Just going to work should be enough. Just having a job should be enough. Going in there ten hours per day. “Networking.” Reading work related material on weekends. All the absurd time and energy demands of any “professional” “career” type gig in 2012 are more than enough of a burden on a human being’s brief life.
But you gotta pay the bills. You gotta register your car. You gotta serve jury duty. You gotta do your taxes. You have to go to the doctor, and sit in the waiting room, and fill out insurance forms which you have already filled out many times. You have to go to the doctor again because the first doctor never knows what the fuck he is talking about. No general practitioner on the entire god damn planet is ever of any use whatsoever in terms of diagnosing, treating, or curing disease. Always has to be the specialist, which you have to go to the general practitioner so you can even get told to go to the specialist. Find the specialist covered by your insurance plan. Call the specialist, make an appointment with the specialist. The specialist, like every other professional and business, is only open at the exact same time as you are working; you will have to take the time off of work. This does not mean that amount of work goes away, mind you. There is no one “covering” for anybody at work in 2012; productivity is maximized; man hours are stretched tight as a drum. You will need to do this work in off hours, still ailing from what the specialist was unable to diagnose, treat, or cure, because it turns out all doctors are completely useless. If you are a doctor, fuck you. Call the insurance company about the bills you got from the general practitioner and specialist, argue with them; get put on hold, get hung up on on hold, call them, get on hold again. The toilet is broken. Call somebody to fix the toilet. They only operate during normal business hours. Wait for the guy to come fix the toilet.
Wait for the guy to come set up your internet. Why can’t they just flip a fucking switch. My house is connected to wires, which are connected to more wires, which are connected to every wire in the entire world. Why do you have to be in my house and disrupting the squirrels’ nest on the local telephone pole– it is two thousand god damn motherfucking twelve. You have to set up internet with a level of technology you would use to set up a telegraph. Select two four hour windows in which the representative from the internet company may or may not come and flip a switch on the phone pole that they couldn’t have possibly figured out how to put in the cable and internet company’s headquarters, which is just a vast nest of similar switches. For Christ’s sake, just take my fucking money and make shit work.
You got a fix it ticket. For your license plate light. Your license plate light is out and so cops would not be able to identify you if you committed some more serious infraction than having your license plate light out. Go to Auto Zone. Wait in line. Get the license plate light bulb. Attempt to replace the license plate light bulb, except the weird little bulb gets sucked into some nether region deep in the rusty bowels of the car and is lost forever. Buy another license plate light bulb, except, the process of trying to fix the license plate light with the previous bulb has loosened and bent the little metal tab that holds the bulb into the socket and grounds it; finally, when you have finally, prone on your back in the filthy oil covered street trying to jam this tiny tic tac sized bulb into its impossibly dark and narrow housing not built to accomodate the width of two human fingers, even dainty ones like yours– finally when you get the fucking thing in there the tab breaks off and the bulb comes loose from your sweaty hands and clatters into the street. But does NOT break. God did you this one small favor. You are able to jerry rig a grounding/ stabilizing structure out of a paper clip and get the license plate light functioning; you drive it in to the Los Angeles fix it ticket testing center and driving over a curb causes it to clatter out of place and when you try to replace it now the new bulb gets pushed into the bowels of the car. But you are already there, in South Central LA at 8AM before work, having driven around the city’s impossibly confusing labyrinth of ramps and parking structures for 40 minutes. Now you have to set a court date, to delay proving that you have repaired this license plate light until you can fix it again. Fortunately they’re booked for six months. Six blissful months of not thinking about this fucking shit. But how will the city live on with this master fucking criminal on the streets.
You have to replace your smoke detectors and make sure there are batteries in them because the city is inspecting your apartment. You have to buy two nine volt batteries that you will pop in the smoke detectors for one day and then take out and never use again because fucking smoke detectors are the stupidest invention of all time– they have never once alerted anyone to an actual fire, but are constantly shrieking because you’ve cooked a normal meal involving no flames whatsoever. You have to take the cat to get shots. You have to fill out rebate paperwork for the phone you just purchased because they can’t just give you the god damn money; they have to make it a giant pain in the ass so forty per cent of people just forget about the rebate. You have to check your mail which is going to have the same three bills you pay online and the same mountain of color newsprint flyers, all the length of a novella, advertising tongues and lamb eyeballs and other shit out of a god damn horror movie for sale at the Mexican market. ¡CARNE FRESCA! You have to check your mail so you can painstakingly leaf through this Mexican butcher’s bible-length advertisement to make sure that no important document has slipped between the pages. It never has, but you have to check. Could be your death warrant between smudged photos of reduced cost jicama.
All this shit. There is a vessel inside me that holds all the little indignities and pains in the ass of life, and eleven god damn motherfucking hours per day at my bullshit menial job fills it right up to the fucking meniscus. I can not take even one more drop of miserable paperwork and bullshit, yet in life, there’s an entire full time career’s worth of this fucking shit that everyone must do. And then clean the house. Cook meals. Buy groceries. If you have kids… God, I can’t even motherfucking imagine.
This is why, even though I am a feminist, I motherfucking hate feminism and wish we could go back to the 1950’s. Because now everybody has to run the house. And everybody has to work– you need two motherfucking incomes because as soon as any households started having two incomes the price of absolutely everything was jacked up so those two incomes might cover the bare minimum standard of living.
Used to be you’d come home from the factory, which paid you enough wages to have a house and car, and your wife was waiting for you, and it was her whole fucking job to take care of everything besides working. You work, you come home, you forget about it. Now we both have to do all of it– the work, the house, the kids, the bullshit. It all just fucking multiplied. I can’t fucking vacuum. It is a rape of my leisure time. But now we both have to be busting our ass every motherfucking second to sustain a life that fucking sucks.
Anyway.
delicioustacos 
now I know why truckers do what they do for shitty pay and long hours driving for weeks at a time: because they live in their trucks and don’t have to do anything but drive and drop off loads, eat, shower, drive, pretrip inspections, call dispatch, drive, eat, drive. Probably the most straightforward job of all time.
Think of all the books on tape you could listen to.
Just so you know, I listed this site in my college applications as one of the sites I visit the most. I’m never getting into college.
Aww. That is genuinely charming.