Where We're At

The best thing about you may be your looks. Or your ability to find anything anyone has lost. Or how well you can cook (the mountain?). For some people, the most impressive thing about them is their career. Thus, their resume.

My resume is not impressive. I've job-hopped more than I'd prefer. I only have an associate's degree. My resume does not, can not, show the best things about me, because the best things about me are not things that would be appropriate on my resume.

If you tell me one thing, I will nod and know that about you, and two other things you didn't mean for me to know. It's not like if you tell me you like stringbeans I'll know what color panties you're wearing. But I might figure out from the WAY you tell me about your stringbean fetish that you're the baby of your family. I might let you walk out of an elevator in front of me, and you'll have told me nothing, but I'll know that you're favoring your right knee by the way you walk, and that your ankle is starting to hurt. I'm not explaining it very well, but trust me, it's special.

I have other impressive yet obscure things like that, that can't go on a resume for a legal secretary. And that sucks. That I have to put my working history on a piece of paper and hand it to someone who will look at it, and they will judge me, everything about me, based on that. And decide I'm not good enough. And that sucks. Because I'm so much more than my resume.

You've never met anyone who will try as hard as I do to be a good friend. But that can't go on a resume.

Unfortunately, I'm not beautiful, so I can't say "Screw the resume, I'll coast on my looks" since they won't take me far in an interview. All I've got is personality, and it takes me a long time to warm up before I show the best of it.

One of my friends is very free with her compliments. Not in a she-gives-out-so-many-that-they-mean-nothing kind of way. More in a they're-so-unique-they-must-be-pure kind of way. She once told me that if she and her husband got divorced, she wouldn't mind if he remarried me, because she thinks I'd be a good wife to him and a good step-mother to their kids. She gives the best compliments ever. She's good for my ego.

So I wonder what the HR people and attorneys are thinking when they interview me. You know, other than "How many years of litigation does she have?" and "Does she know how to e-file?"

I'll tell you a secret. The kind of secret you learn in Psych 101, but I don't see many other people doing it. When you copy someone else's body language, it subconsiously makes them more comfortable with you. I do that in interviews. If the lawyer leans forward, arms on conference table, I do too. If they're sitting back in their chair with their legs crossed, so am I. I've been doing this for years, and I only do it in business situations.

The only tough thing about it is knowing whose body language to follow if you're interviewing with more than one person. Like today, when I was sitting across from two attorneys and one HR person.

Apparently today I copied the right person's body language, because I got a job offer. Just yesterday I went to the bank and officially freaked out at how little savings I have left (two month's worth). A responsible person would replenish their savings for a few months, make sure the job is working out, all that shit.

Being responsible is so draining though. It exhausts me. I don't want to be responsible right now.

*This post brought to you courtesy of Trixie's computer, and the letter W.

**Trixie is back! And she brought me a green alpaca scarf from South America. Or pashmina, I don't know how to tell the difference.