Every day for the last couple weeks, I have been perusing job sites, looking in vain for a full time job to take me away from the current double part-time customer-service-all-the-time fiasco of my employment. Not that I dislike the jobs, necessarily. In fact, there are many aspects I quite enjoy. But I can’t help feeling like my library career had a messy divorce and now I’m constantly caught in the middle going back and forth between two places, and neither one is trying to bribe me with ice cream or a puppy. It’s getting exhausting, especially the customer service aspect. It’s crazy to me that I, a diehard introvert, am willingly driving to a place where I sit/stand at a desk for hours on end, waiting for people to come up to me one by one and ask questions I have no idea how to answer and yell at me for things I had no part in doing.

Thus, the search. My job search strategy is a bit…extensive. It takes me a while to find a job I’m even remotely interested in (or, more likely, that I’m remotely qualified for), but when I do, it’s like the equivalent of stumbling upon the Facebook page of a girl your boyfriend had a crush on for a semester six years ago, i.e. full-on stalker mode.

Once I see the job and read the job description through a few times, deciding what skills they ask that I actually possess, and which ones I could fudge my expertise in, I go to the company/county website and learn everything I can about their organization.

Then I research their location. I pop in the address to Google Maps and see how long of a drive it is from my apartment. And exactly what roads I’d have to take. Are they scenic? Will I be driving at sunrise with the sun directly in my eyes, blinded because I was too lazy to put in my contacts and can’t wear sunglasses over my glasses?

If it passes the route test, I’ll go on the city’s tourism website and see what there is to do in the town. I map out the closest Target and Caribou to my possible future workplace.

If I’m feeling über (I spent the last 5 minutes trying to figure out the keyboard shortcut for umlauts. Success!) excited about the prospect, then I’ll go take a gander to my favorite housing website and see what kind of houses are on the market, and pretend I could afford one soon. If the houses are all in cookie cutter developments and selling for $450,000, it’s a hard pass. If they’re cute and there’s a few $80,000 fixer uppers in a nice wooded lot in the area, then we’re back on track.

So there I am, a good 45 minutes to an hour later, my entire possible future planned out. Then I read through the description again and think ehhhh and I won’t even apply.

The crazy thing is (well, crazier…) while I’m job “searching” (stalking), I know the entire time I’ll take all the steps, but fall short of applying every time. And it’s always either because:

a) I’m scared of whatever responsibility or initiative the job will entail

b)I just want to write, and the job doesn’t include that in the slightest. Unless you count filling out damage slips and doing your time card.

or

c) It actually is a writing job AND I’m scared. I’m terrified of having to write well and being judged for what I write because somebody’s actually paying me to do it.

So until I get over that or they devise a system in which amazing and fulfilling jobs that actually utilize your passion find you and not the other way around (actually I think that’s sort of the premise for LinkedIn, but I can’t be sure because I never even had enough initiative to figure out how LinkedIn works), I’ll be running from one place to the next, sometimes on the same day, sometimes for three weeks in a row, sometimes to the wrong place on the wrong day, dreading the day before it even begins.

I don’t know what my next step is or where I’ll end up. Even though everyone else probably pegged it when I was younger, I certainly didn’t think I’d be working in libraries right now. When I was in elementary school I was debating between a career as an art teacher and a race car driver. My art dreams were crushed when I discovered my dolphin painting, my best work, was actually super shitty. It’s a tough realization for a seven year old. And after I actually was of driving age I learned I’m probably the worst driver in all of history. My very good friends who I’ve almost ran over on multiple occasions and all of my neighbor’s cars I’ve backed into can attest to that.

What I truly want to do, in some way, for the rest of my life, is wander as far as I can, observe as much as I can, and interpret it all through writing to the best of my ability.

And of course it would help if that writing could happen on the balcony of my apartment, while I wear my favorite elephant pajamas and sip a nice chilled glass of chocolate Nesquik (in some ways, I’ll always be seven).