Apt metaphor? I'm just sitting here / spinning my wheels, /(they) go round and round...
Thank god for GRE scores, because the past two months otherwise would've been dubiously spent. Every day it's the whir whir scan the jobs, send the resumes, whir whir, wait, no fruit, WHIR WHIR, frustration. An interview goes well, then they offer you a job teaching science instead of math; another math job pops up, only it's across the city AND at night. I do a solid twenty minute phone interview yesterday and it turns out to be one of these buy-in for $100 scams - posting your info all over the world wide has its expenses. And I went to an interview the other day that turned out to be the embodiment of soul-less marketing 101, not that I got offered anything anyways - they were looking for someone with more sales experience. One, thanks for having me drive down there to tell me that, two, SALES? F-ing sales? Beggars / choosers and such, but what the hell am I doing interviewing for sales, pretty much antiNyet on all faces?
And why am I wasting precious blog space on a job search process that is only going to be a temporary stint anyways? Jobs in the bios get one-line toss-offs: Pynchon was a tech-writer, this guy or another wrote his masterworks at night using the company printer in between his desk-job nothings. So who gives a crap what I end up doing (especially here in the short run), so long as it helps pay bills and gets medical insurance for the next inevitable ligamental snap?
Ah, the blackness. Karen (or she-who-has-not-blogged-lately) wrote this recently (or not really that recently, given her above epithet):
2) I then spent a month alternating between "having no job agrees with me. I have sent out resumes for all the jobs I want, so now I think I'll take a glass of wine out the back yard and read my book" and "I'm going to DIE. In a GUTTER." Thew ratio of these thought were about 65/35.Keeping in mind that this post is being composed from the vantage point of one of those rare level-headed, non self-deprecatory moods - I feel that plus. Not that our existential angst should be some kind of pissing contest. Um, woah. Last visual image = deleted. But I would put forth that my ratio sits at about 10/90 in the opposite direction. ANd the latter label isn't die in a gutter, it's "whatever conclusion we arrive at is so hopelessly and pervasively meaningless that it quite simply matters not: success or failure, there will always be the nagging, empty, base blackness beneath it all." These thoughts are one, quite inimical to venturing out on career-boosting ventures, and two, have an under-nagging, a sub-subtext, that they are obviously self-excusing insurance policies of a sort; if we fail badly, at least there was no meaning anyways. In my stupid GRE essay, I wrote about how the statement "the ends justify the means" is implicitly suspect, because people who use it as a justification for their actions have an obvious investment in whatever ends they have achieved. And my little "everything is pointless" fallback is just that implicitly derailed; of course it would be better, more psychologically shielding, if those failures I've had and the successes I'm jealous of are just empty nothings anyways.
I haven't been sleeping well, shocker. I wake up nightly multiple times with a skull shattering "getajobgetajobyouwastelesspointlessnothingetajobgetajobyouleechoffBeck'saccomplishmentspunknothing" mantra blasting between my ears, not exactly healthy for the relaxing night's recoup. I try to combat this by occasionally taking some Tylenol PM (or more accurately, its generic equivalent) to help get me through the night (ladies and gents, it's the all John Lennon solo career song post! More on that in a sec). And the other night I took two as indicated by bottle's typed instructions, and I went in bed, and somewhere in there I forgot whether I had taken them yet or not. I apparently felt awake. And I did the practical thing and just waited to see if I fell asleep, which I did. But there was an odd detachment there, just a sort of cerebral, factual "well, you shouldn't take two more because that would wreck your liver and possibly kill you," it was just those chemical facts, and no adrenaline-firing, fight-or-flight mechanism of "must preserve life." Just a casual notation, not the appropriate repulsion of the pain / death that extra pills tend to cause.
Flash-forward to the next morning, when i'm watching Sportscenter in a drugged haze (thanks Ty PM) and there's this former cocaine addict who has turned his life around by becoming an ironman triathlete. (The subject of Sportscenter and its drama, soap opera for men turn it has taken of late is its own subject - and I will sum up the bizarre estrogen-testosterone-fueled event that SC has become by pointing to its treatment of the Michael Vick case, and its panel questions of "How will this effect Michael as a person, and not as a quarterback?"). And he's recounting his worst days, the height of his cocaine fueled nights, and he says that he never got to some depths where he wanted to off himself or anything, but it was rather this sinking blackness and emptiness of not caring one way or the other. The dread of emptiness. And I'm not saying I had anything approaching that life-of-coke induced bottoming out, but given the last night's "too many pills, no, don't do that (whatever)" experience, I could at least see quite clearly what such a bottoming out level of dread would be like. It's not so much a feeling of sinking but one of perpetual sink, like there ain't nothing beneath nothing, a thought transcending sadness (transcending negatively, I suppose).
Flash-forward again to watching "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," an enlightening and interesting but really fairly flitty doc about the US gov (Tricky Dick, J. Edgar Hoover et al) trying to deport John Lennon on the basis of a trivial drug charge back in England. And there's a scene in there, after John has gone a little off the deep end, where he's debating his effect on the war with some uppity reporter from the New Yorker in an office; she's claiming his "Give Peace a Chance" is fluff, and he's proud that people have taken it up as an anthem. And it's such a collision of foolish idealism and elitist crap that it's fairly sickening, and on both sides - the meaning that Lennon has given to his work, the movement, everything is blindingly constructed, as is her rejection of that meaning - on both sides there are only constructs, and beneath a whole lot of nothing, just impressions and desires and wants piled on top of nothingness. Imagine no possessions? Imagine nothing. For some reason, i got a solid glimpse of it in the middle of the movie, just the crushing feeling that all yesterday's revolutionaries, hippies, and peaceniks are today's investors - and what's bad is not that there activity has flipped from good to bad, but that in both cases it was a bunch of idiotic nothingness, just whims and short-sighted evaluations of what to do with social righteousness in both cases. It is admittedly a seventh level cynical and borderline nihilistic thought, but the need for reorientation that a fundamental faith in the nothingness of it all is a mind-wrenching undertaking, and my basic response thus far has been one of dejection. Whir whir WHIR WHIR, stop.
Which is natch very melodramatic and etc. And the thing whirs up again every day with dependency, whether its faith and love or just this stupid job search. If we want to push the stupidity of this metaphor to its obvious limit, I got impatient with a dysfunctional DVD drive and bought an external one soon after the trouble started - maybe I just need an external guide of sorts now, eh? In the form of, I don't know, say, an academic program? Quick fix, or thing that finds it? Good question - the obvious fear here is that the next undertaking, however better fitting it is with some normal sense of self as a thinker not a doer, is just the next short whir solution to the inevitable crush that is coming, the silence.
I've written before (have I?) about something I loosely think of as "The Cube," this idea that you've got a certain set of outlooks available to you, but they come in the form of a large cube with faces so imposing that they obscure all other sides in any given moment. Right now I'm on an upbeat, relatively objective cube-face (as a rule, I don't post in bad cube face moments - they would pretty much bring you and me down both) and so I've got a sort of blind faith in my good friend Andy's "Everything always works out" outlook and think I can go along with pretending that things mean things in the short run, and that hopefully a job will fall in place in the near future; after all, wise moms say that there's only one phone call between here and there, stupid endless monster clicking and (irresistible, sorry) stupid, endless, excel sheet clicking (that at least pays bills). But like Karen's 65/35, my days have been bouncing between hopeful searching10 and a 90 that feels this whole endeavor is doomed to my stupid pre-fitted outlook - even if things are good, I won't be happy. Not wired that way. And that dread is enough to make me, at least, want to bang my face through glass or scream until vessels burst or at least eat too many chocolate milkshakes. So it's not fun. Given a couple of months off, I've accomplished very little - read a few books, seen a few movies, and I put the GRE chip in place. I'm profoundly under-motivated and (did I make this clear enough) feeling fairly pointless about the whole thing. Perhaps the real tragic thing is that given the time off, I've been too guilty / neurotic about everything to enjoy it - the findajobetc. mantra even managed to creep its way in to St. Lucia beach musings, which is just terrible on all levels. Still, I clearly am very fortunate to have friends / family to put up with my crap in these times, and very lucky to have the Beck and her constant support (in all facets, though FTR I am still being paid by the Nut and she has not achieved unadultered "sugar-momma" status just yet). Good thing, because the inner drive has been a wimpy wind of late.
But, head above water and all. Keepin' on keepin' on. The stupidity and grandeur of hope and such. Etc. This is either as sincere or ironic as you'd like, as fits your needs.
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Now playing: John Lennon - Watching the Wheels
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