Resume Management

There comes a point in one's career in which prospective employers no longer care about part of your history. When I'm trying to get a job when I'm 30, nobody really needs to know that I worked at Sea World when I was 16. It's relevant, but only in a very limited sense and has little direct bearing on what is happening now.

I wonder now if I have reached the point in which high school relationships don't count. Yes, I officially dated two girls in high school, but that was a long time ago and under very different circumstances than I would date a girl now. Does it count? Should it be removed from the "resume"?

What of relationships that were such in name only? Does it count that I dated Kat for two weeks? How can that be part of the tally? Probably not. I say now I have never been in a "true" relationship¹- one in which genuine exchanges of emotion and spirit took place. I never have been in the position to need to truly take another into account when making an important decision. I have not had to think of another person when envisioning the future, long term or short.

Perhaps I should just note my "girlfriend number" has an asterisk. Makes sense to me.

_______________________________________________________

1 I note with some ruefulness I'm getting to the age in which this would freak women out. Sounds like a catch-22.

Yeah, That Sounds Nice

I'm currently reading The Broom of the System by
David Foster Wallace (who else?). I had never ventured into DFW's fiction before, but at LaWell's prodding and providing of books, I am doing so. While I'm still in the nascent stages of the book and his fiction writing in general, I am enjoying it thoroughly, even if I still like his essays better. Aw well. Either way, I wanted to post this excerpt.

"I admit it, it is what I do, I am a kisser, and a kiss with Lenore is, if I may indulge a bit for a moment here, not so much a kiss as it is a dislocation, a removal and rude transportation of essence from self to lip, so that it is not so much two human bodies coming together and doing the usual things with their lips as it is two sets of lips spawned together and joined in kind from the beginning of post-Scarsdale time, achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union and trailing behind and below them, as the join and become whole, two now utterly superfluous fleshly bodies, drooping outward and downward from the kiss like the tired stems of overblossomed flora, trailing shoes on the ground, husks. A kiss with Lenore is a scenario in which I skate with buttered sloes over the moist rink of lower lip, sheltered from weathers by the wet warm overhang of upper, finally to crawl between lip and gum and pull the lip to me like a child's blanket and stare over it with beady, unfriendly eyes out at the world external to Lenore, of which I not longer wish to be part."

OK. So, I don't know if you noticed, but that whole thing was only two sentences. Also, wow. I don't know if anyone has actually experienced anything like that, but it sounds pretty incredible, no?

Seriously, the genius of this man almost hurts. In telling people about DFW, I say he was so brilliant, it tortured him. In reading him, I wish I could even approach a glimmer of his talent. The other part of me knows it couldn't handle that burden.