The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Comic Book Store Owner

Hey kid--interesting shirt. What kind of t-shirt is that? Bangladeshi Death Ska? Right--Yeah, you probably are the only kid who's cool enough to know their music. So you want to be a music... Oh--comic book store, huh? Right, I know NOT like that guy on The Simpsons. I think it might be interesting...

You're someone who is going to have to overcome one of the most challenging handicaps when it comes to starting a business--your overall disdain for the human race. You've always been that trendy hipster who takes unhealthy obssessive pride that the music, movies, literature, and--dare I say, comics--that you like are a sign of your superiority. Yeah, right--anime is literature. Podiatrists are doctors, too.

Your problem is your love for the esoteric, and your smugness about it. You'll need to actually be nice to the people you approach to help finance your comic store, but your overbearing nature will make it difficult for you to avoid offending them. (I remember the time you threw your drink on that girl who asked you to dance just because she was wearing a "Samurai Pizza Cats" t-shirt.)

Eventually, though, you'll manage to get a lease on a small, mildewed store located in a bad part of downtown. You'll beg and borrow from everyone you know and slide into further debt to stock the store. As much as you hate it, you'll stock the "popular" comics--anime series you spent most of your high school years sneering at. You'll bite your tongue every time some fanboy or fangirl comes in to purchase the overhyped crap that is your store's only chance of survival. Meanwhile, your own favorite series--an obscure comic written in an odd dialect by a former Shinto priest who lives on a tiny Japanese island--languishes untouched on its huge display in the center of your shop.

You become even more frustrated when your taste in J-pop is completely rejected by your customers as well. You up selling off the cds to giggling Japanese tourists for a quarter of their original worth. The tourists smile at your taste in music, and look almost disturbed at the odd flotsam of their culture that fills your store.

Meanwhile, you descend further into misanthropy; even your parents find it difficult to stomach your company more than a few times a year. You are so wrapped up in your fascination with your own passions that you know nothing of politics, hit tv shows or any of the other interests of the common man. Your consciousness is completely dominated by your particular anime obssession--the story of a gentle but wise clam who has the magical ability to shift into another dimension where he solves domestic disputes by telling traditional Shinto parables.

You stave off bankruptcy by tapping into the lucrative social misfit market--you begin staging and supplying various animecon and comic expo events. Although the anime community flocks to your store to outfit themselves for these events, you still creep them out. Your pathetic attempts to "chill" with some kids in their ersatz Cardcaptor costumes just results in derision: "What's with the creepy guy in the clam suit?"

Still, their money is good, and eventually you save up enough to realize your dream--you fly to Japan and go to the island where your hero still lives. You get off the boat and make the long trek up to his simple home--the place where he drew the clam stories that fill your consciousness. He is surprised to see you, but then seems almost a bit frightened when he realizes you are the same person who has been sending him letters on an almost daily basis for the last eight years. Still, over a cup of tea he relaxes, and begins dispensing his wisdom.

Eventually, though, you can't take it. You really had no idea what you would hear from him, but you certainly had not expected him to essentially tell you to "get a life". You begin weeping and run to some cliffs and consider throwing yourself into the sea. The old man follows you and tries to convince you your life is worth living, but he simply angers you more and you push him over the cliff instead.

Japanese prison will not be pleasant. You won't get to keep your clam outfit. The good thing is, though--no one will miss you.

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Civic Official

Hi kid--what's your interest today? "Civic official?" Oh yeah, I saw that guy at the press conference explaining why the mayor wasn't really drunk at the boat show last weekend. I suppose, if that's what looks like a good way to spend your life, I could give you some ideas...

There's a fundamental flaw with municipal politics--or with most politics, really. You see, the people need a mayor to be someone who can understand the finer points of political discourse, study issues and look for resolutions, and pay attention to the minute details of governmental policy. Problem is, the characteristics that get you elected--charisma, broad appeal, making issues simplistic and polarized--are all antithetical to those characteristics that will make a good mayor.

That's where you will come in. You will be the one who does the boring background work on every issue. If there's a contraversy about a new housing development being built in a sensitive environmental area, you get to poll all the ecofreaks about their concerns. If the city sees the potential financial windfall from a legalized prostitution district, you're the guy who will have to sit down with the local priest and be harangued about your filthy lack of morals.

You will become a familiar fixture at the city archives, and your intimate knowledge of so many previous political decisions and all of the implications of any future legislation make you the mayor's first choice when he or she needs to be advised on what position to adopt. If you give wise counsel, the mayor will claim all credit and you will languish in the shadows. If you make a mistake, you will be sacrificed to the media, pilloried for your stupidity while the mayor disavows you repeatedly.

The mayor gets to attend all the galas and soirees, while you bring home stacks of briefs and position papers each night to further wedge distance between you and your longsuffering family--oh, didn't I mention you'll get married young? You'll do so shrewdly; binding yourself to the unattractive but well-connected daughter of a long-time political bagman.

Eventually your frustration with the stupidity of the elected officials around you leads to one of the three solaces of the smart but disillusioned civic official: drink, adultery or corruption. No matter which you choose, it will be a further descent into the loneliness that makes you daily question the worth of your existence. And when you are finally fired, whether for drunken incompetence, inappropriate office romance, or reckless embezzlement, you will silently rejoice that your career has ended.

Your new life, whether living in a cheap motel, sleeping over a tawdry bar, or hiding from libidinous fellow inmates, will still seem far superior to the walking death that is civic administration.

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Librarian

Hey--don't just stand there; it's okay to come in. That's right--sit down. I won't bite. Okay now, you tell me what career you want to know about. What's that--speak up, okay? A what? Ohhh, a librarian. Actually, that makes a lot of sense.

So you'll need to go learn "library science" at some university or college someplace. Don't let them fool you; there's no science involved. Oh there will be computers, microfiches, security scanners and such, but really, things haven't changed much since the library was a bunch of parchment scrolls in some monastery. The principles are still the same.

Here's the thing. On the outside, books are flat, lifeless and boring. Your job is to blend in--and you look like you're cut out for it--no offense. Your wardrobe will continue to be simple sweaters and conservative skirts, maybe the occasional daring foray into a plain drab suit of some sort. Under the migraine-inducing flickering of defective fluorescent lights you'll squint your way into the vision problems that will soon have you sporting the de rigeur horned-rim glasses hung round your neck with a chain.

The library is your refuge. Just like you hid from the other kids in a corner of the elementary school playground, or handed out the sports equipment at lunch so you'd never have to use it, so now you retreat from the social challenges of normal human interaction to cloister yourself among novels, encyclopedias and magazines. Oh you'll have friends of a sort--the fish on your desk rely on you to feed them once a day, and you'll name them after some of your favorite authors, and you'll think it somehow darkly humorous when you flush Herman Melville down the toilet but you will have no one to share the irony with you.

You won't be the only librarian, of course, but you'll quickly become the one who embodies the essence of the library's loneliness. The others may date or even marry, but you will languish among the imagined passions of victorian romances because you never encounter anyone in the drab routine of your life who could make those stories real for you.

That's not to say you won't have suitors--every time a new entry in the adult classic "Hot Librarians" series is released some oversexed admirer will stalk you through the stacks, slipping horribly-graphic propositions inside the dust jackets of DH Lawrence novels left open at meaningful passages. Over time, to avoid the humiliation and asthma attacks (book dust will play havoc with your respiratory system) you leave the public library system and move into the even more isolated realms of the law library. Then only creepy attorneys will make your life occasionally difficult when they show up in small herds after overimbibing at expense-account luncheons to have a laugh at "that librarian who blushes all the time".

Fortunately for them, you'll be too mortified to ever consider a harassment suit.

At some point you'll fulfill the ultimate librarian life destiny--you'll move in with your ailing widowed mother to care for her in her twilight years. While she may be ailing, she'll demonstrate a tenacious cling on life for many years, and her longevity may well mean she'll be there to scowl through your retirement party. Throughout the quiet desperation of your life with her, she'll criticize your every clothing choice or hair cut as branding you a "wanton hussy", even though you likely will never have a real date in your life.

Don't look so sad, it doesn't have to be this way. At some point you may go crazy and take an axe to the old lady--it's the quiet ones who usually snap in the end.

Poetry By Dythandra

My Nightmare Before Christmas

Grandma wants your christmas list, dear
Certainly, Mother (I'm difficult to buy for, apparently.)

Grandmama won't like my part of the record store--
Those closest to the crypt don't celebrate it much.
She means well--but the road to hell is paved
With the souls of those who bothered me.

I suggest a gift certificate to my favorite shop
"The Lycanthrope's Temple--Tatoos and Piercing"
(They never check ages)

It's always a festive season around our house
The fake tree, festooned with lights
The family decorations collected over the years
And mine, borrowed from the butcher's alley dumpster.
(Hook and Eye aren't just sewing terms)

No stocking for me--my torn fishnets are too porous
Even for the threatened coal
They long ago learned the dangers of giving ME fuel
And when I left Santa my specially-prepared "cookies and milk"
A stomach pump was de rigeur.

My class prepares a hamper for the needy--
There's a girl they say, just about my size.
But somehow my garments end up on the reject pile--
How metaphorical, I think to myself
(I should think scary would be an asset
For those with little else.)

But now I must run--
It's time for my favorite holiday pastime
A few photos snapped of the mall santa,
Then photoshopped and voila!
I've created a warning poster--"Registered Sexual Offender"
So fun to plaster them around the parking lot.
Even better to watch the parents explain,
As they whisk their toddlers away.

If they're smart, they'll board the chimney up this year.

The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future in

Glass Repair

Glass work? You mean where you blow up those bottles on the... oh, okay. Really? That's your ambition? Yeah, I guess I can.

You'll go to work for some company that has a two-inch square ad in the yellow pages and promises 24-hour emergency service. Once they've trained you--which means you are told many times a day "Don't drop anything" and they teach you how to use the glass cutters--you are then the "qualified technician" and you get to wear the pager that interrupts all manner of meals, celebrations and romantic moments. Usually it's because some crazy ex gets drunk enough to forget the court order and you get to fix the window on the double wide.

Car repairs are also a specialty of your shop. You have the "innovative" technique that means a car windshield doesn't have to be repaired it can be fixed. Thing is, every glass shop has being doing that for decades. Your particular shop won't have good ventilation and days of inhaling the car window repair fumes will give you short term disorientation and long term illness.

You will watch yourself age badly in the customer service area--the fluorescent lights and a few hundred mirrors surrounding you allow for a daily self-analysis that simply depresses you as time takes its toll. Also, inhaling miniscule airborne shards of cut and broken glass for decades can't be good for one's lungs.

Then of course, if you're at all superstitious, is the cumulative 1456 years bad luck you've earned by breaking mirrors. Have fun with that.