I got a job recently. I spent the summer trying to recover from my shattered hand and spent the past few weeks looking for work. To be honest I was no where near as committed to seeking out positions as other people I know. I would have bursts of applications every other week or so, no where near the rate or frequency of a friend of mine. But for all my efforts I either never heard from them again or I would get an interview and then never hear from them again. I even missed out on scheduling an interview because I had surgery earlier that week and when I told the recruiter I could not drive at all, let alone to Tukwila, so shortly after a major surgery. They just dropped off the face of the earth when I told them that. I should’ve followed up the week after but I didn’t.
I did get a job recently, part time, doing retail. I was milling around with the other two new hires waiting for instructions and one of them mentioned how he had gone to homecoming the night before. I was working with high schoolers and I didn’t have the heart to tell anyone how old I was. It was too depressing for me to tell them that I had been out of high school longer than they have been in high school. The next few hours were spent attaching security tags to coats. It was not hard work but I found myself thinking: “I went to college and this is what I’m doing.”
It seems to be a common experience with everyone I know who graduated with me. We graduated and now are a year or so out and we either have jobs or are unemployed. I was taught there is a vast difference between a job and a career. A job is something you just do, you may like it but in the grand scheme of things it is not going anywhere. I’m sure everyone older than me doesn’t care or sympathize with this but to be honest I do not care about what you think. Your life is yours and mine is mine. I shouldn’t have to live your life or have your bad experiences. That is an undercurrent that flows through the various idiots and talking heads for the right wing in this country. They are all useless old men and their vacuous wives who are immune to any hardship at this point and they are sociopathic in their want of empathy. The circus around the government shutdown recently really brought it out. They didn’t care what happened, they don’t go to national parks or need food stamps or have to worry about paying rent. They wanted to stop something that had passed every single check and balance in the Constitution so they decided to go with Mengsk style of government.
I look at my life now and it is not what I want and I’m having trouble trying to find a way out. I have a Bachelor of the Arts in History and Economics, which translates to something nobody wants apparently. It seems people have figured out that after four years of economic depression (because semantics is our only protection against economic reality, the only reason it is was called the Recession was to avoid the word Depression. The only reason it was called a Depression was to avoid the word Panic which is what old economic crises were called) everyone looking for work is desperate. My friend works as a contractor, not building things but a contract worker for a company, which seems to translate that they don’t have to take care of him, can get rid of him at anytime and they get the benefits of an employee and less of the costs (something that got repeated many times in my economics classes was that employment is a cost not a benefit for a company). I would look at job postings that were labelled entry level that had in their minimum requirements two or three or four years of experience. It appears I am woefully unqualified for any kind of work that is not just a job. According to my mom, I should’ve studied a computer science track or something similar. And I find it hard not to agree with her. I studied what I enjoyed and wanted to learn but I haven’t earned a Masters or a Ph.D and thus I can’t do anything with them. I wish I had known this three years ago, I could’ve done something then. Now I’m a position where I can’t do much about it.
And it seems whenever people around my age point that out and try to change something it is met with derision by the people in charge. Opposition is one thing, I can understand opposition and even in the face of opposition things can still be accomplished. But derision is worse, it means they don’t just think we’re wrong, that we’re comically wrong. And if what is supposedly wrong is just a joke then everything is fine and we don’t have to fix anything. I’m listless and so is my writing.
Going to do something marginally more productive and do some alterations to this site so it is not quite so erratic and sad.