Real Jobs Are For Squares

I started a serious job hunt this week. What with my car being close to road worthy, I figured it was about time. I have a decent enough resume but after searching through about a dozen job listing sites, two newspapers and a temp agency, I’m beginning to realize that there isn’t a lot out there. I take that back. If you have a degree and 5 - 7+ years experience in anything with the words “Manager”, “Lead”,  “Senior“ or “Engineer” in them, it’s a gold mine. 


My problem is, I have 5 years of experience, but it’s all over the place. For example, I have 2 years of sales/retail experience, 3 years in customer service, 2 years in data entry, 3 months as a cook,  2 months in project coordination and 1 week as a maid. (I know that doesn't add up to 5. They overlap.) All I need is baby sitting and I’d have all the experience required to be a mother. 


And why is work so boring? It’s always like “type lots of stuff”, “call people who don’t want to talk to you”, or “stare blankly at an Excel spread sheet for the next two hours”.  I want to do something cool like, fixing airplanes or firing cannons or riding dinosaurs. 


I wish potential employers didn’t look so hard at things like experience and qualifications and achievements. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if people hired you based solely on personality and mediocre talents? There’d be people a mile long knocking at my door begging me to work for them. Especially if I could fly…

That’d be sweet.


Also, resumes are boring. They don’t even let you draw pictures on them or talk about any of the cooler things you can do. Next time I turn in a resume, I think it’ll look like this.

Wish me luck.

A Lazy Post

My "art work" was featured today on a rising web comic at Social Construct. It's not the cute little MS Paint doodles you're used to, but I was still glad to have been given the honor of a guest spot. Thanks Adam!

In other news, I REALLY WANT A FUR TRAPPER'S HAT.

They're way harder to find than you'd think. Trust me, I've been looking for ages. Mind you, I don't want one of those cheesy faux fur ones. I want animals to have died in the making of my hat! Legions of them! ...Or however many it takes to make a hat.

One of these days I'll get around to drawing you guys some more pictures. That day is not today.

Driving a Geo Metro is basically a signed death warrant. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

Have you ever been sitting in a restaurant, having a chat with someone when the woman or gentleman at the booth across from you feels the need to jump into your conversation?  It usually starts with something like, “I don’t mean to butt in, but…” or “Not that I was eavesdropping, but…”. No, actually you DO mean to “butt in” or you wouldn’t have spoken to me in mid-sentence to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, I actually think it’s pretty neat (so long as they‘re courteous enough to give the conversation back after a while). It’s got a small town charm about it. You know, in towns with populations of 500 people or less you can talk to strangers without fear of them then offering you doped candy or telling you there’s a puppy in their car. …I think.

Well any who, all that to say, “yeah, that happened to me today”. I was talking to a friend about the car I purchased months ago and then never registered or inspected. I was expressing my concern with its size when the woman in the booth beside mine said, “I don’t mean to interject, but I couldn’t help over hearing you talk about your Geo Metro”.  She then proceeded to tell a tale that I THINK was a warning of the dangers of driving too fast in small cars: that or she just loves telling horror stories to unsuspecting Friendly’s patrons.

Her story went like this: “Last year, just about this time, I was driving up to New York to be with my family for Christmas. It was an icy and windy day. Well, up along side me comes this girl in one of them Smart cars, she’s flying up doing 90 or so and everyone’s scrambling to get out of her way because she appears to be losing control of her car. Just as she gets out in front of me, her car begins to swerve and then blows right over-- flips a couple times-- and lands on the  roof.”

By now my eyes are bugging out of my head as I continue to listen.

“Well, let me tell you, she went for, no lie, a quarter of a mile with her car still on it’s roof. Just slid aaaaall the way down before the car finally tipped again and landed upright.”

I had to ask her... “So was she all right?”

“Oh, no, wasn’t a chance! And there were Christmas presents all over the highway, still wrapped up. I watched the news that night and they said she died.”

“But I mean, serves her right for driving like a lunatic. Well, I better get going. Enjoy your holiday!”

Seriously?

This is going to affect the way I drive for the rest of my life.

Two days in a ROW.

Today was productive. I feel like I’m cheating by saying that as I’ve only been awake for a little under 3 hours. So, let’s revise that. The first two hours of my day have been massively productive.

I woke up at 3:40pm, little later than usual, but I wasn’t going to let that get me down, no. In fact, the first thing I did when I got up was have a tail wagging contest with my dog.

I won.

Then after letting him out, feeding him, etc, I felt a song coming on. I grabbed the nearest hair brush and began prancing around the room dramatically singing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” into it.

Then I paid three medical bills and a cell phone bill.

That’s right, I’m on top of this stuff. Adult-like? I THINK SO.

I even showered today! I think that proves that I’m morphing into a real person.

Yeah, she isn’t messing around. Look at that smirk. It says, “I’m successful, but most of all I’m an adult”.

One of these days kids, one of these days.

Your Parietals Are Showing

Two posts in and I’m already high and dry. You know, I tried to write/draw stuff about six different times. I’d get close to the end of a post and then decide it wasn’t worth being seen and would delete it. Well guess what? I got over it and now you’re all going to have to suffer whatever dreadful thing comes to my mind. So there!

Honestly. I don’t even have a topic for this post.

How about this? I discovered the magic of a tactic I call “Double Please” the other day. No one can resist its charms.

I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.

See, I was hoping that 14 pictures in a row would be enough to make this a post, but it’s still feeling like a pretty big cop out.

What else can I bore you all with? Ah! A picture of mine that I've been working on is going to be featured on a rising web comic site the end of this month. I'll post the link when it's up.

As a side note, sometimes my brain really wants to be an adult and do something smart but usually those moments last about 5 seconds because I come to realization that I ACTUALLY have the mind of a four year old. It’s all like, “Hey! You know what would be really awesome!? Reading text books on Anatomy and Physiology!… Or finger painting!”

Seriously.

Oh, maybe I could combine them.

No. No, that won’t do.

Update: It's midnight and someone just called from an unknown and private number. The conversation went like this:

Me: "Hello?"
Unknown Caller: "WHOADAAHSH!?"
Me: "Hmmm... I'm going to try that again. Hello?"
Unknown Caller: "WHOOOOADAAHSH!?!?!?!"

Me: "Okay, let's try something new. You might have the wrong number, who are you trying to reach?"

Unknown Caller: "Who-a-daahsh...?"

Me: "You know, this would be a lot easier if you'd respond differently."
Unknown Caller: "WHOOOOADAAHSHSHSHSHSHHHHHHHAHH!?!?!?!"

Me: "Alright, this is going no where. Call back when you have something nice to say."
Unknown Caller: "Okay."

Double Homicide is Children's Play

When I was little I really wanted an imaginary friend. Just think, a friend that only you could see: one that would always be there to play with you and always wanted to play the games you wanted to play. I’m fairly certain that they also double as minions if needed. All I had to do was think one up. I’m pretty sure most kids imagine someone very similar to themselves. Well, I decided in my 6 year old wisdom that it’d be much more enjoyable if my imaginary friend were a horse instead of a clone. We were going to do everything together. As you could well imagine, these coming years with my new friend were going to be fantastic, magic filled adventures. …Or so I thought. It turns out that imaginary friends are actually a lot of work. Contrary to my apparent belief, they DO NOT develop personalities of their own, nor do they become visible over time. In fact, they don’t do anything without you imagining them doing it. There was no room for improvisation here! I was heart broken. Let me give you a better idea of why.

This is what I thought imaginary friends would be like:

This is what it was ACTUALLY like:

Yeah, there’s no fun, candy OR tap dancing going on there. It was like something was missing…

I was beginning to realize that imaginary friends weren’t all that TV cracked them up to be. For the next couple of days I held on to the hope that over time things would improve.

They didn’t.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. The problem was, I couldn’t just stop imagining him. My poor underdeveloped mind couldn’t comprehend the concept of “ceasing to exit”. No, I was going to have to kill him. I had to get creative too. I didn’t want him to feel betrayed. It was going to have to look like an accident.

After much planning, it was decided that I would tell him to play in the street. Everyone (but horses) knows that if you play in the street, you’ll get hit by a car and die. It was the perfect plan. I played in the backyard while I waited for the deed to be done.

With my imaginary friend out of the way life could return to normal. Except, normal didn’t last too long. A couple months later I felt like I should try the imaginary friend thing out again. I had experience this time and I knew what I was getting myself into. I would be going in prepared. I even decided to make imagining him a little bit easier by giving him the body of my favorite stuffed animal. If my memory serves me correctly, he looked like this (giant, goofy plastic eyes and all).

Long story aside, I grew tired of this one even more quickly than the first and so I used the bridle he came with to tie him to a sapling just inside the woods surrounding our home. I left him there for many days, checking his progress now and then to see if he had starved to death yet.

 

Moral of the story here? Imaginary friends suck.

I never really noticed how incredibly morbid that tale was until right now. I feel as though I should leave this off on a better note.

Speaking of horses, here’s a bad pun!

My Cat Needs Valium... or More Sandwiches.

I stumbled out of bed this morning (as I do every morning) to let my dog outside. I usually slide my abnormally small feet into a pair of size 2-½ slippers, grab his leash and prepare to head into the frigid terror that is my backyard. My dog takes forever to go to the bathroom. First, he checks the cat’s dish to see if there’s any food left behind for him. Then he proceeds to look for the cat (or other unsuspecting critter). When he can’t find any creatures to traumatize he finally begins to project excrement. This process is by far the longest of the bunch.

On this particular day, while trying not to freeze to death and fall asleep simultaneously, an absurd creature crawled out from underneath my deck. My cat, Poe, had somehow managed to get a zip-lock sandwich bag stuck on his head. I mean, it was WAY on there.

I’m pretty sure it was there for a while too, because it was full of condensation from his breathing and he seemed like he was getting less airflow to the brain than usual. Being the caring and concerned pet owner that I am, I laughed at him before proceeding to stand there for an exaggerated amount of time, trying to figure out how it could have happened. Then I remembered he was nearly asphyxiated and I should probably muse over his motives at a later point in time.

Let me tell you, he didn’t look any better with the bag OFF his head but at least he could breathe.

I returned to the warmth of my smelly little apartment and began to ponder how something like that would have even happened. I came up with two viable possibilities:

ONE: My cat is suffering from Major Depressive Disorder-- due to semi-recently becoming an outdoor cat-- and in a psychosis fueled delusion, assumed I no longer loved him thus deciding to make one valiant effort to kill himself.

TWO: He was really hungry and there was a sandwich in there.

The third and not at all realistic scenario involved his trip into space in which his oxygen was eventually depleted due to a malfunction in the hyper drive. You may ask what the hyper drive has to do with the life support systems, well, nothing but that doesn’t stop me from thinking it. I assume that he was then forced to breathe what little air was left in the zip lock lunch bag he had packed until he arrived safely home. Upon his reentry to Earth, he realized he was far too stupid to remove it.

Well, with my cat saved from death, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I mean, really. I just saved a life. I think there’s a new profession in my future…