Politeness is an inconvenience, despite its virtue

The race to the bottom of the heap, mired in manure to the chest or even the chin, is the secret of success for many conspicuous personages. I need only ring the bell for James Frey, at least before the expose, Donald Trump, the prince of gaudy eyesores and incorrigible bankruptcy bailouts, and our pencil-thin pariah Paris Hilton, who has not a bone of saving grace, to point out that being a miserable person will be rewarded handsomely! This is, without a doubt, the 21st century rags-to-riches story, but Horatio Alger be cursed, because doing what mom and dad said will only result in rewards no more exciting than plain vanilla ice cream, definitely not Breyer's.

Enter my blog! If it takes off, I could be walking hand-in-hand with other notables. For instance, there are bloggers who regularly give themselves a manure facial, such as the Washingtonienne: a coke-sniffing Pennsylvania Ave. street-walker, proud of herself beyond all reason. More prominently, and with much more appeal, are the self-made Hollywood automartyrs, like Morgan Spurlock, the once praised but now forgettable McDonald's antihero and creator of Super Size Me. As I digested my Burger King breakfast, it came to me in a carb-loaded vision that this non-native New Yorker pulled off a rather common coup-de-tete: he stole the lifestyle of the urban lower class and made money selling it to the middle class. Hopefully, since he is clearly an exploitation artist, he can go over some new ideas with Harmony Korine, who acutely purges melodrama all over her movies with the finesse of a Lifetime movie that interjects daytrading scandal and German war crimes into a typical waspy wham-bam-beat 'er up hormone fest. At the very least, these vision-in-the-flesh directors have given screentime to everyone from frumpy hipster girls to lanky slang-slinging rollerbladers, those who would normally never get the chance.

The problem, though, is that my blog keeps floating up from the bottom of the manure spread, where it could be popular. If no one responded to my resume, I'd look pretty sorry and therefore prove a real point to a mass audience that likes to be shown which conclusions they should jump to. I'm fifty resumes in and I've already gotten three calls! One of them was a dud, the other was for a job that I shouldn't have applied for, and, most recently, I got a call from a young lady who left me with the wrong message concerning my resume. When I checked my voicemail yesterday, I had a message from Robert Half, another legal staffing firm, asking me to call them back. I called back later on, only to be asked brusquely which position I applied for, and to which I was told that I did not apply for that position, despite the fact that I had applied for it and nearly all the other positions within my reach. Then, she had another call to take, and couldn't get ahold of me again, yesterday or today. I gave her a courteous reminder call that she could return my call anytime, but apparently my application and her position as a legal staffer were irksome details in her life, so, no call back.

I'm not sure what to do about jobs today, besides doing the one that I'm paid for.