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My Fabulous Career

2/19/07
Okay, I give up. Happy New Year. Let's get this movable feast on the road.

Once again, elements of my devoted (dewhich?) readership have begun delicately suggesting that it's time for me to get off my ass and post something resembling a TG entry. It's true, o'course -- leaving a holiday card plastered across the front page is sorta like practicing that happy American tradition of leaving the xmas lights up till Easter, not to mention imbuing a suspicion in the minds of observers that upon entry into my house they'd find me in a state of advanced rigor mortis, mouse clutched in my cold dead fingers whilst mice played about my decomposed remains.

I even have a practical reason to pound coffee and keyboard, to tinker and toy with words, beyond the purely theoretical brain workout it gives me. I've been out scouring the surf for part-time work, and I've been using this site as an example of my fluffy precious website-building skills.

It would be all too easy for me to descend by easy mincing steps into a fetid puddle of consternation over the way this particular Anno Domini began, with wearily sarcastic quips about lost income and inconstant clients and blown mufflers and broken printers and such. Certainly my recent professional life has resembled an extended road trip on a singularly unimproved road, and every pothole and rut has extorted its personal sovereign toll on my already nicely overburdened thank you credit.

But that's not what you guys want to hear about. Do you? I wouldn't.

So really, this is about the lesson that pamper-pooping infant 2007 seems bent on fastening to my head with coarse-thread sheet-rock screws: perseverance furthers. With the caveat: lots of perseverance.

I've reached that point in my life when my more primitive youthful impulses for toys and glory have either been assuaged or lost their piquant quality, the hollowness of such needs brought into sharp relief. Soon or later one simply runs out of room to put any more Objects of Desire, and the endless yellow brick road to wealth and fame is revealed for the hamster wheel it is. The fire in one's belly wanes even as the belly itself expands. It's a predictable, low-tragic process, a side-effect of that fatal disease, duration.

This is not to say that such goals haven't produced laudable results, goodness knows. What house is complete without a sousaphone and a sitar? Not to mention the cultural and physical artifacts of a life spent in major part making an ass of myself in public. If I had to do it all over again, I might be more inclined to get an agent, but I'm drop-dead certain I wouldn't go into bond futures.

Nowadays, though, I'm no longer as concerned about getting a life and more involved in keeping the one that got me. It's house-holding, another predictable process, the classic pressure of real estate management that carves liberal bananas into conservative fence-posts. I've gone from Gypsy Davy to Biederman in about five thousand easy steps, never noticing the manacles growing around my ankles.

And with the coming of the cold light of another Northwest winter, I've been given notice by the stern lecturing dutch uncle who is now, alas, myself, the corporal manifestation of that old old cliche that when the going gets tough, the tough get going and the rest of us are left holding the bag so we might as well get a job.

Ah, but it's the New Age, didn't you know? Instead of scraping the soles of our shoes raw on the metropolitan pavements of unemployment, inking our fingers black in the want ads, groveling before endless impersonal HR droids in endless impersonal cubicles, now we can sit in the comfort and privacy of our homes performing modern up to date versions of exactly the same activities, trying to find an honest ad on Craigslist.

Yes, Craigslist, triumph of libertarian ethos, where the unwary meet the unscrupulous and sometimes even catch a break. My first experiences with the free-as-in-beer (bless you, Craig) service were relatively positive, buying and selling musical instruments and computer impedimenta. Last year I was greatly heartened at its finding me a more-than-serviceable replacement for my previous vehicle, outwitting, outplaying and outlasting all my previous strategies for junker procurement, from street deals right on through to used lot crawling. And in the fall it even provided me the excuse I'd always held out for to pick up a DVD duplicator to replace my mere-shmere CD copying tower, in the person of a local photographer who needed a hundred slide-shows done up quick.

So it was bright and early and broke in the New Year that I began rummaging through the Gigs section, looking for something remunerative but not too formal to help me through the long night of the rainy season. Hope warmed my chilled fingers tapping the keyboard, hope of a marketplace of labor and intellect unblemished by the crass deceptions and grubby acquisitiveness that infest the normal job search like crabgrass in a cracked sidewalk, bright, glittering hope destined all too soon to be smashed to scintillating smithereens on that same hard sidewalk, now cleverly reconstituted on-line.

Simply put: there may be such a thing as right work, but a job is still a job. Employers still take forever to get off their hands and decide who gets to flip the shit, interviewers still care more about your work history than your qualifications, and everybody on the other side of the interview desk is ultimately more concerned with keeping their own good-paying job than in expediting yours. The best that can be said for the web-based job search is that the agony is over more quickly: what used to take three weeks of phone calls and drama can now be settled in one unanswered email inquiry, which is more in keeping with Hermits Named Dave than much else.

Whether the incessant sieving of the InfoPipes will result in anything of consequence for me is still an open issue. Right now I have what appears to be a job doing the web equivalent of Mister Fixit on a Flash-based site. Unless and until I get paid for it, though, it's just Chickadee Glen Community College. Any evidence of the blossoming of my fabulous new career will just have to wait till then, or spring, whichever comes first.


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