In my ongoing effort to not be unemployed anymore, and to move out of my parents’ house, I’ve been writing a lot of cover letters. I hate writing cover letters. A cover letter asks you to explain why you’re brilliant, driven, creative, and qualified for the job in a format that makes it really hard for any of that to come through. They make you write about how great you are, and then make you question if any of that’s even true just a little bit more each time you don’t get any response after sending them. At this point, I wouldn’t mind getting an email from a potential employer viciously insulting my lack of qualifications and ripping me to shreds, because at least that would be recognition.
So anyways, I’m going to take a break from writing about how great I am, because it’s really obnoxious to do. To try to change things up and get cover letter writing out of my system for a few merciful minutes, here are some reasons why I suck.
I spent real money on a Farmville knockoff – There’s this iPad game called Tapped Out that is essentiallyFarmville, only everything is from the Simpsons. It’s one of those “freemium” games, where most buildings and characters are free, but some of them cost real world money. I held out for a while, but I just needed to have Duffman. And then of course that lead to needing Otto. And Kang. And Sideshow Mel. So now, after spending an amount of money that I’m not comfortable saying out loud, I’m the proud owner of a half-dozen virtual sprites who give me fake money when I tap on them. I am awesome with money, guys.
I don’t know how to parallel park – I understand it in theory, but in practice, somebody’s bumper/headlights/curb/small children are getting destroyed. This may have something to do with the fact that I didn’t get my license until I was 18, and then I went off to college where I didn’t drive at all. I am not a great driver.
I check my Amazon wish list to see if people bought anything for me on a regular basis – When people ask me what I want for Christmas/my birthday, I direct them to a handy dandy Amazon wish list. Then, I change the settings so that I can see what’s been purchased off it, apparently because I am a greedy troll with absolutely no patience.
I have a horrible singing voice, yet I’ll sing along to most things – This is not helped by the fact that most of my favorite groups have lead singers with really high voices. (Passion Pit comes to mind.) For someone with a really limited vocal range, this is a problem, and it’s a bigger problem for anyone who is in a car with me when I’m controlling the iPod. Tone deaf doesn’t quite capture it. My voice cracks like that time it did during my 8th grade school play, only this time I’m not ashamed.
I’m not bad at whistling, though.
I make a concerted effort to keep my Twitter following to follower ratio no worse than 2:1 – I’ll be honest, my sense of self worth takes a little blow each time a spambot unfollows me.
I regularly talk about movies and shows I haven’t seen like I’m some kind of goddamn expert or something – I read enough IMDB and movie and TV blogs that I usually have a really good working knowledge about shows I don’t watch, both the plot and behind the scenes. Trust me, I will tell you about whatever stupid trivia I happen to know if it’s tangentially related to whatever we’re talking about. If I had a friend like this, I would stab him.
I owe some friends a Christmas card from like, three years ago – I told them that I would draw a cartoon of all four of them. Then a couple years went by, and they haven’t forgotten. Yesterday, my mom asked me to draw a Christmas card that was a cartoon of the whole family. I fear history may be repeating itself.
I can’t hear the word “duty” without laughing – One day in my high school AP Government class, our teacher started lecturing about civic duty. My friends and I lost it, and could not stop laughing for the entirety of the 45 minute long class. Then, the next day, the teacher announced that “yesterday, we were talking about civic duties,” and we all cracked up again. She wanted to kill us. To this day I find duty hysterical because I’m six years old.
I am procrastinating working on several cover letters and application essays by writing this article – But we already knew that, didn’t we. Oh well. Back to work. But first I need to check and see if Mr. Burns finished his task.
Originally published, Friday, December 7, 2012