until such time as I am gainfully employed

dust collection

the HUD series I co-wrote won a Maggie last weekend. Knowing how incompetent the WPA is, I wonder if I should send them my address unprompted, or wait for a congratulatory email asking where they can send the piece of lucite with my name on it.

I’m proud of myself, but what weight does it carry when I still can’t get an interview anywhere? I’ve got 16 months before the 09-10 library school term starts — what to do in this time?

BAH

The 45 million or so sheep in New Zealand say it, and so did I when I opened the thin letter from the Masters of Library & Information Science program I’d last-minutedly (two weeks before the deadline) applied to. This letter wasn’t even on classy letterhead, like the nice ones I received from Brown & Columbia & Princeton back in spring 2000 when I still hoped to go somewhere full of smart people who weren’t admitted based on some state government deal.

I already knew then that I wasn’t going anywhere but to a UC, and the best I could hope for was Berkeley. Still, getting those three letters on the same day, with their crests embossed on creamy midweight paper stock, I realized that my ivy dreams were ruined, and it was my fault for having smashed them up and pretending I hadn’t cared as soon as I got skinny and made popular friends. Live for the moment, indeed.

Getting this rejection notice isn’t the end of the world; I imagine if I apply as early as possible next year, my chances of acceptance will be much higher; the boldface in this poorly copied letter explained that “the competitive pool of applicants was very large,” and because I only found out about it all three weeks before the deadline, I only managed to submit my application about two weeks early; when it’s a first-come, first-serve school to everyone who meets the (pretty freaking low) standards, then there must have been quite a few people ahead of me.

So, here I am, 116 days out of work, no prospects in sight, and now without the hope of correspondence school in the fall to cling to. Is it any wonder all I really want to do is crawl into an ativan cave and come out when someone ELSE has the answer? I’m not mature enough to manage my own disappointment.

second wednesday

It made up for the Thursday 17th April I missed crossing the international dateline westward. New Zealand really is full of sheep, and a lot of the white natives look like ugly British people. On the other hand, penguins close enough to touch! Two kinds of penguins! And a kiwi, and albatross chicks, and two kinds of cormorants, and the enormous, beautiful New Zealand pigeon, and what the hell I got all excited about birds.

The country is, outside of its wool & dairy production (they make “vegetarian cheese,” i.e., cheese without rennet, which I thought admirable, though being generally opposed to dairy industries I did not eat any of it), heavily dependent on tourism; as one of our bus drivers informed us, lakeside towns with three-digit populations can swell into the mid-thousands during the summer months. Franz Josef Glacier, where we spent two days, officially counts around 100 people as residents, though there were certainly double that at least when we were there, during the off-season (read: fall).

I’m finding it extremely disorienting to return from 6pm sunsets to dusk at 7:30. Also, the “competitive pool of applicants” was too big for me and I won’t be attending library school in the fall. Now I really have to find a job, what the hell.

94

I am your deadbeat unemployed boyfriend who sits in his underwear all day playing videogames instead of applying for jobs. I’ve been trying to shower and dress in outside clothes every day; I do a lot of dishes.

I still pay my share of the bills, too, but how much longer will that last once the state cuts off my unemployment insurance? This makes me feel sick, and coupled with the agoraphobia staying inside all day seems to be breeding, I wonder if my no-prospects slog of a job I lost in January was better for the crazies after all.

baking magic

82

My actual Neal award came in the mail on Monday. It’s a fancy, heavy, engraved medal. It was not accompanied by any display devices or place to affix a ribbon to, so I’m not sure what to do with it. Guess it stays in the box.

Is there an analogy I’m missing? It’s a complete let-down to win an award for work on a magazine you were discarded from. Also, there’s no way to talk about it without forcing it awkwardly into conversations: “Yeah, no job yet. But I did win a pretty prestigious award you’ve never heard of, for these articles in a magazine you’ve never heard of on a topic you couldn’t care less about! So that’s all right.”  I guess if I were really ecstatic about it I wouldn’t mind bragging a little, but no one from the magazine has even sent one tiny “Hey the HUD articles won big, good job” email, so where is the momentum supposed to come from?

It’s an award, be proud: but it’s meaningless to everyone I know, and the people (the person) whose acknowledgment has understanding (& therefore higher worth) won’t give me any, so there’s just me to be proud of it all by myself, and that is not in my skillset. The opposite, rather, HA HA HA, despite my best efforts to LOVE MYSELF because I’M PRETTY ALL RIGHT, TOO.

So hungry.