Tuesday, 13 July 2010

• Middle of the Road, Nowhere to Go

  
  I just got off the phone with a career counselor from Syracuse University, my alma mater.  I am now greatly saddened.  It dawns on me how insignificant and undesirable I am as a candidate for employment.  With every daunting question she broke down my enthusiasm until after half an hour, it dissipated, leaving only a bitter taste of regret and tobacco. I told her how many resumes I had sent out, how many emails I’d written, how many job sites I perused.  I told her my hopes of being employed at an advertising company.  I even told her my dreams of writing and directing movies.
  
  She, with quick raps of her evil tongue, asked me some things:   She asked me; why do you only have one internship?  What extracurricular activities were you a part of at Syracuse?  What else did you do?  How well did you do in the English program?  What’s your GPA?  And out of major?  How are you creative?  Have you written a screenplay?  Have you been a part of a movie? Do you honestly think advertising is the correct stepping-stone industry for a career in movies?  What have you been doing since you graduated?  Are you part of any organizations in New Jersey?  Do you write with your right or left hand?  Is your mother half Japanese?  Was Dennis Quaid fucking serious when he made Enemy Mine (1985) or was that a fucking joke?
   
  Questions that burned a hole through my head like an Amish girl.* I had no way of answering most of them, if you can I guess you already have a job.  I could not for the life of me tell her what I was good at AND back it up with fact.  I’d say things like “I am a creative person.”  She’d say “Why and how are you?”  “I… am creative… in everyday situations.  I rolled this massive cone out of newspaper and receipts, though I’m sure we all got obscure lung disease.”  I turned into a dumbass real fast. 
  
  I then had the balls to tell her that I could communicate well in oral and written fashions.  “Your dreams are fantasies and your life is in shambles.”  That’s how she said good-bye to me. Do I continue?  Do I wrap the Ethernet cord ever so gently around my neck and pull ever so greatly?  It will pass, my mother says; like a winter’s night, a cold, long, desolate and lonely night.  Sunlight will grace the shores of my watery disposition (not because I pissed myself but because I’m crying, I guess) to once again proliferate the unified self that is Ali Riaz. But for right now, I’m depressed and devoid of hope. 
  
  The destruction train rumbled passed egotism station, passed through the self-aggrandizing tunnel, and left me an introvert, sitting alone at the back, wondering which emotionally charged landmark would pass me next.
  
  *(Ok so some kid on Call of Duty Online tried to tell me that Amish girls have a hole or a dot [he didn’t specify] on their heads.  When I confronted him about the subject all he kept repeating (in usual online fashion) was “You’re retarded, you don’t know that Amish girls have holes on their heads?  You say you went to college?  Your mom is gay, look it up.”  So I did. I got something about “gay hole girl” and “human head inside woman ass pics of teens with pear breasts.”  Some would say this search is inconclusive; others would say he got Amish girls confused with Indian girls with pear breasts…).
  
  How is your search for a job coming?  If you have one, how did you do these things?

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