When I grow up, I want to be... employed

The time has come for me to resume my job search In Earnest. I resolved to take the summer off... remember my plans for this summer and how great it was going to be? It's been just like I pictured it! Except not at all! Because it turns out that a hysterectomy can really throw a kink into your beach plans. You wouldn't think you'd need a uterus for building sandcastles or anything, and really it's not the uterus itself, but the post-surgical time period where you hope for death for about five weeks just does not put you in a frolicking, beachy mood. Who knew?

Anyway. August is nearly upon us. Chickadee starts school on September 1st. I have about a month to find myself a job. My resume is ready and the panic attacks have returned. All I need to do now is... get a job.

It sounds so simple. It is so anything but. I am remembering why I stopped this routine back in May.

Here's how it goes: Sit down at computer, bring up Monster, search on jobs in the immediate area. Note that I am either not qualified for or break out in hives at the sight of 99% of the listings. Hey! Failure Analysis Engineer! That sounds like it's right up... oh, that's not what I thought it was going to be. Failure Engineer, maybe. It's the analysis part (and the requirement for a degree in Engineering Physics) where I fall a bit short. Okay, no matter. Who needs dumb ol' Monster, anyway? I'm gonna search America's Job Bank. Except that, on AJB, I can't search just by area. I need a keyword. Okay. I try various combinations of keywords that yield no matches until I find myself typing keywords like "royalty" and "dictator" and "piles of money" in idle frustration.

(After that, I switch to trying to Google the ex's new woman based only on her first name and the newest snippet of info--gleaned because she gave the children musical toothbrushes--which is that she is a chemist for a large health and beauty conglomerate. Strictly speaking, this is not standard job search procedure. Also, there are a lot more chemists out there with that name than you might think. I got bupkus.)

And so my hour of job hunting leaves me with... zero leads. Would anyone like a copy of my resume? I'm a highly qualified and experienced engineer, if it happens to be the year 2000. If you're picky and want current qualifications, I write. Lots. And often. About nothing. But that's sort of an art, you know. Also I am an expert shopper, genius room designer, television critic, ice cream connoisseur, micro-manager, bargain maven, and--with the correct hormone patch on my derriere--relatively bright human being. It really seems to me like I ought to be able to shoot a little higher than assistant manager at Taco Bell. And yet, here I sit.

A month is a long time. I'll find something. Something with decent pay, that I don't hate. Right? These things have a way of working themselves out, I know. And any amount of woulda-coulda-shoulda-ing my career choice, staying home with my kids, my marriage, my divorce, any of these things, doesn't change that. But I still think it's a crying shame that there are no local job openings for royalty.