The Job Front: Wits, Hits, Blitz, and Fritz

Friend Spartacus, from his hi-tech bomb shelter in the rugged, wooded wilderness up thataway, was the first to write me back on my recent, voluntary change of employment status:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2007 11:25 PM
Subject: Re: Change of Address

Hey buddy! Thanks for the update!! Good luck with everything!

I can tell from your letter (and from the posts you've made recently to your blog) that a great weight has been lifted from you. I can sense the excitement and enthusiasm even through the cyberspace.

Sometimes things need to reach (or get VERY close) to the breaking point before we can make a big change. It's like that old story about the Chinese ideograph for "crisis" being the same as the one for "opportunity".

Yes, I will pray for you (and NO, I don't see any contradiction or hypocrisy in that--I'm happy to put some good vibes out there!).

If you need a letter of recommendation or anything else, let me know!!

--

If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. - George Carlin

So this morning I wrote him back:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2007 9:17 AM
Subject: RE: Change of A Dress

Thanks for the good word, sir!

Just this morning, sister Mew forwarded me an ad for an executive assistant, so I'll give them a go. The trick to getting a new job is not merely to have a killer résumé; rather – as my recently former boss pointed out a few days ago – it's the same principle for taking awesome photos, where you fill roll after roll with shots: you saturate the area with your résumé. Why focus (literally!) on one blossom, one bird, and cross your fingers before clicking just once? Shoot away! Angle, lighting, depth, distance… maximize your chances. Click, zzzzt! Repeat.

This is how (thanks, Mother!) I got two jobs in one week when I was fifteen or sixteen. Yee-hah!

And I'm looking back mostly for the sake of the friends still there; there's little or no regret, so I doubt I'll be replaced by a pillar of salt. To a couple of these folks, I likened it yesterday to that silly experiment from high school (or semi-wasted college days): you stand centered in a doorway, arms down but pressed hard against the doorframe; stay like this for a couple minutes until your arms actually ache, then step into (or out of) the room.

Voilà! Your arms float upward on their own, and you're standing there with a really goofy grin on your face…

That's how I feel inside.

No contradiction in your praying for me, you! No doctrine is needed – indeed, not even any surety of the infinite or eternal – for doing what genuinely is prayer. You know that, too: it's simply the reaching out with one's inner essence for the sake of someone or something in need… with a sense, at least, that there just may be something greater out there to which this essence joins, and brings strength/healing/resolution to where it's needed.

Father Groeschel occasionally mentions an agnostic he knows who goes to church regularly. Father asked him why, and the man answered with a shrug, "It might all be true!" This goes hand-in-hand with another tale of his, where on Ash Wednesday even some true-Jew yentas show up for their share of the ashes and blessing. He's asked them, too, what brings them there; and with a genuine American-Yiddish shrug (and accent!), they answer, "It couldn't hoit."

That I like!

Thanks also for that letter offer; I may take you up on it where a non-work reference might be requested, someone who can testify absolutely to my fine character, keen moral sense, and unimpeachable highest standard of ethics. So I'll owe you twenty bucks for that, plus the first half-decent blues CD I can shoplift, along with a nickel-bag of the finest Panama Red. Might snub a beggar just for the fun of it (in your name) on the way back home, too.

Hah! I will call on you for a letter of reference for the seminary! So it's not too soon for you to practice your high-school Latin. Repeat after me, and sprinkle liberally through your many drafts:

1. Pange lingua gloriosi!
2. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
3. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres; unum eorum incolunt Belgae.
4. Omne bene, sine poena; tempus est ludendi. Venit hora, absque mora, libros deponendi.
5. Vulgariter dictur, quod primo opportet cervum capere, et postea cum captus fuerit, illum excoriare.
6. Sator Arepo tenet opera rotas.

Civile, si ergo: fortibus es in ero. Novili, demis trux; si vatis indem: causan dux.

Actually, all but the first two are non- Church Latin. The sixth one's a palindrome, and that last one is bogus. If you read it out loud, you'll find you're really saying, "See Willy, see 'er go! Forty buses in a row? No, Willy; dem is trucks – see what is in dem: cows and ducks!" Remind me to tell you sometime about the bogus mantra I bought into, courtesy of a smart-aleck high-school English teacher who looked (in the later seventies) like George Carlin did at the time. PS: great tagline of yours there; I like Carlin!

Regards,

Julius Sneezer

Actually also: As I understand it, Spartacus is not truly "agnostic" by most definitions and characterizations; we examined that (i.e., he explained and I apologized for misunderstanding) en passant back in March, while springboarding far away from the topic of… tattooing??!!

Now, onto those lines in Latin:

1. Sing out, O my tongue, of the Glorious! (sixth-century hymn)
2. Lamb of God, who take away the sins of the world, grant us peace. (from the Latin Mass)
3. The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts; the Belgians inhabit one of these. (from Caesar’s "On the Gallic War"; my translation)
4. All is well, free of punishment; it’s time to play. The hour is coming – without delay – to lay your school-books down. (quoted by Robert Heinlein in his sweet "Time Enough for Love", though Washington Irving beat him to it by over 150 years; the tentative translation is mine... Heinlein's own (more likely his wife's) is much better – I'll graft it in here once I dig out my copy of that novel)
5. The commoners say that as soon as you capture a stag, once it's captured you gut it. (again, my translation; this line's from the thirteenth century)
6. This is really cool! (And it's wilder than your average palindrome.) My dad first showed me back in high school, and I hazarded a translation back then as "Father Arepo has trouble screwing". Wikipedia – and you've got to see their article on it! – offers "'The sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort", which likely is better translation than my teenage-years attempt.
7. This one I first saw in an Omni magazine competition in the late seventies or very early eighties. That was a great periodical, despite its being a Guccione publication.

I decided my email to Spartacus would serve nicely as a smooth followup to yesterday's post (and APB email itself), so I checked to see if he'd mind my posting it. He answered:

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2007 9:38 AM

You go guy!! Just please take it easy on the homeless beggar. [I'd actually written "slug a beggar", but that really is too crude, so I fixed that before pulling together this current posting]

I'll pass on the Panama Red, in favor of Tampa Red (old bluesman also known as the "Guitar Wizard").

Good luck with the shotgun blast of resume's--I can see them stuck under car windshield wipers like menus from a newly opened Chinese restaurant! Paper Blitz!!!!!!!!

Incredibly, my most recent (and probably last) former girlfriend, Azey (rhymes with "hazy", which she isn't; yesterday I spelled that as "AZ") wrote back first thing this morning with her own sweet encouragement.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2007 5:17 AM
Subject: RE: Change of Address

Acey, I completely understand about the commute. Life is much too short!!!! Please give me a call sometime and we can catch up. Probably best to do it on the weekend when I have free minutes since I imagine we will be chatting for a very long time.

[I have] a five mile commute one way!!! […] I hope the family is doing well and I am looking forward to your call.

Azey

Will do! Azey was especially loving and supportive when I needed it the very most: grieving over the death of my father. She also was incredibly patient as I later proved to her and to myself that I was a poor choice in boyfriends, and no longer able to reciprocate in kind… or even kindly.

Bless her heart; she's an angel – after those horrendous potholes in our brief road together, she's only sweetness and kindness. An even luckier man will make her a wonderful husband.