Empty Nest/Empty Pockets
Friday, January 2, 2015
Monday, December 29, 2014
Beating Against The Current
The above photo is from a recent job fair I attended. The opportunities offered were mostly sales positions at communications, life insurance, and health club companies; NYPD and NYFD recruitment; and temp agencies shilling for resumes.
The end of the
year 2014 still finds me, brain atrophying, working as a part time law firm
receptionist, where the phone is often an inarticulate instrument. My hours,
recently cut, have been rearranged and pasted on to additional days, necessitating an
increase in the gasoline budget. Bills from the two colleges my youngest
children attend arrive every month like proverbial Swiss clockwork. Our
post-Hurricane Sandy bank account remains as
empty and infertile as the drought-stricken California farmland; replenishment from my
end looks to be as unlikely as a forecast for a steady, gentle months-long West
Coast rain.
The past year’s
efforts at finding full time employment in the midst of the stagnating
recession simmered occasionally, and then iced up, because of what I can only
perceive to be the unwillingness of the ironically named human resources
departments to see beyond the middle-aged face to the value inherent in an
older worker. What I can offer is a
fabulous work ethic; kick-ass writing, editing, and proofreading abilities; professionalism
and a dedication to client satisfaction; a good working knowledge of Microsoft
Office Suite; insatiable curiosity; and a desire to add to my knowledge base by
any training that might be offered.
My half-a-dozen
interviews for executive support, office management, and administrative
assistant positions culminated in nothing except despair; several expressed
interest in a second meeting but led in every case to radio silence and an
occasional regretful e-mail relaying the fact that someone else was a better
fit. What might lie ahead in 2015? More of the same, I’d wager. But still, to
paraphrase Fitzgerald, I beat on against the current of the modern, job-seeking
reality and persevere with an optimism that becomes harder to maintain.
For more on the
subject of the pervasive ageism rampant in the American job market, read Ann Brenoff's article, highlighted by Huffington Post editor Shelley Emling as 14 Blog Posts from 2014 That Everyone Over 50 Must Read.
"5 Years After I Lost My Job:What's Changed?
"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-brenoff/being-laid-off_b_4949989.html
Monday, September 8, 2014
Nurture and Nature
Well, she might not have empty pockets, but she surely has an empty nest. This is how one woman filled that ineffable need-to-nurture void. Julie Salamon, from the New York Times.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/filling-the-empty-nest-with-animals/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A10%22%7D
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/filling-the-empty-nest-with-animals/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A10%22%7D
Friday, August 22, 2014
A Child of Air
To Any Reader
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.
As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Empty Nest/Empty Pockets, Indeed.
Before college costs are considered, rearing a middle-class child in the northeast U.S. is estimated to be about $300,000. Check out the latest, from the Associated Press, via the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/08/18/business/ap-us-parenting-cost.html?ref=business
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Jobs I Have Known
The first job I ever had of course, being a female
who came of age in the 1970s, was as a babysitter. In those days, the going rate was a buck an
hour regardless of how many kids you were saddled with; discussing this once
with my sister-in-law, we agreed that maybe if the couple was generous, they
threw in an extra quarter on New Year’s Eve. Twenty years later, I was
astonished to discover that a good babysitter was a treasure to be hoarded at
the rate of ten dollars an hour. I have four children, and let me tell you, I
was grateful to pony up the dough every single time. Today my youngest daughter
babysits for two kids and she makes fifteen dollars an hour. That is more money
than I am making now, with a B.A. in History (and let’s not forget the minor in
Middle Eastern Studies) as a part-time law firm receptionist, where I answer
the occasional phone call, copy endless legal documents, and get giddy with joy
when I have to use 21st century technology like the scanner.
In my late teens I worked at McDonald’s, wearing the
obligatory polyester uniform, but that was fun, because it was a snowy winter
that year, and my boyfriend would wait for my shift to end out in the parking
lot, car heater on full blast, chilling a 6 pack of beer in a snowbank. We
later moved to North Carolina, where I was a very bad waitress – indeed, I
still suffer from the occasional waitress nightmare wherein the joint gets
slammed and I am all alone in a packed restaurant and everyone is yelling at
me.
So I realized a restaurant career was not in my
stars and turned towards yet another typically pink-collar way to earn a living
and became a secretary, and excelled at this, because I was much better at
typing and organizing and wearing cute outfits sitting in a cushy office than I
was at slinging hash wearing a knee length navy blue dress and a pair of sturdy
white shoes. But as I moved up the
corporate ladder to ultimately become a partner’s secretary at what was then
called a Big-8 accounting firm, my soul shrank at this altar of the worship of
Ronald Reagan, and when I got pregnant I happily fled salaried employment for
the joys of raising children in suburbia. Supported by a husband who made a
comfortable salary and was quite happy to come home every night to a house full
of screaming children and a hot meal, I joked that I now worked for room and
board and an occasional topaz necklace.
But I was uneasy. Didn’t feminists warn against the
trap of a career in homemaking, from which so many women couldn’t extricate
themselves when marriages turned sour? Luckily my husband is a good guy, and
proved it by putting me through college, one class a semester, starting when my
youngest entered kindergarten. Ten years later the economy imploded. Of course it was then that I graduated.
People complain all the time about how hard it is to
find a good job. They are not lying.
I’ve researched companies both profit and non, corporate and government,
tailored enough cover letters and sent off enough resumes and writing samples
to line the walls of a small house, which, for all I know is where they remain,
for it is very seldom that I hear anything again from these places, and your
guess is as good as mine as to how - or if - once discarded, they are used.
Perhaps they are downloaded and printed, and serve as entertainment at holiday
parties, or used as decorative displays in the offices of Human Resources all
over New York City, or are folded into paper airplanes and flown across
cubicles during those stressful times before the end of the third quarter, when
a demand for levity becomes a necessity. I’d like to think they are put to some
good use, instead of floating endlessly in a virtual trash bin in the
netherworld of the Cloud. I suspect, though, that I think this in vain.
So I soldier on, beating against the tide, in the
hope that one day I will have the ability to amend this amusing little diatribe
with a footnote stating that yes, I managed at last to find ennobling
employment. I can only hope that this happens before my husband decides to
retire.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
History. Everywhere.
Twice a week I pass these Bryant Park beauties on my way to the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society, where I am currently having lots of fun doing historical research using J.H. French's 1860 Gazetteer of the State of New York (which you can access for free at archive.org, if you're into that kind of stuff.) The first time I saw these horses rearing their heads by the 6th Avenue park entrance, I thought of Hector, the Tamer of Horses - or Breaker of Horses, it depends upon which translation of The Iliad you hold close to your heart - but it turns out these are scaled-down models of a hundred foot Falkirk, Scotland sculpture entitled "The Kelpies." Mythological, water-borne horses, Kelpies were said to haunt the loch and river waterways, transforming into lovely women to lure men to their deaths. But the sculptor, Andy Fox, by using native work horses as his models, and Scottish iron in tribute to the glory of its industrial past, created these images to pay homage to Scotland's history and resilience, which in light of the vote for Scottish independence in September, holds great resonance within the UK right about now.
History binds us, ties us, to the past and the present. Look up. It's everywhere.
For more information on "The Kelpies" follow this link:
http://www.thekelpies.co.uk/
History binds us, ties us, to the past and the present. Look up. It's everywhere.
For more information on "The Kelpies" follow this link:
http://www.thekelpies.co.uk/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)