Here’s My Effing Resume

By

“Because we’re grownups now, and it’s our turn to decide what that means.” —  Randall Munroe, XKCD

Esteemed prospective future employers:

We are living in a new world, and it is a world that young people are creating, choice by choice. It is also a world that we will ultimately hand our children. When that time comes, we will have to look them in the eyes and know that we did everything in our power to make this place, our existence in this reality, better. To improve the world, one must either create something totally new or fix something broken, and the employment process could stand a little fixing up. In the spirit of this, I propose a new hiring tradition. I propose we acknowledge that the stuff of human beings cannot be properly conveyed by an exaggerated list of places where we have sat behind desks and gchatted. I propose we represent ourselves honestly, and allow others the same kindness. The classic CV is absurd, and it wants a reinventing.

So here’s my effing resume.

1. I can stand on my head. It took me three months to build up the strength, but I do it all the time now and I think it’s pretty impressive.

2. The winter after my grandma died, I moved to Spain with almost no money. I became certified to teach English, found a(n illegal) job, secured a place to live, and learned how to party in a country where I barely spoke the language(s). I held hands with the first friend I made out there at 7 a.m. as the sun came up over Las Ramblas after the most exhilarating night I’d ever had, declining cans of Estrella and churros from the street vendors, and I knew that I was alive. I knew that this was life, happening, that I had carved a piece of it out for myself, and that it was beautiful.

3. I sing in the shower. I sing in my room, in my underwear, in the morning, and I dance it out. If there’s a mirror close by forget about it. It’s over. I’m never getting out of there, esteemed prospective future employer. It is a concert and I am the star and when people walk in on me, which sometimes happens, it is INCREDIBLY embarrassing but eff it. This is who I am.

4. I designed my own major in school despite being told that I had to make a choice between a) graduating with a ‘real degree’ and b) being unemployable. But “the rest of my life” seemed like not a lot of time, and certainly not enough time to study something that bored me. Also, LOL @ anyone who thinks a degree in the humanities, social sciences, or even most of the sciences is a post-collegiate guarantee of any kind. So I looked at the impact of storytelling on political discourse and at least had fun. Incidentally, in the words of Nicki Minaj, “I get MONEY.” I’ve worked since I was 13, love it, and will never stop. Can not be stopped. Try and stop me at your own peril.

5. I have been: a clerk in an army navy store, a boardwalk games barker, a record stand manager, a barista, a maker of sandwiches, a waiter, a bus boy, a copy-editor, an English teacher, a radio show host between the hours of 4 and 6 a.m. once a week, a volunteer for a non-profit that wants to build politically autonomous cities in the middle of the ocean, and a pretty-successful-but-boooooored editor of non-fiction.

6. Ham Hell. That’s a sandwich on the menu where I put stuff on bagels for a while. Nine layers of meat and heat, themed to Dante’s Inferno. I invented that shit.

7. I am currently: a writer of fiction, a writer of non-fiction, employed at a kind of punk rock VC firm that focuses on radical innovation in technology, single.

(@micsolana for flirty banter thx)

8. I have written: three teleplays, one screenplay about the Jersey Devil, a children’s musical, one pretty bad novel that took me five years to finish and that I don’t want to talk about, one pretty good novel about an invisible boy who discovers the nature of reality and must defeat a bunch of bad guys and also there’s a giant robot dog (because duh), so many short things, like ten journals, and some of the most embarrassing drunken poetry that exists, probably. Most of it has never been published but whatever. I’m doing my thing, and I’m not worried.

9. I have trouble sleeping at night, and have since I was very little. We were born suspended in space on a spec of dust in free fall around another spec of dust called the sun, which is in fact so large that human beings cannot fully, all at once, conceive of its magnitude. We are small. But what keeps me up is this: if we can contemplate reality forever — infinitely, which I think we can — then it follows that the human imagination is infinite. And holy effing Jesus bananas, that is amazing.

10. The world needs saving, I earnestly wish to help save it, and I don’t believe there’s anything silly about that.

References available upon request.

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