Job Clarity

(Wiping JoAnn Fabrics off the table for good)

I may love roses because of their similarity to books: they have to open up to unfold their story.

This rose is called "Variegata Di Bologna" and is a sport of the old rose "Rosa Mundi". Cultivated roses have traceable parentage, like people. Sometimes enormous spiders lunge out from the layers and give me heart attacks. People have been known to do the same thing.


Yesterday I applied for a job at the local cookie factory: graveyard shift cookie packager. I realized that I keep holding JoAnn's fabrics up as the bench mark for how low I've gone and how desperate I am. I thought I was already there. Then I realized that I would rather work the graveyard shift shoving cookies in packages than work in a fabric store.

I've spent the last twenty years making use of my $20,000 education and I'm done. I didn't become a famous designer. I didn't become a career swatcher. I could have. But I didn't. I've worked in fabric stores, done costume design, been a production artist, and had my own business. I can't say I made a success of many of those ventures (I was a kick-ass swatcher though) but I don't still have the same dreams I used to have. I'm not looking to break into fashion design, or fabric design, or pattern design. If I haven't done it in the past twenty years of working my ass off, it aint gonna happen.

What I found out in this big adventure of my life is that what I really want is to stay home, be an urban homesteader, and write about it. On my terms. In my way. I am happiest and healthiest doing and learning all those homesteading activities like baking bread, making cheese (a cheese post is coming soon!), and growing food.

But that's not in the cards right now. At thirty eight years old I know exactly what I want but I have to reframe* those desires somehow into a scenario that will pay the bills until Philip can make enough money that I have the choice to stay home again. That day may never materialize. Working at a library is the one career move left to me that I could get up every day and be excited about- it's the kind of job where my enthusiasm, my skills, and my passions would be well used. If I get an opportunity to work at my local library I will snatch it up. Maybe another position will come up and if it does I will try again. It's the one job that might make me change my mind about coming back home when the money situation is no longer dire. I feel in my bones that I would love it. Thrive on the challenges it would afford me.

But that is not an actual opportunity for me right now. I didn't get an interview. End of story. It's time to look at what I don't feel willing to do for work, what would destroy my spirit, and then look at what is left:

• I don't want to work at JoAnn's. (The only fabric store I would work at- because it is AMAZING- is our local quilt shop. I will see if I can put in an application there...but they rarely seem to hire new people because the employees like working there and rarely quit. That's a good sign in a business.) So, today I have decided that I simply WON'T work at JoAnn's.

• I don't want to try to crab a living together with freelance jobs. Either hire me or don't hire me. Having to spend fifty percent of every day trying to convince people to give me a scrap of work is depressing and wears me down. Some people can be very successful this way. I'm not one of them. It depresses the living crap out of me to have to convince people of my capabilities, my skills, and my worthiness. It taps into very dark places in my psych and isn't healthy for me. So no freelance.

• I don't want to write articles for magazines. Again, the freelance life isn't a good fit for me. More than that, I've been spending hours and hours reading submission guidelines and most of it is a load of self righteous crap. I'm not interested in distilling information into easy bites or taking on a journalistic tone. I could do it. I'm an excellent researcher (again, perfect skill for a librarian) and I could mimic any magazine's voice, but then I'd have nothing left to give to my own writing. I would like to write useful informative pieces on urban homesteading, but I want to do it my way. I am the ultimate self righteous editor. I edit Dustpan Alley and I'll use swear words like real people do.

• I don't want to work in a retail store. I have no patience for pandering to the whims of the spending public. I wouldn't get benefits, I'd barely make enough money to make it worth all the hard work, and I can't sell crap to save my life. Being a cashier in a grocery store is a whole different potato. More on that later.

So where does all that land me? There are two camps of options, as far as I can tell. The first one consists of possible serious career moves. The difficulty in this camp is convincing someone to take my excellence on (see Monica, you slap me around enough and I start listening) because I refuse to go deeper into debt to return to school for a job that, once I have the proper education, will require that I have already put ten years experience under my belt. I need to find an employer who is smart enough to recognize the trainable, intelligent, powerhouse of potential that I am.

Here are careers I would be willing to put my heart into and to work my ass off for, the list is short:

• Librarian- The environment is one I love, I am already adept at using library computer systems, I am an excellent researcher, I am great at helping people find information because I love doing it, I would love to be buried in books any day of the week, and I have EXCELLENT organizational skills. Not a skill I've applied to my own home very often...but in my work experience I have excelled in any part of my jobs requiring organization.

• Editorial job- working for a magazine as an editor or an editor's assistant, working for an online website or actual magazine makes no difference to me. A place with energy, quality work, great team, and great pay. I believe I would enjoy this work but would love to hear from the two editors I know who sometimes visit my blog (Mary and Cindy) to find out what their take on that is. I am great at streamlining work methods. In an editorial capacity I can offer my writing skills without being the author pleading for a listen...I'd be on the other
  

• Professional Blog Writer- only if it pays well, is full time, and is a blog I care about. I would be excellent at this. In fact, ideally I would have loved my own blog to be my career. Like Heather Armstrong's "Dooce" which pays all her bills. I won't spend time beating myself up over not being Heather because she's way too skinny anyway. Plus it must be obnoxious to be a person who's always so funny.
  

Then there's the other camp. It's the camp I'm more likely to land in. And really? Maybe that's just fine. It's the unglamorous world of jobs for the everyday Jane:

• Grocery store work. Grocery stores, especially large corporate ones, have great benefits and often pay well. There are quite a few of them in town and I'm at the very least qualified to be a stock person or a cashier. It's not a creative job, but the kind of work you go to, do it to the best of your ability, and then leave it in the parking lot when you go home.

• Office work. I am qualified for some office jobs and could easily train for most of them. They are plentiful and although not all of them pay well, there are some good paying opportunities in this field. I'm great at filing, organizing, greeting people, and I have a very good phone manner.

• Factory jobs. Let's face it: I've always wanted to learn to drive a fork lift...why pass up such a chance?** Or how about picking bad cherries off the fruit conveyor belt? How about stuffing cookies in packages? This is the kind of work that legends are made of. Great writer's fodder. It's like working inside the very heart of our nation because when it comes right down to it America isn't really about lofty ideals like freedom and happiness, it's about the dollar and the pillar that holds that dollar up is our great tradition of mass producing crap.

*Mom and sister- see how I'm using your lingo? See how I'm using the methods on myself?

**Although the truth is, no one wants to train anyone how to use a fork life...they always want you to already know how. Bummer.

Jobs and Whores
And what they have in common

This is my eye candy for today. Kaiserin Fredrich rose.

I'm swimming with words tonight. I am pretty sure I have become the most lost and ill fitting person. I think it may be time to get arrested in a brand new red Porsche for picking up a prostitute. Because I've tried almost everything else. I'm not good at much. I heard my fortune told when I was very small, over and over again, how I wouldn't ever find success because I'm too undisciplined, not smart enough, and as though that wasn't crime enough I'm a god-damned bleeding heart liberal. I'll never be good at business, my fortune teller accused me, because I'm too soft.

I feel pretty hard right now. The fortune teller turned out to be correct. Trying to get a job is the best way to find out how much you suck as a person and to find out how much more education everyone else has, how much more experience they have, and how good they are at writing resumes. It's a demoralizing business to know how perfect you would be at a job and then not even get an interview over and over again. I am only at the beginning of it. I saw Philip go through it for a year. I understand better why he was so deeply depressed all that time.

Trying to write a tantalizing resume is like a whore trying on the tightest shortest skirt and wondering if she should go with the leather cutouts or the see-thru lace? Should she go for that MAC lip gloss that makes her look like she's got wet voltage for lips or go with something like dark velvet smoke? What will shimmer and attract the most prospects? It feels dirty. Come and get my nectar...I'm really good at following orders directions...

It's got me wondering what the hell I'm doing. I'm too tired to really hike the skirt up for job prospects. I'm too tired to prove myself. I've never gotten the dream job without selling my soul first. Why should it be different for me now that I'm older, fatter, and apparently just as unqualified as ever?

I keep trying to make my blog into some recognizable success. Maybe if I get enough traffic I could make enough money to stay home? People do it all the time. I have a very smart and helpful friend who keeps giving me the recipe over and over again on how to get more traffic. She tells me everything I need to know. I've followed some of her advice and thanks to her I have been enjoying taking photos more than ever before and they are improving in quality all the time. But there is a wall between me and taking the steps to do what people do to get more traffic. Single topic? Yeah, I do that really well. Don't lure people in with pretty crafts and then shock the crap out of them with deflating posts like this one. Eye Candy!! Optimism! Focus!!

It is thanks to her that I got an opportunity to fund much of my trip to Scotland by doing some technical writing.

It's easy to get sucked into the desire for a high traffic blog. I've been looking at writing jobs and all the professional blogger ones want (obviously) a writer who has already written for high traffic blogs and knows how to play the search engines like a high rolling gambler in a Vegas casino. I can say that I have some very loyal readers but the most I've ever had in a day is too embarrassing to report.

Everyone wants what I haven't got.

Now I'm afraid to go to JoAnn's Fabrics to ask for an application because it's the one job I have been certain I could get. Why should I be so sure? What makes me so special that I should automatically qualify for a minimum wage sales job in a fabric shop? I'm terrified to find out that I can't even qualify for a job there. The place it all began. My professional life. Fabric store sales clerk. I was hopeful then that that's not all I would achieve.

I'm going to pick up an application tomorrow.

I'm crashing fast. This is American life. In case anyone was curious to know, I spent $20,000 dollars to get an associates degree in Fashion Design so that I could end up jobless and penniless at forty. All the extraneous things in my life are going to have to be shed. Hopes, passions, community service. I will have no spirit left for anyone but myself and my family. I won't have time to give to others. I think about all the commitments I've made and I feel regret.

I think I can't breath.

I'm peeling off a layer right here. I don't care if I get traffic on this blog or not. I can't keep trying so hard at everything. It hurts too much. I'm full up with disappointments in myself. I don't need one more thing to make me feel like a loser. I don't care if anyone comes here. This is my club. My secret fort. I will eat cheese and I will tell the truth even if it drives every last person away. I almost always feel alone anyway.

There is no air left.

I suppose better days are ahead. That's what everyone likes to say. I'm not so sure. I kind of think this might be it. I had a tarot reading once that said I would never get rich or famous. I would possibly have just enough, maybe even an adequate living, but I would never lead a couture life.

I'm going to go watch as many episodes of CSI as I can before I fall asleep sitting up with a beer in my hand and don't bother telling me that this isn't the answer to my problems. Of course it's not. But until the answer presents itself in very clear language I am going to do what I can to salvage my very tenuous grasp on my sanity.

Here are a few things I'm thankful for:

• That I'm not missing all my limbs from a freak accident with a weed whacker.

• That lettuce is in season and available to me again.

• That I'm not dying of cancer, yet.

• That I haven't stuck my hand in my food processor.

• That my friend Chelsea is still my friend and seems able to put up with my crazy.

• That Sid and Dennis will always sit down to dinner with us.

• That Philip is learning to brew beer.

• That George Bush Jr. will be out of office in seven months.

• That my old rose "Kaiserin Fredrich" is so beautiful.

• That I don't have a bladder infection right now.

See, I'm still capable of seeing the bright side. I just need to put an end to this prolonged (just about three years now) period of extreme stress. It's really worn down my kid, my husband, and me. I can work a sales job like the rest of this country, be glad my hand hasn't been pulverized in a blender, and live out the rest of my life just working the forty and losing my teeth like the rest of America.

Life reminds me of reading Steinbeck novels. That is why I stopped reading Steinbeck.

What brand of gratitude is this?

Two years ago exactly Philip had just lost his job, a filling fell out, and I broke my hip and couldn't walk for three months. A month after that our car broke down and required a $4,000 fix. Another filling fell out somewhere in there too. No jobs came up. No longer medically covered by Philip's job we started paying an astronomical amount to be covered by Cobra. Looking for insurance we found ourselves uninsurable because of my injury and Philip's asthma. So the medical bills began to mount.

We refinanced our house to buy us some time, but it cost us so much to buy that time that the band-aid actually became a problem all in itself. While trying not to notice that we had to sell our house, Philip broke his arm in such a bad way that he required very expensive surgery. It was right after his surgery that we finally realized that we had absolutely no other options and that we would have to sell our house. The medical bills got bigger. He is still in need of more surgery, incidentally, but we can't afford it.

No work materialized for either of us.

During this time I heard a lot of friends and family and neighbors tell me all the ways in which we were lucky. It's hard to see people's lives go down the tubes, I think people feel that the only service they can render is to try to see the lighter side. I can't tell you how hard I worked to see the bright side, to look for the good luck suffocating under the bad. I dug through the rubble to find my gratitude and I thanked god things weren't worse than they were every single day as they got worse and worse.

But there comes a point when you get sick of people pointing out how lucky you are to be alive. There comes a point when it gets ridiculous, like looking for gold nuggets after the gold rush is over and the mines have been stripped. Sometimes it just doesn't matter that you're still alive because when everything is getting stripped from you and there's nothing waiting in the future for you, being alive doesn't feel like a blessing, it feels a lot more like a burden.

I took a gamble to follow a dream and I lost. In losing, in risking everything, I am losing everything too. I am sitting here watching it all drain away. It's true that we're not dead yet, which I guess is a blessing, though living requires a lot of things like food and shelter and jobs to pay for those things and right now we haven't got more than one month's worth of living covered. For the first time, I am regretting having opened the store. I am regretting a whole chain of decisions over the past two years.

I'm not sure what good it will do to have these regrets because what I'm realizing is that what the Universe seems to have slated for us is a different life than any human being hopes for. I'm starting to really believe, through two years of no one hiring either of us, through two years of living off of our house, that it doesn't want us to work. It doesn't want us to get by. It wants us to suffer.

I have done my damnedest to be positive, to keep on trucking, to see the brighter side, to feel how lucky lucky lucky we are. I have worked my fucking ass off to solve our situation, to make my own luck by starting my own business. To be positive for my family, my friends, and the people I meet out there. I have tried to hang onto my deep belief that if you work hard enough, are humble, have a positive attitude and a willingness to get your hands dirty, that you can always find work and make a living.

I don't believe it anymore. It's over for me now.

Yes, yes, I know it's grim talk here. Because that's what it is for us right now. Underneath all the talk of luck and hopes for change and all the gruelling hours we've put in to change our fortune, our fortune is exactly the same as it was two years ago. The only real card I have left is to sell my house. But what then? Then we use up the last of our equity to survive while looking for work and not finding any? Is that what the Universe wants for us? To have no assets, no shred of safety? Have I not been humble enough? Have I not loved enough? Or given enough? Or been a generous enough person? Have I not felt enough daily gratitude for still being alive after being stripped of a livelihood and my health and Philip's health?

Gratitude was the last thing I was hanging onto and now I have no gratitude left. Life has not been treating us well. The Universe has not been taking care of us. The Universe has not been listening to my prayers or rewarding hard work with results. Sometimes that's how life is. Not everyone survives.

I'm angry. I also don't want to hear from anyone about my good fortune. My ears are shut. I don't have the energy to fight the tide anymore. The fight is just an echo now. Because it appears I have merely been fighting so that I can get a depressing job working at Jo-Annes, renting a mobile home, putting my kid in daycare (which will certainly make more of a thug of him), and never having a day of rest again in my life. Frankly, I could have had all that without fighting at all, I could have had that without all the trouble I've gone to for something better.

I know how hard it is to hear people speak when what they have to say is not a message of hope. When they are covered in the stench of defeat. So until I can think of something less awful to say, I'm not going to post here. None of us are looking to hear how bad it can get out there. We want the happy story. I don't have one to tell.

I hope Bob Dylan is getting out his pen and notebook because I think our life is gearing up to make a very good depressing American folk story. I'd write it myself if I wasn't so busy trying to hold my whole life up with my pinky.

The First Carrot

(And all kinds of talk about faith and karma and other heavy topics.)

This morning I came in with more beets (all small in size), one carrot, one tomato, two impossibly small yellow crookneck squashes, and a few more pickling cucumbers.

I also managed to pick this modest vase of flowers. If I want more flowers I'm going to have to go out there and pull up a truckload of weeds which are choking everything out. I'm going to have to deadhead the roses and pinch off the dead flowers from the daisies and zinnias.

Where I will find time for this while caring for my child who refuses to go outside unless I fight him tooth and nail, while Philip sends in resumes and looks for work which he needs to have if we are going to avoid having to sell our house, I really don't know. If I were to manage to squeeze out even a few moments to accomplish any fraction of the above chores...I have to pray my sore back doesn't turn into a broken back. I wake up every morning unrefreshed with that nasty ache in my shoulders, neck, and back. I think it's my bed trying to kill me in my sleep, but I can't seem to catch it in the act. It would never stand up in a court of law.

A low grade insistent insidious depression has been gracing me with an annoying inertia. I have no energy to do anything even when I have the time. Partly that's because having the store made my household come in last place for a year. Things are so out of order (and I have all the furniture and my whole studio from the store packed in my garage) that to do any small thing here requires a huge chain of events to precede it. Like, if you want to put away the emptied out canning jars as we use them, you must first make room for them somewhere which requires shifting everything in the kitchen just a little.

There's also this colossal anxiety. Always. Every day. Panic in my chest. Dread. Which mounts to an untenable cacophony every single day I listen to my boy complaining about pretty much everything in his life and how he may as well have not been born. Philip does a great deal to add to that cacophony with his own anxiety and the fact that he is always saying the right things to piss our boy off just a little more. How does a six year old access so much negativity? How does he come to see a spat with the neighbor kid as conclusive proof that he will never find any boys his own age who like to do the exact same things as him and he shouldn't even bother because there aren't any in our WHOLE TOWN?!

I guess the apple didn't even bother falling off the tree.

On a lighter note, if I just push everything aside for a few hours by using my superpowers to freeze the whole world in it's tracks, I could do my first batch of pickles of the season today. Maybe. If I can muster up the energy while I put Max in his closet with his game boy, just maybe I could do it. I've got enough from my own garden for a small batch. I love dill pickles.

One thing that feels really good and is a tremendous relief to me is the clean wood floors in my kitchen and dining room. AAAAAhh. No more repulsive animal and people stained oatmeal colored area rug. It's wonderful to walk on that smooth clean mopped surface. Cool to the toes, not harboring diseases or nasty little what-have-yous. The kitchen floor was just scary. I am not crazy about having wood floors in there, I mean to say that while hardwood is my all time favorite flooring, I'm hard on everything I own and use and the kitchen is a room in my house that gets tremendous wear. It just seems like that finish on the wood is going to wear out super fast.

Maybe not, though, it actually still looks pretty good when I mop it.

I don't have a lot of spiritual faith. Most of what I believe in I believe because I can see that it's true. Like karma. The concept of karma is even in the bible. It isn't called karma, but it's there. The whole concept that there are consequences for behavior, whether good or bad, that will lower on our shoulders. When we live thoughtfully with compassion for others we tend to have better relationships and people will reach out to you in times of need. If you live selfishly and meanly then you will find yourself shut off from all help in times of misfortune. This is a concept you can verify in your life. Try it and see. It's true that you will reap what you sow, though perhaps not immediately. That's not something I have faith in, it's something I believe because I've seen it born out my whole life.

I also believe that everything happens for a reason and that everything that happens is supposed to happen. I came to this sometimes uncomfortable conclusion in my early twenties when I found it couldn't be refuted by a reasonable mind. I don't think there's a person on earth who hasn't wished to refute it at some point in their life. But if something has happened, you can't reasonably say it wasn't meant to happen. Maybe YOU didn't mean it to happen, but it was meant to happen because it did. You can reasonably say that YOU didn't mean something to happen, but if you unload your own intentions and back off a little, you will see that the Universe, or God did mean it to happen, because it happened. Humans do not control the universe. Nature, facts, life cycles, maybe even God does, but we don't. So ultimately, what we mean to have happen in our lives is only a small part of our life. We have only control over the choices we make, not on the outcomes of our actions.

Somehow I think I may not have spoken as clearly as I had hoped.

It has always bothered me when people say "He/She wasn't meant to die so young!" But how can that be true if He/She is, in fact, dead? We are surprised when people die young, we are devastated, we are sorrowful, but how can we know what is meant to happen except by seeing what is happening and what has happened?

I take comfort in these beliefs. I have never been able to believe in the idea that God will take care of your needs if only you have faith in him. Oh yeah? I don't know about that. That's not something born out by proof in my opinion. I guess it depends on how you think God interprets our needs. I know that there are a lot of people out there who desperately need food and are dying because no food is available to them. Does this mean that what they really need is to starve to death? Or that they don't have enough faith?

It's entirely possible that when the bible mentions God always taking care of his children that it means only in a spiritual sense. Not in a literal corporeal sense. But if that's so, then I think it's unconscionable to tell people that God will take care of their needs as a form of comforting the poor, or the sick, or the lost and letting them think that if they pray enough and give the church money or whatever it is having enough faith means, that their sickness will be cured, their poverty lifted, or that they'll find their way back to themselves.

The idea of faith bothers me a lot. Faith as in: a belief not based on proof.

I do believe in the other definition of faith: confidence or trust in a person or thing.

They are not the same. Often, religion asks you to have a faith not based on proof.

I guess I'm thinking about all this right now because I believe that whatever the future holds for me and my family, whether we have to sell our house and rent something to get by, or whether we are fortunate and find work and get to stay here in some degree of comfort, I believe everything will unfold just as it's meant to. What we can do for ourselves is keep slogging away at trying to find work, put our best feet forward, try to tame the chaos that having and then closing a store has wreaked in our lives, and if we still end up a wreck, then that's just what we have to go through. As scary as it is to me to face joblessness in this strangling economy, I do not get to decide the ultimate outcome of my life. I steer it as best I can and then the rest is up to nature, luck, the forces that be, and possibly even karma.

The thing that worries me is that getting therapy, chiropractic medicine, massage, and counseling for Max, plus necessary trips to the dentist all cost money we can't afford to spend. Not to mention visits to the vet. I don't feel I'm in a position to take care of these important things until we have an income again. It's a classic American problem. It doesn't matter how important all of these things are, if you don't have the money for them, you don't take care of them.

I think I need to drink more coffee. I just heard from Philip a minute ago that the new pot of coffee I brewed spilled all over the counter because I failed to put the pot in correctly. Damn.

What's weird is that we are exactly where we were a year and a half ago. Exactly. As though we have made no progress at all. It kind of freaks me out. How long can a person go without work? No, don't answer that question, I already know the answer. I'm going to go investigate the coffee situation and put my head in the grounds.