Biting the Bullet

It was long ago, and I'd been out of work for quite a while, and I was spending a lot of time trying to sell my resume to someone and waiting for the phone to ring.  I was fed up with trying to live on a trickle of free-lance money doing articles for local magazines. Fed up with trying to stand on my head and sing Yankee Doodle Dandy. I was living with my girlfriend in a rented house on Reardon Street.  Most of the past weeks I had been able to cover my share of the rent and groceries, but on the first of the month, when my old student loans had to be paid, things were tight.

 "Don't get discouraged," said all the books on job hunting, "You have to stay with it, keep sending that resume out, keep reading the classifieds, get out and see people, sell yourself, sell yourself" And that’s what I did, to the best of my ability. It’s the way you do it, keep writing, keep sending out your work. Keep sending out your applications. No takers. Not only was a recession going on, but I didn't have a very good product. There were too many holes in my resume, too many career shifts. Maybe I didn’t want to wear a suit and tie any more. Maybe I just wanted to ruin my future for once and for all and have done with it. Be a failure.

So one morning I went down to unemployment to pick up my check. I had been on the dole for twenty eight weeks, and I was pretty fed up with that too, standing there in the line every week with all my fellow deadbeats, manufacturing our stories as to where we'd been looking for work lately.

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