Now What?

For the past year I haven’t really applied for any jobs that I didn’t think that I’d go to – which resulted in me applying for a total of about 2 dozen jobs all year, max.  I’ve somehow managed to lie to my family this entire time about where my income is coming from and how it is that I manage to keep myself afloat without full-time employment.  I’ve basically been stretching the truth so far that it’s at that point where I’m yanking at the corners to try and get a little more give to work with.

So I’ve decided: I need a real job.  Not a crap real job like a cashier or a barista somewhere – an office job, something that will actually be useful on my resume, even if it’s not what I really want to be doing.  It has to be something that will add to my skill set instead of diverge from it, but most office jobs fall into that category, as do most sales jobs.  Even if I hate my job, I need to be working now.  I need the stability, the structure, and the steady income – it doesn’t have to be much, not even full-time.  I just need somewhere that I have to be in order to collect a paycheck so that I can focus my energy more on my personal life than my work life.

Which means that today I applied for the last of my 2006 job hunt – one, final email as a last-ditch effort to find the kind of employment I want.  I want something part-time, flexible, in my field, and ideally something queer.  An opportunity came up with the local queer film festival.

This is the job I applied for:

Director of Sponsors and Marketing, part-time (17.5hrs)

I KNOW that I can do this job.  I know for a fact that I can do this job and kick ass at it.  But I’ve known that before and not even gotten the interview phone call.  This is the last time – if I don’t get the interview phone call, it means that I’m significantly over-shooting my abilities and I need to severely humble myself and just take a fucking entry level or close-to-it position with any faceless company or corporation that will give me a chance to get to where I need to go.

I sent in my cover letter and resume just after 5am on Christmas morning.  After I hit send I kinda bent over my keyboard and slowly started crying.  It’s hard to realize that the idealism and ambition of youth might be a total illusion, and that I may have fucked myself over, even though I knew I was doing it at the time.

The deadline for applications is January 9th.  If I don’t hear back by January 15th at the latest, I have to completely realign my employment ambitions.