While going through some old stuff, I found the list of bizarre resume interests/hobbies that I collected during one summer spent sourcing countless resumes. These are real quotes from real resumes submitted by actual people for actual paying jobs.
- Fluent in Tolkien languages
- World of Warcraft Guild Leader
- Avid Fly Fisherman
- Terraforming Mars
- Amateur Hydroponics
- Extra in Bollywood film shoots (this sounds kind of awesome actually)
- Computer Camp attendee
- Have been to 2/3 of China
- Amateur weather forecasting
- Socializing
- Mothers of Twins Club Member
- Developing and using my own stock analysis software
- Social computing
- Chameleon-type social skills
- Live action role playing (New England Interactive Literature)
- Strategy board games
Today is May 13th and today you graduate and the rules are about to change, and one of them is this: Decisions are made by those who show up. Don’t ever forget that you’re a citizen of this world.
Don’t ever forget that you’re a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character. You’re too good for schadenfreude, you’re too good for gossip and snark, you’re too good for intolerance—and since you’re walking into the middle of a presidential election, it’s worth mentioning that you’re too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy. Unless they went to Georgetown, in which case, they can go to hell.
Only people wrong for us, I decided,
confused soul
with intelligence or with sorrow.
Discussions with them never touched
down, clicked in. In our true friends
there it was, simply.
It became a part of what we meant
when we said their names.
Because finally the personal is all that matters, we spend years describing stones, chairs, abandoned farmhouses— until we're ready. Always it's a matter of precision, what it feels like to kiss someone or to walk out the door. How good it was to practice on stones which were things we could love without weeping over. How good someone else abandoned the farmhouse, bankrupt and desperate. Now we can bring a fine edge to our parents. We can hold hurt up to the sun for examination. But just when we think we have it, the personal goes the way of belief. What seemed so deep begins to seem naive, something that could be trusted because we hadn't read Plato or held two contradictory ideas or women in the same day. Love, then, becomes an old movie. Loss seems so common it belongs to the air, to breath itself, anyone's. We're left with style, a particular way of standing and saying, the idiosyncratic look at the frown which means nothing until we say it does. Years later, long after we believed it peculiar to ourselves, we return to love. We return to everything strange, inchoate, like living with someone, like living alone, settling for the partial, the almost satisfactory sense of it.
My apartment in Berlin was on the bottom street. I miss it.
COMPARISON OF STREETS IN BERLIN BEFORE THE WAR AND AFTER THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CITY AFTER THE WAR, 2nd HALF OF THE 20th CENTURY
“The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes.” - Tender is the Night
