I might not be as dashing as the man on the cover, but I'm close.
In a perfect world, there would be no crime or war and I’d be able to Taser people with my mind. As it is, I have to stun them instead with my vast knowledge of Hollywood Squares and my ability to list every color tie that Bob Barker wore during his last 500 episodes of The Price is Right. I’ve got it all on a spreadsheet if you’re interested.
Unfortunately, neither of those things are “marketable skills” and they fail to impress employers when featured on my resume. So somehow I need to acquire some sort of valuable training but I can’t because the stupid community college won’t accept me because technically I didn’t finish high school. In reality, I did finish high school, but they wouldn’t let me graduate because I failed all my classes, which is stupid. I was there. I put in my time.
So I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do since my mom is insisting that I start paying rent to live over the garage. And since my freelance architecture business is growing a little slower than expected I just don’t have a regular source of income. All of the places I’ve applied to have fallen through because they refuse to meet my salary demands, even though $75,000/yr. is an awfully reasonable request if you ask me. Stupid Burger King.
I applied for a job in my friend Barry’s electronics start-up business and he seems like he’s impressed with what I have to offer but just doesn’t have the resources to hire me. Once he makes his first sale, though, he’s going to revisit my resume and see if maybe I can help out building high-definition TVs or something. I’d kind of like to build rockets for him, but he said that’s a little later in his business plan and he’d like to hire an astronaut to help out in that department. But he assured me that if I became an astronaut, he’d be totally down with me joining the yet-to-be-created rocket science department of his company.
That’s a great fall-back, really, but I just don’t know if I have that kind of time, especially since my mom has already started advertising the garage sale to sell all my stuff this weekend. I looked around on-line for some fast-track astronaut classes, but the only ones that I found never called me back even though I gave them my credit card number. Joke’s on them, though, because my card is maxed out to its $450 limit.
Ultimately, though, I don’t really want to be an astronaut. Space freaks me out with all those stars and dead space monkey corpses floating around up there. I just don’t think it’s a very safe environment for someone like me, and on top of that I’m incredibly fair-skinned and it would be a bad idea for me to be that close to the sun. Also, NASA gets mad at me when I call them and ask, “How big is Uranus?”
If you don’t think that’s hilarious, you’re dumb.
Looking back on high school, I did have a meeting with my guidance counselor once, and he asked me what I wanted to be when I was older. When I said I didn’t know, he told me to figure out what I was passionate about and strive to make a career out of it. That’s easy since I’m really only passionate about one thing and that’s mangoes. I found some nice land and tried to start a mango farm, but that ended quickly once Mr. Jenkins found out I had covered his backyard in mango trees without his permission. On top of that, I had accidentally planted apple trees because I don’t actually know what a mango is.
The longer this plays out, the more I realize the community college is my only real option. If I could just show my mom that I’m committed to getting a real job someday, maybe she’ll let me stay. So I’ve started courting the president of the community college in hopes that if I can get into a relationship with her, she’ll let me in despite my “poor academic record” and “questionable criminal history.” (Those are exact quotes from my last rejection letter.)
So far she hasn’t returned my advances, however, and recently she informed me that she was not interested and that her husband worked out. Little does she know that, while I don’t work out now, I finally figured out how to put together that bench press I bought two years ago and I plan to work my way up towards using it by doing a series of light curls and three to five push-ups per day for the next two years. So I’ll be pretty ripped some day.
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Bill Legarm
