� legend that was always printed at the bottom of the Carter Family�s original 1920�s playbills

Good lord what a boring and miserable day yesterday. Nothing to say about that because, well, there is nothing to say about it. At quitting time yesterday I was passing by the Nurses� Nook where a couple of the ladies were chatting, and Melissa � whom I�d briefed, the day after, on the orientation fiasco � called out, teasing, "Hey, I spent a lot of time on the internet today. I guess I�m going to get fired." And if that�s true, for my crimes I should be drawn and quartered and fed to animals.

(But there is nothing to do. I am fulfilling my job requirements and there are still whole days where there�s substantively nothing to do. So what am I supposed to do?)

Here�s an e-mail exchange from Monday morning.

Me: With respect to the Next Job I�m looking for and will be until I get one, it looks like my choice is going to be either to hold out until I get something approaching the good old ideal job, where I get good money for using a large part of my brain, challenging work, fun office, good benefits, nice colleagues, etc. OR, for instance, a nice comfortable place to work, where the money is not good though the benefits may be (I am not going anywhere that doesn�t have good ones), fun office and good colleagues where the work is not so challenging but steady and where it�s kind of taken for granted that I�m not using my whole brain. The problem is that the first kind of job is very hard to come by. The second kind, less so, but I worry that if I got a second-kind job then I would forever have diverted myself from the path of first-kind jobs, and I�d be stuck as an overqualified admin type for the rest of my life.

My sister: I think that job type a makes you happy while at work, and that job type b can make you happy if you promise yourself that you will leave on time every day to go see movies, if you promise yourself to keep writing, if you're creative in your spare time. you can't have a job that requires such huge brainpower and such a time commitment and remain as creative as you can be in the small-brain job. maybe the small-brain job is better. you can be creative doing what you want to do, not what you have to do. with the big-brain job, you leave feeling exhausted. with the small-brain job, you leave thrilled to be out of there for the day so that you can smile your usual evil smile and not the PC version. with the small-brain job, you're stepford 40 hours per week. with the big brain job, you think about work when you're not there, beyond "shiznit, I have to be up tomorrow at 7:00 and it's 2:00 now." see?

Of note, just so that I can be sure I�ve been conscientious about establishing the terms of discussion:

1. My smile is not evil, Mary � shut up! It is very sweet.
2. I think that if anything, she�s even more cynical than I am about Type-Bness (yes, you pronounce its opposite "type anus"). This is odd for someone like me to see in someone else, but she�s erecting dichotomies that I did not mean to encourage her to build. For instance, Stepfordism doesn�t come into play, since I�d never take a job in the first place that required me to muzzle my whole self � a biscuit job � and I think this sort of descriptor is the wrong trope in terms of which to describe the B; it has more to do with, hmm, a general sense of smallness and constriction (again the Moore, did you notice?), like the light under the bushel, the not letting on all you�ve done and all you know, the intellectual self-corseting during office hours. I do it here, in case I�ve never mentioned. I stay in my office and keep my mouth shut because when I start opening it, it�s clear to everyone how out of place I am, and that makes us all uncomfortable, and that is no kind of way to conduct oneself in an office, being the bearer and vessel of discomfort like that. The A is where I�d be able to turn it up to my personal Eleven and have no fear.
3. I am not going to let someone cast aspersions on my smile, anyway, who is a close personal friend of Carrot Top. Ha! So there.
4. Also don�t think I�m going to Moore out on you and go crazy and stop eating and dress all in white or anything. In fact, while I was at Elliott Bay Books last Saturday something else I bought � it�s in my briefcase now � is Frank O�Hara�s "Poems Retrieved." I realized I didn�t have any O�Hara, a condition that I needed to correct posthaste.
5. Discuss amongst yourselves: Frank O�Hara is equally and similarly important to the American canon as Walt Whitman. (Sorry, I�ve really derailed myself here.)
6. All right. And the A is not necessarily exhausting or a huge time commitment, and the B is not necessarily something the 5 pm escape from which gives a person something to look forward to all day. The A does more than make you happy while you�re at work. The A gives you that badass feeling to call your own all the time, 24-7 � it gives you a right to it. It gives you a place to be your whole self, and�
7. OK, this all has a lot more to do with money than I was trying to have to spell out here. The A pays decently, is what the A does, or at the very least it offers a coherent and non-subjective route there. I was raised not to talk about money but I was also raised constantly to worry and flagellate myself over it, and I should admit that. Also, in Seattle, it�s a bummer but as egregiously as in Manhattan you tend to get judged by how much you make, and if you want not to have to talk about money or to be the subject of other people�s talkings about money, you don�t want it to be screamingly obvious that you�re not making much. I know, that�s totally fucked up of me, but I should admit it too.
8. My recently rising self-esteem, as expressed in (a) and (b) through (e) above, is an objective good thing but might be the last fucking thing I need in this job market. Did Oliver Twist ask if he might peruse a dessert menu instead? No he did not.
9. But am I Oliver Twist? No I am not. (This isn't easy.)
10. I don�t like "fun" as an adjective and my sister knows that, so to her, in my e-mail, it�s shorthand. Also, the paragraph that follows the one I wrote her and copied to here began, Or until I go back to school. Or� and I put some other things that I don�t remember, and now I�ve deleted it. The A or the B or the whatever that fills the spot and time period of Until I Go Back To School, I am trying to keep telling myself that it�s probably not what I�m going to do forever � though who knows; how many people have jobs and careers that they regard perhaps ruefully as not quite what they envisioned for themselves � and not the context in which I will be fixed by those I meet. So, yes, chances are that within x number of years I�ll be doing something else. (Unless some hypothetical job makes me want to do nothing but itself, a prospect to which I am happily open.) There�s even some possibility that I�d move to Germany, in exchange for which I�d even bump down to C or even D for a while. The point being � this is what the "keep telling myself" part looks like � that none of what I�m talking about here is life-or-death dire. In e-mail to Vanessa last week shortly after the orientation I caught myself writing, in re the hosp, that there was no reason to think I couldn�t be out of here in a year. I was being pessimistic when I typed it, but as I read the sentence over I thought, for real, that even a year wouldn�t break me.

A reader asks an interesting question. He wonders whether my malcontentedness at the party last Saturday could be attributed to the fact that I was not the center of attention. A response requires me to view myself critically and severely, to cut myself no slack, and, for the sake of scientific inquiry, to assume that my actions and behaviors were motivated by something ugly � selfishness, arrogance � and then see whether it�s that background that brings them into full relief, so of course it was an opportunity I jumped all over. And the answer is no, I don�t think that by listing the factors that made me ill at ease I was rationalizing the big-baby feeling of not being everyone�s favorite party guest. And I certainly don�t resent Steve for conversation-hopping, since these are his friends he seldom gets to sit and gossip with, and I can talk to dude any old time I want and I don�t require hand-holding. Some parties are better than others. But there was something about the critical inquiry, my subjecting myself to it, that did put me in a bad mood. Last night before the movie I was trying to pin it down, and here is some of what it is: for me to pretend I don�t have feelings of, say, grumpiness and paranoia (that is, admitting that I do) or that I don�t notice a thing that sets me outside the group of all the other women at the party (that is, those by whom I would wish to be recognized) or that writing these things down so as to document them (that is, what I *do*) is petty � is that how I would insure against seeming to others as if I want to be the center of attention? Ha ha, no wonder I don�t get invited out. What would Glenn Gould do? What would Frank O�Hara do? I�ll tell you what Frank O�Hara would do, he�d lift his head up off the table and scratch his balls and raise his glass of Irish whiskey to me and slur, "Go, Tiger � you�re fine!" I mean, right? I need to believe that I�m right. I don�t want to be everyone�s favorite. Fuck no, that's too much responsibility. I just want to be recognized � recognized for being me, myself. On the job and in my life, I want my habits of mind and the ways I am to be something I�m allowed to let loose, rather than leashed and collared and muzzled and chained up. If that sounds like a manifesto, well then it kind of is.

Yesterday in my mind-numbing boredom I was flipping through one of the publications that Dr. Blahblah gets � a severely bogus one, targeted to patients, in which dubious two-page articles on medical issues are always followed by four-page pharmaceutical-company ads for the drugs that treat them � and in it was a piece written by a girl I went to college with, who sat across the room from me in Spenser seminar. The subject: "Incontinence." Things are tough all over for us English majors.

I have a new crush. You can meet him here.