Getting Personal

This post is going to be a lot more personal and a lot less political than usual. Feel free to skip it. I'll try not to do this too often. Then again, as the feminists taught us, the personal is political.

I have lots of things I'm good at. Unfortunately, right now they feel like they're none of the things I NEED to be good at. I just graduated college in what has to be the crappiest job market since the early Eighties (see, this IS political) and now I've moved all the way across the country to live where I want to. I have my Bachelors in Landscape Architecture (really, politics is just a hobby). So, I'm good at all sorts of things. Staying amused through the internet, video games, riding my bike, blogging, photography, bonsai, fishtanks, all sorts of things. But I'm not good at things like this. Applying for real jobs, interviews, treading the fine line of honest but not too honest during interviews, paying bills consistently, finding a job that pays more than minimum wage, seeming like I can actually do what I went to school for, and generally acting like an adult.

Unfortunately, those are the things I need to be good at right now. In another time, in another economy I could get an entry level job at some firm somewhere where no one expects me to be good at anything particularly other than learning to be good at things. Which is something I'm good at. But in this economy all the jobs I'm finding are jobs that require experience or being able to feign experience. Which I'm bad at. In short, to get the job I've been told I need I need to be good already at all the things I'd just pick up along the way in an entry level job.

This is all due to the economy. Since there are no entry level jobs I have two options. I can fight it out in the viper pit for something minimum wage at the nearest grocery store or whatnot which seems to be what most people with an education below PhD are doing. Which is why I'm having no luck there. Why hire someone with a Bachelors when you can hire someone who has a Masters to stock shelves at Safeway or Kroger? Our economy is so week right now that people with Masters Degrees are looking for part-time, minimum wage work. How am I supposed to compete? Or for that matter people who dropped out of high school or have GEDs? Geez. They're really screwed. My other option is to apply for all those jobs I feel totally unqualified for. And even if I am, and even if I get hired, I'll be scared to death to even go to work. I mean, really? Putting me in charge of things?