All Japanese Girl Rolls

First, Tonight, Friday:

Meanwhile:

It gets me thinking about not just the process of work, but the process of finding work.  In a sense, it's a job in itself: crafting resume, cover letter; navigating the online application softwares various places now use; if you're looking for teaching, you've got a stack of letters somewhere and have to ask someone to send those out for you.  Then there's the waiting: most jobs in teaching seem to want the materials in October or November, and maybe they'll get back to you by April or May.  Even the average administrative gig's process can take two or three months.  Nevermind the task those who review those must undertake.  Like I said, it's a job...a process.

I'd rather be painting than have a finished painting on my wall.  I am more fulfilled in the time it takes between starting and finishing a poem than I am in the time between sending the poem out and having it published.  The process is paramount to the finished piece.  Just as we create art through a process, is there art in the process of finding the work?  

I spoke with "my attorney" yesterday, who's sent about 500 cover letters, where in the first sentence he intended to write "public," apparently had the word "pubic."  It humbled him, made himself laugh to tears, as the biggest firms in Manhattan, he believes, have his letter set aside as an example of what not to send.  The humor's there, the laugher, is wonderful.  His sense of humiliation, I hope, passes as it doesn't seem productive.  He told me about his typo, and I remembered the old lesson that there are no mistakes in art.

Is it possible that that missing "l" is exactly what his artist process needed?  I believe if that detail kept him from getting into any of those firms, those jobs where not were he can best serve.  The goal, perhaps, is to get the job, but that is just as important as doing the job.  If the job has called to you.  If you perform your job with faith and grace.  

Deep within Max's post, we're reminded that, regardless of your actual profession, we are always in process.  Challenges that are our opportunities.  If you work, why?  If not, do you use that time to work on the interior life?  

Here's the first poem in Stephen Dunn's Different Hours:

Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus

of melancholy--maybe those are

the Saturday night-events

to take your best girl to.  At least then

there might be moments of vanishing beauty

before the sky darkens,

and the expectation of happiness

would hardly exist

and therefore might be possible.

More and more you learn to live

with the unacceptable.

You sense the ever-hidden God

retreating even farther,

terrified or embarrassed.

You might was well be a clown,

big silly clothes, no evidence of desire.  

That's how you feel, say on a Tuesday.

Then out of the daily wreckage

comes an invitation

with your name on it.  Or more likely,

that best girl of yours offers you,

once again, a small local kindness.

You open your windows to good air

blowing in from who you knows where,

which you gulp and deeply inhale

as if you have a death sentence.  You have.

All your life, it seems, you've been appealing it.

Night sweats and useless strategem. Reprieves.

***