Oh, well this is just great...

            My plan has been ruined!  I got a job, and now I don’t know what to write about.  The untamed territory of the unemployed with all its associated adventure has been closed off to me.  I feel as if I promised you a rip-roaring roller coaster ride but ended up just pushing you around a few times on a wobbly merry-go-round at some questionable city park with teenagers smoking pot in the bathroom.  I’m such a sellout.  I sacrificed the lifeblood of my art for the glimmer of wealth.  I can’t even look at myself.  The passion to write and create and share is laced through my very sinews, but I tossed it aside for the chance to sell hot dogs off the street for a few greasy dollars.

            Actually, selling hot dogs would probably make for some good blog-fodder.  I’ll keep that in mind.

            So, real quick:  I’ve been hired by Big Brothers Big Sisters to help with their annual auction gala.  Today was my first day.  I showed up in my slacks and nice blouse to discover that everyone was in jeans.  I practically peed myself with happiness—and I could have, because I don’t need to wear those slacks again for at least two months, which is when the gig ends since I’ve only been hired to help with the event.  So there are two months until I could potentially be in the same spot I was in last week, and then I would be able to again hold the masses captivated as I spun my riveting tale about a girl’s dedicated struggle against the man to eke out a living while subsisting on nothing more than boiled beans and shoe leather… but I’m actually not crossing my fingers for that one.  At one point in my life I would have been, but nothing adds a healthy dose of boring to your life quite as efficiently as having a mortgage payment. 

I mean, I’m at a point now where I actually like talking about the mortgage with Husband.  It’s like it’s our evil nemesis, making us endlessly roll a giant ball of responsibility up a slippery hill, but we’re cleverly outwitting it month by month by thwarting its every dastardly attempt to destroy us using only our wit, cunning, and ridiculous good looks.  Also by paying down the principle.  That last thing sounds less interesting unless you realize paying down the principle is like taking off your glove, slapping your bulging, angry, Schwarzenegger-esque mortgage in the face, and daring it to make a move.

            Let me assure you that this is most certainly not destined to become a financially-themed blog.  (And the huddled masses breathed a sigh of relief…)  But I can’t write about unemployment anymore, and I’ve made it a personal goal to blog once a week.  I’ve actually created an Excel spreadsheet with weekly goals for myself and blogging is one of them.  Several blog topics have crossed my mind, all of which I don’t know enough about or that would just be self-indulgent.  Running was an obvious thought, but apparently not everyone is as proud of me as I think they should be when I get home and my socks are soaked in blood.  I want to write about something that someone else could potentially identify with, and I don’t just mean other bloody-sock people.  Whether they actually do identify or not is a separate issue, but it’s important to me to at least try to write something with worth for someone other than myself. 

            I’m almost to the end of the page and I haven’t come to a conclusion yet.  Suggestions are welcome, but not expected.  Tips, however, will be automatically added to your bill.  My thanks to you all, and I’ll see you next week with hopefully some sort of… point.

No need to pee my pants.

            I have now been rejected, passively or through a delicately worded email, 30 times.  And counting.  Once I received a cute little “thank you for your interest, however we’d rather suck eggs than hire you…” post card.  Why is it that the level of cringe caused by the rejection noticed is proportionate to its level of politeness? 

            Yes, yes, I know.  It’s tough out there.  Everyone’s looking.  The realm of the unemployed is a jungle filled with leaping mutant vampire wombats that drool.  But that never really scared me before for two reasons; one stupid reason and one good reason.

            The stupid reason was, well, this is me we’re talking about here.  Sure there are a ton of people out there looking for jobs with more experience, more education, more ambition and tighter abs, but still, like I mentioned, I’m me.  My bosses have always loved me, my friends and family think I’m great, and I’m generally unfamiliar to rejection (excepting 30 recent events).  I’m Katie Taylor—I’m on the list. 

            My inner conviction that I’m worth my salt (and probably my weight in gold) has to be a result of my parents’ daily bias of my greatness expressing itself throughout my childhood.  Exaggerated as it may be, it’s really helped me keep my chin up.  Even though jobs I would have loved and been highly qualified for have denied me with passionate consistency for over two months now, I still have the gall to think that the next job I apply for really could be the one.  I’m just not that big on despair, I guess.  I’m like that five-year-old who’s just learned to play tic-tac-toe and keeps thinking that they’re going to beat you if you’ll just play with them once more even though they mark the same squares every time.  That’s it!  My parents probably let me beat them at tic-tac-toe leaving me with an unrealistic sense of optimism.  Now I’m stuck believing in myself for the rest of my life—thanks a lot, Mom. 

            Anyway, the second reason is because of God.  I did not really plan or even want this to be a blog that gets into my Christian life that much (you know, to keep it accessible to the untold zillions of people reading it), but I’ve found I can’t really avoid talking about God if I’m going to talk about anything remotely serious in my life.  I’ve discovered it’s best to just trust God from the get-go so you don’t end up feeling stupid later.  That way when God provides just like he says he’s going to, when things don’t crash and burn like my terrible fantasies would predict, when I see how his plan fits together after I’m already through the dark spot, I don’t have to go back to God sheepishly and say, “Oh, I see you were serious about that whole ‘do not worry’ bit in Matthew six… sorry I for that embarrassing freak-out session…”  I’ve had enough of those experiences.  Since God has always taken good care of me in the past despite the freak-outs (though not always in the ways I’ve recommended to him), I’ve just decided to forget it and trust him and not make a liar out of myself if I want to sing “Great is thy Faithfulness” with the rest of the crowd on Sunday.  I guess he could change his mind this one time and I could completely crash and burn, but I’ve never really heard of or experienced that and I’ve never come across a “sometimes I just like to screw around with you for fun,” scripture.

            So on a practical level, just this morning I found out that I’ll have two interviews this week.  One for a temporary job that would be pretty cool and look great on my resume, and one for a job that would probably be amazing—working for my one of my favorite humanitarian nonprofits.  Even the fact that I have two interviews tempts me with stress… what if I get offered the job I want less and have to decide whether or not to take it before I know about the job I want more?  What if I screw it up?  But I’m not going there.  No—I am now accountable to you, World Wide Web and friendly blog-readers.  There is no reason I need to worry—not if I actually believe what God says.  And I do. 

            When it comes to people who don’t believe in God and his power and presence in our lives, I don’t know how you do it.  My hat is off to you, because if I were you I’d be peeing in my pants.   

           

            Thanks all!  I’ll let you know how this week goes…

“Katie, there have been more cuts.” 

“Is one of them me?”

“Yes…”

And honestly I was far from devastated at that moment.  When your boss calls you into her office and asks that you shut the door you can bet it’s not because there’s a surprise party in there, but I was envisioning being made aware of some heinous and previously unknown mistake I had made that had irreversible repercussions on the agency, on the volunteer program, on innocent little puppies in Tazmania… but I was just losing my job. 

Which, to be fair, was not in the list of the top ten things I wanted to hear my boss say.  Examples from that list would be, “It’s sunny out, why don’t you go home early?” or, “I’m going to see about getting you a raise,” or “Your tireless efforts really further our mission to help kids and families and because of your invaluable contribution you’ll be receiving a dozen homemade cookies from the CEO every Monday this month.”  I certainly did not want to lose my job.  On any given day at work you could find me making art projects with kids, writing limericks in my office, or carting new toys and books down to the residential cottages.  I was probably most valued for the limericks, actually, and while I enjoyed limericks as much as anyone at times I wondered if I was using my $100,000 English education to its full potential, but I digress.

There are some who would not enjoy a job that involves constantly talking to fun and interesting people and trying to make traumatized kids’ lives a little brighter, but I don’t happen to be one of them.  I had left a job I loathed for one I adored eight months before, and the prospect of leaving that job, my first real job, didn’t exactly cue my mental hallelujah chorus.

Still, as my boss continued on, extrapolating about how much they didn’t want to lose me, how valuable I was to the team and to the volunteer program, and how a bunch of other people were being cut too (some who’d been there a large chunk of their adult lives), I was preparing my graceful response.  As soon as she paused I was going to tell her that I understood, that it had been a great honor to work there, and that I had learned so much from her.  It was a really great, very mature response.  She paused,

“Well this sucks.” 

Yep.  Smooth.  My first thought after those words escaped my lips were:  it’s so unprofessional to use sucks in front of your boss.  My second thought was:  fat lot it matters now. 

I was given three weeks of notice, which was equally a blessing and a curse.  I worked in the development office managing a volunteer and in-kind gifts program… plus a ton of other stuff that for some reason was my responsibility (employees of the world can relate).  My to-do list was two pages long, and a bullet point that says, “increase volunteer diversity” can’t just be checked off by posting a sign on the street that says, “non-Whites wanted.”  (I will say the thought had tempted me a time or two).  And because I had a salaried position, and because I valued the projects on my list to the point where taking ownership bordered on becoming a hissing possessive maniac, so began a string of long nights at work.  Husband knew he could either eat dinner on his own or wait for me to make something… at eight or nine at night.  I came home to him with empty bags of chips on the coffee table in front of him.  I hated that part of it, partly because he can eat like that and not gain any weight anywhere ever, but I wanted to leave that position knowing that I’d done everything I could to not drop flat the volunteers, projects, and people I’d worked so hard to support.

Unless you’re a crappy worker and everyone at your job despises you, I highly recommend getting laid off sometime.  Sure, I had the insecurity of unemployment looming before me, but for those last three weeks I could do no wrong.  Something new to spearhead?  Well, no point in giving that to me.  Someone screwed up?  Don’t blame Katie… she’s already been terminated for heaven’s sake, cut her a break!  Give her a mini-scone instead. 

I also really got to see the impact I had on certain programs and people.  People that I didn’t think my leaving would affect at all were outraged:  “Who’s going to do all the stuff that you do?”  I received hugs, unsolicited reference letters, thank-yous, and even a little breakfast put on by program staff to thank me and another victim of the budget cuts.  To be quite honest, while I know I did the best job I could while I was there, I think that people saw me through rose-colored glasses after it came out that I was being cut.  Even the CEO told me how wonderful I was, which was really touching.  I felt bad for the guy because he was the one who got the stink eye for making all the cuts.  I, more maturely, preferred to give the stink eye to “the man.”  Anyway, for those last three weeks, I had a pass.  Little birdies flew behind me singing, and cherubs spread flowers before my feet.  It was a very encouraging, tiring, insane time. 

And then on my last day, July 8^th, at 9:45pm, I came to a point when I had done all I was going to be able to do.  It was time to go; I no longer worked there.  Everyone else was long gone and it was dark, and after leaving post-it notes on every item on my desk that needed to be taken care of, that I didn’t know what to do with, or that I didn’t have the heart to throw away (i.e. the 500 new business cards I had finally received a few weeks earlier), I put my keys in my desk, grabbed my things, took one last look, and locked the door behind me.  For the first time since I’d heard the news, my heart hurt.  I left the radio off in my car and was quiet as I headed through Seattle—at a speed smooth enough for melancholy since traffic isn’t backed up at ten o’clock.  Saying so many goodbyes, wrapping up so many projects, and eating so many mini-scones had really taken a toll on me.  Saying goodbye to the kids was the worst, one girl said, “people always leave,” to me.  And while in her life that was probably even more true than usual, I hadn’t wanted it to be true of me. 

It was about that point, passing under Seneca, that I realized I’d forgotten my blazer in the office.  Stickle bats!  So I would be back after all—because I needed that stupid blazer.  I needed it because I was now going to embark on a new, unknown, more perilous adventure that calls for even more sucking up than working in development—job hunting.