The Daily Write: On the bedroom floor (August 25, 2013)

Writing Prompt: On the bedroom floor

I had a mission. I was made for that job. Everything up until that moment pointed me in that direction; the years of being an outcast; going to an alternative college where people like me learned to be more like ourselves and less like everyone else; the dinners with monks on long peace walks when I was a teenager; my co-coordination of the Lesbian/Gay Resource Center at school; my mom living on a commune. If not me, then whom exactly?
 

I had never applied for a "real" job before. I'd done stints as a nanny for two different families, uniquely awful in their own ways. I had delivered pizza for Domino's, unaware of their right wing politics and unable to turn down the money even if I had known. I worked for Burger King for a month or two, and a Danish Bakery, both while I was on a strict liquid protein fast (there are multiple ways to damage yourself, not just the obvious ones like cutting or drugs).
 

I babysat. I counted screws and nails during a hardware store's biannual inventory. I cleaned houses. But I never worked in anything where you had to fill out a long application with essay answers to hard questions. I'll admit, it freaked me out. I wanted to work there so badly, I was perfect for the position as a youth organizer for LGBT Quakers, but what could I say about my commitment to non-violence that didn't relate back to what I characterized as my pacifist upbringing? Having an aunt and a mother with gurus for spiritual leaders and being anti-war suddenly didn't seem like quite enough.
 

I was intimidated by the application and didn't have a typewriter to make my responses look neat. Instead I borrowed my roommate's typing machine with a one-line text display in an LCD window like something you'd see on a calculator. It was compact, complex and easy to lose one's work. I struggled to write coherent answers to questions that were far too specific for a general background like mine while learning how to bold, underline, backspace and save work, only successful some of the time.

Everything I wrote felt wrong and I struggled for two days and nights trying to make it a good application while crying, getting so frustrated I begged my roommate to be a reader and editor. Finally, an hour after the deadline passed, I drove up from the country outside Olympia to Seattle, searched for the center in the dark past midnight, and slipped my clumsy application under the door in a too-thick envelope.

I didn't even get a call. I may have been naive, but they were too closed minded. Or so I consoled myself as I waited in line at the food bank, no job in sight.