Job application

[vaneramos]

Cross-posted to free_write: 10 minutes.

Reaching out. Beam reach. Spinnaker puff puff puff. Spinnaker puff puff puff. Those were the cards in the game Regatta we used to play.

I would have Steve Robbins over on a Saturday afternoon and we would play a couple games of that before we went over to the golf course and played 18 holes. We both liked Regatta. I hated golf. But I liked Steve. He was one of the moderately well-liked people at school. Quiet but popular. Well, not popular in the way that outgoing people are, but everyone liked him. I think. I did. His mother, Marilyn, was one of my mom's friends. She was the secretary at the high school. I liked Marilyn.

In 1984 Steve died in a car accident on the way home in the wee hours of the morning on Father's Day. He and his father, Rob Robbins, planned to go golfing together in the morning. But Steve died. He was the first of my friends to go that way, in car accidents. Asleep at the wheel after a movie night. He wasn't wearing a seat belt. He fell asleep, rolled into a field, and went flying through the windshield. He kept flying and flying and flying.

Here I am worrying about taking a stupid resume into Royal City Nursery, but I have lived 20 years longer, no 21. It was the summer of 1983 after we had all finished one year of university. I went to a party that night, a reunion of the grade 13 class. I drove home drunk. It was only a few miles, but I could have died. I should have died instead of Steve, who didn't drink that night. I never drove drunk again. That was crazy.

It's not that I should have died. I'm glad I didn't. It's just that life is unfair. The universe is unfair. I accepted Jesus into my heart two months later on August 28, 1983. What a crazy decision that was. I guess I was afraid. Maybe I thought that if the universe was unfair, maybe God would help out if I sucked up to him.

If I suck up to him today, will it help me get a job?

Oh, piss off. Stop being so bitter. It's not like that. There's nothing there to be bitter at. The universe is crazy and chaotic indeed. It isn't fair. And it isn't unfair. It just is. It does these things.

The marvel is that, in the giant soup of equilibrium, anything comes to life at all. There is an explanation. I have read it before. It's complicated. Life is like the crest of an acoustic wave, a quiver of probability. To the deists and creationists it looks utterly improbable. Somebody must have thought this up, they say.

But when you take a cold, hard look at the facts it isn't so crazy and unbelievable after all. You have to be open to the facts.

So getting a job would be just another quaver of probability.

Comments

[apel.livejournal.com]

Good luck! ;-)

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[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It went badly, but just getting myself out there was a victory. Hopefully I can learn from the experience and do better with the next one.

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[queenmomcat.livejournal.com]

Don't take any one given interview/application procedure too hard. I know each one is going to hurt, especially if your sense of self-worth is a little on the shaky side. (Mine was, and still is.) I applied for 10-15 library jobs before I ended up with the one I've got now, and countless grunt jobs prior to that; getting turned down for professional library positions isn't nearly as humiliating as getting turned down for dishwasher jobs but I can't say as either one was fun.

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[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's encouraging actually. The worst part was my inept interview skills, but that will get better with experience.

[ahira.livejournal.com]

Now that's perspective :) Sometimes I struggle with these cosmic questions til my brain hurts, once in awhile I can relax and know the answer, then as I look for it with my brain - *poof* -it's gone.

Good luck on the job front!

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[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way. I'm fascinated by complex physics and cosmology, but usually it doesn't make sense. Then, one day, a difficult concept will suddenly spring into focus.