10 June, 2009

Help Want Me.

(i wrote this yesterday but couldn't upload it till today)
This morning I officially started my “job hunt” and as usual just opening a job listings site sends me into paroxysms of self-doubt and confusion. Made all the more fun by the fact that I am in a foreign country and thousands of miles from anyone who uses the term miles. Nothing makes me feel as unqualified as reading a job posting, somehow even listings for jobs that I know require little to know skills manage to make them sound out of my reach, or they are so heinous sounding that my soul dies a little inside just reading the job description (though to be fair if you wrote out the job description of any of my bookstore jobs I would probably rather drink acid then do them, but I guess that’s why I left them.) I am uselessly picky in much the same way that I am when it comes to relationships, I assume all of the things I would like would never hire me and all of the things that are practically throwing themselves at me couldn't’t arouse my interest with a bottle of Viagra and a copy of freshman magazine.
Though to be fair I think the larger problem here is that it is a recession and there seem to be no publishing companies or magazines in the city of Auckland, the only kind of jobs I ever feel both vaguely interested in and vaguely qualified for. So on top of having “issues” with job hunting there are also just not that many things out there for me at the moment which is over feeding my pessimism. I’ve sort of started to look into temp agencies but haven’t made enough progress there yet to know if that will be useful to me. None of them had a convenient “start” here section on their websites and I need to work up the nerve to try and visit them in person. (Sidebar: at some point in my life I became terrified of unsolicited communication with people/entities, that I’ve just started to realize is incredibly problematic in my life. It makes me shy, anti-social, and scared of the kinds of things that it takes to get a job/friends/boyfriends. How do I fix this?)
Then there is the fact that I have borderline useless degree and little concrete idea of what I actually want to be doing with my life. I know I want to do something creative, and something that is sort of to do with words (problematic for someone who is dyslexic and has awful penmanship) but beyond that I can never quite come up with anything that comes close to an actual kind of employment. Editorial assistant was the last job I applied to that I really was interested in doing, but Chronicle decided that I should probably stay at my crapy retail post, which is at least better then how McS treated me vis-à-vis paid employment.
This is usually where I start thinking “maybe you should go back to school” at which point my brain really starts to spin wildly out of control. I like the school application process only a hair more then I like the job application process (and anything that would mean talking to Hofstra is its own bag of worms). As much as the idea of living in a dorm gives me an emotional (and actual) boner, I know it won’t be like that and then I remember that I have know idea what I would want to study (well I think the problem is actually that I have too many things I would like to study and none of them are any more practical then the stuff I already know) …
Ok I’m going to stop, now that I’ve annoyed my self with my neurotic ramblings I’m going leave off here. Maybe I will just work at the Borders down the street (I was shocked when I first saw it) or become a baker, or maybe I will join the Peace Corps. Who knows?

-Peter-

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