This Saturday I will be tabling at the Cincinnati Art Book Fair. I’ll have my book of haiku, Comforting Voids, a few haiku prints, Disco Diary zines, Analog Fair t-shirts, and more goodies. Come and say hello!
In June I started a full time job. I’m not going to tell you about it because my experience is too contemporary to become public record. But being employed by someone else (as opposed to being employed by myself—which I still am, by the way) has me thinking back to all the jobs I’ve had in all the 21 years I’ve been working.
If you’re thinking, “But K., you are always thinking about all the jobs you had,” you would be right. Jobs were kind of like hobbies for me when I was younger. I dabbled in extracurricular activities in middle and high school, but mostly I just interviewed for jobs (and scored all of them, unless it came out that I was underage). By the time I graduated high school, I’d had seven jobs: a pool concession stand, a dairy store, a movie theater, a family-owned pharmacy, a coffee shop, a clothing store at the mall, and a pizza chain.
I wasn’t saving money for a car or college, and my parents didn’t make me work. It was the potential of every position that drew me to the interviews. Imagine my life restocking bandaids under the quiet fluorescents of a neighborhood pharmacy, or congregated with my friends in a popcorn-scented lobby in between showings. Regretfully, I was one of those kids who couldn’t wait to be an adult. I wanted independence. Working sounded exciting, until it wasn’t, and then I was on the hunt for the next interview high.
It goes to show I’ve always been hooked on the beginnings of things. Recently I’ve been writing about how drastically this inhibits my writing. I don’t think it’s uncommon for creatives to get swept up in the potential of the next thing—especially when the current thing gets difficult. The middle of a project is obviously the hardest part because it’s the period with the least certainty. It’s the actual process of creating, which is a process of discovery. It can be very uncomfortable. No wonder I shy away!
More on that later, maybe. For now, in honor of new eras, movie theater dreams, and all the times I thought my life was about to change, I give you five interviews.
The Dairy Store
Age 14, my mom drives me the 18 minute commute to Ohio’s most iconic dairy farm. For the interview, I’m wearing a pinstripe button-down beneath a long-sleeved Billabong shirt as though it were a sweater. The striped collar sticks out above the surfboard logo, painting my work persona as laid back but professional when necessary. I sit in a wooden booth across from a handsome middle-aged man with curly, greying hair. My mom waits in the car. My hands are folded on the table with my application sitting between us. Babysitting, good grades, last summer at a pool concession stand. Will this man trust me enough to take on the massive responsibility of an on-the-books job?
The Movie Theater
Half of my friends are employed by a rude family that owns a handful of movie theaters in town, and I want in. I stop by to fill out an application and have the most likable of my friends put in a good word for me. Later a man with a croaky voice calls me and asks me to come in one afternoon. I still don’t have my license, so once again my mom drives me to my destiny. The theater is part of the mall, and we pull up in front of the squat, one-story building. Most of the parking spaces on the theater side are empty. We’re in the matinee hours. Once I’m through the glass facade I’m greeted by a perky woman in flared khaki pants. She leads me up a stairway to an office where the man with the croaky voice is hunched over a messy desk, a Speedway styrofoam coffee cup resting inches from his right hand. He seems happy to see me. I sit in the chair across from him and answer his questions, knowing all along he is about to hire me—unless he finds out I’m only 15.
The Chain Restaurant
I apply online and two hours later get called in for an interview. Clearly they are desperate but even that doesn’t ease my nerves. The host tells me to wait a minute, then comes back with a rail-thin man in a billowy button-down. He leads us past late-lunch diners leaning over crescent-shaped plates of salad and bowls of French onion soup to a table in the far corner of the restaurant. Over the next two years, I’ll sit at the same table and shovel boneless honey barbecue wings into my mouth in a great hurry since real breaks aren’t a thing in the corporate service industry, not even when you work doubles.
The Alternative Newspaper
My first feature story is about an olympic training program for rowers. I want to tell stories like someone who has lived them, so I arrange to meet a female coach at the river one Saturday morning. She takes me onto the water and teaches me to row. Later in the beige office of a little man I’d like to impress, I suggest we name the story “Gently Down the Stream.” “Fucking brilliant,” he says. “I like her,” he says in a performative aside to my editor. I beam. The story is soon published, and I am paid $35. Later they ask me to take a full-time job. The whole world seems to open up.
The Catholic School
My professor sends the email to a handful of students. We all spent last quarter teaching an after school French program to fifth graders in the suburbs, and now another school needs a French teacher for the upcoming school year. It will never be me, but I apply anyway just to see what might happen. I’m being carried along a little French fate stream, every French language teaching opportunity lining up in an unbelievable coincidence. When I’m called in for the interview I feel certain it’s still a mistake, but the principal looks at me from across his desk with hope in his eyes and tells me he thinks I’m just what they’re looking for. Minutes later he’s left me alone to look around my new classroom. I write my name on the board, wipe my chalky hand on my pants, and look out at the mess of empty desks. If he believes in me, maybe I should too.
I love this Disco Diaries even more than usual! I've never heard "The Stories of the Interview Experience." Wonderful!