The (Mis?)Adventures of a Perpetual Job-Hunter/Job-Hater

I was plagued by the most disgusting dizziness today. It started at about 9:30 am and lasted the entire work day. I think a lot of people who have desk jobs suffer from this ailment now and then, but I’m convinced that working in legal publishing increases the frequency of my dizziness episodes. Marking up and being hunched over hundreds of pages for hours on end, all the while trying to decipher legalese that employs a bunch of misplaced and, in my opinion, unnecessary commas that impede comprehension (I’m definitely a fan of the comma, as you all can tell by now, but even I’ll admit that my curvy little friend can make too many appearances) really does aggravate my desk-job-rooted proneness to dizziness. Ugh. Such. A. Bad. Day.

Anyway, another dizzying situation is the scheduling issue I’ve been having with regard to the internship. The editor at the magazine emailed me on Monday to let me know that after more thought, she realized that she could not accommodate my new job schedule. But she’d be more than happy to take me on as an intern as soon as my availability opens up. So, because I decided that I can’t let this opportunity slip away, I approached my supervisor and asked her if I could still stay on with the company and work Monday to Wednesday (so that I can dedicate all of Thursday and Friday to the internship). She was happy to work with this proposed schedule, but unfortunately I’m still waiting for official approval from the Big Kahuna. So, I’ll have to wait and see what happens… but I’ve made a choice – I’m going to do this internship even if my work schedule doesn’t get approved. If I don’t, then what was the Big Stand that I took when I quit my previous job for???

I’ve realized that sometimes all it really boils down to is a choice. Sometimes it’s not about dizzying yourself by keeping your options open, trying to juggle a couple of opportunities and then waiting to see which one ends up working out. Sometimes it’s about streamlining… eliminating the non-essentials… choosing to do what you truly want to do, thereby creating a simple trajectory to follow, even if the risks of that simple path are obviously high (therefore rendering that simple path not so simple after all!) and you’re not sure where you’ll end up at the end of it all. Those  types of choices are particularly difficult to make… a choice is a full-fledged commitment, and it’s absolutely terrifying to commit to something that’s so uncertain. But making these choices is contingent on a leap of faith that’s the starting point for the fruition of truly remarkable things.

…

I’ll work my way up to “remarkable”. Right now, I’ll settle for trying to ”do something that I actually want to do”. But then again, some might even call that remarkable, no?

The editor at the magazine had no qualms about working around my work schedule! I’m incredibly excited!!!! I’m so elated that I don’t have to give up this experience.

Man, I hope this leads to good things. I really, really hope that in a year I can say that I actually work – for wages – at a magazine. Maybe in 2.5 years I’ll somehow get an Assistant Editor gig… and I’d be happy to remain in that position until the 5-year mark - hopefully at that point I’ll be a full-fledged Editor.

I think I should take some magazine publishing courses… I really wish I hadn’t switched my Journalism major to English in the second year of my undergraduate career. I mean, I don’t regret the route I ended up taking. I wholeheartedly loved my undergrad courses in English and didn’t know for certain that I no longer wanted to pursue my PhD until after I finished my MA and was just a couple months away from beginning the PhD, so I had no clue it would all end up this way and that I’d eventually want to pursue a journalistic rather than academic career… but it’s not too late, right?

It’s never too late!

Can’t it all just work out for me for once? So the new job is fine, but it lost quite a bit of its lustre this afternoon when my supervisor told me that I can’t work early hours until my “newness” has diminished. She wants me to get more traning under my belt before I begin working without a supervisor in the office (the earliest a supervisor arrives in the morning is 7). The problem – IT’S A BIG PROBLEM – is that I’m supposed to intern from 2-5. I was supposed to work from 5-1, which would’ve worked perfectly with my internship hours, but now my plan that was neatly tied up with a pretty little bow has gone completely to hell.

I want to be a part of this magazine – seriously, I NEED this experience. Since Friday is a short work day at the company I work for, I can intern from 12:15 to 5, but the internship requires a two-day commitment. I’ve already emailed the editor of the magazine with all of the details re: the schedule debacle and told her I can come in for an hour Monday to Thursday (to discuss new developments and assignments that I can take home) AND dedicate all my spare time to completing tasks on my own time (I completed some fact-checking on my own this past week and it went really well!)… I just hope we can work something out.

What am I supposed to do, though? While I need to intern for the magazine to help me get on the career path that I want to be on, since I haven’t won the lottery yet, I also need this job. And for the first time in a very long time, I can say that my job is decent… and the company is more than decent. It’s a truly solid company, actually. Probably the best I’ve worked for in terms of taking care of employees. I’m on contract, but the chances of getting hired permanently are quite high… and once that happens, I could work the hours I want, receive awesome benefits (maternity leave top-up!), and eventually work from home FOREVER if I choose to do so.

At the end of the day, though, I don’t think it would be enough. Yes, I do think I would be able to learn to accept having a “meh” job at a good company. But it still wouldn’t be enough… I could never permanently quiet the nagging voice inside my head, which would constantly remind me that I’d be happier doing something else.

I just hope that nagging voice never leaves me – because so long as I’m armed with it, there will always be potential for my continued evolution. I don’t ever want to lose the ability to want better for myself when I know I can amount to so much more.

First off, the new job is okay. After my last nightmare of a job, it’s such a huge relief to have a boss who doesn’t breathe down my neck. It’s an eerily quiet, anti-social environment for the most part, but such is life when you work in legal publishing. I knew what to expect before starting. My co-workers seem nice and good-humoured enough, so hopefully I get to run into them more often in the halls or library to strike up more conversation (how ironic, yes, striking up conversation in a library – again, such is life when you work in legal publishing).

Anyway, I’ve already got some work to do, which is good… I guess. To be honest, I was hoping to cruise for the first few days or so reading lame training material, but because I’ve got moderate editorial experience under my belt, they’ve decided to put me to work already. It’s not fun work, but it never is in legal publishing. I can’t stop thinking about the work I have to complete for the magazine – it’s so much more interesting… today all I kept thinking about was making calls to verify some details in a few articles I’ve been assigned to fact-check. I was really distracted. I wish they would just pay me! I’d be elated if they said they could pay me minimum wage to work for them… sigh, maybe one day.

Anywho, these updates are going somewhere today – for once, I have a point, haha. Reflecting on my varied work experience, which consists of paid and unpaid positions and ranges from God-awful to “meh” to, now that I’m working for the magazine, warm, fuzzy-feeling-eliciting, I’ve realized that it has definitely given me a better appreciation for the value of a dollar. I know someone who’s a pretty ridiculous character, quite happily leeching off of others to pay for her gym membership, satisfy her penchant for name brands, buy things she shouldn’t, rack up enormous debt in their names so that she can spoil herself, etc., etc., etc. She doesn’t pay rent, people. She’s been unemployed for several years and lacks any job skills (or people skills, for that matter!). She’s 30-something and virtually the only thing she can put on her resume is her short-lived experience working at a fair, for Christ’s sake. You would think that someone who takes, takes, takes from wonderful people who give, give, give would do what she could to show her appreciation. But no, she doesn’t even help out at home in any adequately quantifiable way… and she’s completely unapologetic about being thoroughly USELESS  to her family that’s selflessly and painstakingly helping her out. She’s pretty crappy in my books, so these days I’m not surprised when I hear about something effin’ stupid that she does.

But the other day, my husband and I gave her daughter a monetary gift for her birthday. Sure, it wasn’t huge or anything, but I hadn’t worked in weeks and we had to be modest because of our situation. It wasn’t a paltry amount either, though, so I expected a polite “thanks” in return. But when her daughter gave her nasty mom the money and told her it was from us, nasty mom just looked down at it and said nothing… not a word. Nor did she tell her daughter to thank us. She looked down at the money like it was infected. I could see it on her nasty face: she was thinking, “CHEAP”. It wasn’t even HER gift! And still she passed judgment! I’m baffled by how she feels entitled to pass judgment with NOTHING that she’s EARNED SELF-SUFFICIENTLY to her name.

Funny that someone who’s too useless to generate an income would think that, huh? Apparently people who are “too good” to work honestly for a dollar are are still “too good” for monetary gifts/free money.

Maybe if the dumb b!tch actually WORKED a damn day in her life, had a boss who made her want to crawl into a hole and scream, had a job like my husband’s that made her body ache every day, had to settle for all of these not-so-wonderful things for the sake of DOING WHAT’S RIGHT… maybe then she wouldn’t scoff at our gift. She simply hasn’t evolved enough to understand just what kind of bullsh!t and sacrifice goes into making an honest dollar. And the fact that she revels in her ignorance enrages me – a 30-something ADULT who lacks this insight is a sorry waste of human life! ARGH!

I’m glad I’ll never be like her. Without a doubt, she’s the biggest idiot I have the misfortune of knowing.