I make a habit of reading parts of the New York Times everyday, and then I hop through a predictable procession of websites: Joemygod.com for gay political news; OMG Blog to see what they've posted about new fun music; Huffingtonpost Taste Section for food porn; Herald Times Bloomington for 1.5 minutes of local.
In navigating these pages, I often run across other links and teasers I'll read--often lists or rankings that have nothing to do with anything I'm really interested in knowing. The Fifteen best small towns in America, the unhealthiest states, 10 reasons your resume gets rejected--they are pat, unsurprising, or ambiguous in that way that anything is when it's just a paid advertisement posing as a story.
In this manner, I've read several lists of DO NOTS from headhunters and HR executives about interviewing, and the type of public image one is best advised to project to accompany the job search. Did you know, for example, that there are companies that do naught but scrub the naughty out of your Facebook feed? True, the real sublimated fuck of you, the asshole that you actually are, the person with the ribald sense of humor is nuked clean. You glow with the unintended but corporate consequences of acceptability.
This annoys the fuck out of me.
Look, if there's one thing that writing this blog is about, it's finding authenticity. I'd like to know as well as I can who the hell I am before I croak. Am I good, am I bad, am I inherently evil, has my life had meaning and if not, can I stuff the damn thing full now before it's too late? I barely have time to practice French and Danish, I sure as hell don't have time to princess pose for Corporate Fucking America.
I'd like to be the model cancer patient, I really would. Selfless, unaffected, dis-effected, angelic, but I am in no way any of those things. I'm vulgar, and messy, and often enough barely contained. I love to say fuck this, fuck that, fuck you, fuck them, fuck it all. I laugh when I say the word bitch and pinker souls visibly flinch. Yeah, Laugh. To be nice to me is to be honest, and to be honest is to speak as you normally would to me, and to speak as I normally would includes those words, plus motherfucker, which I hold especially dear.
Myself, I'd rather deal with a corporation that hires people who react and feel and have to post a Grace Jones video on Facebook because....damn. Just for that reason. I'd rather buy my groceries and shop for shirts where people know that slave labor made 90% of what surrounds us and no matter what our Facebook pages look like, we are dirty fucking bastards who are participating in the rape and murder of countless people who count less than us because they weren't born here. People who say fuck in Bengali, Creole, Hmong, Tagalog.
Along those same lines, let me just get this off my chest: I still can't be married in every state of the US, but by god if someone utters the word "fag" we now all have to fall out over bigotry. Does this bother anybody? Does it shock you that some fucking asshole tells fag jokes and there's a lynch mob forming for him while gay men are getting the shit beat out of them on New York City streets and all we hear is "Well, let's wait for the justice system to work." As if. Oh and by the way--Tranny. Hot tranny mess. Tranny tranny tranny. Damn that felt good.
I theorize that holding in who I am has created way more unhappiness in me than I've ever experienced as a contrarian, I theorize that unhappiness, self-repression and self editing are just forms of cancer, as destructive as what happens in my mouth, face and chest. The creation of homogenization was a boon to milk as a corporate product, so it seems people must be homogenized to maximize profit in just such a similar way.
There are times when I get a taste of the sweet in the bigotry of low expectations. I've applied for a few jobs recently and have heard nothing back, even from those for which I'm ridiculously well qualified--but in my cover letter, against the express advice of the HR experts, I talk about my year and half of learning from cancer. I talk about how that view has expanded me,, why it's wonderful to have to be creative about communicating, how nimble my mind has become to accomodate what I can't do well anymore, like lift heavy boxes or run on a treadmill.
And although I don't talk about it, how I like to use fuck on Facebook these days. In honor of authenticity, to create a Baudelairean moment out of a quotidian event, to say I'm alive you dumb fuck, look past the bandages and watch me smize! I don't need Tourette's, Cartman, I've got truth on my side.
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