So little, part 2

I spent part of my time today in an online meditation workshop, partly because Debbie mentioned it but maybe also a little bit as another way to avoid working on finding a job. One of our exercises was to free-write about some small irritation in our lives, and I chose my serious procrastination on the job-hunting front. My first remarks were about not wanting to compete, like I wrote here a couple of days ago -- about thinking that all the other candidates are so much brighter and shinier than I am. But it rapidly shifted to something else, and I made a connection that I don't remember whether I ever made before. (Maybe I have -- maybe it's even buried in here somewhere -- but I don't have the patience to look for it.) 

You've heard me whine plenty of times about not liking the kind of work I do … not that there's anything wrong with it, really, but just that it's not as interesting as my current fantasie du jour. And suddenly I remembered hearing the exact same complaint from my dad. When my father owned his own business, he became -- of necessity -- a real expert on the kind of service that he offered. He once said, with a dry chuckle, that he was the only person he knew who could talk about this very commonplace topic for an hour without repeating himself. But in his mind he was never a businessman. (That part was true enough!) He was an actor. He didn't really care about providing this [actually useful but] unromantic service to all of his [actually grateful but] dull and commonplace customers. He wanted to perform on Broadway; he wanted to star in Shakespearean drama at the Old Vic. He didn't want to be stuck in Suburbia, pissing away his talents in community theater and in entertaining the local Rotary Club. I remember him bemoaning this fate one evening, when he segued casually into remarking that …

There is a tide in the affairs of men, 
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

And he went on to say that he feared his tide had passed him by, so that shallows and miseries were all that was left him. 

All of which is just to say, I guess, that I come by my ambivalence for my paying work honestly. Of course I also don't think much of the way my dad handled his professional life. Maybe I should get my ass back in gear and find a job, huh?

     

So little

I have accomplished more or less fuck-all in my job search in the last week. Yesterday Marie sent me an email asking how it's going, since I haven't said much about it. I don't really want to admit to her how useless I've been, but this evening I sat down in front of an open text file just to type out the first things that came to my head on the subject. It ended up as a conversation that went like this.

==========

Why have you accomplished so little in job hunting?

Well it's not like I've done nothing. I've watched recorded videos about how to brand yourself. I've attended live webinars on important topics like how to get medical insurance when you are unemployed. I spent a lot of time formatting my resume for the state unemployment department, which was a requirement for getting Unemployment Insurance. And I've attended professional webinars put on by my professional association.

You've also squandered hours and hours of time. And all this stuff -- maybe it matters but it's all getting in your way. Why aren't you looking for work?

Because I don't want to!

You don't want work?

I wouldn't mind working. I don't want to have to look for work!

Bad news, dude, but jobs don't grow on trees.

I know that.

Fine. What do you dislike about it so much?

I don't like that it's all a competition I don't like having to think about what I'm especially good at. And all my accomplishments seem so specious. When I go online and read the requirements for this or that real job, I think there's no way I can match those. What a joke! They are looking for people who are polished and accomplished. I sit at my desk and fill out forms, after somebody else explains them all to me.

Is that all you can do?

Well -- OK, maybe not. But I don't see any way that I can pretend to meet all the bright, shiny requirements in these ads.

Are you looking at the wrong ads?

I guess I must be.

Where would you find the right ones?

Shit, I don't know! I'm googling jobs with titles similar to the ones I used to have, or that use keywords that look right.

But you don't fit most of what you find?

Let's say that when I see a new ad, the first thing I do is scan it for some requirement that would eliminate me. I usually find one.

Because you don't want to work?

Because I don't want to have to fight for it in the arena. So if there's some reason I'm going to be disqualified anyway, I figure let's get it over with. There usually is.

And you assume they are going to find someone with 100% of what they want.

Maybe not. Look, if the part I don't have is listed as "preferred" or "nice to have" then I don't worry so much. But if they absolutely require some familiarity that I don't have, why should I waste their time and mine applying?

If that's true it seems like you should spend more time at the search, not less, because you need time to weed out all the inappropriate ones. 

I know, I know. It's just depressing.

Do you need to target your search a little better? Who is it that you can really help?

Small start-ups that have just been acquired by huge global firms and need help integrating into the systems of their new parent. At least, that's where my last two jobs have been.

Is that who you are targeting?

I don't know how to find them.

Are you asking anybody?

No. Where would I even start?

Your existing network? Or that consultant that your last employer hired for you until June?

Oh. Yeah. I guess that would be a good idea. I didn't think of that. Also I don't want to move out of this general region.

Nice to know your requirements are so simple!

Well, you know, my mom ….

Yes, yes. I know. Nice to know your requirements are so simple. Are you sure you're not just adding more requirements to make a big heap so the whole effort becomes impossible?

I'm not sure, no.

So you might be?

I might.

Is that OK with you?

Fuck, I don't know. What does it matter?

Are you planning to get another job?

Oh, I'm sure it will happen sooner or later.

Which? When?

I don't know.

Do you care?

It's hard for me to care.

Because you don't want to?

Not a lot, I guess.

Do you want to retire?

I don't know if I can afford to retire.

If you could afford it, would you want to?

It would be tempting. On the other hand I look at how I piss away my days right now, and I remember how much my dad pissed away his time once he sold his business, and I'm not sure it would make me any happier. What it would make me, after a little while, is unemployable -- because I would have forgotten the dance that you have to do at work to get things done.

Are there things you still want to get done?

Sure. I want to write up all the philosophy that I keep promising out on the Patio, and maybe a couple of things I've never mentioned there. I'd like to publish a book I started writing last year about some of the stuff I do professionally.

Could you do those things if you weren't working?

You'd think so, huh? But I don't know if I'd ever get the motivation to sit down and do it.

Will you do those things if you do get a job?

I haven't yet, and I'm nearly 60.

So are you saying they'll never happen?

I'm saying I need some kind of outside compulsion.

And what about job hunting?

Look, tomorrow morning I've got an appointment with my main consultant, and also with a resume specialist. Those meetings will push me back on track.

Really?

No, not really.

==========

Fun, huh? Maybe I need to admit that one of my consultants is Sister Failure. Or maybe I just need to get my ass in gear. That's another way to read the data.

     

Blackmail

 Wife has discovered a new way to blackmail the children. Or at least (for the moment) Son 1.

You know that I'm out of a job. I have severance through the end of August and a little bit into September. And I have applied for Unemployment Insurance, for whatever that adds up to. (Not much.) According to my Separation Agreement with Wife, the alimony I pay is partly dependent on my income: if my income drops too far, the alimony goes to zero. (It never turns negative, though.) So if I don't get a new job by September -- or at any rate October, just to be certain -- Wife's alimony stops.

She explained all this to Son 1 over the phone one evening, in a dead panic -- the kind of panic she gets in where there is no way to placate her or to reason with her. And she kept it up until he told her, "It's going to be fine, Mom. If your alimony runs out you can move in with me." (Son 1, remember, has a job and his own apartment now.) Apparently that let her calm down.

And that's great and all, except … God in heaven, who ever thought this was a good idea? In the first place Wife is crazy and emotionally abusive. Beyond that, how is Son 1 supposed to live a normal life as a young man if he shares an apartment with his mother? 

• What happens when she starts telling him not to spend so much time playing video games? Properly, at that point he should throw her out. But if his whole motivation is that he doesn't want her to be homeless, will he be able to do that? 
• What happens if he wants to bring a young woman home for the night? Does he tell her, "It's fine, my mom won't mind?"
• One point I mentioned directly to him on the phone is that when you are responsible for paying somebody else's bills, you cannot help but judge their spending. So it is a foregone conclusion that if she moves in with him, one day he'll find himself screaming at her, "For God's sake, woman, why did you go spend money on that, of all things?"

But of course he doesn't want her to be homeless. That speaks well of him. But it really bothers me. I see it as the opening wedge, as her putting her nose in the tent in such a way that Son 1 will never get her out again. She would love that, but it's wrong.

I also can't help wondering what she has been doing for the last eight years since we've each lived alone? Did she never understand that one day the alimony would run out? It runs out when I die, for example. If my income ends when I retire, it runs out then. And there was always the possibility that I might be laid off. Did she really take no steps in all that time to secure some kind of income on her own? Of course she often says that she can't get a job, because of her various illnesses. But surely there are ways to secure an income of some kind without working a regular 8:00 to 5:00 job, or without having to type 150 words a minute in a legal office. Flannery O'Connor suffered from lupus just as Wife does, but it didn't stop her from writing. Has Wife really been willing to be simply dependent for the rest of her life, and to leave it at that?

Apparently so. And it's very sad.

       

Not having to go to school

A couple of posts ago (here) I reference a post from five and a half years ago (here) where I tell a story about realizing, not long after leaving graduate school, that I could afford to jettison the whole school-based model I had developed for how to relate to other people and the world.

And I discovered today that Zach Weinersmith already said the exact same thing years ago too -- except he was much funnier, of course. You can find the official cartoon here.

Career counseling, redux

A little over three years ago, I wrote this post here explaining why I've always found it hard to articulate professional goals: namely, that I just don't believe in any of the work I'm actually doing. Somehow my heart of hearts still thinks I'm just on vacation and any day now I'm going back to Academia. (This means my heart of hearts is pretty stupid, for the record.)

Why am I thinking about this now? You'd think it's because I am unemployed (March 31 was my Last Day Worked), but no -- that's not it. Actually it's because I was killing time recently by reading old articles from The Last Psychiatrist, and I stumbled across this one: The Last Psychiatrist: The Near Death Of A Salesman.

Right now I don't want to talk about how much I resemble the character he describes in this fiction: yes, I don't eat as well as I should; and yes, I'm really out of shape. I don't listen to talk radio, so there's that. 

No, the part that hit me like a locomotive was three sentences in the middle of the third paragraph:

And this wasn't his real life, anyway, he was still planning his real life.  He was 47--  three years of youth left.  Three years to get his real life started.

That's what TLP's post is really about, anyway. The delusion that any of us might have a "real life" somewhere out there in another dimension that's different from the life we actually lead day-to-day.

Of course, it's not like I ever believed that. Not really. Besides, I'm not 47. That was back when I started the blog, more or less. (Not quite, but close enough.)

Trying too hard? Yeah, I thought so too. But if I suffer from the same narcissistic delusion as this moron, the salesman in this story … well, … I mean ….

Well shit, that sucks. Sure wish it weren't true.

   

Leaving school

The School of Life has a wonderful essay today about leaving school, and about how so many of us still think and act like we are students in school even when we think we are being solid adults. You can find it here.

After reading it, I spent a couple hours browsing through my old posts, looking for places where I said something similar, because it seems to me that their point is one I have also made more than once. Maybe I should have a label for "school" the way I have one for "teleportation." 

I don't really have anything new to say about it at this point, but you can find some of my older posts:

• Here, in my "fourth theory" -- especially the long, indented paragraph.
• Or here, where I tell the same story but in a more abbreviated form.
• Here's yet another angle on the same basic idea.
• I look at school (and also monasticism) in a broader perspective here. 
• That's similar to what I say a lot more briefly here.
• In this post I talk about how my father faced the same pressures that the School of Life discusses.

Gosh, that's a fair number of posts. You'd almost think school had been a big deal in my mental landscape, or something. (smirk)

Silly Buzzfeed questionnaire

 I was dawdling on the Internet earlier this morning, rather than getting anything productive done, and I stumbled across a Buzzfeed questionnaire: "What is your love language?"

My answer, apparently, is Physical Touch.

It says "You're not big on compliments or gifts," which I guess is true enough.

For what it's worth ….