Before we get to my foolheaded rambling, I present the latest installment of my Things I've Learned series:
40 Signs You're in the Wrong Line of Work
1 - A scant hour after administering your Federal Oath of Office, your boss tells you to "get on your knees and make sure you get all of the pubes."
2 - The statement not only fails to constitute sexual harassment but proves to be the most useful component of your orientation.
3 - Despite such sage guidance, it takes months of field testing before you finally resign yourself to the fact there's only one way to clean a urinal.
4 - Instead of a desk and a computer, your office has an oversized sink and a drain in the floor.
5 - You catch yourself staring in silent awe at the engineering marvel known as the over-under twin-roll toilet paper dispenser.
6 - You reflexively identify mops by make and model.
7 - You hate the guy at Cracker Barrel because his inelegant, amateurish technique is an insult to his MopStar S-7271 and its 4-ply blended cotton loops ("the cutting edge in tangle-free mopping").
8 - You get so engrossed in an internal debate whether Schiller's aesthetic theory is misguided or simply outdated that you inadvertently weedwhack your own shin.
9 - You expand your personal Code of Honor to include a prohibition on using any toilet you clean three times a day.
10 - You find yourself immersed in the most recent issue of SPORTSTURF Magazine, the official publication of the Sports Turf Managers Association.
11 - You cry when you discover you don't qualify for membership in the STMA.
12 - You celebrate your birthday by cleaning the men's room first.
13 - You find the muted whine of a two-cycle engine more soothing than waves crashing on the beach.
14 - You briefly consider the viability of diesel fuel as an upscale cologne.
15 - You spend two full work days debating which would be most embarrassing: your tenth high school reunion, your fifth college reunion, or your first bartending school reunion.
16 - Your ill will toward deer flies progresses to the point that, with both hands full, you suck one off of your forearm just to chew it up and spit it out.
17 - This "biting back" immediately supplants capturing them and feeding them to spiders as your preferred method of retribution.
18 - You work a shifted schedule that includes weekends.
19 - That schedule throws you so far off stride you periodically freeze up for a full minute trying to figure out what day the rest of the world thinks it is.
20 - In order to alleviate your confusion, you start routinely referring to the days of the week as ThursdaymyMonday, MondaymyFriday, and so on.
21 - Your seemingly effortless facility with a broom and dustpan becomes no small point of pride for you.
22 - So does your ability to clean both sides of a toilet seat in one fluid motion.
23 - Your workplace has a standing procedure known as a "Code Brown."
24 - That procedure consists of calling you.
25 - Your coworkers start calling you The Pimp because "you sure know how to handle a hoe."
26 - You catch yourself waxing nostalgic for jobs you quit because they sucked.
27 - You have to interrupt your surprisingly concise overview of the US Civil Rights movement to unload twenty-five eighty-pound bags of concrete.
28 - You spend six hours digging a ditch.
29 - Before the sweat dries from your shirt, your boss tells you to fill it back in.
30 - You need only tuck in your shirt to confirm that it is, in fact, colder than a well digger's ass out here.
31 - Your solemn reverence for the feminine mystique wanes a bit when you empirically determine they use four times as much toilet paper and twice as much hand soap but are still equally likely to piss on the seat.
32 - Twenty minutes after returning from a long weekend, you find yourself scraping a turd off of ceramic tile because someone has pinched a loaf a good ten feet from the nearest toilet.
33 - You then have to scrub up the footprints that same individual tracked across the length of the room after stepping in his own pile of still-warm dung.
34 - The episode doesn't even faze you until you're scrubbing the last footprint and realize that after taking a dump on the floor, stepping in it, and leaving a trail of shitty footprints, the hypocritical son-of-a-bitch stopped to wash his hands.
35 - You spend weeks debating whether your "Department of the Interior On-the-Spot Safety Award" should replace "Eagle Scout" or "National Merit Scholar" on your resume.
36 - You step into a Waffle House bathroom that looks like a gastrointestinal crime scene, and, rather than horror or revulsion, you feel only relief that you don't work there.
37 - In the middle of a staff meeting, you suddenly realize you are the only person in the room who doesn't know the standard incline for a sewage pipe.
38 - You justify your filthy bathroom with a righteous vow to never bring your work home with you.
39 - You even briefly consider "rubbing the world's face in" anything by taping it to your mop bucket.
40 - Your decade-old internal debate as to whether the legal profession is beneath you comes to an abrupt end when you realize you're conducting it while elbow-deep in a toilet bowl.
Dear [my special name for you here],
If you're like me (and we both know you are), you've spent an awful lot of time over the past year wondering what the hell I'm doing. Seeing as how you've always been my favorite, I thought it high time to bring you up to date.
When we last saw our hero, I had returned to the motherland of coastal Georgia with a Master Plan to gain admission to a respectable MFA writing program and chase my lifelong dream of being a writer -- and not just any writer but the sort of writer that other wannabe writers wanna be. To that end, last fall I threw together a handful of MFA applications and sent them into the waiting arms of admissions committees to be enveloped in a warm cloud of richly deserved adoration. While I was waiting to hear back from them, I cast about for something to keep me entertained until the fall when, amid ticker-tape cheers, I would make my glorious entrance to whichever hallowed hall stood victorious, its inkthirst slaked, after the bitter contest for my artistic and academic favor. Talk about a concentration in fiction.
I applied to be a library assistant at the local college; no. I applied to drive a service route for a linen service, no. I applied to shill paperbacks at that boil on the ass-end of book retailers Books-A-Million (the other cheek being occupied by Book Warehouse); no. I applied to be a lumber yard attendant; no. I applied to be a liquor store jockey; no. I applied to map sidewalks for the state of Georgia; no. Wait. No. Yes. We're sorry. When we said no, we meant yes. No, not just because the woman we hired over you quit. No, that no meant no. It was all a big understanding. What? Right. That's what I meant. A big misunderstanding.
So, I started mapping sidewalks and streets for the Coastal Georgia Regional Development Center. The job primarily entailed driving (streets) or walking (sidewalks) around all day with a backpack GPS unit to collect data to make maps for a variety of purported public and governmental uses. If you've never had the opportunity to walk around wearing a bright yellow backpack with a six-foot antenna sticking out of it, pausing whenever the once-every-second beeping stops until it starts again, and answering questions from every slack-jawed yokel in sight (not an inconsiderable number in south Georgia) and the occasional pair of FBI agents, let me just share this thought with you: I have concluded there are three types of experiences. There are the experiences that you simply MUST have. Everyone needs to have them, and they can only be experienced firsthand. No amount of description will do. Included in this first class of experiences is, after slamming your car into something solid at 50mph and getting out, you gradually realize the queer giddiness causing you to ignore the state trooper's instruction to "wipe that shit-eatin' grin off your face" is the oft-overlooked sensation of, somewhat unexpectedly, still being alive. The second type is a little less ethereal. These experiences aren't necessarily commonplace, but they can be sufficiently grasped through a secondhand account. Still, your life is a little better if you put forth some effort to experience them yourself. An example of this second class is eating a Margie's turtle sundae at Western and Milwaukee in Chicago. (Man, that's a damned good sundae.) The third type of experience enriches your life only in so far as you are vaguely aware that other people have the experience. Even a cursory description of these experiences is more than enough to realize fully their potential usefulness to you. Anything further actually detracts from your overall quality of life. An example of this third class is ritualized public adult circumcision. Another, more personal example of this third class is mapping sidewalks and streets for the Coastal Georgia Regional Development Center. Suffice it to say it was the most absurd job I've ever had, and, as you are probably well aware, that's really saying something.
While I initially thought the RDC job could be done by a trained chimp, I spent a week proving to myself the opposable thumb wasn't actually necessary. Nonetheless, I dutifully collected geographic data while pretending I wasn't really sitting around waiting for all of those MFA programs to send me a letter that consisted primarily of "Once upon a time, there was an applicant named Paul...and he matriculated happily ever after." Eventually, they all did send me letters, but that plot line was more like "No," and I was stuck standing there with my thumbs taped to my hands and a big yellow antenna sticking out of my back, holding an elbowful of rejection letters and crying like a baby onion whose skin just ripped open on the jagged realization that he really has to figure out what to do with his life now.
In the midst of that trauma, I totaled my car. April 12, 2003 was a clear, breezy Saturday here in the Golden Isles, and I decided to spend the afternoon on Saint Simons Island writing at a picnic table overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I hauled a coffee cup, a legal pad, and my happy ass into the maroon 1995 Nissan Pathfinder that had carried me across and around the country for the preceding three and a half years. Only a few days earlier, we had popped a bottle of vintage Pennzoil to commemorate our one-hundred-thousandth mile together (Pat's one-hundred-fifty-thousandth overall), but our festive afterglow was shattered when John Saraceno of Fort Wayne, IN blew a stop sign and pulled his 1998 Chevrolet TrailBlazer directly into my path. I t-boned the Blazer and shortened the Pathfinder by a couple of feet. I walked away from the accident with a scraped knee and a heap of scrap metal, but I would be lying if I told you there isn't a part of me that felt like I won because, unlike John Saraceno of Fort Wayne, IN and his precious 1998 Chevrolet TrailBlazer, I wasn't upside-down when we all stopped moving. Jackass.
[A moment of silence in memory of Nissan "Pat" H. Finder: Model Year 1995 - 4/12/03: It died as it lived - on the road.] Thank you.
In the wake of the sudden and tragic loss of my sled, I backslid into some bad habits. As is so often the case with abusive relationships, I returned to my old oppressor - the nonprofit sector. I started throwing resumes at every remotely promising possibility that dared show its face. Now, if you picked up a paper in the past year, you might have noticed the job market has sucked lately. I managed to not rise above that. You could say I didn't land my dream job. Or a daydream job. Or a pleasant notion job. Or even a mildly offensive thought job. In fact, it was a job I wouldn't allow myself to apply for until I promised myself I wouldn't take it if I got it. Of course, I immediately applied for it. And got it. And took it.
(Incidentally, the rest of the job search can be summed up in the following series of curses: Damn you, KaBOOM! Damn you, Corporation for National & Community Service! Damn you - damn, damn, double DAMN you - Habitat for Humanity International! And, damn you, every other org and individual who not only didn't hire me but made me believe that you might before unceremoniously dropping the hammer or simply disappearing into the night.)
So, I accepted a temporary position with the National Park Service at Fort Frederica National Monument on Saint Simons Island, GA. My official title was "Maintenance Worker #3," but I tried to make the rest of the staff feel comfortable by letting them call me Paul or Earthquake or PDiddy or Piranha or El Conquistador. My schedule was from 700AM to 330PM on Thursdays through Mondays, which did wonders for my social life. The job consisted primarily of cutting grass and cleaning toilets, although I got to spice things up from time to time by moving large piles of gravel from one place to another and laying the occasional sewage line. (Does the fun ever start?!)
While it wasn't exactly the golden career move I hoped to make in 2003, the Park Service gig did have its up sides. In addition to furnishing the pleasure of the temperate coastal climate, the job gave me plenty of time to think some things over by graciously demanding absolutely no intellectual exertion on my part. The consequent mental serenity allowed me to lay to rest my longstanding internal debate whether or not to take a run at law school, and I've finally embraced the answer at which I've known for the past several years I would eventually arrive. As a result, I spent much of my free time this fall completing and submitting applications to about a dozen law schools east of the Mississippi, in the hopes they don't hang out with those MFA jerkwads. For a variety of reasons, I'm sincerely excited about my decision to go to law school. I am confident it's the right decision, and I am convinced I couldn't have made it at any other time. Besides, I'm really tired of being the biggest asshole in the room, and it's time to do something about it.
Although I was somewhat shocked to still find myself there (since my plan was to work there for about a month until something better came along), my six-month appointment with the Park Service finally (blissfully, blessedly) expired a few days before Christmas, thereby returning me to my natural state of unemployment. Uncharacteristically for me, it seems I won't remain here long. I recently received a job offer from the Congressional Youth Leadership Council. CYLC runs a stable of experiential leadership development programs for younger students, and I've been hired as an Operations Team member for their spring sessions. The job will basically consist of driving around DC and making sure the chairs and tables and classpaks are where they are supposed to be before the students show up, making sure there isn't a bunch of trash and broken glass and steaming logs on the floor after they leave, and making sure that none of them dies between getting off of his flight to DC and getting on her flight home at the end of the week. The major drawback is the gig only lasts from late January through early April, which means I still have a few months to fill before I run off to school next fall; however, it does satisfy the only two criteria I have established for what I'm doing between now and August: 1 - no toilet-cleaning, and 2 - not in Brunswick, GA.
(Incidentally, those of you in the DC area should consider this fair warning of my impending arrival in your fair city.)
The other pleasant aspect of the job is I don't have to be in DC until the last week in January. As such, I plan to spend the next few weeks pretending not to be waiting to hear back from law schools, taking my replacement Pathfinder (silver and - damn it! - an automatic) out of the state for the first time since I bought it on May 1, finally indulging my barely contained wanderlust, and generally relishing the fact that I never have to clean another urinal ever again.
Thus, I find myself at the end of my tale, and you find yourself up to date. As you can see, I've just been layin' low, keepin' it real, scratchin' and survivin', hangin' in and jivin', and I'm on the threshold of making some welcome changes I expected to make a while ago. I hope this needlessly rambling message finds you well and in the early stages of an exceptional new year. I further hope my recently re-won mobility will lead to a crossing of our respective paths in the not-too-distant future, and I would love to hear where yours is taking you these days. Until then, I remain
Warmly yours,
Eq
PS - Oh, and in case you were wondering: the sewer pipe incline? One-quarter vertical inch per horizontal foot. Any more level than that, and nothing much likes to flow. Any steeper than that, and the water rushes by leaving everything else behind. Apparently, at a quarter-inch per foot, everything floats along nice and easy into the oozing bowels of the Su-age Canal. Makes me wonder what the incline of this message is...
-- Paul "The Earthquake" Richter
"To be a good friend, a jolly man, a good boozer, to
me, that spells honor and glory." - François Rabelais
