She's come undone

It was the new year. I knelt on the oriental rug in front of the fireplace and waited.

After spinning an old record that told us how to read our palms, I was still unsatisfied with the answers. Sure, I had a generous love line (keep your comments to yourself) and I am creative and sensitive and from the looks of things, might actually live to be old and even more annoying....but there were bigger fish to fry. I complained that I still didn't know any more than I knew when vinyl side A was placed on the turn table.

He then told me that he could tell my fortune. The tarot cards were brought down from a dusty hiding place and I was asked to shuffle them and think hard about a question that I wanted an answer to. That would be no problem. I'd had one question gnawing at my brain for what seemed like forever. No...not "how do they get those tiny little m's on the m&m's?" but a more serious question. A life changing question. For once, chocolate could wait.

I shuffled the cards around and around on the rug - perhaps a little too excitedly, hoping to make the fates dizzy. I concentrated hard, asking my question over and over in my head like a middle school kid cramming last minute for an important test. The cards were chosen and lined up. They were then fipped over one by one.

I watched each card flip with moderate curiosity - mostly eyeing the pretty designs - not knowing what they meant. The last card revealed got my attention though.

It was the "Death" card.

I gasped and sat back and looked into his face for a sign of how long I had to live. He didn't seem alarmed. I blurted out, "Does this mean that I am going to DIE???" He then told me that it didn't necessarily mean that I was doomed. It could mean the end of a previous way of thinking or approach to something.

I sighed and all of the air let out of me like a sleeping cat.

The question that I'd asked while shuffling the cards was, "Should I quit my job EVEN IF I have to struggle and make less money to be happy?"

So, days later.....with the fortunes stacked in my favor, I walked out of my job. With no new job. In a Bush economy.

Yes. I know. It sounds stupid. Crazy, if you will. But, my friends.....I had been there six years and was at the end of my rope. The thought of working there for another day...another week....another year..... made my blood run cold.

When I walked out of that office, I felt like the happiest girl in the world. I didn't know what was going to happen - and I still don't. It has been over three weeks now and I'm still in the land of the unemployed. It's funny how your view of careers shifts and changes as the weeks add up and your checkbook starts to contain more negative than positive balances.

I have applied for some jobs that made my friends and family laugh - There was the job at an upscale, trendy salon where my friend remarked, "No offense....but you don't look like the TYPE...". Then there was the collective outcry as I applied at a Children's shop: "You don't even LIKE kids!" It was the gingham aprons that appealed to me on that one. They were blue and white and I was convinced that they would bring out the blue in my eyes.... "SO RETRO!", was what I told anyone who would listen. I chose to block out the little prep school uniforms made for tiny children which made me instantly think as I walked in the front door, "Oh. Damien!"

Today, I applied at a Kinko's, remembering how I had told a friend months earlier, "Oh my god....can you imagine a worse job than working in a Kinko's? So cold! The glaring lights!" Now, the community spirit and bright lights seem to appeal to me. Anything that takes me out of the world of resumes and daytime soap operas...and once again, you get to wear an apron.

A blue one.

Sooner or later, you do get to the point where ANY job is a job. I now recall what made me take some of the worst jobs of my life - though brief they were. For instance:

The video clerk job in a tiny little town in Georgia. It paid less than minimum wage and turned out to be a very loose front for a video porn outlet. And the weirder the porn, the better. There I'd sit for hour after hour, trying to divert my eyes from the video covers, with my only entertainment between questionable customers being two radio stations - one which had an ongoing campaign to sell "Girls with Guns" calendars and the other - a contemporary country station that must have been bankrolled by Toby Keith. I remember feeling relieved to have the excitement once of a small mouse getting trapped in a waste paper basket. He propelled himself up and down, up and down from the basket, clearing the top each time but never being able to get the trajectory right to get OUT of the can. I finally freed him - but not before seeing the symbolic nature of that leaping, trapped mouse - surrounded by porn videos and G. Gordon Liddy's voice.

Or how about the job at Olan Mill's Kids? I worked there until lunch time and then never went back. Yeah. There were kids there.

There was the job that I took working nights, typing obituaries at the local paper. That one lasted only a couple of days and ended with me leaving a note on the manager's desk. I lied and said that I had decided to relocate out of state. To this day, I can't see the words, "Survived by..." without wanting to throw up. I can recall the elderly lady who trained me telling me that I would have to be "creative" when people died of AIDS or suicide... "make it sound like they died in their sleep.."

With that said.....who knows where I will end up next?

Here I sit with a pantry stocked too overflowing for my taste with the three varieties of Campbell's soup that I can actually still stomach (and yes...I DO look for answers in the alphabet soup), resumes in fax in-boxes all over town (probably with typos that I will notice months from now), and a fresh newspaper clipping for a job opening as the Easter Bunny at the mall.

And I read today that across town, starlings are reportedly being outnumbered with "devices including recorded distress calls, pyrotechnics, automatic gas exploders, lights, and low intensity laser beams."

There is a verse in the bible that says in effect that we shouldn't trouble over how we will survive - according to this verse, the birds of the air don't stress about it. Why should we?:

"Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life?"

Perhaps things are different now - in a time when birds are being zapped from their comfortable tree top perches with laser beams....perhaps Spring will reveal itself with me sitting with lap full of screaming child and large fuzzy rabbit head sitting precariously cocked on my shoulders. I might be laminating the hell out of some documents downtown. I might even be answering phones somewhere - once again acting like I care. I may just be in a job that I like. Who can say?

Not me.....that's for sure. But, I AM going to buy myself an apron.