Tuesday, June 28, 2005

The Kid Who Sits Behind You Explains

Waiting for Godot

Whoa, this Beckett dude is whacked! So there's like this weird place--our sub who made us read this said it was like purge-atory, which I think is like some place where bulemic chicks go puke. Anyway, there's these two dudes, Vladimir and Estrogen, and they're like all symbolic, but dude, I suck at figuring that out sometimes. The way I see it, Vladimir is all "I'm Russian and we're going to nuke you 'cause it's the cold war" and Estrogen is like "I'm a female hormone so be afraid", and they're waiting for this Godot dude who has like "god" in his name, but they don't seem to get that they keep repeating stuff, kind of like my old uncle Jake who keeps opening the door to let the cat in but the cat died like five years ago.

Anyway, they just talk hella long about crap and "giving birth astride the grave" which I think means that like one of their wives or moms or something was in a maternity ward over top of some hospital morgue and like maybe they could see through the vents down to the dead guys which would explain why these dudes are so freaky.

Oh, and like the sub dude showed us the movie and it had Zero Mostel--who was in that "Producers" movie my dad liked and the other guy was the original Penguin on the old Batman show--that show was all "Bam" "Pow" and waay more interesting than this boring drag.

Monday, June 27, 2005

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future As A

Roofer

Roofer, huh? I've known a few over the years. You might want to think about this one...

After high school you'll go to work for some roofing company doing whatever job is the worst they have to offer--the junior employee's life isn't easy most places. Chances are you'll be the one who has to hike shingles up a ladder, or try to avoid being overcome by fumes as you tend the tar machine.

As you work your way "up the ladder", so to speak. you'll realize that crappy as that entry level job was, most of the other jobs aren't much better--save one. The job that all of your crew will secretly aspire to is that of the foreman. He gets to drive from jobsite to jobsite in the clean company vehicle, stopping by homes to smilingly deliver an estimate, or visiting your crew to hand back paperwork refusing some lackey a day off to attend the birth of his child.

You'll learn that whatever the summer temperature, the roof is always about 20 degrees hotter, and there'e no shade to hide behind. At first you'll try covering up to protect your skin, but you sweat off 10 pounds before the morning is over, so you become just another guy on the roof with his shirt off. Of course, you slather yourself with sunscreen the first few days, but the constant teasing of your crew mates--"lovely cold cream you use on that pasty white skin, sissy boy" eventually forces you to sacrifice your body to the unrelenting glare from above. You realize that in spite of their coarseness, you like many of your coworkers, and you feel sad as each year one or two more succumb to the ravages of skin cancer.

The heat and the stink of the tar lower any resistance to joining the others in their daily pilgrimage to the strip bar once your work is done. You already suffer from an almost constant low grade sunstroke, and a half-dozen pints of beer on top of that make you drop off to sleep as soon as you stumble home--ideally without having risked lives by getting behind the wheel of your car. You get used to waking up in a groggy haze each evening around 10 and gulping down a couple of quickly-prepared hot dogs before falling, unshowered once more, into your tar-stained bed.

The cold wet days are perhaps even more deadly than the scorchers. You find the steep roofs a constant danger as the water slickens the moss which covers them--you'll be lucky to attend your retirement dinner without needing a wheelchair ramp to enter.

Besides the carcinogenic ultraviolet rays of the sun, the toxic fumes from the tar, and the ever present risk of falling, you also inhale buckets of fiberglass from the shingles you work with each day.

One day the bitter wet, cold weather, coupled with your unhealthy lifestyle, makes you susceptible to a nasty virus that eventually plugs your sinuses and messes up your inner ear. You go to work feeling wobbly, and a few beer with lunch does nothing to improve the situation. When your foreman comes up the ladder to explain something to you, you slip and as you start to tumble you knock your supervisor off the roof.

His family doesn't acknowledge your flowers, which arrive a few hours after they take him off life support. The other workers know you were ambitious, and a nasty suspicion spreads among them that the accident might have been more by design than they first realized. When the owner of the company names you the next foreman, their suspicions are confirmed. Macbeth had nothing on you when it came to the ruthless pursuit of goals, they decide.

They do little to mask their hatred of you when you talk to them on the jobsite. You feel their hate and suspicion, and try to compensate for it by being overly kind to them--which they perceive as weakness and futher proof of your guilt.

One day they arrange for you to "accidentally" fall off a roof. Will you survive? Hey kid--I'm no pyschic; I'm just a guidance counsellor.

See you later. Oh, sorry, that mat's a bit slippery. Are you okay?

Thursday, June 23, 2005

J.J. and L.W. Shizznat with Mogo and Dwoeeeby

Yes that is stupid gibberish. Some of it is taken from real yearbook grad writeups. I think I'll post a few real ones some time so we can point and mock.

Many grad writeups are great--sentimental messages directed at family, friends, or teachers, while others make witty observations about life or humorous predictions for the future. But then there are the wannabe gangstas who feel that lots of "izzle" words, interspersed with long lists of friends' initials and occasional internet abbreviations "ROTFL" or "LOL" make them look witty. pLuS AlwaYz mEsS arOuNd wIt' cApiTaL lEtTeRz, yo.

News flash--when your kids pick up that yearbook some day in the future, they're going to ask "Dad, were you on drugs a lot in high school?" "Mom, were you in the 'special' class?"

Nobody, including you, is likely to remember what all those initials stand for, and when people dig the book out just before their reunions every ten years, your stupidity will be once again recalled.

I rant about this for two reasons. First, we got our yearbooks on Monday, and quite a few did the same old crap I hate. Second, my last couple of posts have been kind of "inside" posts--posts about a specific situation that has meaning to a very limited number of people who are in the know.

I don't want to turn everyone else off, just like the losers who write all the inside code words and initials. (BTW--News flash--we all know what 4/20 is about as well)

I do like to write parables, though. I can come out and give my opinion on someone's problem and likely annoy or offend them, or I can tell a story and hope they get the message. That's what I chose to do for the last blog.

But now we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Close captioning will be unnecessary.

Friday, June 17, 2005

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Peace Activist

Hi--c'mon in. Peace Activist? Yeah, I guess I could offer some ideas along that line. Just a question--is everything you own tie-dyed? I mean, the shirts I can see, and maybe even the pants--but how the hell did you manage the sneakers? Nevermind--I think you can expect something like this:

You're starting out okay trying this line in high school, but you won't really get going until you hit university. You'll need to go somewhere that's suitably left wing--my advice is don't go to any college where the agriculture faculty is bigger than the women's studies department. Eventually you'll take your message to the world, but you'll need a relatively friendly incubator to develop it first.

You'll take a few courses to justify being there, such as sociology, or global studies--things that don't really take up much of your time. If you can get into upper level courses like "The Marxist Dialectic as it informs German Expressionist Cinema" I'd say go for it. You need classrooms where you can practice being painfully earnest in discussions that no one in the real world would care about, but which stir up such passion in your soul that you physically threaten classmates who vociferously defend opposing viewpoints.

No doubt there'll be several "peace groups" already on campus--you'll infiltrate them subtly, but remain noncommital as you look for places where they stray from your particular brand of peacenik orthodoxy. Perhaps they'll be soft on CIA crimes in the Latin American political sphere, or they'll fail to jump quickly enough to support the politically-corrrect side of the latest Sri Lankan hostilities. Once you find their soft underbelly, make yourself the voice crying in the wilderness. It helps if any of their leadership is male--you can regularly use add the words "male-dominated" or "anti-feminist" to your diatribes about the "military-industrial complex". Ironic that one comes from a general, isn't it?

Over time you'll wear down the leadership of one of the groups, since senior students actually have to worry about things like writing thesis papers and eventually graduating, and you will happily take control and begin shifting the group's direction to gain more notoriety off campus. Your nude sit-in at an army recruiting center makes newcasts nationwide, and it's only a matter of time before you're being interviewed by television and radio personalities from all over the country.

Sadly though, universities don't go full speed all year, and the four months downtime in the summer erases the progress of your publicity campaign. Many of your key helpers don't return the following year, either having graduated or simply run out of tuition money because their focus on activism dropped their grades and ended their scholarships. You try to forge onwards, but you lack the drive to take it to the next level. It's then your knight in shining armor comes to the rescue.

He'll be a refugee from an Ivy League college--possibly old money, but without the banal passivity that characterizes so many of his ilk. Instead, he'll drop in on your weekly coffeehouse meeting and quote some passages from a Helen Caldicott book from memory--you'll be entranced by the smoothness and sincerity of his delivery. It becomes clear quite quickly he's interested in both your group and in you personally, and soon the two of you are a team, working to spread your message against militarism while sharing the joy of your newfound love in his loft apartment--saving the cost of rent by moving in together allows you that much more to spend on leaflet printing.

It's Neville--you can't quite get used to his old money moniker--who plans some of your more successful publicity stunts. He skydives into a local wine tasting festival and convinces you and your friends to pose for a fundraising calendar wearing nothing but the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Soon you're no longer heading just a campus group, but something spreading throughout your city, and to cities nearby. You rent office space and buy a listing in the Yellow Pages. Your greatest publicity coup comes when your group heads a protest at an air show, and while the police are trying to quell a few skirmishes in their riot gear, you take a night stick to the head and wake up the next day in a hospital bed, surrounded by get well wishes from peaceniks around the world.

The video footage of your attack is damning, and the police begin an investigation, but the actual identity of the officer who assaulted you is unknown, though you can remember his face clearly. In a few days you are released from the hospital, and rather than trouble Neville, you take a cab home. As you enter your apartment building, you are shocked to see your assailant leaving your apartment. When you question Neville he admits paying an acquaintance to impersonate a police officer and strike you. You are shocked and run out of the apartment and back to your parents' home. He phones you and tries to explain that he did it for the greater good, but you refuse to talk to him. A few days later he vanishes, and his signing authority for the organization allows him to steal the huge windfall of donations your injuries brought in. You are too heartbroken to go to the police.

The police investigation eventually uncovers the fraud, and the story breaks at the same time as some of your colleagues are quoted as saying that the Allies shouldn't have gone to war against Hitler and that the Holocaust was exaggerated to allow warmongering leaders to send young men to their death to fatten the bank accounts of arms merchants.

You are soon facing the possibility of fraud charges, and each day as you leave your home to testify at an investigation of your organization's tactics and fundraising, you push through a gamut of hostile protesters who label you an anti-semetic Holocaust denier.

After taking a one-semester leave, you transfer to a quiet university 300 miles away and get a degree in communications. By your 25th birthday you're working in the public relations department of large oil company. You do donate a small portion of your monthly income to Amnesty International, though, and maybe you'll wear the tie-dye stuff on weekends around the house.

Saturday, June 11, 2005

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future As A

Therapist (by request)

Hi--I remember you--you're the girl that ran "Rainbow Week" and "Diversity Camp". Yeah--you're also the assistant manager of the cheerleading squad, right? You'd probably make a pretty good therapist; I overheard Tiffany saying how you were "so there for her" when the football captain dumped her and you had her over to watch that ya-ya sisterhood movie and give each other pedicures... What? I am not smirking. Whatever--so let's think about what a therapist's career has to offer:

It's not the same as psychiatry--let's be honest, you don't have the marks for med school--and one of the benefits of that is that you won't have to carry a pager around at all hours so a dozen psychos can call you before they plan to jump. Really, you just have to get some sort of relevant-sounding degree, set up an office somewhere, and learn these few simple phrases:

How does that make you feel?
What was your relationship with your father like?
What was your relationship with your mother like?
Do you think you can really love someone else if you can't love yourself?
What do you think you should do?
Yes, I am listening.
No, I don't accept post-dated cheques.

and if you want to be a "neo-Freudian":


Were you breast or bottle fed?
How did toilet training go for you?

Once you get these down, you'll master the therapist's art of double-think--pretending to be engrossed by the self-absorbed whiner in your office while planning your next trip to Cabo.

It will work nicely for you--for a while. Then you'll meet "the one"--that unique patient who is so beautiful, fragile and genuine, that you find yourself actually listening rather than calculating your taxes in your head. You'll ache as she describes her psychopathic ex, and you'll break the cardinal rule of therapists--you'll talk about your own tortured past.

You see, the last thing your patients need to know is that part of the reason therapists and counsellors get into talking about their problems is that they themselves have deep-seated fears and insecurities about the very same things... What the hell are you smirking at? Career counselling is not the same thing at all! Anyway, to continue:

Your special patient will be given your home phone number--again, the violation of another taboo, and it seems only natural when you end up going for supper more and more frequently after her sessions, since she always seems to get the appointments at the end of the day. Your office assistant becomes colder and you catch her glaring at you when she thinks you're not looking, but you're not sure if she just disapproves of your inappropriate therapist-client friendship, or if she's still carrying around the crush on you she drunkenly confessed to the previous christmas.

The "incidents" that start occuring are so minor as to escape your conscious notice at first--your car mirror is smashed, you get just breathing on the phone line when you answer those late-night calls--but then the signs become clearer. Someone chases away a hooded stranger before they cut your brake line in the office parkade, and when you weed your flower bed you notice a pile of cigarette butts outside your bedroom window.

You decide it's time to relocate, and you invite your patient friend--with whom you've crossed the friend line so badly your license should be revoked, but as a self-styled therapist you don't need a license--but she's been taking a few psychology courses at the local community college and she's learned about "transference", and realizes her feelings for you are artificial and that you are scum for taking advantage of them, so she cuts off all contact with you.

You are heartbroken, and take a leave for three months, and rent a villa in Tuscany. (I never said this gig wouldn't pay well.) You're amazed at how distance, fine wine and relaxation time heal your pain. You're almost ready to come home when the psychotic ex finds you. The local police find two bodies--your killer is the one which hasn't been ritually dismembered, and the subsequent investigation finds letters in your murderer's room which put your assistant in prison for 18 months for passing along your wherabouts--it seems she was the jealous type after all...

What do you mean "why don't we have a female career counsellor"? I am not homophobic! I signed your stupid "definition of marriage" petition didn't I? Wait a minute, come back--let's talk about this.

Crap. This isn't going to be good.

The other 37 Career Counsellor posts can be found here.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Paramedic

So, you going to ride in the ambulance, huh? Well, I hope you've got a strong stomach and a lot of patience, because you're going to need both.

Here's the deal--you'll go to school for a couple years and learn all the extreme first aid you need--the whole piling doughnut bandages like a ring toss game to stabilize the screwdriver sticking out of some guy's eye socket, or looking for missing digits after one of those Japanese "cook it at your table" guys gets a little too enthusiastic while chopping the beef.

You think you'll be able to handle it, but when they tour you through the pediatric burn unit, your resolve will wither away to the point you consider dropping the whole thing. Eventually, though, you steel yourself for the worst you can imagine and you jump into the game. You'll quickly recognize the unique combination of adrenalin rush and sickening dread each time you get called out to an accident. It won't take you long to accumulate enough nightmarish dismemberment stories to supply a hundred pre-graduation safety presentations.

Of course, there will be the other frustrations of the job to keep your mind off the memories of the most horrible scenes--frustrations like the people who call repeatedly for no good reason, or your anger at not being able to throttle the crackhead father who claims his youngster "keeps on fallin' down the stairs". You cross the line the day that father overdoses and you treat him just slowly enough to ensure he'll never hurt the kid again--it's your own brand of justice and you never doubt you did the right thing--until eight years later you treat the same kid for wounds at the hands of an angry john.

The hospitals annoy you too--some of the emergency doctors don't accept your triage advice, and you resent the fact that you do the same work in the back of a swerving vehicle that they do in a hospital but they get to drive home a Lexus or a BMW, while you'll be lucky if you can ever get rid of the ten year old rustbucket pickup truck you drive. It will also gall you that even though you're the senior paramedic on your team, everyone talks to your partner first because you're female.

When you get assigned to the downtown station, you quickly become another redneck who wants to toughen up drug laws to help keep you from having to avoid needle sticks from the same junkies every weekend. You contemplate carrying an air rifle to shoot out the windows of the jerks who hear your siren but don't bother to pull over--it doesn't help your career when your boss calls you in to ask why you gave the mayor the finger...

My best suggestion--keep the liquor cabinet full until you've got enough seniority for a good stress leave arrangement. Just don't drink and drive--you wouldn't want to have your colleagues hose you off the pavement, after all.

Monday, June 06, 2005

A Sonnet in Lieu of a Post. (with apologies to Camila)

Yeah, well it wasn't really a haiku, was it? Here goes:

I sit and type while youngsters sit nearby
Their videos they're trying to perfect
While they take shots--I just get no respect
And some sad attempts at acting make me cry
Some only do enough to just get by
While others worry 'bout each small defect
And struggle--"What transition to select?"
And panic as their deadline draweth nigh.

I'd like to just go home--vacate this place
Forget about the stresses of today
Sit back and maybe open up a beer
And problems from my thoughts I can erase
I head outside to join my kids in play
And hap'ly think we're almost done the year.


(Petrarchan sonnets are tougher than the Elizabethan
ones, kids)

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Photographer

Sounds good, doesn't it kid? You get to go buy a nice camera or two, a few lights and tripods, maybe put a darkroom in your parents' basement, and voilá--beautiful girls are begging you to take photos of them in their bathing suits or less. It's only a matter of time before Hugh Hefner calls and between shoots in exotic locales and jetting back to the Playboy Mansion for parties with the bunnies you have barely got time to spend half the money you'll be raking in. Yeah, right. Let me set your sights a little more firmly on what really lies ahead:

First of all, digital photography is fast relegating darkroom photographers to the same status as those audiophile snobs at the quaint "record" store downtown--you can pretend all you want, but you're really just a living museum piece if you don't move with the times. You'll need a high-end computer workstation if you're going to compete in this business, and some expensive software to go along with it. Unfortunately, it's getting more and more difficult to convince the average layperson that your high-priced prints are significantly better than what comes off their printer at home.

So it comes down to how well you can "capture" the perfect shot. Your job opportunities will be limited:

First, you could do freelance work for magazines. "Freelance" is a nice word for "no benefits and no regular income" or "you'd better marry rich". Sure, you could score a tidy sum for being lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time, but even then, it's no guarantee there'll be any more after that.

Second, there's the photo studio. Problem is, the high end studios are dying out. People go to places like Walmart now for family portraits--don't expect to get much in pay or benefits if you end up there. There are also the specialty studios--trying to get both ears in the passport photo or retouch the fat, pockmarked realtor's publicity shots so he looks less like a diseased troll.

Finally, there's the photo lab. You see, a few of them still like the snob appeal of having a real photographer on staff, plus you'll know enough to work the camera sales counter as well. There you'll learn to despise all sunsets and pictures of dogs and grandchildren--after all, it's only the over 60 crowd who won't be using digital cameras soon. Once in a while, a sicko will turn in a film for processing, thinking it's done by machine so know one sees it--at best you'll be disgusted by the fetish activities depicted, at worst you'll testify in court about the horrible underage photos you saw, only to realize an underground network of perverts will have marked you for death, and you'll have to move to some hick town where you're the one photographing the blessed unions of first cousins.

Have fun.