Are You in the Right Job?

Cool jobs, cool work, cool self, cool cool cool!!!

I want one of those cool jobs. Have you heard of them?

I want to be the assistant editor at an indie publisher. I am paid handsomely to read the slush pile. We are literary, trend-bucking, niche yet wildly profitable. All entries pass through my eyeballs. Every dream curls up in my hands. I rub its back. It is a holy hope. My office is in the corner a converted warehouse with wide industrial windows, warm brick, so much natural light. I bring hot black coffee to my lips while the manuscripts sing me their songs. Every day I take the subway to work. No man ogles my chest, my legs. Strangers emit angelic white light. We share smiles. I tuck paper reams under my armpit. I see main characters come alive in cement shadows. I get to meet poets and novelists and up-and-coming talent at exclusive readings in unpretentious galleries. Agents buy me drinks. Their business cards never bend in my pocket.

📷 Cred

I want to be a tattoo artist. I want to be in demand. Folks traverse state lines to hear my needle’s hum. They count down the weeks until I open my books, until they open their hearts, their skin. My studio glows with the blue calm of a zen garden pond dashed with the eclectic furniture of your favorite well-traveled, three-times-married, three-times-divorced great aunt. I bring in graffiti artists to spray paint the walls. This, too, is a tattoo. My address is in the cool part of town. The part now a few years past the waterfall pound of focal gentrification, but my still-below-market rent a numeric sin for which I must contrive monthly penance. I hang the right inclusive signs in my windows. I champion the right voices. I donate to local activists, local artists. My style blends together all its forebearers yet nods to something fresh, something lyrical, something heart-rendered and real. My hands never shake. I am a part of everyone who sits in my chair. I wander with them. I age with them. I hurt with them. Through me, everyone becomes themselves.

📷 Cred

I want to work at a record store. It is beloved, a fixture of the neighborhood since nineteen-nostalgia-something. We have an Lelit espresso machine in the back, but from time to time we let Marty, the retired high school English teacher with the ponytail and the rescue pit bull, pop back there and whip himself a cappuccino. He is a regular. His home collection spans three rooms, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. He knows the store’s owner. He takes my recommendations seriously. Everyone does. My picks are scripture. My taste heavenly delivered, hellishly divine. I start at $75.50/hour and get a raise every month. I am the aesthetic love child of a Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, and Kurt Cobain threesome. My shifts are here and there yet I’m always at the register when you come in. My nose ring glints. I smile a smile that’s beyond a welcome, because you don’t need to be welcomed somewhere that’s already home.

I want to run a children’s art studio. I want water paints and Play-Doh lining open shelves. I want laughter between paper mache. I want sticky little hands learning how to share. I want silliness and curiosity and high-pitched look mom, look what I made! I want endless basking in the way children learn through sing-song ceaseless questions and never seem to fear getting it all wrong, or fear today, or fear tomorrow, they’re too busy drawing the horizon in all shades of gold.

📷 Cred

I want to own a jazz club. I want hazy mauve light to velvet cloak the bar. I want everyone to stroll in and feel the lines ease on their foreheads, the sax, the trumpet, the double base softening their jaws. I want them to sigh sitting back in their chairs. My neon sign seems to wink at you if you walk by. It promises not just a good time — the right time. The exact time and space you need. I want the best negronis in town. I want martinis dirtier than imagination. I want lips smacked. I want notes sponging skin. I want a trance. I want reverie. I want the air to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, never letting go. I want regulars. I want camaraderie. I hug everyone as they leave. When I turn off the neon sign and lock the front door it is dawn, but just the start of it, a pink wink to the sky.

📷 Cred

I don’t want one of “those” jobs. I don’t want exhausting performativity. I don’t want mutual awareness of exhausting performativity, met with even more exhausting performativity, plus a pizza party. I don’t want row after row of square ceiling lights. I don’t want to read the report some Big Boy in a corner office on another floor paid six times more than me dubbed a gamechanger, to other Big Boys paid six times more than me, because they all read about it on LinkedIn, then punted to theirs teams to complete, then forgot about, until it was brought again to their desks. I don’t want the quarterly KPIs. I don’t want the work hard play hard. I don’t believe you should be allowed to time my lunch breaks. Someone died in her office and wasn’t discovered for four days. For fuck’s sake. What are we doing here?

📷 Cred

📷 Cred

I don’t know how to end this question mark. I don’t know how to plot the calendar. I want a certain level of structure to my weeks, but not so much it turns fortress. I want a certain level of meaning to my work, but not so much it devours the mixed berry pie that is a sense of self. I want ridiculousness, even recognition for cosmic absurdity, without sacrificing to its void what can be beautiful routine. I want collaboration and kinship yet respect for the limits of each others’ time, skills, being. I want my voice to be elicited. I want my thoughts to be called upon, valued, considered, deeply heard. I want urgency banished and connection fanned and flamed. I never again want a boss who makes comments about my body. Coworkers too afraid to say no. I want autonomy, but responsibly dolled, and to those who’ve proven worthy of it. I want you to understand that nothing matters as much as you assume it does and yet it’s all so incredibly, porcelain precious. Painfully brief.

I want to care. I want you to care. I want us each to care that each other cares.

I want one of those cool jobs. Have you heard of them? 🎱

-Amy