About Last Night

If I wonder why my phone has been ringing off the hook with more text messaging fun from, uh, "Re-Girlfriend" (I found The Company Bitch's use so effective, I knew it was only a matter of time before I stole it for the other sex) than calls from possible employers, I got a good little hip check from reality yesterday.

After doing my best to maintain my weekly tradition of a meal at the best place no (or maybe "not enough") people have eaten at in Chicago, I swung by The Chronic's office for an hour or two. Still rolling my tongue along the roof of my mouth and wondering just how badly that first spoonful of chicken tomato pasta soup had burned me, I caught up on a week's worth of items I had missed. (Who the hell is Carl Monday you ask?)

Not allowing me the simple route of sitting around this summer and feeling sorry for myself, a staff advisor on the newspaper looked over my most recent renovations to my resume (a late grade—an "A," by the way—bumped the GPA up another two hundreths of a point or something), it was Edit City.

"Cut this," "re-word this," ... make it fucking active. You know, the same thing I was being told every week when I'm sure my editors were ready to say, "What part of subject-verb-object do you not fucking understand?!"

So there was that. And when I went back to the train station, still not used to no longer routinely having a weekly pass in my back pocket, I met a lengthy line at the ticket window. So much for catching that 7:40. Better send a text message letting her know I'll be late.

And what better place to kill an hour and watch some intense Game Seven National Hockey League action than ... than ... well, nobody in the area had it on television, actually. I guess that's what happens when there's also a White Sox game against a division rival ... not to mention a crucial Game Five in the NBA that night. Oh, and it's hockey we're talking about.

Alas, the scene remains the Chicago News Room. It's one of the two bars inside the Ogilvie facility, and the prices at both places I'm pretty sure could rival what they charge at major sporting events. Still, the bartender's first words to me—during a post-season baseball game I was catching after class one night a few semesters ago—were, "Gotta buy something or gotta leave."

And so I said a scotch on the rocks. It was $5.50.

Then he bought my next one.

That's pretty much how it's worked every time I've come running into the train station, scurried up the escalator, burst through the revolving door and made it just in time to watch my train leave. (P.S. Thank you very much, Chicago Clean Indoor Air Oridnance of 2005—and please stay out of the suburbs.)

Last night, looking over my sorry-ass resume, the scotch went down quite easy. And everything continued to go down easy when I hopped off my train in Geneva and entered Caboose's to meet up and watch Dirk Nowitzki go, well, ape-fucking-shit on the Phoenix Suns.

As it turned out, the woman seated beside me saw my scratched-up resume sitting on top of the three newspapers I had brought home—check that, two newspapers and the RedEye (need to be accurate here ...).

I saw her glancing at it a few times, but then she finally asked if it was a resume (Duh ...) and then, "Could I see it?"

Now, the part of me that's been living in this unrealistic world where a college student inches closer to graduation and expects to walk out of the ceremony and basically have employers fall out of the sky wanting to capture you and drag you to a cubicle you'll inhabit for the remainder of your life—sadly, that part of me is still alive and well. Sure, there's no chance this would ever happen, but it's comforting to your ego to still think of the job hunt that way. That said, I immediately wondered if this woman worked for a local paper. Yes, I want to get the hell out of the suburbs, but even more so, I want to get the hell out of the restaurant. Fawning over college girl co-workers is fun for a while, but when you're 28 years old and now armed with a degree, you have to wince when you ask, "And how would you like those eggs prepared?" "What kind of cheese?" "Toast or pancakes?"

Back to the woman at the bar, I have to ask her why she wants to look this thing over. She's perusing the reprinted one (without corrections, just a bolder font), and says, "I look over resumes for a living."

Well, that's just fucking terrific, isn't it?

There's a huge gap she tells me. Of course there's a huge gap, I say. I wasn't in school. Don't worry, though. I've got it all figured out. When I bomb my first interview, the explanation will simply be, "I was broke." We can leave out that part about me dropping out of University because I thought I was going to be a screenwriter (only to, instead, become a bartender/server/vaccum salesman/video clerk/etc.).

"But you don't want it to look like you were just sitting on your ass during that time," she tells me. And so, maybe she's right. After all, I've been trying to limit the "Experience" portion to just writing jobs. But I guess the three-and-a-half years at the country club would make for some nice filler. And here I'd thought it only made for some great stories.

After the Mavericks conclude their pummeling of the Suns, I realize that I need to get home and straighten this shit out. A short cab ride later, I'm in the disaster area of the basement we call "my room" and anxious to do this over. Send more out.

Only thing is, I fall asleep. It's been a long day.