Life in Capital Letters

Ah, the smirk-faced question about having an ‘unstable’ job history. My favorite.

I always want to reply with something snarky, like “I know that by the time you were 27, you’d already been at this company for 10 years and now you’ve been here for 40 years because you have no imagination and have never wanted more for yourself and you’re boring me to death just by looking at me, but guess what, times are different now, grandpa.

It’s not my fault your generation screwed everything up and now we are in school for 21 years of our lives, fed with false promises, then released into the wild with only service industry jobs and a meaningless degree to show for it, and yes I changed service industry jobs practically every year but I hardly see how that makes me unstable or why I should be particularly loyal to a restaurant (!!!) that pays me minimum wage.

Please just go ahead and retire with the money that you pillaged from your employees and probably from the poor and maybe even babies, you life and economic resource sucking zombie, so the world can move on and look back and condemn you properly.”

I don’t want your job anyway.

Dear Person Who Should Give Me a Job:

“I was born to write. But like a character in a low-budget, made-for-TV movie, I’ve found the path to my dreams blocked with myriad obstacles, including the economic recession and an annoying obligation to pay my rent. Melodrama mostly aside, I do consider writing to be one of my greatest skills, second only to my ability to eat and followed closely by my aptitude for sleep.

I started writing for pleasure in high school: not passing notes (though I did a fair amount of that, too), but blogging. I continue to blog nearly every day, despite my mother’s admonitions that the Internet is a dangerous place. (To which I roll my eyes and reply, “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a cloud made of kittens and 10 being Detroit, where would you actually rank the Internet? Last I heard, the Internet didn’t have a homicide rate.”) I like blogging because I get to express my very personal, extraordinarily unique and attention-worthy perspective on life through an impersonal medium. All this to say that writing is one of favorite ways to pass the time, not least of all because I can do it in the comfort of my own home, which saves me from skin cancer, getting hit by a streetcar, catching the bird flu and everything else my mother warns me about through dire emails in comic sans font.

While passion is a great, if unconvincing, reason to consider yourself good at something, I feel that I have other writing credentials that are worth mentioning. You may be surprised to discover that I can write with correct grammar and quite appropriate use of parentheses when necessary. I have demonstrated this ability in college and beyond, during which time I conducted numerous hours of research on topics ranging from obscure Slavic dialects to wealthy New Orleans businessmen (don’t ask), and wrote many papers, proposals and synopses. My academic achievement in college and high performance as a development coordinator indicate that I am a committed and hard-working individual.

Finally, I believe that I would make an excellent New Orleans freelance writer because I love my city. If I could marry a city and have lots of weird human-tree-street-building hybrid babies, New Orleans would be the one for me. So, I hope you will consider fulfilling a young woman’s dream, if not for my sake and the sake of my starving, unborn children, then for the sake of New Orleans, which deserves only the best.”