a job for a while and I'm not on the market and I forget.
Like, supposedly, women forget labor, they say they remember labor but how about the women who have four, five kids, they must forget labor, even two kids. This isn't the world of Business self help. This is my world, the world of Gogol, like I said, the world of shabbiness and a neon awareness of the insults to one's dignity, an awareness that one suppresses as one can, because they can't read your thoughts.
They can't, I know that for a fact.
Perhaps, this time I was thinking, I'd just glide into a position somewhere. I was cocky, this time. I'd been out of work for some time, mooching on my betters, trying to write. Yeah, I was engaged in piling up cultural capital. But of course this jaunty, surface self, this imp, this was just a charade, a self - deception. Really, the old me, the fearful me, was behind the scenes, and the fearful me knows. Knows that I will never slide into a job, that the word is sneak. That maybe I'll sneak into a niche. An ecological niche. I'm like one of those creatures which, at certain point, stopped being the fittest, and has to find some aberrant island ecology in which to even lay its head. Yes, some poor retro beast. That's what I'm like, here. And so I wait in the waiting room of whatever Temp agency this one is. In one of those office complexes, the building a toothsome display of smoky glass so they can see out but you can't see in. Although inside those complexes, invariably, nobody is looking out. A total flourescent light environment, such as fish get in an acquarium. A bunch of doors down a red carpeted corridor, and the right one, and now I am here. Early, important to be early. My ancestors, with the advice. From before the great Depression, the advice on the major topic of jobs. Be early. Show them your best. Make a good first impression.
