American families don't leave their kin without a referral

For those of you who haven't listened to my hour-long explanantion of the maternal side of my family, you probably don't know that my first cousins and I have made a persistent effort to stick together. We're still cousins, no doubt, so we don't hang out all the time, but we've gotten to know each other despite distances or age differences, minor as they are. I've been told to straighten up and fly right by my youngest cousin, I went out in drag with another cousin, and I've stayed at my eldest cousin's home a couple of times - that's what you get for being the first homeowner in a generation.

I sent my blog to this particular cousin, actually, because I was sure that she wouldn't divulge this blog to anyone who would cause trouble, which would be my parents. I have to hide this from them because I've found that blogging can be affected too much by their opinions, which still carry the disciplinary undertones from my teenaged years. Also, they think that anything on the internet will come back around to haunt me, essentially getting me fired and blacklisted from working near a computer again, unless it's a computer to type in orders at a restaurant.

She wrote back, approved of the blog, and then reminded me that she had a best friend working as an editor, no less, at Time Inc. and her husband had an editor friend as well. Excellent! While these are hardly a jobs-on-a-platter, they're always worth probing and certainly better than applying through the internet. Even with the internet, it's great to put a referral in your resume. HR employees love people, that's why they stretch an attractive human skin over their cold, robot bodies before going to work each morning. It's inevitable, then, that they'll ask your referral a few questions and listen to see if you're that ace-in-the-hole employee to fill the job. I must say that this has never worked for me yet. I had to go to the Pharaoh of Talk Radio to get my job and I'm sure that for a promotion he'll want to eat my first born. Hopefully the producers will record the noshing sounds for a lead-in after commercials about herbal impotence drugs.