Sometimes, You're Just a Small, German Child

I just finished writing my first scholarly paper since graduate school. I didn’t enjoy it very much, because, really, there isn’t very much to enjoy about writing scholarly papers-- unless you’re writing them whilst receiving oral sex, which I wasn’t.

I wrote this paper as part and parcel of the process of acquiring a BBJ (Big Boy Job—nothing to do with oral sex anymore, sorry) and, if I get it (God I hope I get it! How many losers do they need?!) it may very well be the first BBJ I’ve held since 2003. Since then, I’ve had a quaint series of jobs, but none of them have been BBJs. They’ve just been, you know, Little J’s, as opposed to the Flying J, which, apparently, is a franchise of highway gas stations for eighteen-wheelers, and not some sort of Jewish person doing avian acrobatics.

You might surmise that, since I didn’t especially enjoy the process of writing this scholarly paper that maybe I’m not applying/vying for the right job. You know, since, if I get hired, that’s pretty much what I’ll be doing, um, all goddamn day long. Well, that and applying for other jobs. And waiting for a satisfactorily suburban police department to announce that they’re holding a written and physical agility testing session. And blogging from work.

Actually, come to think of it, since this is a BBJ with an actual, real company, they’ll probably have all kinds of internet filters and firewalls and blocked sites and super-scary Big Brother e-monitoring/iSnoopery going on so that if I so much as try to buy Stan Rogers music on Amazon they’ll probably fire my tight, though distinctly bony ass.

And then I will look for other jobs, and wait for police departments, and blog from home. And, sporadically, observe pornographic still images/moving motion pictures via a computer with no ookie spy shit on it.

Writing the scholarly paper wasn’t hard—then again, maybe I just didn’t do it right—but motivating myself to do it was extraordinarily Herculean. I would do anything before I would sit down to write this paper. I did the dishes, I walked the dogs, I watched clips of Tim Conway cracking Harvey Korman up on “The Carol Burnett Show.” I made obscure Gilbertian references on peoples’ Facebook pages—and you all know I’m not into that.

By the way—did you know that the first lemur ever born in captivity in the United Kingdom was born on Gilbert’s property?

Anyway, I am a hopeless slackass and, really, I ought to be more motivated and zealous about an opportunity to land a BBJ when I won’t have any J or j in almost precisely a month but maybe I’m just not ready for a BBJ. Maybe I don’t want another desk.

Or, far scarier, maybe another desk is just what I need.

Ever get the feeling that you’re the small, ruddy-cheeked German child in any number of Brothers Grimm fairy tales? You know—you’re hopping along through the forest, wearing a red cape or lederhosen or chaps coated in Vaseline or whatever and the woods get all dark and scary and shit, and the trees are all gnarled and twisty-like, and there you are, just standing there with a basket of pastries in one hand and your plump little choad in the other and you’re faced with two paths. One of those paths leads to a precious little cottage, safe and warm with a white damask sleeper sofa from Jennifer Convertibles, all ready for you, and your favorite hot bowl of regurgitated mushflakes, and grammaw crocheting you a facemask or something…

…and the other path leads straight into the lair of your friendly, local clustertoothed, semi-retarded, lascivious wolf or T-Rex or rabid llama who will assrape you with a frozen garden hose until you sing the “Star Spangled Banner” like Stevie Nicks.

Well, that’s kind of how I feel, looking for jobs, and, not to sound too dramatic here but kind of standing on the precipice—making choices, being a small, German child kind of all alone in the woods, on the lookout for drooling, hairy creatures clutching the frozen garden hoses of the world, petrified to bend over to pick up that tempting pastry I just dropped.