Lonesome Postcard from Bodymore, Murdaland

Until I move to New York on June 22, I'm in Baltimore, working at the same website that's employed me since '06. Most of my friends in the area have skipped town for the summer or forever, so I spend most of my free time alone in the throes of media consumption.

All of this alone time has given me plenty of occasions to consolidate my fears and anxieties about The Future. Lacking more amusing fare, I'll proceed now to burden you with these fears in what I can safely claim to be the first "major downer" entry on our humble Post-Burg blog.

Last week, the publishing course FedExed me a bundle of assignments and administrative junk, among which was a handy guide to resume-writing. While well-written and undoubtedly useful in making me a salable human being, the guide also skirts some of the pitfalls of "professionalism" as I understand it. Its author foresees that some of us may be averse to "blowing [our] own horn[s]," which is the resume's raison d'etre. Her advice? "Get over it. Do you want a job or not?"

Wise words, in a sense, but they called to mind those anti-drug workshops we were subjected to in middle school, scripted scenarios in which a teenager brandishes a ripe doobie for an impressionable youth. "Get over it," the stoner tells his innocuous comrade at the first sign of protest. "Do you want to be cool or not?" Then, alack, the kid does get over it and succumbs to peer pressure and takes a big 'ol puff, because who among us doesn't crave coolness?

Back then, we were told this was a mistake. We were told to trust our finely-honed instincts, which of course held that ripe doobies were agents of objective immorality. (You might say our instincts were a wee bit off here, but for the sake of argument let's assume they weren't.)

Nowadays, the metaphorical doobie of professionalism is dangled in front of us, with the major caveat that this time we're expected to smoke it willingly. Who doesn't want a job? Who doesn't want financial independence, a fulfilling career, a sense of accomplishment in the short- and long-term? Yeah, well, good for you, kid: how 'bout tooting yer horn a little bit, being something you're not? It won't hurt you... much...

So here I am, blaring my own shrill horn to the tune of "Dixie," marketing the piss out of myself. Granted, for most members of our generation, the resume is likely small potatoes. As many critics have noted, the social networking sites with which we're so obsessed exist purely for self-promotion. Anyone well-acquainted with Facebook's little boxes -- favorite this, favorite that, blurb here, photograph there -- probably has no problem filling out his or her resume. Same product, different packaging.

But as I pare down my accomplishments and job experience to a single, wide-margined page, I can't help but feel like a fraud. It's not that I'm lying or exaggerating my achievements. The problem is more that this one piece of paper, merely by virtue of its existence, casts me as something I'm not: a greedy go-getter willing to edge out the competition in the name of efficiency, capitalism and uppercase Progress. A truly great resume oozes ambition.

And the real fear is that this comparatively insignificant piece of paper is only the beginning. Job interviews demand the same fraudulence, writ large. The prefix in "interview" suggests an exchange of views, a candid and frank conversation between people. But this is precisely what job interviews are bent on preventing. Both interviewer and interviewee are role-players, hiding certain aspects of themselves in order to live up to preconceived notions of professionalism. (If the word "interview" were interpreted literally, could there even be a passive "interviewee"? Wouldn't both parties be interviewers?) The resume-writing guide asks us to consider what employers seek when they read resumes. "A new friend? No!" Well, but why not? Why don't they want their subordinates to be their pals? Why further sever the tenuous bonds of community?

The answer, of course, is "for the sake the professionalism." As near as I can tell, "professionalism" can be defined as "the subjugation and suppression of personal interests, identity traits and idiosyncrasies, in pursuit of increased productivity in the workplace." Not to say that this is a new critique of white-collar livin'. From The Office to Fight Club to Office Space to Joshua Ferris's And Then We Came to the End, contemporary pop culture has skewered professionalism time and again. Even "Dilbert," which is about as subversive as a pack of airline peanuts, is known for mocking white-collar mores. Since the '90s and the prosperity of the Clinton era, dysfunction in the workplace has practically become a genre unto itself. Here we are, mid-2008, and we're still milking it for all it's worth.

Because it's still a problem. Is it any wonder that white-collar Americans are constantly complaining about their stress levels and emotional disconnects when they're required to conceal whole elements of their identities -- however shifting and amorphous those identities might naturally be -- for forty hours a week? Is it really surprising that we suffer from psychological conditions like imposter syndrome when it's our full-time duty to wear the mask of someone even-keeled, vibrant and engaged? Do post-grads often laud college as "the best four years of their lives" because they were then exempt from all that bullshit, the dress codes and 9-to-5 rigmarole*?

Again, I'm not avowing that I'm onto something original here. Professionalism and its accompanying afflictions are yesterday's news, traceable to Marx and all that talk of species-being and alienation; this is all pretty trite business. But now that I've committed myself to being a part of that world, its lifestyle suddenly appears more impoverished and hypocritical than ever before. I always "knew" that office life had its share of phoniness, but in a way I was unable to grasp its full import.

In many senses, these are trivial concerns. For one thing, there's no way to predict what my future workplace -- assuming there is one -- will be like. Certainly all professional environments aren't as stifling and homogeneous as I've made them out to be. Furthermore, even if my gainful employment necessitates social posturing and suppression, I will still have a job, a fancy-schmancy New York one, at that. Given such good fortune, hemming and hawing over the vagaries of "identity" is akin to looking a gift horse in the mouth.

The remaining question is whether or not it's possible to "Just Say No" to professionalism, to be the good little anti-drug kid. Is such a denial tenable? If I want to live above a certain threshold of comfort and/or available leisure time, what are my other options?

This is a really shitty postcard.

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*Excepting business majors and certain smarmy pre-law types, whose lust for material wealth is such that they began exuding professionalism sometime between teething and learning to tie their shoelaces, experts say.

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BOOKS
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

MUSIC
"Kim and Jessie" by M83, from the album Saturdays=Youth
"Intermission" by The Death Set, from the album Worldwide
Cadence Weapon, Afterparty Babies
Cannonball Adderley, The Black Messiah