 "Photo: James Cavin")
Well it's getting to that time of the year when graduating seniors start getting overly concerned with their futures. Everybody is scrapping for a job. What they all seem to be forgetting is that "job" is in fact just a synonym for "work."
I've never understood this transition. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've spent the last seven - err I mean four - years in college, which means I've basically spent the last four years strenuously training to avoid work in any way possible. Case in point: I actually wrote this article three years ago and just resubmit it every time the opinion editor changes. So to take professionally trained slackers such as ourselves and expect us to go straight into employment seems a bit illogical.
Perhaps I'm just overly cynical because employment is not a choice for us liberal arts students. (Art and English majors, start looking for the good refrigerator boxes now.) "What?" you ask, "How can you make a gigantic generalization about the employability of an entire school?" Just ask yourself this simple question: "Do I enjoy what I do?" If the answer is yes, you can't make a job out of it. OK, smart alecs, I'll get to prostitution later. Think about it, all the money is in the stuff nobody wants to do. If I actually enjoyed emptying the dishwasher myself, I wouldn't pay my little brother to do it. And by "pay my little brother" I mean try to subconsciously program him to do it by whispering "the dishwasher needs to be emptied" over and over when he falls asleep on the couch. Sometimes just to mix things up I whisper, "Mother never loved you."
If you fall under one of these unemployable categories, fear not! I've compiled a comprehensive list of all the things you can do rather than find a job:
Die.
Donate blood. This seems to be a favorite among students, as evidenced by those awful television ads with the "students" who wave and smile at the camera lobotomy-style as if donating blood is the single most relaxing feeling the human mind is capable of experiencing. And then they start chipping in with all the things you can do with your blood money. "I use mine to help pay for textbooks," says one. "I use mine to support my Valium addiction." "I use mine to buy more blood so I can donate again." "I just like bleeding, wheeee!"
What I want to know is where the heck does all this blood go? Of all the campus blood drives I've seen, only one or two have actually explicitly stated who the blood was going to. The others just kind of show up and people assume it's legitimate. How do we know it's not just some creep with a van starting a personal collection?
Of course, blood donation seems to be uncool at the moment. Donating plasma is all the rage these days. Does anyone actually know what "plasma" is? I mean, I know it's somehow involved in the making of plasma screen televisions, but in that case, what the heck is it doing in my body? (Maybe those Telletubbies were on to something!) If I donate, can I get mine made into a plasma rifle?
Well, if donating bodily fluids isn't doing it for you, you can always take things to the next level and start selling organs on the black market. If I've learned one thing from watching television, it's that Russian mobsters enjoy collecting organs for little or no apparent reason (my guess: powdered kidney is actually a potent aphrodisiac.) Man, I've got to stop watching sci-fi channel originals.
Anyway, if donating your body to science isn't your style, you can always go the traditional route and become a starving artist. There's a plethora of positions available in this field. For instance, you could become a street artist, such as a mime. You get to wear strange clothes and makeup to attract people's attention, and do strange things and hope somebody will give you money for it. Basically, it's like prostitution but more degrading.
I prefer the literary starving artist, silently working on the great American masterpiece. After the sci-fi channel sends me my check, I'll be able to afford a new cardboard box.
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