All in a Days Work

Set aside how long the whole thing takes from start to finish, the most frustrating part of the hiring process is trying to figure out what they want from you.  From your resume to the interview to all those annoying personality tests they make you take, you never know what they're looking for in you. 

Having many years of management experience and a habitual job-hopper in my youth, I have interviewed hundreds of people and have been interviewed, so I know both sides of game.  I immediately look around the room and size up the interviewer to find some common ground and figure out who they want me to be.  If interviewing, I try to trick people into telling me things about themselves that they normally wouldn't have brought up to find out what they are about as a person.  One time, my ex and I were up for the same job... he got it because he had wing-tip shoes on that reminded the interviewer of his Dad.  It's a crap shoot... it doesn't matter what your skills or experience is, it all comes down to their connectivity with you, and if it's positive or negative.

Recently, I went on an interview for a job with a 'progressive' company (which basically means they hire people with facial hair and tattoos).  Little of the 45 minute interview was about my 25 years of business experience or skill set or whether I could do the job.  We talked about what I did outside of work, etc. to the point that it felt like I was being interviewed to be his best friend and how easily I could obtain a keg, rather than someone he was going to hand the keys to the million-dollar business.  The second interview, had I not told them to forget it, would have been me being interviewed by the 18 year old kid who takes the garbage out at the end of the night, because 'everyone's opinion counts'.  Now I have to have a skateboard to get a job? 

Green INFJ-A Activator Guardian.  Those are some of the results from the many personality tests I've taken;  The Color Test, Meyers-Briggs, Gallup, Keirsey... and you might as well throw in Gemini and Goat... to round it out with my astrology signs.  As silly as they all are, they are eerily accurate.  I'm not sure if they are vague enough that they fit a whole bunch of different kinds of people or if there really is some science to it, but suddenly, it all seems like an interview I once had at a restaurant where they made me get up on the stage in the middle of a packed room and do the worm dance while singing "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener" to see how extroverted I was.  As an introvert, I obviously didn't get the job (although I did as I was told, and well, I might add).. but I thought it was pushing the limit of trying to be different than every other applicant.  Hell, it was cutting edge back in the day to print your resume on colored paper or with rounded edges.  In a stack of hundreds, it was supposed to make you stand out. 

Nowadays, you need a Vaudeville act and a nose piercing before you're going to get anywhere.  My ability to entertain shouldn't be the criteria for how well I would run a company, although dealing with millennials, I would surely need a lot of Bayer children's aspirin, some Highlights magazines and some gold stars to hand out. At the risk of sounding like an old fuddy-duddy (ok, well that became a self-fulfilling prophecy, just using that term), what's this world coming to? 

Boxes in The Basement

Several years ago, I had the daunting task of going through my Uncle's house when his wife passed away.  He had health problems of his own and he couldn't stay in the house by himself.  He wasn't particularly close to me when we were growing up, and it's only been in the last couple of years that he moved in with my Aunt that I have gotten to know him more, as I look after them both.  The task was just that; going through the house and either selling things, keeping things or throwing things out with the end goal of getting the house ready for sale.  It was a difficult position for me to be in... to come into his home and take two months determining, essentially, which parts of his life was worth marking, saving, selling or forgetting.

It's amazing the things that we accumulate in our lives that mean something to us with a value derived mostly from our experience or memory, but mean nothing to someone else.  A cocktail napkin with a number scribbled on it from the guy that you wound up marrying can be more valuable than the expensive painting hanging on the wall.  Which one tells more of a story?  The decision to make that call to the number on the napkin made all the difference in your life.  Once the pictures and memories fade, those valuables in our lives fade away also, like they never happened.  In the end, those things mean little to anyone.  They say if you haven't touched it in 6 months, get rid of it.  I used to keep everything, scrapbooking it or keeping in a Tupperware container, dragging it from place to place, never really looking at them.  I've always been a person to pack away things in the boxes in my mind, much like I did with my Uncle's belongings.  Fears, hopes, goals, dreams, pain, grief, experiences... we shelve all of these until we are just an empty box ourselves, walking around, still searching for something to make us feel alive and have value.

"Yesterday is history and tomorrow's a mystery", my Uncle said to me the other day, "so you have to live for today".  Somewhere along the way we got the idea that life has to be so fucking amazing and there's a higher purpose we should seek out.  In the scheme of things, we are a microscopic speck in the universe.  Very few of us are going to make some earth-shattering discovery or go down in history, and chasing that idea is a fool's errand.  Life is about a series of small moments and happiness has to be sought in those moments or your life will be for not.  If you never find the joy in something or someone, always thinking there is something better coming, before you know it... you will have nothing or no one.  You may have spent your life miserable climbing some corporate ladder, only getting to the top and jumping off when you realize you've wasted your life making someone else's dreams come true.  Alone when you think someone better was coming;  they're not.  Frugally going through life saving for something and being plucked from the universe before you attain it.  Life is unexpected... you have to seize the day.  You have much less time than you think.

Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.

Eyes Wide Shut

The purpose of your eyelids is to shield and protect your eyes but, whether open or closed, you're only going to 'see' what you want to.  They can be wide open, looking at something, and you 'turn a blind eye' to it, not acknowledging or accepting it, and not reacting.  Conversely, you can have your eyes closed and still see everything, maybe relying on your other senses or beliefs or your imagination gets the best of you.  When I was a child and I was scared, I would close my eyes, thinking that if I didn't see it, the boogeyman wouldn't be able to get me.  Same with looking in the closet or under the bed... I knew they were there, but if I didn't see the monsters with my own two eyes, I was safe.  Obviously, that is a fallacy.  Even in pitch black with your eyes opened wide, you are still seeing something, even if you're not aware of it.  Eigengrau is the shade of black seen by the human eye in complete darkness.  It is also called Eigenlicht, meaning 'intrinsic light';  that which is natural or inherit, rather than learned.

Your brain is at work all day long, not only receiving from your eyes, but from other senses.  It only takes 13 milliseconds for your brain to process an image and then it is on to the next image, constantly calibrating itself, figuring out what to look at next. Because it all happens so rapidly, the eye-to-brain connection sends these 'concepts'.  The eye has to see something and the brain has to figure out what it is to be able to look at the next thing to be able to put the concept together, and make sense of it, to be able to react. This happens three times a second.  It's a wonder it can correctly interpret what it's seeing, but it does, somehow.  Mind over matter... it's a very powerful thing.

There are many things that help or block your vision.  Obviously, glasses can magnify the clarity in the objects you see, while beer goggles... well, we all know how that turns out.  X-rays, fog, telescopes, as well as other things, all cloud or help how we see things, but the most distorting are those that interfere most with what we think.  Quick judgements... not letting the brain truly process fully, coming to a quick decision... stubborn beliefs... religious traditions that don't let us see the present or future, only the past... racism... only seeing what's on the surface... and the things we block out, mostly about ourselves, that don't allow us to see ourselves as we truly are because we don't want to take the time to change them or we don't want to take responsibility and face the things that are bad.  In contrast, maybe we see ourselves in a bad light and not how others see us at all or what's not true, but in our own head.  Our own self-impression, as if the eyes could see inward, are just as destructive as the things we don't want to come to terms with.  Nothing can harm us as easily as we can ourselves.  Sometimes, we are our own boogeyman.

There's something to be said for the candid picture... catching you off-guard so you can see the real you.  Today's selfie is just a façade.  In the natural, intrinsic light... maybe it's time to take a good, long look.

L'Oiseau Bleu (Bird Blue) - An Original Poem

L'oiseau Bleu (Bird Blue)

 

Out-stretched wings in effortless flight
rising to meet the sunrise, Native alarm clock
blue-hued plumage, sheens and shadows in the tuft
wind-lifted soaring and whistled-singing happiness

Once fancy-free, turned blue, from

clear as aqua to deep as ocean...
light as powder to dark as midnight...
warm as electric to cold as steel...
brightly-regal as royal to tarnished as verdigris...

Resting on a vane, in vain,

...directionless, wind-blown
Out on a wire
...a balancing act, over-extended
On the fence
...mind split, discomfited angst
Out on a limb
...snapping twig, foothold lost
 

Cluttered, empty-nested, broodless brooding...

songless, stifled, and ruffle-feathered...
aimless, hapless, lost harbinger of happiness...
tossed and swirling, up and down in swells...
abruptly grounded



(Notes:  I wrote this as an homage to the bluebird of happiness with a play on the word 'blue' also meaning 'down in the dumps', or depressed.  A juxtaposition of happy and sad, it's also personification of the qualities of the different shades of blue, comparing them to their associated qualities... and comparing some of the places the bird might land to phrases that would suggest why it's so angst-ridden.  Ultimately, it's about the bluebird starting out so happy but then turning sad, and after a tough go at it, giving up.)