...more recent posts
Feb 11, 2000
I'm in need of a job having just quit mine. Here's my resume. It's the resume of the unemployable.
The summer of high school graduation: a summer job in Rathmullen House Hotel. The job was procured for me and my best friend Helen by our classmate Juliet, Juliet's parents Bob and Jummy (yes, Jummy) owned the hotel. We never bothered to ascertain exactly what we would be doing during our summer of employment there. I was the dishwasher. Helen got to cook eggs and other things as well as wait on tables for dinner service. Helen was, and in fact still is, very beautiful; I think this may have been why she also got the relatively glamorous dining room stint. She also got to know some of the more handsome local boys; this gave me the opportunity to get to know her handsome Dutch boyfriend when he came to visit. I've always liked the fact that she didn't mind sharing him. She was miserable cooking eggs, I was miserable washing dishes: we ate huge amounts of food and left with our girlish figures and our ambitions somewhat revised. I still wonder what Juliet was doing that summer. At the end of our toil our "Leaving Certificate" results arrived; I thought I'd been saved as I had been offered a place doing what I wanted to do at University.
First summer of college: Again my employment is wrapped up with Helen. Gary had fallen for Helen. He had found himself a very lucrative job in a car factory in Germany and wrote to us telling of jobs nearby in a plum factory. We sent a telegram to Gary: "Two plum jobs for girls" and booked our train and ferry tickets. The plum jobs never materialized and Gary's job came to an end. We found ourselves shop lifting peanut butter in Amsterdam and living in the house of a strange Dutch woman. Eventually we secured jobs peeling bulbs in a suburb of Amsterdam. Unfortunately our rate of bulb peeling (slower than our eleven year old co-workers) prevented our experience from being profitable, after we had paid our rent to Frau Verbeek and paid for the bus to the bulb plant we were losing money. Helen and Gary decided to go on vacation on Gary's factory proceeds, I went home and got a waitressing job. It strikes me that the contours of these first two jobs contain all of the characteristics of all the rest of my jobs.
After college I got a job with a friend of my mother's. She ran an educational Institute in a damp and cold Georgian building in Dublin. I was hired to do administrative things. She lured American college students to Dublin where they were lectured in literature, history and archeology. The American students were always bitterly diappointed when they arrived and saw the crumbling building and the alcoholic teachers. This brings me to another recurring theme in my employment history: the suspicion that all of the businesses I have worked for are complete shams. This may be related to the fact that they are the only businesses that would hire me.
Every Tuesday I would visit the Careers and Appointments (or Disappointments as it was referred to) Office of Trinity College in an attempt to get another job. It was the year with the highest statistic for graduate emmigration in Ireland; the Celtic Tiger's parents hadn't even met at this point. The only job offer was teaching English in Beirut.
I emmigrated to New York with two friends. I got a job in an Italian cafe run by a Pakistani on Jones Street. During the day I worked as a proofreader for cable television schedules. Other jobs followed: painting costume jewelry, legal proofreader, house painting, caretaking the homeless mentally ill, decorative/so-faux-you wouldn't-know painting, teaching essay skills to junkies, magazine copy editing, ghost writer for a psychic, assistant to a mean fundraiser, PR account executive, personal assistant/nanny to an oversexed, chocolate devouring, hash smoking 19 year old movie star, copy editor/writer for a non-profit agency's publications, assistant to a pastry chef, and now hostess at a restaurant in which I have an interest. I have also supplemented my income in the past with welfare fraud and credit card abuse. I have a deep distrust of psychiatry but have actually wondered if one of the profession could help me with my atrocious attitude to work and my, what I think they refer to as, entitlement issues. My motto seems to be: bite the hand that feeds you; it's the closest. I think the only job I could perform without becoming increasingly bitter and twisted will involve working alone and for myself. References available upon request.
Aug 31, 2000
I sleep in his semi-retired white cotton undershirts, the cheap ones that get like some perversly expensive fabric from wear and washing. Every time I go to his closet and click the safety catch open to access the neatly folded pile I think of Eleanor, who used to say when I would get out of bed and take another one of the t-shirts from the huge box: "You know, you can't just take a fresh one of those every day." She was trying to make a living one student summer having had things like "girl" and "boy" screened on them and we both came from households where you didn't take a fresh thing every day. I get such pleasure from taking a fresh t-shirt every night and not hearing a reproach, merely an echo of frugality.
Aug 02, 2000
This weather is like a perpetual European autumn; there is something deeply comforting about it. I have subtracted alcohol (1.5 bottles of wine/day), selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (Effexor 150mg/day) and coffee (2 cups/day). I have added a bicycle (1 Trek 4500). I have to say that I am enjoying the latter at least as much as the cumulative effect of all of the former. I may even commence to rant with an evangelical tinge. Perhaps it's merely the urban equivalent of all those hysterical women who had to ride horses flat out every day; it's good to straddle something (other than another human).
Jul 05, 2000
Why is pedestrian a derogatory term? Resist the temptation to high five our flaccid air, to heil the sky: take to the street rather than that imposed sociability of the taxi spree. This evening wandering from Bar Veloce on 2nd Avenue (somewhere in the early teens; don't ask me where exactly, I'm a girl), where they serve delectable paninni and excellent wine, I experienced one of those nocturnal perambulations that remind one that psychedelics, though no longer imbibed on a regular basis, taught you the language of the metropolis. Post-samosas on 2nd Avenue in an odd Dehli-like deli affair, I find myself on 2nd Street going east of 2nd Avenue, blocks bulging with significance: the New York City Marble Cemetry (looks like it was fashioned after an Edward Gorey illustration); a mutual revelation in 67 2nd Street to Brian Greenbaum, amidst tubs of Haagen Dazs, of our imminent deaths, the only difference being he is dead and I am not; the dog shit strewn sidewalk of 2nd Street between 1st and A and the vision, simultaneously, of a homeless man alseep on the street and the chevron of fruit rippling accross the avenue outside Graceland deli. But I've missed two of the most pleasing aspects: I actually grabbed hold of the railings to climb up to read the plaque of the Marble Cemetry, and a Preserved Fish, a prominent merchant happens to be buried there. Whatsmore, just before reaching Avenue A I encountered whatever the collective noun for a lot of empty beer bottles is, lying there, beautifully, like a piece of Brit art. And three last things finished the night to perfection: I am without ambition, but cannot resist the temptation to make a walk sign, my favourite achievement being to cross Houston from A to Essex, or vice versa, without hesitation—made it tonight; then I find a clothes horse in the garbage, a twin to our household faithful on which our clothes hang, all of those we are too damn precious to throw in the dryer. Finally, I walk through the door to air conditioning. Thank you men folk who I love.
Jun 29, 2000
Fresh from the other side of the Atlantic: Hibernia, the old sod, Eire, home, the sow that eats her farrow... Actually, it seemed far more benign than JJ's moniker for his deserted muse. D. and I spent a magical ten days in Connemara sandwiched by familial visits in Dublin. Two weeks, the statutory vacation time, seemed cruelly short. But today, my first day off since return, reminded me how this time can refurbish the soul. The cooler weather of today in Manhattan had me wandering the streets and relishing the juxtaposition of Ireland and New York. It seems to me the perfect pairing, and my Gemini self wishes it could flit more frequently between the heteregeneous streets of New York and the dense homogeneity of Ireland. We ate well, as we always do, wherever we are. We drank well, as we always do. We are indulgent and don't seem to suffer too much guilt. We drove one and a half hours to purchase the hindquaters of a Connemara spring lamb in the town of Cong, Co. Mayo, which we marinated in port in a bucket and transported back to Dublin for a BBQ. The barbecue was borrowed from a friend, one returned from America, and my father emerged from the house and inquired if the barbecue was battery operated. He had never seen one before. Neither had he ever eaten the indigenous lamb in such a delicious guise. Wandering has its benefits, though they are difficult to define precisely. My friends in Ireland appear to have been tackling the underpopulation of their isle with a personal fervour. One's ovaries always ache a little during and after a visit there. They make childrearing look simpler and more of a necessity. However, all of that energetic investigation undertaken in one's early/mid-twenties, and late too, was postponed for many of them with the responsibility of caring for infants. Those infants are now half grown and some of their parents are itching to carry on in the way I remember doing so when I first arrived on these shores. It makes for interesting encounters. Some of the women have a sweet and desperate look in their eyes.