After my little resumption of job hunting today, I got to thinking. Sending out resumes is a lot like playing the lotto. You have your little ticket, which you hope is going to help you find riches, but it's really all a game of chance, with the odds weighted significantly against you.

In the lotto, you pick from a bunch of numbers, and hope they end up being the same ones that are on the balls that fall through the slots. With a resume, you shuffle sections around, pick out various key words to highlight, and hope that on this try, you'll find the "winning" sequence that matches what the recruiter is looking for.

Sometimes, after you've played for a long time without winning, you decide that maybe it's just easier to not play at all. Better to accept the certainty of getting nothing, than to constantly get your hopes up only to have them dashed yet again. So you stop trying, and resign yourself to the reality of living with your parents and making a few bucks now and then at sub-market rates whenever your enterprising entrepreneur friend needs help fixing servers or gets another wild pie-in-the-sky idea for a new business plan.

Maybe you get the bright idea that it might be better to sidestep the whole thing, and resolve to find ways of "living outside" the system. You do pick up some new tricks, and practice them with a relative degree of success. All good lessons to learn, and fun in the process. Dropping out as a way of life, and loving it. Maybe it could just work?

But at the end of the day, you still haven't quite managed to kick that old bourgeoisie conditioning. Maybe you could, if... if... if. If most of the friends with whom you'd still like to maintain at least some common ground weren't all hopelessly inured to the point that they seem to find your "insights" incomprehensible (but at least they're polite about it). If you could just break off the emotional attachment to the Precious, and leave it behind forever. But it's always there, calling you back. If you could find a way to shake it off when your parents talk in horror about "living on the streets", as if that were the worst catastrophe that could ever happen to a human being (even as the "liberals" or "socialists" who would try to change conditions so nobody would have to suffer such a fate are viewed as the enemy). Maybe you could break away, if only there wasn't a part of yourself deep within that thinks that maybe, just maybe, all of them are right.

Having bitten off a little more than you can chew, you become overwhelmed, as well as becoming increasingly baffled by the insane direction the world seems to be taking. Your mind and body just want to shut down, and wish it all would just disappear. Some days, even just venturing outside the front door seems like too much.

But eventually, hopelessness also becomes a tiresome companion. So your mind plays another little trick on itself, and adopts the delusional notion that you can make things better. What's even crazier is that once you've bought into the delusion, it doesn't matter if it's real or not.

Sure, why not spend weeks writing a new version of a website where I can post megabytes pointless drivel to be read by all of 5 people? And the nutty thing was, I did get a little boost out of it.

Now I'm losing track of where I was going with this...

Playing lotto. With resumes.

The trick, I think, is to be just delusional enough to think that a positive result might occur so that you actually send the resume, but not become so invested in it that you're crushed when you get nothing after applying for 50 positions for which you seem to qualify perfectly. Also, it doesn't hurt to momentarily forget how dreary and unfulfilling life in the 9-5 world typically ends up being.

Yes, the mind must play tricks on itself in order to survive. That must be why we're all so fucking crazy.

I've got a sore throat to fight, and I'm getting the odd urge to dumpster dive even though I'm not really hungry right now. Peace.