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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Obfuscation, Obfuscation, Obfuscation

I've been doing my fair share of job hunting recently. Except that there's nothing "fair" about it, not in the meaning of "fair" as in "equitable" or "fair" as in "she's a fair lass." Life, we are told from that first slap on the ass onwards, isn't fair. It's not even-steven, and it's not pretty. Lately, I've been thinking about how job hunters (or anyone else aiming to impress) try to even up the score.

We lie.

Really. I tell people all the time that I'm "detail-oriented and highly organized." Please. I'm thinking of having one of those nose-ring things done, just to carry my keys around on. I lose those suckers a minimum of once a day, and I even have a special nifty dragonfly hook next to my door to hang them on. I just can't be bothered to take the 9.7 nanoseconds required to actually hook them on there when my arms are full of groceries, there are hungry cats twisting themselves into knots around my ankles, and I'm already doing the gotta-pee jiggy dance of too much coffee and too little time to off-load it. Highly organized I am not.

But I'll quite happily claim to be organized. I can even fake it, in the short term, as long as no one looks too closely. When I was teaching (ahhhhhhhhh past tense ahhhhhhhhh), I had these massive three-ring binders, several for each level of ESL I taught. They were (ostensibly) separated by themes: health and body, emergencies, the house, school, looking for work, etc. As long as the binder remained closed, I could haul it around, little plastic tags prominently and smugly displayed. Inside, it was a different story. Hell, there could have been anything in there: lost works by Jackson Pollock, Amelia Earhart's final flight plan, that 18 1/2 minutes from the Nixon tapes. Actual, usable lesson plan fodder? Not so much.

I just spent the last hour, for example, trying to find pictures to use for my bio on my NEW WRITING THINGY (warning: shameless self-promotion ahead) at Sustainable Style Foundation. I know I have tons of nifty pictures of me in the blurry distance -- where they are is anyone's guess. I fear I may have to embark on a journey to THE STORAGE CLOSET. I have a storage closet that's been divided in half -- an upper and a lower -- and I have the lower half. It's a great place to put camping gear and the like, as that way my tent and sleeping bag get acclimated to dank, smelly, wet places. It's a graveyard of old spiderwebs full of the bodies of formerly juicy moths, flies, small children, etc.; it is also a hiding place for the spiders who built them and who still scurry around there, looking multi-legged and threatening. I can't stick my hand in any of the boxes without images of gangrenous spider bites spreading up my arm until the doctors tell me they're going to have to remove my neck and just balance my head between my shoulders and whatever you do, don't untie the ribbon!

But I've exhausted all the possible hiding places in my house (and at 450 sq. ft., that doesn't take long), so I'm left with the ridiculous places (that little gullwing-door butter nook in the fridge; under a cat; wrapped in plastic and duct tape and suspended in the toilet tank) or THE STORAGE CLOSET.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Being organized and more into the details than the devil hisself. About that? I lied.


4 comments:

NuclearToast said...

I think each time you say "the storage closet" it should be followed by a dramatic DUN DUN DUUUNNNN!

Ash said...

I feel the same way about our shed. It's kind of scary. Sometimes I have to prop the door open to pull out boxes of Christmas or Halloween decorations and I am always so worried that a stray cat is going to go in there when I'm not looking and then I will accidentally lock them in.

Lynn Sinclair said...

Why do spiders like those damp, dark places? Are there really a lot of food sources hanging out in there?

The pic posted is nice--clear enough to see that you own a white t-shirt and sunglasses, but fuzzy enough that people might run you down without ever recognizing you.

Shannon Perry said...

And that is definitely what I was going for: vaguely familiar yet still run-downable!