Happy, Happy Prole.

My friend Ginger works as a housekeeper at one of the more popular, affluent beaches here in Beachtown. This means she comes home the very definition of drained, every single evening, having spent the day polishing the staircases and scouring vomit from the bedroom floors of tourist bungalows. It also means my diet has expanded, to include exciting surprise items we now find in our refrigerator and pantry on a regular basis: full six-packs of strawberry yogurt, plastic bags half full of Tortilla chips, canned chili and other foodstuffs the profligate tourists leave behind in their beach houses when their vacation week is through.

Since Ginger and Carmelita are the principle cooks in our household, and since their summer jobs maintaining other people’s homes have made occasions of pot roasts and fancy stews less and less a frequent occurrence at home, we’ve taken to grilling out The Tourists’ hotdogs and drinking their leftover Coronas a whole lot. (Or: Ginger and Carmelita have. I don’t know how to use the grill.)

Having recently joined the ranks of the unemployed myself, I’m happy to consume free Wiener Casserole and Shish-kadogs several nights a week. And it would all be quite enjoyable if it weren’t for the fact of Carm’ and Ginger’s drooping eyelids over our (thanks, tourists!) paper plates, every night.

But I do need to find a job of my own. I found out a couple of weeks ago that funding for a bookish, on-campus position I was supposed to hold this fall had fallen through. I didn’t work in July, but concentrated on writing and researching for el Book, thinking that this job would pick up again in August. But now it won’t.

So I’m looking for something mildly interesting and profitable that won’t suck all my energy away this year, so I can concentrate on this thesis. This job doesn’t have to be my career, but it would be nice if I didn’t dread going. I have a lot of friends like Ginger, who take perverse pleasure in the satisfaction gleaned from a rote task perfectly done. People who enjoy physical labor as the polar opposite of writing. How it clears the mind.

But I am lame.
Unlike Ginger and my other friends, I am an imperfect cleaner at best. I get physically tired and when I do, I feel sorry for myself and when I do, I want to whine about it and I want people to feel sorry for me. I am bad at being consistently pleasant to mean, rich vacationers with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. The never-doneness of housework maddens me and makes me want to give up. I work sllllowly.

It scares me, Henshaw, this tiny set of skills that I have. I will never be Ted Conover. Hell, I’ll never be David Sedaris. (But we knew this, Alice.)

I can write. I can talk with people and listen and show them how to do things. I can get extremely involved in one task and hunt down its every last detail till there’s nothing left.
But that’s about it. It's sad.

Workers of the World, Unite! But let me do the part where I don’t have to sweat.