When She Was Grad

I wrote this when I worked in a restaurant instead of an office. Now I work in an office instead of a restaurant

Dear Reader,

I have recently(ish...) graduated with a degree in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews and am writing to express my interest in never having to write any letter that begins in this manner ever again. In addition to my nine years of (unpaid) experience writing, editing, and proofreading articles for various amateur journalistic publications, I am currently a wage slave at a restaurant where my responsibilities include sweeping the floor with a broom that looks like it was recently couriered to the restaurant via tornado (photo attached). It is this ability to think outside the box (e.g., strategizing how to effectively sweep the floor with pictured broom), the fact that I know the correct use of “e.g.,” and the act of community service that ending my parents’ trials and tribulations of having to live with their capricious adult child would constitute that make me an ideal candidate for this position. Any position. As long as it’s not under 45k/year. I guess.

The broom in question. Can’t be bothered to rotate this so cock your head left or practice the art of interpretation please

In all seriousness, dear readers, I am getting tired of me. Talking about my lifelong passion for your company, just yours, it’s the only one for me, the other companies just don’t do it as well as you, attempting alchemy on a regular basis in trying to spin my “experience,” which feels simultaneously nonexistent and so excessive as to be obvious (several customer-facing roles, not a stranger to a spreadsheet or proper comma placement, what else does one really need for an entry-level sit-at-desk?), crafting my nascent worksona for future corporate enjoyment. She loves Friday eve! But not in a way that she’s like, complaining about having to be at work!     

It has become a regular occurrence that my lovely socially and politically conscious boyfriend will ask me if I’ve heard about some very culturally salient event that just took place, like the death of a man who played guitar in the seventies or a new revelation of a human rights violation, and my answer is unfailingly “no.” I wake up and I either go to the restaurant to assemble takeout boxes for twelve hours or I think about job applications, and often both at once. I go to bed and instead of sleeping, I write a Substack post about thinking about job applications. No matter how many times I write down the list of cover letters I have to write on my Notes app and/or planner, my brain compulsively cycles through them all as I try to drift off. I never manage to finish the list, because writing one single cover letter feels tantamount to donating approximately five hundred pints of blood. Use a template, they say. But tailor it to the specific company and its values, they say. How many ways can I possibly plumb the depths of my personality in order to market it slightly differently to each company? When am I going to have the time or energy to again read long-form Atlantic articles about how to think about the current culture or to get to the bottom of the indecipherable controversy people have Tweeting about for the last seven hours and will continue to Tweet about for the next five? I legitimately have no idea what the fuck is going on. Apparently White Noise is a movie everyone has watched recently? And has also recently become a documentary?

It’s not as if I’m a recluse. That would be detrimental to my job search. Here is an example of the type of conversation I have at parties now:

ME

Hi! I’m Calla.

MORE SUCCESSFUL PERSON

Ella?

ME 

Caaaalla

MSP

Nice to meet you, Cah-luh. Blah blah how long have you lived in New York.

ME

22 years! You?

MSP

I moved here from random American suburb to make TikToks for a company which is a title with the word executive in it for some reason for 80k a year!

ME

OoooOoooh cooool. What company? I don’t have a job.

MSP

I could...refer...you?

ME (nodding vigorously)

Yes! Yes, you could!

Sometimes I throw in a disclaimer like, “not to be networky,” or “haha I hate networking sorry!” to demonstrate I am at least self-aware about the whole thing. It’s not a lie, though--I genuinely do resent having to leverage every preexisting relationship I have and interpersonal interaction I conduct. The purity of whatever connection might have organically taken place feels irrevocably tainted.

This is not even to speak of interviews, in which I have learned that much of the adult contingent of our species has decided to engage in a charade that their primary motivation for staring at a screen inside a fluorescently-lit building for forty hours per week or more is not to earn money, and, by extension, ensure their survival. Perhaps it was naive, but I used to think questions like “What motivates your passion for administration/customer service/[insert any job that’s not one of the like five actually stimulating jobs that exist here]?” were parodies of less laughable questions one might actually encounter in the wild. Not so. 

I think it is something of an inevitability that looking for a job in our times has made me feel trapped inside myself. Gone are the days when boomers with stories like, “I drove cross-country in a Volkswagen bus and lived in a San Franciscan commune for five years on a whim but then I grew up and am now the...Vice President of this....silly little bank,” speak of. In a world in which a bachelor’s degree has devolved from a qualification to an expectation, we are forced to relentlessly market every potentially advantageous facet of our own personalities to have any chance of securing a life outside of the gig economy. Gone are the days of writing in relative anonymity, as a name rather than a face. We are now navigating the time of having to curate your “personal brand” to make it as a writer (or as anything in a media-adjacent field), fighting to amass Instagram and Twitter followers so that 2% of them might read your Substack.

In any case, I’m going to keep applying to jobs on the off chance that this Substack doesn’t go viral enough to support my livelihood. But while I do, it is my fervent recommendation that you guys start thinking about death more, because I don’t think you’re getting it. We have approximately twenty years (depending on the quality of your skincare products) of being hot and able to bend our knees without complaint. Spend it wisely.