UNEMPLOYED USEFUL POET SEEKING HIGH-PAYING JOB

Dear potential employers,

I need at least $2000 a month which is as unlikely, it seems, as anyone thinking that Barack deserved the Nobel.

I am not: enthusiastic, energetic, highly motivated, pleasant, excited about my low-paying crappy humiliating job. I will not be cheerful when answering phones all day for $9 an hour. I will not be highly motivated as an attendant at the Marriott. I will not be a self-starter unless you pay enough for me to feed and clothe said self.

Do you realize that $600 a month for daycare, which I can’t afford, is unbelievably cheap? For this rate, when you pick your child up you get to stand in the rain waiting for someone to come to the locked door because the daycare doesn’t have enough money to pay a receptionist. (I admit, I considered applying to be their receptionist.)

I am not just out of college and will not accept perpetually being paid a rate that 22-year-olds have no choice but to accept with joy in their hearts. I have no joy in my heart unless I can afford good red wine.

How about I just write poems for you? I can do that. I have degrees in that. Writing poems—a real life skill! Just pay at least $20 an hour and expect that I will need to sit around for hours staring into space waiting for the creative spirit to strike; and that if it does strike, this doesn’t necessarily mean that A) whatever I’m doing will become a poem, or B) it will be any good. I will need to be well-supplied with coffee. None of that cheap crap, either although there is something poetic about the cappuccinos that come out of convenience store machines adjacent to gas pumps. Lonely machines that wait under fluorescent lights to be refilled! Have you considered paying me to properly honor, with song, these machines and their secret dark hazelnut-flavored product?

I need health insurance. I am a human being who may tomorrow be rear-ended or knocked flat by a bus. I may require 20 stitches, or glasses so I can see when I drive. I may need a little something done with my teeth once a year so they don’t fall out, thus entirely erasing my single-mom dating prospects. Expect that the human being will require maintenance in order to be cheerful, a self-starter, high-performing—or to show up at all.

If this sounds good you may reach me anytime at…oh screw it. Please call me now. I will be your steak cook, nail technician, night auditor. I will work at your HoJo in Slidell. Just pay at least $20 an hour and don’t expect me to have any of the skills / personality attributes you are seeking.

What are we here for?

This is what I'm wondering right now. You can't just exist; you have to have money and credit cards and a car, etc. and the bondage to all of these things. I spend my days sitting at a desk at one job or another, or running errands that need to be done (depositing money in the bank, mailing bills, going through junk mail, cleaning...). Is this what my childhood was preparing me for? Is it what riding my bike through the sweet blue evenings of childhood summer was leading to? And dressing up for dance recitals, posing for pictures in satiny skirts and bright pink lipstick, receiving shiny trophies at the recital every June (which didn't mean anything, because everyone got one just for making it through another year of dance...). By the time I get home from work I don't have energy for anyting, let alone hanging out with my poor toddler...I just want her to be quiet and removed somewhere while Mommy collapses on the couch with a book of poetry or a magazine or a burrito and a beer. And that isn't living either, it's RECOVERING. It seems only if you have money, a lot of money, can you actually have life--filling your days and moments with things you want to do and choose to do, living on your own rhythms. Imagine waking up, puttering over to a cafe and sitting there reading and writing for hours, then having a glass of wine over a leisurely gourmet lunch, then taking a long walk...but maybe on some level all these things, too are just things to fill time--the time of existing, which none of us can bear without filling it with something. But that is going way beyond where I wanted to go in this thought. I just wonder, what exactly is the point if all your moments are spent just paying for something you deserve in the first place--to exist, to take up space on the earth among all the other earth-inhabitants, and to feel what is meaningful about that existence, to look for meaning. I guess we're all competing for resources but the resources aren't actually scarce, it's the system that makes them that way. Like, it's not as if I have to spend my days making spears so that a wild boar doesn't kill me on the open plains. But spending my days making money is THE SAME THING.

People say to find a job you love. I think that's bullshit. Who loves their job? How quickly can love turn to hate when you have to do something over and over or else there will be dire consequences? I am burnt out and tired and I resent having to devote my best energy (all the daylight hours) to administrative tasks, to busy-work, to driving around and around through traffic to do other tasks. I feel a constant anxiety that whatever I choose to do with the rare free moment isn't good enough, because there is so little unoccupied, unspoken-for time. I'm even starting to nurture fantasies about taking this summer off from work entirely and making some kind of big change to my work life after that, since a recent inheritance gives me a financial cushion (but then, any use of such money feels frivolous). It probably is true that I need to make more money so there is less sense of living-on-the-financial-edge grind, and find tasks that feel less compromising, and that things would feel better after that. But I still think we all deserve, for no reason at all (not because of our status or amount of money, etc.), to have the time to exist and search for ourselves and have wild pointless sexual encounters that never go anywhere, and write poetry about it, and eat too much dessert, and visit a beautiful place and stay in hostels and just breathe, and let the garbage bags accumulate around the side of the house and throw the recycling out the window for deer to graze on! and spend four hours choosing a shade of lipstick or an outfit, and look through old photo albums and cry, and tell someone to fuck off and not feel bad about it, and not say "I'm sorry" when someone is blocking the aisle at the grocery store, and light a lot of scented candles, and make a sculpture out of pine needles and spaghetti that represents a lost moment of our adolescense.