According to a brochure on resumés from the staffing agency I visited today, the lack of an objective is a red flag that causes human resources operatives to instantly pass you over.

According to a book on resumés I’m reading while sitting in Borders, the inclusion of an objective is ill-advised because “if you are like many cadidates you do not know the exact title of the job you’re pursuing… take up crucial space in which you could describe your qualifications.”

I take it human resources management is not an exact science.

The thing about industry today is that too many companies use staffing services rather than their own HR department, then just promote internally. This leads to a situation in which companies are rarely, if ever, getting the best person for more senior jobs or jobs with greater amounts of responsibility.

—

Me walks into a staffing agency.

Me says “Masters degree!” but hears “Ho-hum.”

Me says “Author and Editor!” but hears “Not really our department.”

Me says “I.Q. in 150+ range, superior analytical skills!” but hears “Uh-huh.”

Me says “Integrity, initiative, work ethic!” but hears “Yeah, okay.”

They say, “Take some tests in typing, Word, Excel, language, math, filing.”

Me shrugs, takes tests.

They say, “Oh my god! 102 words per minute with zero errors! You’re a god!”

Me says, “Ho-hum.”

They say, “We’ve never seen such high proficiency in office applications!”

Me is tempted to say “Well, I didn’t exactly write the book on office applications, but I was Technical Editor on that project, and I did use office applications to write my own five books during which I had to type 2500+ pages,” but instead Me just says, “Not really my department.”

They say, “Wow, you answered more proofreading questions in the alotted time than anyone we’ve seen yet, and you scored 100% correct! Amazing! Unfortunately, we don’t have too much call for proofreading, much less writing or editing.”

Me says, “Uh-huh.”

They say, “But with your superior typing and office applications skills, and your excellent filing score, we should find you something in administrative assisting in no time, provided you’ll be willing to wear slacks and a button-up shirt and not be tardy too often.”

Me says, “Yeah, okay.”

—

Me doesn’t even bother anymore to tell people that me can: repair any PC, any Mac, any laptop, or even any SparcStation or pre-Sparc Sun station set in front of me; architect and deploy a large LAN/WAN, detailing everything from hardware to software, from appliances to endpoints; launch an e-commerce web site from scratch, handling registration, hosting, coding, content, and automation; do all necessary research for any report on congressional/senate data, agency data, NGO/NPO data, or any data you care to name and compile a theoretically sound, well-contextualized report examining all possibilities and eventualities; investigate and report on just about any topic you care to name…

Me thinks me is qualified for an incredible number of jobs out there, but me is having trouble convincing anyone of this possibility. In support of the adage, me is likely at the end of it all to end up teaching.

—

Later in the day, I return to the coffee shop to continue in the real job hunt. Not a single bite, not a message left or an email received for any of 100+ resumes and cover letters sent around the nation. I do get some advice by email: “We tend to hire at the entry level, then promote internally.”

This country is wasting a lot of good talent on data entry and Word/Excel. A lot of good talent.

I want to have a secretary, not be a secretary.

—

I just got a new piece of SPAM (one of about 400 I get every day) offering to sell me a brand new, shiny “Rolax” watch.

Let me tell you how tempted I was.

Are you so thrilled at the prospect of wearing a stiff pinstripe suit at a full-time job that you’re cumming in your pants? Do you have what it takes to lay down on your back and spread ’em wide for the president of the company? Were the first eight words you learned “Pay me, I’ll die for this great firm?”

We’re looking for the biggest pricks and stuffiest hotshots that America has to offer.

Send us your resume, cover letter, underpants, and four letters recommendations from fortune 500 CEOs not related to you via Federal Express International Overnight. Include a summary, in six words or less, with a professionally produced music track, of why you’re destined to be the next Rupert Murdoch, and why that makes you hotter than Anna Nicole after a six-pack of Christian Brothers 750s.

Excitement awaits!

(No losers or unenthusiastic people, no exceptions. We Mean It!)

These are the days of our lives.

—

My religion:

1 part pop Buddhism
1 part pop Taoism
1 part Northern Exposure
1 part Russian novel
1 part seawater
1 part Popeye’s dad

Stir, add lime, burn incense, drink a lot.

My entire adult life it’s been the same. I meet a woman somewhere. We stay together for a while. But she’ll never tell me that she cares enough to try to build something. And then, at some point, it’s

“I want to go to Costa Rica for a year or two”

or

“I want to go around the world for a while”

or

“I want a career as a rock and roll roadie”

and I’m never really invited, or if I am, it’s only peripherally, like I have to actually ask

“Will we be a couple in Costa Rica, or are we just ‘going together’ but when we get there we’re both on the open market?”

or even

“If I stay here, can I expect you to come back to me someday? Do we have something to build on? Do I have something to look forward to?”

and then, her answer is always

“No, I’m sorry. I just don’t know. I can’t promise anything. We’ll see what happens. I can’t promise I won’t leave you. I can’t promise I won’t meet somebody else. But I’d like for you to wait for me.”

And so it’s up to me to contemplate sitting on my ass for month(s) or year(s) while she goes off and does her thing and I do what… wait? For… the nothing specific that’s been promised?

Then, we fight. And as a result, we break up.

And then, somehow, she always sees it as my fault. Every woman I’ve ever broken up with has seen it as my fault for not hanging around for month(s) or year(s) waiting for her even though she won’t make the same promise in return to me.

I hate women. Selfish, selfish people, women. I don’t exist. I don’t get a life. Only they get a life. And if I decide that I want a life, even though I made all the promises to them and it was them who left and them who would never make any promises about returning to me, I’m always the selfish bastard who can’t “let them be themselves” or “let them spread their wings” or “let them be who they are” and they use me as an example of the bad, bad, badness of men for years to come in conversations.

Why are women the only ones who get to have lives and do what they want? And why are men the ones who have to make all the sacrifices?

You know who to feel bad for? The forty-something, greying, balding, stern banker-or-something-stuffy that comes walking through the coffee shop at noon, nose in air, red tie and a gold tie-clip and a suit that fits like absolute shit. The guy is living a nightmare life. Cubicle, rat race, only ever got his B.A. in econ or accounting or something joyous like that and has been climbing the ladder forever wearing that shit in hopes of getting a slight raise or a promotion or blah, blah, blah, and yet he knows somewhere deep down inside that even if he pushes paper and plays the asshat until he’s seventy years old, he’s only ever going to make it as high as middle management.

All he’s got is his fscking pinstripe suit. And if that doesn’t even come close to fitting properly, if it makes him look like an absolute grandmother, he’s got nothing.

Nothing.

—

I’m going to re-code my local diary backend sometime in the next few days so that it submits to greymatter and that way I can keep my local diary and my Web diary in sync once again, rather than having to maintain two separate threads.

—

Faxed my transcript request forms. They’ll arrive sometime soon. I’m either going to forward them on to Utah or open a new Interfolio file at Chicago. Either way, I’ve got to organize it soon, because I need recs on file, so I need to ask for them, but of course in order to do that I need to know where they need to go.

Watch my dust, y’all.

—

Ah Gong, I will justify your faith in me.

I have spent all day using the career sites. I found my way into the University of Chicago’s alumni careers network and placement office index with Monster. I’ve applied for a pile of positions and have set in motion the process of building a file suitable for landing a college-level teaching position.

To do:

1) Update credentials file somewhere (whether Chicago or Utah, I haven’t decided yet) and get current transcripts and writing samples in there.

2) Get the great people at my department and profs at U/U and U/C to give me two sets of recs, one for teaching and one for the Ph.D. program applications that will go out in the fall.

3) Discuss locations/jobs/blah/blah/blah with Girlfriend.

4) Sleep for a while because I’m supposed to enjoy a night of merriment and poker later on.

I gotta find work, I’m broke. I’m really qualified to do a whole hell of a lot of stuff these days. It’s pretty damn cool. But navigating the “job search” world isn’t so amazingly cool.

Time to call it an afternoon.

Yes, I got your email. No, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I assure you I was glad to receive it and will read it and reply shortly. I’m sorry that I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, and I’m equally sorry that I haven’t managed to call you recently — everything is just so very busy in my life right now!

—

I spent today working on my resumé, searching craigslist.org, and updating all of my information at sites like idealist.org, guru.com, and monster.com. Yes, I know, I’m not usually one to play the “career chap,” but sometimes you have to wake up and smell the reality and not let your bills get too far behind.

—

Plus, I got ticketed in Vegas and now owe for that as well… for going through a yellow light without slowing down first. Yes, it is a signal violation in Nevada. Fucking cowboys.

I am always leaving. I see no reason for today to be any different.

(sigh)

More snow. No matter, unless there is a drastic turn for the worse in road conditions, I’m leaving tomorrow. Period. There are other things, but I won’t go into them here.

…that women are the most insecure bunch of people on the face of the Earth.

It’s funny how women work so hard to seem like MTV vee-jays or pop stars to men. They focus a hundred percent of their attention on make-up and hair and zero percent of their attention on seeming like a human being or on treating their guy like a human being. They’re quick to admit to their prospective date(s) how many threesomes they’ve had and how my times they’ve been high and naked in a room full of police officers, but they’re scared shitless that the guy will someday find out that they once read The Return of the Native, or used to play chess with high school friends, or used to do community theatre with their parents, or used to like warm popcorn balls on snowy days.

Then, they’re confused when mere human guys lose interest, or when the men that appear in their lives are only interested in sex and seem shallow and uncaring. Inevitably, as they feel less and less fulfilled by the types of male companionship they have, they put on more make-up, more hair spray, and tell still wilder stories about the time they put on a live sex show with four men, a governor, a stick of dynamite, and a rhino in front of an audience of drunken nuns in Italy. They bury their simple, human selves — their normal past and normal childhood (i.e. everything even remotely loveable about them) — even deeper, and do their best to give the impresison that for them, insane exploits and escapades are a daily routine.

“Because then I’ll be more sexy and more exciting to them, right?” they ask themselves subconsciously.

And then women complain that men are only interested in sex and drugs and see women as objects. Ladies: nice guys want to date human beings with the same needs and insecurities that they have — it’s not a warm fuzzy to feel like you’re trying to date a cross between Aphrodite, Medusa, and an Amazon. Men date and settle down for companionship, not because they want a comic book porn show. Comic book porn shows are easy enough to get at any magazine shop or gentlemen’s club — there are professionals for that and there always have been, we don’t need to put up with you in long-term relationships to get it. And here’s some news for you: most guys in happy long-term relationships would not trade their girlfriend in for Anna Nicole or Mistress Wanda. And they’d be less attracted to you if you were to try to become more like either.

Why are women shocked to learn that when they construct themselves as oversexualized, girls-gone-wild supermodels, they seem to attract men who are looking for just those attributes? Why do they blind everyone in sight with their hyper-vagina-dentata-ness, and then complain that nobody then sees the “real me that’s lonely, deep down inside” of them?

If you want to be loved for you, you’re gonna have to be you. If you emphasize your tits and ass and refuse to give people access to the real you, the only people around you are going to be the ones who are after your tits and ass. So many feminist theorists are so sure that men are afraid of womens’ sexuality… well here’s news. We’re not. We enjoy it. But we don’t want to drown in it any more than we want to drown in any other force of nature. And guess what? As an autonomous being just like you, that’s my right, as it is the right of every man. You’re free to put on as much makeup and screw as many people in one week as you want. Just be prepared to spend time with the men who are into that, while the rest of us take shelter from your storm.

Duh. Just duh.

—

And here’s news for you… Most of the guys who appear to be shallow tit-and-ass chasers without a sentimental bone in their body are overcompensating for insecurity about their own attractiveness and personal worth in precisely the same way. Unfulfilled at the way that women don’t see the real them, deep down inside, hey work hard at being hyper-masculine in an effort to attract female attention.

Funny, isn’t it?

Or sad, maybe…

—

P.S. I realize that I didn’t include the womens’ point of view or the GLBT point of view in this rant, but I am neither a woman, nor am I a GLBT person, so I won’t presume to speak for either crowd. Thanks.

Windshield wiper fixed. (For the 20394867638274238th time. We’ll hope it holds up.)

I am thinking myself in circles today.

One thing I decided, that I guess I’ve known for a long time, but that really came to me clearly today in so many words: the biggest mistake I ever made was getting together with Je—- in ’95. The second biggest mistake I ever made was not transferring to another university out of state immediately after she and I broke up.

Everything would be so totally, completely altered in my world if I hadn’t done either one of those things. For the better or for the worse, I don’t know… but both of them ate up years. Lots of years… during which I could have been doing other stuff.

—

All of my friends, and now even my parents, are telling me that I don’t belong to this culture, that I need to leave this country permanently. Will it really make that big a difference? I tend to think not, but then, what do I know?

Anyway, it’s not like they’re all mentioning the same eventual destinations when they tell me I need to leave. They’re all over the globe. Sounds maybe like you-gotta-get-out-of-here-ness, rather than I-know-a-place-you’d-like-ness.

Maybe I should start thinking Cambridge again? Beh.

It’s all crap. Crap, crap, crap, crap.

I am not confused this morning, just unhappy. The smallest of things would make me a million percent happier, but in a world full of other people, you just can’t get those tiny things. The world is grey and miserable and cold. I miss my girlfriend and the good times we’ve had together terribly, but she and I may be pulling in two ever-so-slightly different directions. I don’t know. I hope not, but I don’t know. And before that, she doesn’t know.

I’m incredibly lonely. Desperately lonely. I feel like nobody understands me. I’m positive that nobody understands me. And the more people tell me that I have no reason to be lonely, the more lonely I feel. The more people tell me that they understand me, the more it becomes clear that they don’t. It’s nobody’s job to understand me, it’s true, but I also have a perfect right to be sad about that fact.

Stop feeling sorry for myself? Fuck you. Make me. I wrote six books, got two B.A. degrees and an M.A. degree, took 100 gigabytes of photos and drove to half the states in the country seeing sights. I hiked to the top of King’s peak, got my Red Cross certifications, and put twenty thousand miles on my bicycle. Does that sound like someone who’s wasted a life feeling sorry for themselves? What have you done?

I’ll be down if I want.

No, I’m not suicidal at all, it’s just not my nature, but I know how people in that frame of mind feel. They feel alone and trapped in a world full of people who accuse them for feeling that way, instead of offering epathy, understanding, admissions of the world’s inadequacy, and simple, steadfast, nonjudgmental companionship.

—

My world is today failing to live up to the expectations that I have developed for it as a result of having to live my life within it.

—

Today I may have accidentally come up with a good research project for which to apply for an NSF grant. I’ll have to think more about it. I don’t know if I’m pleased, or if it depresses me.

—

I am in full self-destructive mode. Everything I do, everything I say, everything I am planning to do seems, regardless of what my intent actually was at the moment, to lead me down the path to pain, suffering, misery, and financial and emotional ruin.

Or maybe what I choose doesn’t actually matter. Maybe every choice leads me down that path.

Perhaps it has always been so.

—

Harmir, I’m sorry about the photo. When I came out to take it, everyone had gone. I thought I’d get to it later, like the next day, but I never did. Also, I haven’t yet come up with the sheet of writing you asked for. Right now may not be the moment. Maybe sometime during the next few days. I’ll try my best.

—

Aqueous, I wish we could link our heads with a wire and share reservoirs of wisdom. I’m sure you’ve got some that I could use. I don’t know what, in particular, or why… I’m just sure. Or at least, I could use a hug from an old friend.

—

I’m still stuck in Salt Lake City, although at this point, I don’t know where I belong. The National Weather Service has revised its forecast; Thursday is now the day with the best chance of being clear.

—

I have to go work on my car, to get it ready for the trip.

—

🙁

Fuck. I was going to leave SLC and go back to Cali on Tuesday, but the National Weather Service has rated half of the roads between here and SoCal as “caution” for that day (not just “poor”). If I get stuck here more than a day or two, I’m gonna burst a vein.