-Andrew Ramirez
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Lately, I’ve been getting a total kick out of the simplest shit. Like the other day I caught wind of some beach-cruising, sundress-sporting bombshell drawling into her iPhone: I just wanna experience Madrid ‘cause I think it would be a totally cool experience. And today I heard this dude say to his girlfriend: Baby I wasn’t looking at her, so don’t’ give me that look, which made me start a list right then and there, of all the words that can double as both nouns and verbs. Plus, I kind of like it when someone uses a word both ways in a sentence. It’s the stark rhythm of the blunted conversation. It’s not having enough ammo to variate word choice, or playing close careful attention to the unified sonic cadence of your sentences. So when someone asked me what I was doing jotting all these words on a legal pad, and I told them Oh you know just going to work on a little bit of…work…I knew I could represent this new kind of poetry just fine.
Sites like these make the abundance completely clear: there’re at least one hundred and fifty words that could be used as both nouns and verbs—and everyday we’re double dipping. But strangely enough, one of my favorites—resume—didn’t show up on the list. I mean you can do two things with resume, right? By going out for coffee with that extra special ex, you can legitimately hope to resume a previously halted romance, just like you can turn in a resume to Pasta Roma and hope to get a job (two things—I tried them both this past year—that didn’t quite pan out). But maybe the reason resume wasn’t on the list of one hundred and fifty noun/verb words was just because, technically, resume is the verb and résumé is the noun, and what with all those accents stroked over the top—it makes them two different words, right?
Well whatever, no one attaches those two accents anymore, and anyway, amidst graduation and pending employment, I’m really trying to perfect the current one on my desktop. Not the one that means you resume another year of classes, or another year of sugar sweet academia with all its pretty five-page analytical gumdrops, but the other kind of resume—ahem, résumé—the one with WHAT THE HELL NOW!? stamped right next to your name, alongside a one hundred and fifty word cover letter that doesn’t mean anything, much less something twice…
Currently, though, I’m caught in a saucy kind of love/hate relationship with mine. It’s not that I don’t have anything to put on it—because I do (and that’s the love part)—but instead, it’s because I’m trying to find interesting ways of saying the same thing everyone else’s says, but I hate myself for it because it’s harder than I thought it’d be. One shining example of this is the term “interpersonal skills.” What the fuck does this even mean? I don’t know, but everybody—including myself—has it typed right there on the resume, and what I really need is an advantage, a small twist, to put me a shoe length ahead of the rest.
EXPERIENCE
Horse Whisperer Los Angeles, CA Fall 2012
Spent summer developing strong interspecies interpersonal skills with Molly the horse
- Strengthened understanding of the importance of animals and their underlying desires
- Used various methods of communication to understand Molly the horse when she was trying to tell me the henhouse was on fire
- Improved appreciation of sunsets by riding into a lot of them
Truly though, I don’t care all that much about my resume being perfect, or even wholly original because it’s all just a game you got to play, kind of like Scrabble but less rewarding—so more accurately: Parcheesi—and I’m taking things easy, one horse trot at a time, happy enough if that piece of paper comes through for me and at least gets me to a face-to-face, at which point I’ll maybe exit an office, tie knotted tie around my throat, telling the secretary: Do you smoke? I need a smoke.
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