Job Clarity

(Wiping JoAnn Fabrics off the table for good)

This rose is called "Variegata Di Bologna" and is a sport of the old rose "Rosa Mundi". Cultivated roses have traceable parentage, like people. Sometimes enormous spiders lunge out from the layers and give me heart attacks. People have been known to do the same thing.


Yesterday I applied for a job at the local cookie factory: graveyard shift cookie packager. I realized that I keep holding JoAnn's fabrics up as the bench mark for how low I've gone and how desperate I am. I thought I was already there. Then I realized that I would rather work the graveyard shift shoving cookies in packages than work in a fabric store.

I've spent the last twenty years making use of my $20,000 education and I'm done. I didn't become a famous designer. I didn't become a career swatcher. I could have. But I didn't. I've worked in fabric stores, done costume design, been a production artist, and had my own business. I can't say I made a success of many of those ventures (I was a kick-ass swatcher though) but I don't still have the same dreams I used to have. I'm not looking to break into fashion design, or fabric design, or pattern design. If I haven't done it in the past twenty years of working my ass off, it aint gonna happen.

What I found out in this big adventure of my life is that what I really want is to stay home, be an urban homesteader, and write about it. On my terms. In my way. I am happiest and healthiest doing and learning all those homesteading activities like baking bread, making cheese (a cheese post is coming soon!), and growing food.

But that's not in the cards right now. At thirty eight years old I know exactly what I want but I have to reframe* those desires somehow into a scenario that will pay the bills until Philip can make enough money that I have the choice to stay home again. That day may never materialize. Working at a library is the one career move left to me that I could get up every day and be excited about- it's the kind of job where my enthusiasm, my skills, and my passions would be well used. If I get an opportunity to work at my local library I will snatch it up. Maybe another position will come up and if it does I will try again. It's the one job that might make me change my mind about coming back home when the money situation is no longer dire. I feel in my bones that I would love it. Thrive on the challenges it would afford me.

But that is not an actual opportunity for me right now. I didn't get an interview. End of story. It's time to look at what I don't feel willing to do for work, what would destroy my spirit, and then look at what is left:

• I don't want to work at JoAnn's. (The only fabric store I would work at- because it is AMAZING- is our local quilt shop. I will see if I can put in an application there...but they rarely seem to hire new people because the employees like working there and rarely quit. That's a good sign in a business.) So, today I have decided that I simply WON'T work at JoAnn's.

• I don't want to try to crab a living together with freelance jobs. Either hire me or don't hire me. Having to spend fifty percent of every day trying to convince people to give me a scrap of work is depressing and wears me down. Some people can be very successful this way. I'm not one of them. It depresses the living crap out of me to have to convince people of my capabilities, my skills, and my worthiness. It taps into very dark places in my psych and isn't healthy for me. So no freelance.

• I don't want to write articles for magazines. Again, the freelance life isn't a good fit for me. More than that, I've been spending hours and hours reading submission guidelines and most of it is a load of self righteous crap. I'm not interested in distilling information into easy bites or taking on a journalistic tone. I could do it. I'm an excellent researcher (again, perfect skill for a librarian) and I could mimic any magazine's voice, but then I'd have nothing left to give to my own writing. I would like to write useful informative pieces on urban homesteading, but I want to do it my way. I am the ultimate self righteous editor. I edit Dustpan Alley and I'll use swear words like real people do.

• I don't want to work in a retail store. I have no patience for pandering to the whims of the spending public. I wouldn't get benefits, I'd barely make enough money to make it worth all the hard work, and I can't sell crap to save my life. Being a cashier in a grocery store is a whole different potato. More on that later.

So where does all that land me? There are two camps of options, as far as I can tell. The first one consists of possible serious career moves. The difficulty in this camp is convincing someone to take my excellence on (see Monica, you slap me around enough and I start listening) because I refuse to go deeper into debt to return to school for a job that, once I have the proper education, will require that I have already put ten years experience under my belt. I need to find an employer who is smart enough to recognize the trainable, intelligent, powerhouse of potential that I am.

Here are careers I would be willing to put my heart into and to work my ass off for, the list is short:

• Librarian- The environment is one I love, I am already adept at using library computer systems, I am an excellent researcher, I am great at helping people find information because I love doing it, I would love to be buried in books any day of the week, and I have EXCELLENT organizational skills. Not a skill I've applied to my own home very often...but in my work experience I have excelled in any part of my jobs requiring organization.

• Editorial job- working for a magazine as an editor or an editor's assistant, working for an online website or actual magazine makes no difference to me. A place with energy, quality work, great team, and great pay. I believe I would enjoy this work but would love to hear from the two editors I know who sometimes visit my blog (Mary and Cindy) to find out what their take on that is. I am great at streamlining work methods. In an editorial capacity I can offer my writing skills without being the author pleading for a listen...I'd be on the other
  

• Professional Blog Writer- only if it pays well, is full time, and is a blog I care about. I would be excellent at this. In fact, ideally I would have loved my own blog to be my career. Like Heather Armstrong's "Dooce" which pays all her bills. I won't spend time beating myself up over not being Heather because she's way too skinny anyway. Plus it must be obnoxious to be a person who's always so funny.
  

Then there's the other camp. It's the camp I'm more likely to land in. And really? Maybe that's just fine. It's the unglamorous world of jobs for the everyday Jane:

• Grocery store work. Grocery stores, especially large corporate ones, have great benefits and often pay well. There are quite a few of them in town and I'm at the very least qualified to be a stock person or a cashier. It's not a creative job, but the kind of work you go to, do it to the best of your ability, and then leave it in the parking lot when you go home.