Are you mindful of the other driver?

Between home and work, those huge digital matrix signs loom over the interstate, the ones intended to keep you abreast of traffic situations. But, except during snowstorms, there are no real traffic situations between home and work. It’s not that kind of town. So, instead, the signs display helpful messages and driving tips. Usually somewhere between self-righteously bossy (“Texting and Driving Don’t Mix”) and winkingly practical (“DUI Patrols Tonight”), lately the DOT has turned more philosophical. The other day, all over the state, the signs asked, “Are You Mindful of the Other Driver?”

It is the word “mindful” that seems out of place in square letters above the interstate. I am used to the DOT being concerned about my driving habits and even about the more physiological aspects of my mental state (who doesn’t like rest stops with free coffee?), but this seems to enter another kind of territory, a territory that is normally the domain of poets and pastors (and—on a side note—of Dinty W. Moore’s new book). I’m not used to hearing about such existential stuff from the lower levels of state bureaucracy. Not that I mind. In fact, I kind of like the idea that they might have more to say than “Merge Left in 1500 Feet.”

But that “mindful” and the abstract “other.” The word choice suggests authorship in a venue that is normally dominated by anonymity. This is not, I think, language that could be produced by machine or by government committee. This language was created, composed. So, reading it, driving beneath this message, I imagine the DOT copywriter in his cubicle, the perfunctory fabric walls, the smell of canned air.

On his breaks, he walks outside. It is spring now. New grass is coming up around the ponderosas. He shuffles his feet, kicks at a cone half-buried. He carries a paperback in his right hand, his thumb holding the place. This week Pedro Páramo, last week that Annie Dillard book, slim volumes that feel to him more like companions. He also keeps a book of poems in the top drawer of his desk, and he steals moments with them between memos and newsletters. He has recently discovered Dana Levin and thinks he might be in love.

The DOT office is in an office park off the highway, so the cars zing past. Most of them don’t notice the little building, one-story with large tinted windows that the copywriter cannot see from his cubicle, buried among the other cubicles. Most of the drivers do not notice him walking there, paperback held loosely between his fingers. But he stops to watch them.

Unless they merge onto 184, they will see one of his signs 2.4 miles ahead. Today, they will see his “Are You Mindful” message, his favorite, the first one he created and the only one he’s created that has gone into the state DOT’s permanent Dynamic Message Sign (DMS) message library. He thinks of this as his opportunity to shape society in his small way: his words, present, glowing above the flow of traffic, sliding easily into the eyes and, thus, the minds of 64,372 commuters each day, on average (based on the December 2010 report; he did the math himself). More on weekdays, fewer on weekends.

Watching the cars pass, he tries to notice each passing motorist. The traffic is light in late morning, so he almost can. The woman in the new Hyundai, probably his own mother’s age, hands at ten and two, sitting up straight so her hair doesn’t press against the headrest and deform. The man in the wax-sheen 4-ton pickup, broad shoulders and short hair: a contractor, he thinks, not a laborer. The girl in the early-90s Honda Civic, a carseat in the back, too young and pretty to have planned for that. These are his audience, his readers, and they are legion. It is a kind of power. More people will read his words today than will read Dana Levin: 64, 372 readers. And that’s vehicles; it doesn’t account for passengers. How many people will read Annie Dillard today? How many people will read Rulfo? Shakespeare? 64, 372 people will read him. Every day he has something to tell them, and every day they hear it.

He thinks of the sign past the 184 exit as his sign because the control box is in his cubicle. For the most part, each sign is controlled locally—normally by a sheriff’s dispatcher, but since this sign is so close to the main DOT offices, the duty defaults to him.

His fifteen-minute break is nearly over, so he dog ears the page in Rulfo and tucks it into his back pocket. He thinks he’ll steal another moment with Levin before writing the weekly road status update, a press release that no one in the press actually reads. If his supervisor were to catch him reading poems on the clock, he has decided he will explain that it is vocationally necessary. He will explain that, since he is a copywriter (a writer, really), he must keep language in his mind. If he does not keep the language fresh, he won’t be able to do his job well. His supervisor is the kind of person who believes in things like inspiration, and she already sees him as a creative type, so he thinks she’ll buy it. And, anyway, he hopes not to be at this job for long.

He fantasizes about his last day on the job, about how he will sign off. He’ll need to leave his readers with something larger than the normal fare. For some among his 64, 372, his words are the only thing they’ll read that day. He’ll need to leave them with something substantial. Like that line from Howard Nemerov: “The world is full of mostly invisible things,/ And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,/ Or its nose, in a book, to find them out”

But that’s a bit pedantic, and it won’t fit on the sign.

Maybe this one, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, “And, for all this, nature is never spent”—But that’s too topical. Or, “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his”

Or this one he just read in Levin: “I know,/ I’m tired of the battle too”

It is his duty, he thinks, not sacred but nearly so, to reach into their lives for an instant, to remind them that, for better or worse, they are not alone.

Next Time You Have to Speak in Public, Picture This

While watching bumper cars at a German carnival, I wondered how I’d give a presentation on superlatives for my new boss the next day using only questions. I was resentful that I had to worry when people around me were eating giant pretzels stacked with cheese, ham, and pineapple; being jerked through the air on the Devil Rocker; careening through Dämonium, “the most innovative haunted house amusement park ride  in the world”; or crashing into each others’ rubber bumpers.

Fortunately a vision saved me from my own self pity: A man with feathery, close-cropped hair, a button down shirt, a pointy nose, and an expression always within a hint of a smile, shared a sparkling teal car with his 6 or 7-year-old daughter. He was letting her drive—except for when they got into horrible pile-ups. Then he would place his hand on the wheel and back up or make a hard turn. He seemed relaxed, pleased with his daughter’s driving skills. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

I fast-forwarded to the next day: He would drive his Audi at 180 kilometers per hour (probably without crashing), arrive at work where he would make presentations at Siemens for rooms of people in which he needed to convince them of costly investments in new technologies. How did he manage not to worry about it while at the Nürnberg Volksfest?

Because he knew he could do it. The question is where to get that sort of confidence. I got mine from him. I went home that evening and  rehearsed my presentation. Tracy acted as my non-English speaking student and made some important points (including that he didn’t think my fifteen-minute-long-string-of-superlative-questioning was too contrived). His comments spurred me to revise my presentation and run through it several more times. I went in the next day and made it through my spiel without going blank in the middle and without completely compromising logic.

How do you enter terrifying situations with bravado? How do you fend off the freeze waiting to flash your mind?

This is what I did:

• Wore a blazer
• Rehearsed my presentation about seven times
• Channelled the imaginary man who drives an Audi, works at Siemens, rides an Autoskooter Sunday evenings, and knows he’s dämonium good

Other ideas?

I never learned how to properly cradle and run at the same time in lacrosse, I was never a Girl Scout and have no woodland survival skills, and I definitely can’t ride a unicycle or walk on stilts (which, given the sheer number of summer camps with a circus program these days, is apparently a larger problem than I realized). Why couldn’t they just hire me to gush about poetry all summer? Why do I need to be multi-talented? And most importantly, what have I been spending my time doing if I don’t even have CPR certification?

Something that is multifaceted. Unlike me.

I can understand why summer camps want to hire people who can cover multiple subjects—more bang for their buck (plus really, how well do you need to know painting to teach it to a seven-year-old?), but I’ve recognized this trend in other areas as well, namely when discussions of securing a teaching position after graduate school come up. Our professors have mentioned to us time and again that if we’re able to teach in more than one genre, or, even better, more than one subject, we’ll be much more appealing candidates for teaching positions. If a college can hire one person to teach creative writing in two genres, plus maybe some technical or business writing on the side, it’s another bang-for-their-buck situation.

But is that what’s important? Or should colleges look for the best teacher possible, regardless of whether they have a broad, multi-genre focus? I recognize that on a practical level this may not be possible, but just stick with me for a second.

I’m currently reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer (yup, brother to that other Foer guy), a book about how our memories work and how people who compete in things like the World Memory Championship train to improve their memories. I just finished the chapter on experts, and learned some interesting things. Apparently it takes about 10,000 hours of training to become an expert at any one thing. And in the course of becoming an expert, your brain will grow and change to make your cognitive process in that subject even more streamlined. That makes sense—one of the brain’s best features is its plasticity, which is the whole reason we can recover from head trauma, not to mention the reason phantom limbs exist, but the important point here is that experts aren’t born, they’re made. Chess masters aren’t inherently better at chess than everyone else, they’ve just played the game for much longer. Like, ten thousand hours longer.

Writing doesn’t fit as neatly into this description, and while it’s unlikely that anyone a college hires will have achieved “expert” writer status on par with that of a chess grand master, I think schools should be aware of and appreciate their faculty’s singular focus. Rather than stretching them too thin by demanding they teach multiple subjects and preventing them from working on improving the one they’re trying to become better at, schools should let them focus on the subject they care most about, which would give them time to improve, which would make them better teachers. Less economically feasible, but how much are schools willing to sacrifice to ensure their students are getting the best education possible? While there’s no rule against being an expert at more than one thing, and I could easily master juggling in 4.5 years if I practiced 6 hours/day and my math is right, I’d rather spend the next 10,000 hours becoming a better poet.

(But really, if anyone knows how to swallow fire or blow glass, let me know, these application deadlines are coming up fast.)

Don't Get Trapped in the Yellow Dog Sentence

Back in my demolition days, I was going to a lot of Amazon parties. That was when Amazon had ads every week in the Seattle Weekly and The Stranger in an ongoing hiring spree.

While Amazon snatched up my friends, I tore down walls. I remember describing some of my misgivings about my job to a woman while sipping wine from plastic cups in an overgrown yard in Wallingford. The sledge hammer was heavy, its blows loud. I wasn’t sure I had enough “rrrr” in me to last in the field.

The woman I was talking to had probably graduated from an Ivy League school and moved to Seattle to work for this start-up. She was the type of person who still thought she was the smartest girl in the world. She said, “You need to embrace your inner balls,” and then demonstrated how I should approach my job by springing into a lunge with fists punching the air, scowling, and growling.

I think I quit my job the next day. I just wasn’t an Amazon sort of girl. The friend who invited me to this particular party was reading a book at the time in which the author encouraged other women to “bite off more than they could chew” in order to advance more quickly and gain more responsibility. Biting off more than one could chew seemed scary. What if you couldn’t deliver, I remember wondering while walking around Greenlake with my friend.

I’ve been wondering about this recently, too, wondering how I’ll manage what I’ve bitten. I’m very lucky to have started a new job. I’ve felt grossly under qualified for it, though. Yes, the job is to teach English to non-native speakers. True, I am a native speaker of English and have two degrees in English. And thank you if you’ve happened to notice that my grammar is relatively flaw-free.

But I had no idea that English had twelve simple tenses until last week when I realized I had to explain them to my class. Nor did I have any idea how many rules exist that determine when to use articles for nouns and which articles to use. I’m the sort of person who, when trying to explain a grammatical rule, gets dizzy with the possibilities.

For instance, when a student suggested a sentence should read, “The yellow dog is the old dog,” I thought, Well, yes, that sentence could work, and then I lost myself in imagining the very strange scene that would need to exist in order for a person to say this: There are two dogs—one old and the other young. The yellow one is the old one, but one of the people in the conversation can’t see so she is unable to tell that the yellow one is the old one. That is why her friend has to tell her this very important and fascinating detail.

What it comes down to is that I’m not good with absolutes. My mind almost always sets out to explore what ifs. And this is why I began to wonder if I was–or even could be–qualified to teach English.

But this weekend I watched Black Swan, was infused with ambition, and this is what I came to realize: I am the kind of person who can sit down for three hours at a stretch and read rules about article usage with feral interest. I’m the kind of person who enjoys talking about the possible uses of each sort of word and the nuanced differences in meaning that can be gained with the slightest variation. I care about language in a way many don’t. I care in ways most people can’t—unless perhaps they realize that language isn’t just about following rules. What if I were able to spread my crazy love for English to my students?

I ventured to try today, during one of my not-so-clear-answers regarding why “electricity” didn’t get an article and “telephone” did.

“I know it can be frustrating that English has so many exceptions,” I said, “but one of the good things is that there are lots of ways to say things in English and many of them can be right. I encourage you to experiment, to play with language, to have fun trying different ways of expressing things.”

And that is when the Metallica lyrics appeared in the Skype chat box.

Lay beside me, tell me what they’ve done
Speak the words I wanna hear, to make my demons run
The door is locked now, but it’s opened if you’re true
If you can understand the me, then I can understand the you

“This was written by a native speaker,” one of my students told us. “I never could understand why there is an article before ‘me’ and one before ‘you.’ Is this what you mean, Shira, about playing with language?”

And I think we all took some comfort there.

The thing about this job is that it sucks up all of my time. Not because I’m learning how to do a few aspects of it, but mostly because there is a lot to be done. There just is, and this year in particular, we were faced with a compressed timeframe. So it goes. My point, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is that I don’t have writing time. I’m not writing. And lest you think I mean, not-writing-but-revising, or not-writing-but-still-submitting-older work, or not-writing-but-plotting-out-my-novel, or not-writing-but-doing-important-work-in-my-head, let me assure you: I’m not writing. I’m not doing anything.

Now, you may be sitting there in the comforts of MFA-land (or from a comfortable, writing-filled, post-MFA perch) promising yourself that you’ll never be like that. You’ll never be the person who doesn’t make writing a priority, or you’ll make sure to find a job that assures you writing time. You’re certain that you can make it work. You know it’s going to be tough, but you can do it.

And I wouldn’t disagree with you. I would never say that you can’t do it. There are certainly many people who are doing it: they’re working full time and waking up early to write; they’re writing one day a week, if that’s all they can spare; or they write in binges when they’re on break from whatever they usually do.

That is not my situation, and it doesn’t really matter why. And it’s perfectly fine if you want to think of me like the weird, pathetic uncle who serves as your example for everything in life you want to avoid. I’m cool with that. But what I’ve discovered is that not writing has driven me slowly insane, and the only way I’ve managed to not go completely insane is by a) writing flippant posts for Bark every Sunday night, which is sort of fake writing but also provides fake accountability and b) thinking about all the things I want to do when I can build writing into my schedule.

Nerd alert: I made a list of all the writing-related things I want to do when I get a new lease on life in a few weeks or a month. It almost feels like I get to hit the reset button: yes, I have to figure out a more sustainable way of being me (I’ll still be working more than full-time), but I get a chance to stop, evaluate, and adjust. I get a chance to fix the problem.

Some of you have very specific immediate goals: finishing and defending your thesis. Some of you might have a goal of finishing a current project, whether it’s putting the final touches on your book of poems before you start sending it out to contests or finally finishing a complete draft of that beast of a novel you’ve been working on. Maybe your goal is to start submitting your work, or maybe it’s to try a form you’ve never played with before. Maybe your goal is a certain number of words, or a certain number of days per week, or a certain point-of-view. I don’t think it matters. And I don’t think it has to be a concrete, specifically defined goal. It could be something nebulous, or something broad and generalized.

But it’s reassuring to have a goal or a set of goals, even if your goals are things like, “establish a set schedule of writing time.” I think that setting some targets or benchmarks for yourself might do you a world of good, no matter how stressed out you are or uncertain of your future.

Plus there’s always that little shot of adrenaline to look forward to when you start checking things off the ol’ list.

CHIEF COMPLAINT:  The patient has been seen by me previously.  (The Chief Complaint is the reason the patient has come in for a visit.)

 She has a point on her back where if she touches that point it causes her to have nausea.  I indicated to her she should probably not push on that spot.

 It actually only happens when she gulps cold beer.  I told her to stop doing that.  (Docs really do say that!  Haha!)

 Sometimes they are poetic:

Six-two-nine-six Cedar Canyon Road.  Say it again:

Six-two-nine-six Cedar Canyon Road 

Pepcid utilized in place of Prilosec given the issues of Plavix.  

Counseling concerning cryotherapy.

 Sometimes the things I write down are things that make me think and sometimes make me angry/sad:

 She was advised that there would be no physician / patient relationship as a consequence of today’s visit.  (You and the doc were just having a good time at that visit .  Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s them.) 

She does indicate she was treated rather rudely by the Emergency Room personnel with regard to her pain medications, and I indicated to her that is just an ongoing problem, and just simply demonstrates the ignorance of other providers with respect to pain medication. 

I do highly recommend that he obtains the recommended x-rays for his cervical and lumbar spine, regardless of ability to pay.  (Sometimes the docs are a little out of touch, telling a pain clinic patient to just find another job that is less labor-intensive so that they won’t be hurting as much.  Oh, is that all?)

 And now, a list of potentially bad/harmful typos have to constantly watch for in my typing:

 addition instead of addiction

not instead of now

shit instead of this

slut instead of flu shot (inexplicably!)

Shitory instead of History

 I read somewhere recently that some clinics and doctors are doing the dictations while the patient is still in the room, or otherwise letting the patient see the dictations, or by just typing up the report while the patient is there.  My providers at Group Health did the latter.  Of course, a patient can see these at any time by asking for their medical records, but not many people actually read their medical records.  The idea is that if a person hears or sees their doc describe their conditions honestly in bare medical terms, they will pay more attention.  Certainly there are doctors who sugarcoat things, or at least use different terminology in their reports than they would with a patient.  An overweight patient is not likely to be called “obese” by their provider face-to-face, but it will probably show up in the record like that.  Would this cause patients to be more concerned about their conditions and take more proactive measures, or would it cause doctors to soften up their words?  Well, either way, voice recognition software has a loooong way to go in the medical transcription field, so I’m not too worried about losing my job to docs who transcribe.  I think most doctors wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea anyway, because it’s just more paperwork, which I know is a pain in the ass for them, seeing as my whole job is doing that paperwork to save time for someone else.

 I’m going to be in my hometown in a couple of days and I’m going to obtain a copy of my medical records from birth to age 18.  I’m extremely interested in what I will find there, mostly in terms of jarring memories loose for writing purposes.  I remember my doctor telling me every time I got a physical that if I kept gaining weight at this rate, next year I’d weigh X pounds.  What else did my providers have to say about me?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Being Flynn is a newly released movie, based upon the best-selling memoir by Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.   At some point over the next few weeks, I plan to see this film.  But before I do, I wanted to write a review so as not to be over-influenced by the subjective experience of it.

First of all, Nick Flynn is a poet and prone to madness.  That is to say, he’s genetically predisposed to delusions of grandeur, which is the non-technical name of the condition suffered by Nick’s father, Jonathan Flynn.  Plus, and this truly sucks, the mother of the writer committed suicide when he was 22 years old.

Second, Robert DiNero plays the part of Jonathan Flynn, which is reason enough to fork over the funds for a $9 matinee viewing.  Spoiler alert:  it’s his best role since playing that scary father-in-law in Meet The Fockers.

And third, I’m now officially wondering (and worried about) what my children, presently ages 17 and 20, may write about their dear ol’ M.F.A. student Dad.   I mean… don’t misunderstand:  I would be proud to have the same thespian who honed his craft on “taxi driver” interpret my curiously complex personality in his dotage.  There are things far worse than having your own chromosome-kin write something like  Cartoon Physics, Part 1, only to then revisit and rehash your own life’s closing chapters:

 

Children under, say, ten, shouldn’t know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down — earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

T-Rock, Who Gave Me His Kindle, Knows How to Enter the Next Phase

You know you’re impressionable when you want to change careers with each paper you grade. When I read “Formaldehyde Follies,” I wanted to become a chemist. When I read “The Balance between Piracy and Freedom,” I wanted to become a computer scientist.

Perhaps I’m a little more impressionable than usual since I’m currently finishing one job and searching for the next. The job I need is in Germany and doesn’t require German language skills. I’m moving to the land of Sauerkraut on Sunday.

So far I’ve noticed one outstanding cultural difference between the US and Germany. Tracy, my dude, had to fill out forms for the company that is moving our things to Franconia. The first set of forms was requested by a German moving company and required that everything we own be quantified in number and/or metric feet. For instance, “How many meters of hanging clothes do you have?” “How many parasols?”

The American company wanted everything quantified in terms of how much it is worth. “Cucu Clock, Total Value? Lingerie, Total Value?” (Unfortunately, we don’t own either of these things.) We did, however, have to estimate how much our (my) book collection is worth. When the American moving company sent a guy to do an inventory of our stuff, he asked, “Are you taking all the books?”

“Yes,” Tracy and I both said.

“What about these ones?”

“Yes, all the books.”

“What about these ones?”

“Yes, all of them.”

“These ones, too?”

Tracy and I got to visit Nuremberg for about 40 hours when he interviewed at Puma, where he will be designing shoes. One of the few touristy things we did while we were there was to visit the library. We walked in, stood in the middle of a room lined with shelves of books, all in German. Tracy looked at me with grave concern and asked, “What are you going to do?”

It is occurring to us in stages that Germany really operates in German. The internet there is in German, too. Wouldn’t that be cool if my blog posts turned German?

Student who paid attention in high school English: I disagree.

ME: You’re wrong. Here’s why. [NOTE, in case my tenure committee is reading this: I say this very kindly, taking advantage of a teachable moment, making sure that the student understands that his/her participation is valued and feels both validated and enlightened.]

STUDENT: My HS English teacher said there are no wrong answers about literature as long as you can defend your ideas.

ME: Your HS English teacher was wrong. There are plenty of wrong answers about literature. What your teacher meant was that there are also plenty of defensible potentially right answers too.

[LONG PAUSE]

STUDENT: So are you saying there are wrong answers in literature and that my HS English teacher, who was my personal role model and who died last week after a heroic bout with cancer, was wrong about everything?

[LONG PAUSE]

ME: I’m sure your teacher was a remarkable person.

STUDENT: A remarkable person who was wrong about everything.

ME: Probably not about everything.

[PAUSE]

ME: Just about this thing.

[At this point, some people are crying in the back of the classroom.]

ME: Let’s move on, shall we?

Dear HS English teachers,

Please stop teaching my future students wrong (read: oversimplified) stuff. They get enough of that from TV.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Frey

the guy who will have them as college freshmen

Have You Considered Fish Spearing? Photo by Mitchell Kanashkevich

If you had to choose your career strictly on its name, which would appeal most to you and why?

Designer
Welder
Phlebotomist
Cobbler
Professor
Barista
Carpenter
Architect
President
CEO
Hygienist
Guitarist
Director
Conductor
Bassoonist
Engineer
Computer Scientist
Singer
Surgeon
Psychologist
Entomologist
Economist
Coach
Editor
Secretary
Soldier
Farmer
Dentist
Commander in Chief
Programmer
Journalist
Teacher
Reviewer
Critic
Commentator
Principal
Body Builder
Drummer
Anesthesiologist
Priest
Recreation Aid
Pundit
Nun
Provost
Catcher
Mechanic
Monk
Butcher
Nurse
Physical Therapist
Concierge
Pitcher
Custodian
Laborer
Hostess
Stylist
Actor
Skipper
Manager
Ballerina
Cashier
Materials Handler
Cook
Clerk
Bartender
Stock Broker
Doctor
Financial Analyst
Blogger
Boom Truck Driver
Producer
Fellow
Diplomat
Nanny
Ambassador
Food and Beverage Attendant
Contract Specialist
Chef
Geologist
Acupuncturist
Columnist
Anchor
Electrician
Naturopath
Mason
Loss Prevention Officer
Teller
Private Detective
Broker
Expeditor
Application Security Consultant
Websphere Application Server
Heave Haul Dispatcher
Tug Captain
Lowboy
Waiter
Longshoreman
Lawyer
Controller
Comptroller
Accountant
Buyer
Web Developer
Esthetician
Game Tester
Choreographer
Videographer
Model
Developer
Curator
Animator
Talk Show Host
Dermatologist
Personal Trainer
Projectionist
Cosmetologist
Courtesy Clerk
Server
Chemist
Exterminator
Protein Crystallographer
Fisheries Observer
Caregiver
Compliance Auditor
Bailiff
Building Inspector
Academic Advisor
Umpire
Google AdWords Specialist
Esquire
Case Manager
Pilot
Canvasser
Call Center Representative
Residential Counselor
Landscaper
Minister
Vet
Physicist

I think my favorites are: Umpire, Physicist, Longshoreman, Anchor, Fellow, Entomologist, Exterminator, and Boom Truck Driver. I’m not saying I actually want to do the work but, rather, I like the words because they’re funny (Fellow), have sweet sounds (Umpire, Physicist), cool associations (Anchor, Longshoreman), make it sound like I would get a lot of respect (Entomologist),  would be an expert at destruction (Exterminator), or drive to some bumping tunes (Boom Truck Driver).

In looking at titles, I found a job description that intrigued me. Have you ever considered being a Waxing Specialist? You just might be qualified. Below are some of the traits desired:

* Must possess sound judgment skills
* Must be self motivated
* Tidy and Timely in their duties
* Someone who will go the extra mile for co-workers and clients
* Naturally positive in demeanor
* Must be able to stay organized and multi-task

Since I don’t even know how to begin imagining how a waxing might proceed, some of these are somewhat difficult for me to picture: multitasking? going the extra mile? I do understand the self-motivation requirement. In other words, nothing about the job itself will be motivating.