Resume-ing Life

Today, I did the unthinkable. The thoroughly distasteful.

Something I never, EVER hoped to do again for the rest of my life.

I updated my resumé.

To be honest, I thought I had purged every hard drive of every computer I had ever owned of all vestiges of the many incarnations of resumé I had accumulated over WAY too many years of chronic job-hunting. I had taken that leap of faith. I had declared myself a 100% genuine, always and forever self-employed person. Master of my own fate. Captain of my own ship. I would never need a resumé again! Into the “Recycle Bin” they went, then merrily deleted forever, into oblivion.

But as luck and technology would have it, when I searched Windows for “resume” I found a copy of one I had sent to the bank with every other document in existence that could possibly put a positive spin on my ability to run a restaurant (and what a crock of crap THAT turned out to be, in the end…!) All I had to do was delete the first decade or so of outdated material (from the 70’s and 80’s—in the vain hope that anyone reading the resume might do the math and calculate I am not quite as ancient as I actually am) and add the last ten years of useless self-employment to the top. And voila! A document which indicates I actually have a work history, dismal as it is.

How funny! I just searched the “Word” thesaurus for synonyms of “resumé” and what came up were things like: “restart,” “take up again,” and my personal favorite, “pick up where you left off.” No, not actually the “resume” I meant…but wildly apropos, n’est ce pas? Here I am, picking up where I left off. Over a decade ago. If only this feeling of going backward was accompanied by a few less lines on my face, a few less gray hairs and a few less aches and pains. Maybe I could even list my age as “forty-something…”

It’s become obvious that the Universe is not going to simply drop a job in my lap, as I exhorted It to do last year at the beginning of my “retirement.” I realized I just can’t be like those fundamentalist Christians who can’t make a move without taking it to God and making sure they’re going in the right direction. I SO detest the word “pro-active,” but I realize that I have to make some kind of move in that direction if I’m going to have any realistic chance of obtaining an income.

So now I have a resume. A resume that sucks, actually, but it does exist. And I shall forward it to selected email boxes from craigslist. I shall then wait for the calls I will never get and the email responses that never appear.

How life affirming…