I spent almost the entire day, about ten hours, working on my concept paper. That old thing, you say? Yep. The living-dead paper that refuses to lay down and die. I keep beating the crap out of it and still it rises up from its fetid grave to perplex and confound my tired brain. Honestly, it feels like I've never written a research paper before in my life. I'm sure my expression must resemble those of my students, who stumbled into Introduction to the Internet (what's a browser, again?) after my colleague Bravadita's Research Paper class, shell-shocked at the prospect of typing (notice I didn't say writing) 15 pages. With in-text citations! And a Works Cited page! Quelle nightmare!
“Here's another one! Listen to this! This poor schmuck used to drive a school bus! Har har har.”
Wow. Time out. After I wrote that last line, I almost had to get up and make a yonana. But I'm sick of bananas masquerading as ice cream, so I just took another pull on my current drug of choice: room temperature PG Tips tea laced with rice milk. (I'm a professional whiner. Don't try this at home.) Fortified, I can now continue.
Sending my patchwork quilt of a resume into the corporate world is sort of like spreading my formerly-white-now-gray granny-panties all along Belmont. It's embarrassing. There's just no way to put a positive spin on my work history: I'm a loser. It's clear as day I had my head up my ass my entire adult life.
The phone didn't ring today. But should I actually get a call next week inviting me downtown for an interview, I can imagine trying to explain what on earth I was doing all those years.
“Uh... I was trying to...uh...”
How can I explain that I was under the mistaken impression that my art career would actually be able to support me? Should I say I was following my bliss (leaving aside the fact that it was anything but blissful)? I don't know—the word bliss sounds like I was on drugs the whole time, and I wasn't (at least not that I can recall). You know, even putting the words art and career in the same sentence shows how deluded I was, and apparently still am. Maybe I could say, “I was pursuing a career in the arts.” No, same problem. Nobody but Thomas Kinkade made a career in the arts (and look how well that turned out...guess I should be grateful).
Truth? I don't want a job. I don't want to work. I just want to write and draw silly pictures, read stupid vampire novels, and eat ice cream until I'm a blob. What are the odds my dream will come true? I bet the blob part wouldn't be too hard.
So, now I'm ABD, big whoop, and I think I can stroll into the corporate world and wow them with my knowledge of statistics. Unlikely. Today is a good day, but even on a good day my mind is trying to kill me. My brain is mush from my vegan debacle, menopause, and years of sleep deprivation from working at the career college. I'd be lucky to be able to describe the differences between mean, mode, and median. If they call me, I can only throw myself on the mercy of the universe. And if they don't call me, I can say, “See? Told you. I'm a loser, baby...”
