TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I wish I could say that I just rescued a puppy from a gun-wielding panther or found a large patch of marijuana while trail-skipping, but it’s been kind of slow around here lately. One medium funny thing did happen—I dropped out of grad school. This in itself is not really all that interesting as my life as an aspiring proletariat isn’t much different from my life as an aspiring master. When you own no textbooks, never attend class, and enrolled in school only to be able to say, “I’m in graduate school,” you don’t really feel like a student so much as a creep for only venturing to campus because there’s a lot of shade and the girls are cute. Here’s the medium funny part: you have to write your reason for leaving school on your withdrawal form, and as, in the words of my grandmother, “the dumbest smart person around,” I wrote, “I’m quitting because school makes me want to kill myself.” I turned in the form at five o’clock the Friday before Labor Day, when, presumably, everyone had left for the weekend. I’m guessing that someone glanced at my form on the secretary’s desk and made a phone call or two, because an hour later, the DEAN called me. It’s a strange experience to explain to a college administrator that if anything made you want to bake your brains in the nearest hotbox, it would have to be way more interesting than school.

Now that my formal education has come to an expensive and unsuccessful conclusion, I’m in the job market. I haven’t had much luck, which is surely more the symptom of North Carolina’s 11% unemployment rate than my absolute lack of experience and/or references. I’ve had to get a little creative with the job search, like sending, for instance, the following email to a local roasting house:

Dear [Redacted],

Love, Katie

I actually got a response to this, which went something like, You’re funny. Maybe we could talk. Send a resume.

My response:

Dear [Redacted],

Love, Katie

Shockingly, I didn’t get a response to this message, so yesterday, I sent the following:

Dear [Redacted]

Love, Katie

Again, no response, and the only person who fully appreciated this, er, cover letter, was my friend Melanie, but she walks her cat on a leash. In Harlem.

I have to cross my legs every time I sneeze so I won’t pee on myself.  I’m not leaving the house today because I accidentally drank four cups of laxative tea last night because I lost my glasses and the box was right next to Sleepytime.  My mom once pasted the following phrase that I had just cut from an email: “My girlfriend and I bid on one of Ani’s used tampons on eBay.”  The point is, it takes a lot to embarrass me.  I am such a dumb fuck that if I were a sensitive dumb fuck, I’d be one of those lesbians who wear stretchy pants and eat icing directly out of the can and have a meaningful relationship with Oprah and don’t consider having more than three cats hoarding.  But there was one day this week that challenged my ability to laugh at myself.  We’ll call this one Tuesday.

The morning was bright, hot, and duo-style.  I slept through class and this made me feel kind of terrible but my power to rationalize quickly supplanted guilt and I drank some coffee and drove my new friend/future lover home.  After that, I stopped by work to pick up a paycheck and buy some product.  It was S. Windor’s (of the Pensecola Windsors) first day on the job after a year hiatus, so I helped out and chatted for a bit, even though I wasn’t wearing socks and had wet brain and fuck head and a huge hole in the crotch of my cut-offs.  I got my check and my product and was about to leave when one of my bosses asked me how I was going to pay for the product.  Um, take it out of my paycheck?  Like always?  Turns out I longer get a paycheck from the Unmentioned Former Place of Employment because I had, unknowingly, been laid off.  And that’s cool.  I mean, I liked the shop and all the employees and that one crushtomer almost to the point of looking forward to work, but I’d been putting in all of four hours a week, so even though it sucks, it’s also not a bad spray tan or anything.  But that is a really uncool way to let someone go.  I’m sure it was less a malicious fuck up and more a communication fuck up, but the ungraceful manner of my dismissal drove me to tears, which is pretty difficult to do considering I don’t have tear ducts and/or feelings.  But, like I said before, after the number of times I’ve been fired, I look at getting laid off as a back-handed compliment.  I’ll get over it.  Eventually.

I then headed to the Chateau to bitch to Lady Mantranny and drink Bud Light and banter via text with a stranger in Austin who I want to gay marry after receiving the following messausage: I’ma woo you, bitch. A few hours and Bud Lights later, I went to the bar.  I was only going to be there for a Lima Bean or two and head home to shower off the shea butter and forge recommendation letters, but then a dear friend I haven’t seen since fucking her over in a really unfunny way walked into the bar.  We didn’t talk at first, but I had nerves like a Jonas on her wedding night, so it was chilled Stoli for my gray matter.  Eventually, my dear friend and I hugged it out and my tear ducts started working again.  And, as if crying in a bar isn’t embarrassing enough, the following occurred: for the first time in my drinking life, I vommed in a bar.  I then had to be convinced not to drive my car and/or ride my bike home (both of which were and are still are parked outside the bar), and was escorted home by a former and favorite co-worker and my new friend/future lover.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t vom in the car, but I did discover vom on the lap of my jeans when I woke up the next morning, so you never know.  This was all while the Carrboro sun with still round and yellow and perched in the sky.  Embarrassing, yes, but what are your teens, 20s, and 30s for if not a little public humiliation?  I mean, fuck, I’d just been fired.

And, yes, I recognize that I’ve been waxing and whining about jobs for a while now.  Why not just get a job and stop living off the generosity of North Carolina tax-payers, right?  What’s so great about not having a reason to get up in the morning?  The truth is—nothing.  Unemployment is boring.  But following rules beyond such OCD-imposed ones like Do Not Sit On Antique Furniture and Never Eat In Public is unpalatable like anal bleeding is unpalatable.  And because I have an unfounded faith that I don’t have to worry about boob sag because gravity doesn’t effect me, and also that I don’t have to work hard because I am immune to such things and poverty and Alzheimer’s and the second coming, I am secretly and not-so-secretly convinced that this blog is my ticket out of a working life, that if only the right person sees this and recognizes my genius use of malapropisms, I will be swooped up to the land of silk and sunny.

But even if that did happen, even if I made a few hardbacks shitting words and rainbows, I’d have to get a gender-neutral moniker and a day job as a sandwich artist just to keep my real life and my writing life completely hidden from Mazog and Pazog.  Is it crazy not to want your 60-year-old mother to read about that time you hooked up in the Christmas tree farm across from the bar and went to brunch with your friend in her mom the next morning covered in saw dust?  Do you want your dad to realize that the first hit when Googling the term “dickthroat” is your blog?  No one wants that blush to cross the parental palette.

Here’s the thing: the shit that enters my head and falls from my mouth is because I am a 26-year-old shorter version of my father.  My dad is most politically incorrect liberal white male I know.  When my parents confronted me about my taco-bumping ways, my mom’s only concern was that I was somehow hurt by my dad’s frequent use of derogatory terms to describe homos and fags, like I’m some kind of a pansy.  My father is such an adept liar that I thought that my grandparents’ dachshund Willy the Elder was my uncle until I was nine and that my dad was a Rolling Stone until I was eleven.  Take the following reviews of my father as professor culled from Rate My Professor:

this class is pretty interesting. but i think he makes a lot of the material up himself.

I will never forget the pubic hair survey or the 1910 dildo he brought into class! Hilarious and smart!

he knows his stuff. if your easily offended by cursing and blunt sex phrases, stay away. He likes to throw the word G**D*** around too. thats not cool with me but…he’s a good teacher

He is a awesome professor. He knows his sex facts!

See the problem?  My muddy mind was written in my DNA, and yet, the parental revelation of my musings is one kind of public humiliation I just can’t get down with.

I’m emotionally and mentally peach fuzz and cannot make decisions for myself beyond who to hit on, so it’s helpful to have a twin sister willing to advise me on such matters as What To Have For Lunch, Should I Wear My White Vee Or My Blue Vee, and Is It Cool To Lie On My Resume?  I’m generally willing to listen to her, but the resume thing, which she recommends against, just isn’t possible.  As I mentioned in a previous post, my resume is long and thin, like Tyra in 1996, but without a rib cage.  I’ve had 26 jobs since entering the work force ten years ago, which averages to 2.6 a year, and although this may be slightly higher than average, I don’t think it’s wholly unacceptable.

Unfortunately, the 23 jobs don’t account for the long periods of unemployment in between.  In Portland, for instance, I was hired to “manage” a coffee shack.—which actually was a shack, but a Range Rover and surgeon’s salary shack, with maple counters and track lighting and a $10,000 espresso machine.  The first sign that this might not have been the most busty business plan was that I wrecked my bike on the way to the interview and showed up with elbows and knees painted in fresh blood.  And they still hired me.  Also, the company was called Java Sutra and the main selling point was that the coffee was infused with an Andean aphrodisiac called maca, which, according to God-like Wikipedia, “was eaten by Inca imperial warriors before battles. Their legendary strength was allegedly imparted by the preparatory consumption of copious amounts of maca, fueling formidable warriors. After a city was conquered, the women had to be protected from the Inca warriors, as they became ambitiously virile from eating such quantities of maca.”  Good in theory, right?  But do you really want blue balls with your morning hotdish?  We were in business for three months.

Getting laid off didn’t really bother me both because I’d been fired from so many jobs already that it seemed like a backhanded compliment, and unemployment insurance left me time to do whatever I pleased.  What I pleased was ride my bike and do crosswords and invest the dole in liver damage.  At the end of happy hour, I would run home to shower off the smell of booze and smoke, clean my house like an Ecudorian line cook, and pull out job applications or my GRE study guide so it looked like I had a productive day when my girlfriend got home from actually having a productive day.

I eventually found a job scooping gelato for wailing, syrupy seven-year-olds and their attractive but totally un-fantasystic mothers, but this only lasted for a month or so before I some Real Bad Shit happened, which I’m not going to get into cause it’ll take the time I’d like to spend catching up on LiLo and Sam, but I will tell you that as soon as you are punched in the face by a partner, you become a victim, which is sort of like Catholics and their We’ll Forget About The Condoms For A Small Donation rule: convenient.

This isn’t to say that my entire life in Portland was full of booze and memory loss (although most of it was).  I also interned at a gay rights non-profit, where I spent most of my time taking walks along with river with the bear accountant with the rocket ship tattoo and testing my gaydar on the bike messengers who worked in the building.  The one time I went to Friday happy hour with the staff, I got so drunk that I told the outreach coordinator’s husband that he should get a manicure cause his hands were seriously calloused before realizing he was in a wheelchair and his hands were constantly pushing rubber.  Actually, I already knew he was in a wheelchair, but I said it anyway.  And when my girlfriend came to pick me up, I was like, “Babe.  You’re tired.  Just go home. I’ll get a ride in time for dinner. I love you.,” so I could smoke cigarettes without judgment.  I later rode home with my boss, who started crying in the car because she had gotten divorced approximately six minutes before, and I was all, “Hey, let’s party! I’ve got Adderall in my bag!”  The non-profit and I went our separate ways soon after—they to make political strides and me to another four internships, seven jobs, and zero references.