Why I'm Not Including This Blog in My Job Applications

I'm leading a double life. Or at least, I'd like to be leading a double life. The one I'm running now doesn't make much money.

This is something I've been telling myself more and more this past week in between finishing up the first editing/ghostwriting job I've done on a complete, book-length manuscript. The feeling of getting it done is pretty sweet, but always in the background has been the knowledge that, with what I'll earn this year from copyediting jobs, I'll be lucky if I can do more than pay the rent (food, car, and other self-employment-related expenses are still a problem).

So, at least for the time being, I'm looking for a job--you know, one of those things where you go to some place and do certain stuff for a certain number of hours everyday and get paid for it if your employer isn't a cheat. Whenever I've got a spare moment, I'm filling out applications like crazy for pretty much any place that's hiring (I was even about the apply at Anthropologie until my girlfriend gave me a quick reality check).

No matter how many I fill out, though, I'm always given a bit of pause when I get to the "current and previous employment" segment. I always think about the jobs I've done recently and, a moment later, realize that my last job job ended at the Cutler Majestic Theater a few months ago. The last one before that was almost a year ago.

Mind you, I have been busy in the meantime. However, the things I've been busy with--blogging, editing, reviewing, and sketch-writing--are things that I can't list because they're not, by definition, current or previous employment. If you go by tax rules, they would be what are called independent contracts, meaning that when I do these things I'm basically selling a service to a customer. I'm not, legally speaking, their employee any more than the guys who change my oil at Jiffy Lube are my employees.

Thus the double life. In the process of balancing freelance work with (attempted) regular employment, what I'm developing is two kind-of-pseudo-careers that don't really have anything to do with each other--even if I did put my freelance work on my applications, Microcenter and Starbucks wouldn't care about them any more than a book publisher would care that I drove a golf cart around the Ohio State Fairgrounds for a few months three years ago.

A couple years back, when I talked with author Ellen Kushner about wanting to be a writer (and, as I now realize, probably made a total anus of myself in so doing), she advised me to always have skills to fall back on. I kinda-sorta listened. Right now I can fix bicycles and make bubble tea; not hugely employable skills, but employable no less. Both are things I picked up along with summer jobs in between years of college, once I figured out that "will train" are two of the most important words to look for in the job ads.

In spite of my mad skills, though, I'm still looking. One city only needs so many bike repair shops and bubble tea cafes, sadly. Still, it helps to know that, while I'm working with a minimally useful BA, there are some areas where I have a major leg up on the competition, and I'm grateful that in my desperate fight to stay afloat financially during my junior and senior years, I managed to pick up something other than just money. (Of course, thankfulness is an odd thing when you've been awake for the last 40 hours.)

Tomorrow I'm applying at Pizza Hut and Bob Evans, and hoping that my kitchen experience at the bubble tea cafe counts for something. O, ye romantique life of the artiste.