Please Want My Help

Hi, remember me? I worked for you three years ago. I mouthed off in your class six years ago. Tall girl? Short brown hair? I once made that really inappropriate joke... I once burned the hell out myself making you coffee... I broke the copier that one time? Yeah! That's me. Um, so how are you? Great, great. Listen, I need to ask a favor of you. I'm applying for another job in yet another state. I'm thinking about applying for graduate school... still. Could I please give your number to a string of total strangers? I'd appreciate it if you could tell them I'm not a douchebag, and if they ask about specific skills or strengths of mine, could you maybe ask what they're looking for and then say I'm good at exactly that? That would really help me out.

The job search. It always seems coincide with the times when I'm really doubting my worth as a human being, and suddenly I need to update this slick-looking document with proactive verbs and examples of my own brilliance and efficiency. I've never lied on a resume, but I am sorely tempted to douse mine in a bath of acidic sarcasm every now and then: "Winged it for a year, managed to sound bright every now and then, was never found out." "Successfully disguised soul-crushing post-collegiate ennui while revamping vendor files."

So, I've compiled a list of jobs from local wants ads that I could do if I abandoned all sense of career continuity and instead embraced my appreciation for the absurd:

* Dating Agency Spokesmodel: they need someone to look regular and yet more attractive than average (which I could manage with professionally applied make-up and a soft-focus lens) to appear in commercials and spout off the advantages of hooking up online. I would also have to create a profile on the site, but I wouldn't be required to answer inquiries. The old bait & switch.

* Prisoner Transporter: I would need to drive a van to and from detention centers and be responsible for feeding the prisoners fast food en route whilst compiling receipts for food and gas. The ad doesn't say anything about what you're allowed to play on the van stereo, so I'd make a perplexing mix tape of my favorite Tupac songs interspersed with foreign children's folk songs and snippets of wacko conservative talk radio. My passengers would be the first to get shiv-happy upon arrival at their new destination.

* Tomato Quality Control Specialist: pretty self-explanatory. Pick out the moldy and deformed ones. I'd take this job as an opportunity to inspect the produce at friends' houses and deliver inappropriately long sermons on their poor decision making skills.

* Homeland Security Airport Screener: This one's just sad. Do you know how much they get paid? Almost nothing. No wonder they have no sense of humor.

* Human Billboard: you've seen these. The job pays remarkably well, seeing as how the only requirement is to stand on a street corner with a giant sign hung around your neck. I saw a girl in Florida do this every weekday for several months and the only difference is that the headphones she wore all day got flashier and flashier. If I had this job I might go topless under the sign. Or occasionally flip the sign over to the back where I would have written something universally inflammatory. Or just stand there bawling and see if anyone noticed.

* OB Tech: Seriously. You need no nursing experience to do this, you just set up all the sterile baby-catching equipment, stay out of the way during the delivery, and then mop up afterwards. For sheer wow-factor this job beats out all the others. I bet you don't have to see that many births before you've got some pretty great stories, and then I could see in advance how battle-hardened OB nurses and doctors become just like any other profession when it comes to serving patients/customers, which is to say jaded and full of sanity-saving insulting jokes.

Actually, until I get a forklift driver's license and a back-up certification in dental hygiene, the job search might be kind of slow. Seems all the positions for neurotic word nerd smartasses are full up these days.

Total upheaval in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

If the military and I were tango partners, and relocations were one of those complicated, whip-lash-inducing interchanges, we'd still be bashing faces and kneeing each other in the groin. I use dance as a metaphor here, and the tango in particular, because it implies hope that I can one day master upheaval and clasp it to my heaving bosom in a passionate, complicated, synchronized embrace.

Right now, not so much.

Pants and I learned a few days ago that within the next two weeks, we are California-bound. It wasn't our first choice, but the more I think about it, I'm ashamed it wasn't. I'm looking forward to boasting about my adopted state's forward-thinking auto emissions requirements, and the fact that I was once terrified of our governor hunting me down with his exposed red robot eye. I'm also looking forward to getting carsick on Highway 1, taunting lemurs in San Diego, and goggling at trees wider at their base than the house I grew up in. There will still be plenty of Mexican immigrants to make me feel at home, but I'll also be within a couple hours' drive of world class drag shows and a nationally recognized dildo shop (inappropriate Christmas gifts!).

I have already warned a friend who lives near San Francisco that I've spent far too long away from my liberal hippie roots. Especially at our current post, things to do and places to go have been limited to dive bars and the local Chili's. I'm looking forward to ordering food I can't pronounce, seeing (intentional) performance art, and meeting people who pay for bizarre restorative treatments.*

*Very soon, Pants will have to sit in the equivalent of a giant salad spinner, whirling around a giant room until he passes out. The whole process, for some obscure and sadistic reason, will be videotaped. There's a reason for this, but it doesn't sound very convincing. Instead, I thought back to a co-worker of mine from a few years ago who paid $40 for blurry Polaroids of her aura, routinely hyperventilated while blindfolded with a group of "trance dancers," and spoke openly of the spiritual power of public nudity.

"How much do you think V____ would pay to ride the salad spinner if you told her it was purifying her chakras?" I asked. "More than $100?"

"Put it this way: probably not as much as the taxpayers pay for me to ride it, and all it does for me is make me puke and pass out," Pants replied.

For now I'm trying to focus on these good things, and not the part where I'm leaving another job I really liked and am about to engage in the crap-shoot hunt for a landlord in another state who doesn't harbor a grudge against military renters or indoor pets. Or the part where I get to frantically search for a job before the time bomb of my unemployment-based depression flattens me.