Randomness Preferred

If you do what you love for a living and thus have a fulfilling and successful life, there’s no point in complaining about sometimes having to put in a little hard work along the way. You’re already a lot luckier than most. Especially if you’re a sought after, international fashion photographer at 20.

I don’t know what the hell you want from me world, but I’m pretty much ready to throw in the towel.

When people think that I must not be trying to find a job, or that I sit around all day watching TWiT because surely I should have found a job within the last two years, well, I die a little inside because practically all I think about is finding a job. Lately, there have been a ton of  jobs to apply for but of course I still have to get interviews, which sometimes means getting past HR and that can be tricky because they only scan resumes for specific conditions and if you don’t appear to meet them on first glance they move on to the next in a stack of five hundred resumes. And, somehow writing and editing have become the kind of work that is no longer appreciated and is compensated like sweatshop labor. 

So, basically, I’m trying to find an underpaid, under appreciated job in an economy that fell just short of a second great depression along with seasoned professionals where employers can demand the best for the least amount of pay. I often find posts that claim 3 - 5 years of experience is entry level. Obviously the term entry level denotes that the applicant has no prior experience or at least very little; 3 - 5 years of experience is neither of those things. 

Perhaps now, you can begin to see, that even though all I do is think about work, because that will get me the money I need to get to where I want to be, and even though I am in a great location to find a job that involves writing and/or editing, my future is left up in the air as complete strangers judge my fitness to belong with their company. My ability to increase profits for the mother (ship) company and therefore DESERVE monetary compensation are of utmost concern to people I don’t know but have the power to make life easier or more difficult for me, and I am not alone. 

If we still had an economy that supported artists via patronage my job search might be less difficult, but we don’t. I have to somehow MAKE myself seem commercially appealing on a single 8.5” by 11” piece of paper that rarely makes it to ACTUAL paper. Clearly this is a difficult thing to do when the employers and the economy have the winds at their backs. 

So, the next time you dismiss my or any unemployed person’s efforts, stop to think about whether you may be jumping to conclusions. Perhaps the economy has unexpectedly put them in a position with very little power beyond applying for everything they seem remotely qualified for. And, no, it’s not ridiculous to hesitate when applying for a job you’ve worked hard to be extremely over-qualified for, like working a retail job, where your attractiveness may be, illegally but subconsciously or even consciously, taken into account before you get past the interview stage. No amount of confidence can overcome the first 30 second appraisal of your fitness to perform a number of tasks, unless of course you happen to have a penis, because as a number of studies and daily experience in our sometimes not so subtly sexist and sometimes misogynistic society demonstrate, men just about always get a pass on looks. They’re the preferred protagonists and they’re frequently the preferred employees, unless of course the interviewee is young and hot – that always helps – even if the babe is talented, educated and deserves the job, being hot is just extra bonus points over the equally qualified but average or less than average looking competitor. But I digress.

My point really is this, I don’t sit around all day watching TWiT, I do have a life and I do keep myself busy. All I think about every moment of every day is how to get a frelling job and to be honest I have no fracking clue. All I can do is keep going, but the best way to do that is through encouragement and support. As my Japanese grandmother would say, you get back the energies you send out. That statement isn’t meant to be passive aggressive. It’s meant to be the truth. So endeavor to send out good energies and I will try to do the same. Of course, if you’re meant to be hit by a wrecking ball in a freak accident no amount of good energies will save you.

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