I need a fairy jobmother.*

I hate job searching.

I suspect -- correction, I know -- I am not alone in this.

There are a lot of things I hate about it, other than the sense of failure and rejection that keeps hitting me over time.  I hate trying to sell myself -- I'm very bad at that.  (The Rocket Scientist gets frustrated because he says I routinely underestimate my abilities. By a lot.)  I hate networking: I am introverted by nature, but more than that, I am really terrible at talking to people about career matters.

Most of all, I hate the recurring question:  just what do you want to do when you grow up?

"Beats the hell out of me" is, frankly speaking, a totally inadequate answer. And more to the point, it is a dishonest answer.  I do know what I want, I just don't know how to get there.

I want to write.  Every single vocational assessment I have taken over the past oh, so many years has come up with "Writer" at the top of the list.  Followed by the vocational counselor saying "Umm, I don't really think that that is a viable career path...."

I am a good writer.  I am an interesting writer.  I have been told this again and again, and more to the point (and unlike many of the other things I have been told over time about myself) I happen to believe it to be true.**

The best job I ever had, in terms of the nature of the work, hands down, was a spell when I wrote trivia questions for Pogo.com. (Sorry, guys at the Census Bureau: I love y'all to bits, but the work left a great deal to be desired. You win the "best work environment" award, which is like Miss Congeniality, only better.) I researched odd things.  I wrote - and I had to write clearly and concisely, which made my writing better. My only frustration was the questions that got kicked back:  any world in which "Who was the last of the Stuart monarchs?" is considered too obscure but "Who was Jennifer Aniston's godfather?" is not is a world with serious educational issues.***

The reason I loved law school is that I had to write a great deal about interesting subject matter. (You get the best cases in law school.) I was able to bring my ability to a new venue (and somehow managed not to be infected with lawyerly writing -- although I can do that on occasion if necessary).  One of the reasons I hated practicing is that the subject matter was a great deal less interesting, and the writing I do best was not called for.  (There is also a certain level of moral elasticity needed to be a good lawyer, with which I had a lot of trouble.) While I recognize that this is probably as much an artifact of the field of law I chose to practice as anything else (I really should have become a criminal lawyer), a great deal of it was just the nature of the legal beast.

So, what should I do? I write.  I write here.  I write on my (probably-never-to-be-published) book.  I have to write to be whole.  The long periods I have not written have been stretches where I was most certainly less than all together.

So the question then becomes: what do I do that will challenge me, keep from going crazy, pay me a decent wage, and still leave me time to write?

And that's the question to which "Beats the hell out of me" is a truthful answer.

*At the time I wrote this post, I was unaware that there is, in fact, a new show called "Fairy Jobmother."  It looks dreadful.
**A strong tendency towards run-on sentences nothwithstanding.
***In the odd chance you actually care, the answers are Queen Anne and Telly Savalas.