Lately, I've been
spending a lot of time among the ranks of the unemployed. That means
sending out a number of job applications. I've come to realize that
every job application is a gamble: it's a gamble of my time. In
addition to the time I spend looking up potential jobs, and narrowing
down whether I think I can do that job, then it's on to the cover
letter itself. I can decide whether to personalize every cover
letter, even make a different resume for each job, which can take,
say, a half an hour, or I can send out my stock cover letter and my
regular resume, and pretty much have it sent out in under a minute. I
will have no way of knowing whether the HR person will look over my
resume and cover letter with a microscope, Googling names of various
companies I've worked for, looking over my resume for any typos or
inconsistencies, or whether I'll get a five second skim—maybe the
whole thing will get scanned by a computer looking for keywords and
it will never even reach the eyes of a real human being. It's a black
box. But, I have to take that gamble, and, like most gambles, the
house has the edge. In this case, the “house” is the hundreds,
maybe thousands, of applicants that are just as qualified as me, that
I have to stand out from, but somehow without standing out so much
that it makes me look rude or unqualified, all this to reach an HR
person who can give me a chance at an interview. My “chips” are
my own time.
When you get right
down to it, we make these kinds of decisions every day, at almost
everything. Which road do I take from point a to point b? Will there
be traffic? Will there be a toll? And so on. One time, I looked at my
GPS, and decided the difference between taking the New Jersey
Turnpike to the GW Bridge, and with it, a ten dollar toll, and the
Tappan Zee Bridge, with a four dollar toll, was about fifteen
minutes. I decided fifteen minutes was worth that much to me. I ended
up hitting a deer and destroying my car. Looks that was a bad gamble.
Any date is a
gamble, and relationship is a gamble that the love you get out of
that relationship is worth the time you put into it.
If you enjoy
playing video games, maybe that's a good way to spend your time, and
you'll get better at playing them. You'll kick ass on multiplayer, or
online, but...would that time have been spent better writing the
Great American Novel? Who knows. I've come to find out that some of
the same things that I thought were, if not a waste of time, then at
least a glorified hobby—Facebook, MySpace, the newest music trends,
video games—turned out, might have helped me get a job.
You can spend your
time learning to play an instrument, and get to be a great player. If
you never play in a band, or if you do play in a band, and never get
a record deal, or, if you do record an album, and it never goes
anywhere near the radio or the top downloads, have you wasted your
time, or have you spent it well, enjoying the pursuit itself?
Someone once told
me that, in high school, he wanted to hit the gym hard, and have a
great body. Like, a monstrous, 80's action hero body. But,
paradoxically, he was depressed and suicidal. He wondered if it was
worth the investment of his own time to have that great body if he
was just going to be dead in a year. He's still around, but his body
is, in a word, average. I'm glad he decided not to take his own life,
but, part of me wonders, if he had decided to go for that body, would
the endorphins, the look in the mirror, maybe even the extra
attention, change his mind, and his mindset? We'll never know. He
never anted up in that department. Such is the paradox of depression.
I think sometimes
of certain artists....Cobain, Hendrix, Joplin, Hendrix; by the time
they were 27 years old, they changed the world, and died. I'm four
years past that, and I haven't even come close. So far, I haven't
even so much as signed a lease or mortgage, gotten married, or had a
child. I did get on TV once, though. Not that it was about me, but I
did get on TV.
And I did get
published in a book. That's not so bad, either.
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