The time has come for me to resume my job search In Earnest. I resolved to take the summer off… remember my plans for this summer and how great it was going to be? It’s been just like I pictured it! Except not at all! Because it turns out that a hysterectomy can really throw a kink into your beach plans. You wouldn’t think you’d need a uterus for building sandcastles or anything, and really it’s not the uterus itself, but the post-surgical time period where you hope for death for about five weeks just does not put you in a frolicking, beachy mood. Who knew?

Anyway. August is nearly upon us. Chickadee starts school on September 1st. I have about a month to find myself a job. My resume is ready and the panic attacks have returned. All I need to do now is… get a job.

It sounds so simple. It is so anything but. I am remembering why I stopped this routine back in May.

Here’s how it goes: Sit down at computer, bring up Monster, search on jobs in the immediate area. Note that I am either not qualified for or break out in hives at the sight of 99% of the listings. Hey! Failure Analysis Engineer! That sounds like it’s right up… oh, that’s not what I thought it was going to be. Failure Engineer, maybe. It’s the analysis part (and the requirement for a degree in Engineering Physics) where I fall a bit short. Okay, no matter. Who needs dumb ol’ Monster, anyway? I’m gonna search America’s Job Bank. Except that, on AJB, I can’t search just by area. I need a keyword. Okay. I try various combinations of keywords that yield no matches until I find myself typing keywords like “royalty” and “dictator” and “piles of money” in idle frustration.

(After that, I switch to trying to Google the ex’s new woman based only on her first name and the newest snippet of info–gleaned because she gave the children musical toothbrushes–which is that she is a chemist for a large health and beauty conglomerate. Strictly speaking, this is not standard job search procedure. Also, there are a lot more chemists out there with that name than you might think. I got bupkus.)

And so my hour of job hunting leaves me with… zero leads. Would anyone like a copy of my resume? I’m a highly qualified and experienced engineer, if it happens to be the year 2000. If you’re picky and want current qualifications, I write. Lots. And often. About nothing. But that’s sort of an art, you know. Also I am an expert shopper, genius room designer, television critic, ice cream connoisseur, micro-manager, bargain maven, and–with the correct hormone patch on my derriere–relatively bright human being. It really seems to me like I ought to be able to shoot a little higher than assistant manager at Taco Bell. And yet, here I sit.

A month is a long time. I’ll find something. Something with decent pay, that I don’t hate. Right? These things have a way of working themselves out, I know. And any amount of woulda-coulda-shoulda-ing my career choice, staying home with my kids, my marriage, my divorce, any of these things, doesn’t change that. But I still think it’s a crying shame that there are no local job openings for royalty.