“So” they say “what exactly are you going to do with that life of yours?”
and
“Will there be a job? Or will you just be a burden to family and state from here on in?”
I generally try to spit, subtly, at these people but perhaps I wouldn’t be so thorny if I could present them with an actual plan. The fact is I have nothing sensible or realistic to tell them. I haven’t seriously aspired towards any sort of job for about seven years, and I will tell you for why.
When I was in year nine my entire class took an online aptitude test that provided you with a list of all the possible professions (I do mean all of them, French Horn Polisher was an option) and ranked them in terms of suitability based on your answers to a series of questions. These professions were marked with either a green tick (for those jobs that would bring you great happiness and advancement) an orange circle (for the ones you weren’t suited to but could basically muddle along in without anyone noticing) or a red cross (for those jobs you should never under any circumstances enter in to, ever). Unlike the majority of people who second-guessed and calculated their way through the exercise, wanting to be reassured that whatever profession it was that they had their eye on was indeed the one their personality marked them out for, I answered the aptitude questions with complete honesty.
For my efforts the computer rewarded me with a long list of red.
I had one orange (Snake Milker, no really, which seemed unviable.)
It was sobering.
A lot of people were unhappy with what the computer had determined was their ideal career, and sat long faced for the remainder of the PSHE lesson ruminating on their grey futures in poultry wrangling or the professional horn polishing business, but I didn’t even have that to look forward to. At my most open and honest, and with what was surely the most comprehensive list of professions ever compiled to choose from, I had been deemed terminally unemployable. Sure, I could struggle through with the snake milking but I would always know that I was only hanging in there by the skin of my teeth. The other snake milkees, the ones that had got a green tick next to Snake Milker, the ones for whom The Milking was a calling that had ‘chosen them’, would look down on me, and rightly so.
This all stuck in the craw to such an extent that I basically gave up on aspirations and decided to dedicate what remained of my life to reading. It was working well until a few months ago when my mother pointed out (forcefully) that this was never going to make me any money, and my sister had to sit me down and make me work out exactly what it was I wanted to do. “Satire?” I said after a while this was dismissed as about as viable as the snake milking “Give me a break, Jonathan Swift” my sister said “what did you want to do before you became a posturing and delicate soul?”
I can’t remember exactly when I became a posturing and delicate soul, as I think it was quite a gradual process but I can remember incredibly clearly all the jobs I wanted to have before actually having a job was a possibility. As a child I was very clear cut about my (at that point, distant) future (it would be a concerning joyless child who wasn’t, really, “What do you want to be when you grow up Timmy?” “Oh...pfftt....something in an office?”)From the ages of four to eight professional acrobatics was my sole aim. My parents had already prepped me for the role by naming me Anna.
Anna the Acrobat!
Alliteration, I had observed, was the key to the profession. As long as the name caught on my lack of coordination and general dudities would be overlooked.
I could just see it....
Anna The Acrobat - wrought in bright colours on posters peeling from dry-cleaners windows. Anna The Acrobat - for one night only! Watch her walk the high wire using only her own massive head as a ballast! Marvel at her feats of daring-do and pause only briefly to allow her some quiet time with her inhaler between acts!
I have no idea where all this came from, as far as I can remember I never saw any particularly inspiring acrobatic displays as a child, I don’t even remember going to a circus. The notion just arrived fully formed in my soft child-head one day “acrobatics - that’s the thing for me”. My parents, ever supportive, installed a trapeze, hand-crafted by my father above my bed, and I practised each night with the sort of fervent self-disapline that has been entirely missing from my life ever since. If only I hadn’t expended it all on that damn trapeze, maybe I would actually have a real job by now.
Anyway, in spite of this initially fervour at age eight acrobatics was left in the dust as I slowly progressed through the dictionary of professions to acting. I was to play Belle in my infant schools production of Beauty and the Beast, opposite James, a flamboyant boy that teachers had decorated so that he resembled a gigantic horned slug. My beast.
Because the role was far too sustained for any one eight year old to tackle singlehandedly they split it between three of us. Other, less talented girls played Belle in the first and third act when she was either flacidly underdeveloped and innocent, or flaccidly developed and rightous, I on the other hand played her in the second, when, captured by slug-James, she went from pure provincal virgin, to Stockholm Syndrome sufferer, to committed lover. To my mind it ranked highly in the list of most complex roles in the western dramatic cannon.
I don’t want to sound boastful but it was staggeringly well received. People threw roses and the such like, asked for my signature, copied my hair cut. I was a hit. The amusingly named Mrs Badger took my parents to one side and suggested that they take me out of main stream education and enrole me in drama school. I knew they would because they had been so supportive with the acrobatics dream and it would be inconsistent of them not to be behind me in this - my true calling.
When they didn’t take their youngest daughter out of school at the age of eight and sentence her to a life of child-acting with all its attendant mental trauma, I started a long campaign of hate against them, pointedly sulking and not speaking to them for days in a way that I hoped would highlight my natural propensity for drama. Looking back I’m really not sure they noticed. Desolate and seeking comfort I turned to television (I still do this, by the way) and spent long evenings watching the Real Actors. Hating them. With that hard knotted hate that only children are really capable of. Fortunately after a while this subsided, but I kept on with the television watching and, in time, repeated exposure to Rolf Harris, who would leer grotesquely over dead or dying animals every evening at 6.30, suggested a new career path.
Along with every other nine year old in the county I spent the next three years discovering to my horror that you didn’t just become a vet. You couldn’t stride into your local practice and begin magically healing animals like St Francis of Assissi until someone decided to pay you for your trouble. Instead the preparation for the role involved really quite offensive amounts of science and by age twelve, realising that even small amounts of science offended me, I called it a day on vetinary surgery. From then on I floated about, fixing on various professions for short periods of time until year nine, when, as we know, all professions (bah one) were entirely ruled out.
Usually I like to tie up these blog entries in some way, but I still don't have a job, so I can't. I want to say that one computer run simulation doesn't genuinely dictate what jobs you can do, I think that is probably true, but I have no proof of it. I haven't been an acrobat, or an actor, or a vet, or a glass eye maker (that was on the cards for a bit) or a satirist even. I've been an Avon Lady for two hours but they fired me before it began. So far in life all the evidence points to the computer aptitude test being right on the money. I am terminally unemployable.
So I'm going to conclude, desolately, with an image.
Heres to the future...
(You were imaging real milk, weren't you!)
She actually looks quite expert, I wouldn't be that good, that snake would have become tangled in my hair by now, or I would have broken the glass or the snake by holding them too tightly.
Seriously though, if anyone needs a satirist, do let me know.
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