Here's My Soul, Cheap as Free!

Ugh. I just filled out another job application to, you know, stay in the game. Even if it's half-hearted, it helps me rub off the rust. And I feel like such a resume whore now, like I'm standing on a street corner saying, "Hey big boy, come check this out!"

Blah blah blah, look at me and all my skillz, I am so teh bomb. This whole cover letter/resume system we've set up is utter crap. Am I right? (I hear the voice of Turk from Scrubs saying, "Hells yeah!" Uh-hmm.)

Truly, I am an artist at heart. We artists don't report to anyone and we don't keep hours. And we also don't get paid. Being of the artistic ilk is a poor endeavour, sadly.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

tee-hee. you said whore. :)

Wendy Wagner; said...

Who said artists don't keep hours and don't get paid? I can't think of one famous one that functioned like that!

As the lady who was unemployed for most of a year, and job-hunting with a chip on her shoulder, I know just how you feel. But I just want to point out that I've written more words since I got a job than I did the entire nine months I was unemployed.

Good luck!

Kt said...

Okay, I might give you the "getting paid" part, depending how commercially successful you are as an artist, but what I mean is that the "work" of art, intrinsically, does not answer to a forced schedule or an exterior boss. You can be an artist in a 9-5 job and train yourself to be creative in that window, you can be given an assignment and train yourself to use it as the basis for inspiration, but since the creative process taps so deeply into one's subconscious, I think it's harder to control or turn off than your typical workday mindset.

The artists who train themselves to mash into an official JOB may be inadvertently limiting themselves. I think throwing commercial viability into the mix severely hampers the end product.

Of course, then you things like the amazing animation of Disney in its prime (and Pixar today), which was both scheduled and commercially oriented, so I guess there are always exceptions.

SWP said...

It's an utterly demeaning experience, I agree.

But here's a secret: cover letters.

You can express yourself meaningfully and creatively with a cover letter. Writing them is excruciating, so I only save them for a job I care about getting. Which means I've written 3.

Monster Librarian said...

I probably have you beat. I have sent out over a dozen resumes and rewritten my cover letter so many times that I think I have it memorized.

I too am a resume whore. :)