He or she who gets hired is not necessarily the one who can do that job best; but, the one who knows the most about how to get hired.

-Richard Lathrop, Who’s Hiring Who?

Know then thyself,

Do not the Market scan

Until you’ve surveyed all You are,

Then you will have your plan.

-Alexander Pope (as paraphrased by Richard Nelson Bolles in the incredible What Color is Your Parachute?)

3 reasons the list below is not helpful.

Compared to actually reading the book.

1. It doesn’t focus on the really, really, really valuable part of What Color is Your Parachute? – The Flower Exercise. Know thyself, someone said. But how? Believe it or not, Richard Nelson Bolles explains, in a way that is completely accessible and not at all condescending, how we can know ourselves better. Nearly half of the book consists of simple exercises or questions to ask oneself.  My experience with the book allowed me to realize, or at the very least define, my skills, values, and preferences. Even further, it helped me communicate them to others.
2. It isn’t nearly as gentle and encouraging as What Color is Your Parachute? I really, really love Mr. Bolles. If you buy his book, you will too.
3. It is too gentle and encouraging. You won’t find a job by reading 25 tips. It might help, but it also might prolong bad habits and prevent you from doing the life-changing work of introspection and goal-setting. Bolles advises you to treat job-hunting as a full-time job. Me, I give you a list.

The List

1. There are at least a million job-openings each month, even in times like these. Bolles bases this calculation on statistics from a 2004 speech by Ben Bernanke that talks about the “churn” of the labor market. Everyday, Bolles reminds us, people get promoted, people retire, people quit, people move, people get injured or sick, people die, and people get fired or laid off – creating vacancies for you to fill.
2. Employer’s look for job-hunters in the opposite way that job-hunters look for employees. At the top of employer’s preferences: hiring from within. At the bottom: using a resume. Obviously, you can’t do anything about the fact that you are not yet within.  But you can do everything you can to network and become known to the people who are looking to fill a position, instead of thinking that your resume is out there performing some kind of job-getting function. And you can do premliminary work to ensure that you are within the employer’s head when she decides to start hiring.
3. The First Thing You Should Do When You Find Yourself Unemployed. Sleep. Exercise. Drink plenty of water. No joke. And get unemployment. (I would also add, enjoy yourself. Discover yourself. My four months of unemployment, ironically, were some of the most productive months of my life.)
4. 7 Most Important Truths to Remember While You’re Unemployed.
   1. Job- hunting is an activity that repeats itself over and over again in most people’s lives.
   2. Job- hunting is an art, not a science.
   3. Job- hunting is always mysterious.
   4. There is no always wrong way to hunt for a job.
   5. There is no always right way to hunt for a job.
   6. Mastering the job hunt is a lot of hard work and takes some hard thinking. (Bolles also reminds us that we do the job hunt the same way we do Life. Your slacker methods might not work this time.)
   7. Job- hunting always takes some luck.
5. Keep hope alive. If what you’re doing isn’t working, change your tactics. Try a new strategy.
6. Everybody is handicapped. We all have a finite number of skills. We all lack something. The trick is to focus on the skills you do have.
7. Shyness can be overcome by informational interviews. Informational interviews are the bee’s knees. There’s nothing at stake, and they usually create valuable connections.
8. The purpose of a resume is to get an interview. The first of many reasons why you shouldn’t rely on your resume.
9. Employers use resumes primarily to eliminate candidates. It takes an HR person 8-30 seconds to scan a resume and one more second to toss it in the round file.
10. A resume is more a business card than a biography.
11. A resume presents itself to the fingers before the eyes.
12. E-mail resumes kinda suck. If you must e-mail your resume, accompany it with a hard copy, on nice paper.
13. 3 Reasons not to depend on resumes:
    1. They are depressing. If you believe in your resume then you’ll believe that those who reject it are rejecting you.
    2. Resumes make you feel like you’re doing something. Even if employers like resumes, yours is just one molecule in a vast ocean of paper.
    3. They might cause you to give up early. If you send out or post 1,000 resumes without a nibble, you may falsely conclude there are no jobs out there. There are (see #1).
14. A resume is something you should never send ahead of you, but always leave behind you. Usually.
15. Different resumes appeal to different employees. If someone claims to have the one-size-fits-all solution, do not believe them.
16. Use the EASY method of talking about your qualifications. Connect your….
    • Experience to your…
    • Achievements, which illustrate your
    • Skills, which
    • You link to the relevant aspects of the job you’re going after.
17. USE YOUR CONTACTS! This means:
    • Reach out everyone you know, anyone you met at a party in the past two years, every gas station attendant, every co-worker from the last five jobs…you get the picture: EVERYONE!
    • Make it your mission to find out who, at the company you want to work for, has the power to hire you. Bolles has a lot of tips for how to approach your contacts, which I won’t enumerate here.
    • Once you find someone who know the person with the power to hire, ask the following questions:
      1. Do you know the person who has the power to hire me at Company X?
      2. What can you tell me about them?
      3. Given the type of job I am looking for, do you think it would be worth going to see them?
      4. Do you have their contact info?
      5. May I tell them that it was you who recommended that I talk with them?
      6. Would you be willing to call ahead, to set up an appointment for me, and tell them who I am?
18. Top 10 biggest mistakes made in job interviews.
    1. Going after only large organizations
    2. Hunting all by yourself for places to visit, using ads and resumes.
    3. Doing no homework on an organization before going there.
    4. Allowing the Personnel or Human Resources Department to interview you. Bolles reminds us: their primary purpose is to screen you OUT.
    5. Setting no time limit when you make the appointment.
    6. Letting your resume be used as the agenda for the interview.
    7. Talking too much about yourself and how the job will benefit you.
    8. Talking for over two minutes at a time.
    9. Approaching them as if you were a “job beggar.”
    10. Not sending a thank you note as soon as you get home.
19. 10 Commandments for job interviews.
    1. Go after small organizations.
    2. Hunt for interviews using the aid of friends and acquaintances.
    3. Do thorough homework on an organization before applying
    4. Identify who has the position to hire you.
    5. Ask for twenty minutes of their time. Take twenty minutes of their time, no more, no less.
    6. Go to the interview with your own agenda – questions, curiosities, and whether or not this job fits you.
    7. Talk about yourself only if what you say offers them something.
    8. Answer each question in less than two minutes (and more than 20 seconds).
    9. Approach them as if you are a resource, able to produce better work than any predecessor.
    10. Always write a thank you note and mail it that day or the next morning.
20. 6 questions you should always ask at the end of an interview.
    1. Given my skills and experience, is there work here that you would consider me for?
    2. Can you offer me this job?
    3. Do you want me to come back for another interview, perhaps with some of the other decision-makers here?
    4. When may I expect to hear from you?”
    5. Might I ask when would be the latest I can expect to hear from you?
    6. May I contact you after that date if I don’t hear from you?
21. 7 secrets of salary negotiation. For me, the biggest “secret” was simply that I should negotiate. I’ve had only about a dozen jobs, and I had never negotiated my salary. As for the seven secrets, they are secret. Buy the book.
22. 7 rules for choosing or changing careers
    1. Talk to people who are already doing the work. Choose anything, but talk to people before jumping in.
    2. Preserve both constancy and change. Don’t change everything at once. If you have a field and a job title, say Advertising and Executive Assistant, and what you really want to be is a Writer for a Newspaper, you might consider becoming a Writer in Advertising, or an Executive Assistant at a Newspaper, before making the full leap.
    3. Start with yourself. Not “what’s hot” in the job market.
    4. Choose a career that uses your favorite skills, in your favorite subjects, in fields that fascinate you, and puts you in your preferred environments and working conditions, working towards your preferred goals or values. I had no idea what my preferences, fascinations, or favorites were before using the exercises in Parachute, so if that last sentence means nothing to you, buy the book!
    5. The more time you give it, the better your choice will be.
    6. You don’t have to get it right the first time.
    7. The more fun you are having, the more likely you are doing it right.
23. Don’t get a degree to get a job. Degrees don’t guarantee jobs. They cost a lot of money, and time. Get a degree if you want to learn about that field and you can afford it, not for job security.
24. Job-hunters don’t fail to find their dream job because they lack information about the job-market, but because they lack information about themselves. I worked for 3 or 4 hours a day, for a week, doing the exercises that collectively form what Bolles calls the flower diagram. In the end, I not only knew more about myself, but I was able to articulate what I knew and look at it in this really cool diagram.
25. If you read What Color is Your Parachute? and follow its advice, you will find a job. I did.

These days a lot of people are asking themselves, “How do I find a job?”

Simple:
Get a copy of What Color is Your Parachute?.
Buy it. Take it out from your library.

Richard Nelson Bolles has been writing and rewriting this perennially best -selling career and job hunting guide since 1970.

Last August, after an expected promotion became an unexpected (and indefinite) vacation, I decided to accept this sudden influx of free time (and unemployment checks) and use it to seek out my dream job.

What Color is Your Parachute?, even the 1990′s version at my local library, changed my life. And I haven’t even read the whole thing.

Giving Thanks

One of the things that really appealed to me about Parachute was the caring and compassionate tone. Bolles ends the preface to the 2009 edition with this sentence:

I am a deeply grateful man.

This is profound to me because I’ve found that gratitude is an emotion of the wise. We get pleasure from anything we receive, but gratification describes a deeper feeling that can only come when we have the wisdom to recognize the value of the gift. You can’t get this wisdom without giving. Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman says it well:

The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in loss of self-consciousness. Time-stops.

- from Authentic Happiness, pg. 9

Once you know that giving is gratifying, the universe is yours.

It may seem that I am going off on a tangent here, but the idea of service as a path to well-being is central to Bolles’s book and talks about success in a different tone than a self-help book like, say, The 4-hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss.

Digression: Freedom vs Satisfaction – What color is your 4 hour workweek?

There was something bothering me about Ferriss and it wasn’t the extra “S” in his name. His book got me excited and encouraged me to move out of my comfort zone. I wrote about one of Ferriss’s great ideas a few weeks ago and wrote this post bemoaning the fact that someone else wrote about Ferriss in a way that was funnier and more engaging than I would have. So, it is obvious that I admire the ideas I’ve found in The 4-hour Workweek.

But Ferriss’s book, and the approach to happiness it proscribes, lacks something that completely imbues Parachute…gratitude.

Where The 4-hour Workweek offers ways to manipulate the System so that it serves you, What Color is Your Parachute? asks precise questions to help you determine how you can happily be of service within the System. Ferriss encourages my sense of entitlement. He talks less about the spiritual satisfaction you can get out of being of service in a good job, and more about the spiritual malaise that you can escape by getting out of your comfort zone and the grip of employers.

In order to live well, I think it is important to be able to break free from the things that are holding you back, but if that is not accompanied by acts of kindness, the feeling that you are of service to a greater good, then all the freedom in the world will not bring you the happiness that feeling purposeful can.

Before reading What Color is Your Parachute? I did not think I could find happiness in the work-a-day world. Now I know better. There are thousands of places where I could happily serve.

My Top 7  Gleanings from What Color is Your Parachute?

1. Informational interviews – Employers hire people they know first. Be known.
2. Thank you cards – Especially if you are authentically thankful, a thank you note will make you stick in an employers head. If your card is attractive and sits on their desk for a week, then it is likely that they never forget you. When an opening comes up, your more likely to get a call.
3. Know thyself – As a pretty introspective guy, I was shocked that a simple exercise in a book could clarify my skills, values, and desires to a degree that 32 years of thinking hadn’t.  In less than a long weekend, I had created a “flower diagram” that reveals a ton of information about who I am and where I will be happy.
4. There are always jobs – Even with unemployment rates higher than a horse’s eye, the “constant churning of human activity” creates millions of job-openings a month. You may have to settle for a temporary job for now, but if you continue to approach organizations that interest you, your butt will be poised above the seat in the giant game of musical chairs known as the job market.
5. Doing a reflective, “life-changing” job hunt has an 86% success rate, while looking for employers’ job-postings on the Internet has a 4-10% success rate. – Sending resumes out at random works 7% of the time. Answering local want ads – 5-24%. In other words, the methods that seem most obvious are often the least effective.
6. Show up in person – This goes along with #1 and #5. If you have more than a virtual presence in your employer’s field of perception, you are more likely to be remembered.
7. Prepare for interviews - Parachute offers tons of tips for maximizing your chances of having a successful interview. Just a few:
   • The 50-50 Rule – Half the time, you should be listening. This one is a tough one for me because I tend to ramble
   • Give 20-second to 2-minute replies
   • There are only five questions that matter - You don’t need to memorize a list of dozens of possible questions because you can answer them all by knowing the answers to these five questions: Why are you here? What can you do for us? What kind of person are you? What distinguishes you from nineteen other people who can do the same task as you? Can I afford you?
   • Research – Not just the mission statement of the company and the job description, but the personality of the person who makes the hiring decisions.

This list barely scratches the surface.

What Color is Your Parachute? is truly a manual for life.

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I’m freaking out! It’s about my economic situation. I am broke.

To make matters worse, some idiotic decisions are coming back to haunt me. I have an awful habit of driving without insurance. A habit that caused me to accrue over $700 dollars in fines.

Luckily, I paid them off.

Unluckily, I got pulled over last week and found out my license was suspended and my tabs were expired. I had a court date yesterday, which I totally forgot about.

Now there is a warrant out for my arrest!

These tickets are probably going to end up costing me a thousand dollars.

I don’t have a job. I’m freaking out.

What now?

Well, the first thing I did was to call the court. They told me I could come in next Thursday and pay 50 bucks for an opportunity to explain why I missed the court date.

I’m still freaking out, but not as badly.

The problem is that the freak-out is self-justifying. It was triggered by my sudden realization that I spaced-out such an important thing, but it continues because it is finding tons of reasons in my sub-conscious to perpetuate itself, things floating around that feed it.

Here is what my freak-out is telling me:

• You are lazy.
• The economy is bad.
• You are crippled by fear.
• You are neglecting your responsibilities.
• You are lazy. (This idea is particularly hardy freak-out food)

My gut is tied in a knot and I feel like crying. Actually, the knot is loosening a little bit. I am starting to feel better.

Why?

I have identified what my freak-out is feeding on. Looking closely at piece of freak-out food, I see that it may be either true and within my control, true and outside of my control, or simply not true.

Not true:

I am not lazy, I am prolific. I am not crippled by fear, I am bravely examining my fear.

Outside of my control:

There is nothing I can do about the economy.

True:

Perhaps I have been neglecting my responsibilites. I can do something about that.

So, after doing what I can about the trigger for my freak-out, I proceed to eradicate the three flavors of freak-out food.

Neutralizing False Fears

I’m just figuring this out myself, but these techniques seem to work on the things that simply aren’t true.

Looking at them - most fears that are obviously false will shrivel under the light of observation. “Look how much I have accomplished in the past month, how can I be lazy.”

Affirmations – “I am prolific and productive. I am brave.” These cheesy statements are often quite effective, even if they remind you of Stuart Smalley.

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!

Writing about them - write a list, persuasive essay, (or a blog post!) giving all the reasons why the fear is a false one. Writing has always given me clarity when I’ve been overwhelmed by emotion, although it doesn’t usually produce very good writing.

Accepting things that are out of your control

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy. – Leo Buscaglia

One of the biggest things that we worry about that is completely out of our control is the past. I can not go back and make that court date, so, intellectually at least, I know I shouldn’t be worrying, much less freaking out about it. I find it helpful to remind myself:

I am not responsible for my past actions, only for the present consequences of those actions.

I am not responsible for the actions of others.

and, for good measure…

I did not break the economy.

Acceptance is also a key part of the serenity prayer, another great thing I learned from 12-step programs:

“…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference…”

Doing something about legitimate fears

Break them down into parts – What are my responsibilities? They are creations of society and my own personal morality. I am responsible for keeping my word, keeping myself fed, paying taxes, and doing what is best for my well-being, which includes helping rather than harming the people I come into contact with. Which of these responsibilities am I neglecting right now? And what can I do about it?

Take action – The only real responsibility I have been neglecting is the promise to myself and my readers to post regularly on this blog. So, guess what? Here it is, a new post! Taking action feels great.

Oscar Rodgers put’s it simply:
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And don’t over-analyze, you can never predict what course events will take, just do the next right thing and know that you are doing everything you can to vanquish your freak-out.

PS – 48 days with no booze!

There is a great scene from the 80′s movie, Broadcast News, where Holly Hunter’s character, Jane, has what I like to think of as a scheduled breakdown. She is in her hotel room and has just agreed to meet her co-worker in the lobby in half an hour.

She hangs up -- takes the phone off the
hook and lays it on the bed for a moment's
solitude.  She sits stiffly, palms on top of
her legs.  It looks like someone with unusually
good posture, waiting for something, and now
we BEGIN TO SEE the first signs redden and
she begins to cry.  Now she sobs -- then
miraculously shakes it off and exits quickly to
the bathroom.  This crying episode is clearly
part of her morning routine.

You can check out the full screenplay here.

Over the years, I’ve come to accept that every couple of months or so, I have a similar breakdown. It lasts longer than Jane’s, and isn’t really scheduled…so I guess it isn’t that similar, except that it feeds the same need…the need to wallow.

My Recent Wallowfest

I spent the last 3 days neglecting nearly every one of my responsibilities.

Here’s how you do it:  Let everything drop, isolate, watch TV and order delivery. Play spider solitaire for five hours. Click the “Stumble!” button on your web browser until your eyes lose focus. Watch TV. Feel depressed.

Shutting down for a couple of days is a childish, “mom, I’m sick” type of thing to do, but there is something to be said for wallowing every once in a while. I don’t want to rationalize it, but I would like to make peace with it.

Why Wallowing Ain’t All Bad

The practice of wallowing does have its benefits. Here are a few lessons I learn and relearn during my time on the pity-pot:

1. The world does not fall apart. Although some of my wallow fests have resulted in minor damage (missed assignments, appointments, or showers), most of the time nothing at all happens. Life goes on.
2. I feel better eventually.  This too passes. No matter how much I cling to the nothingness of depression, it eventually ends. This is my own experience, not meant to be universal advice, particularly for people who have chemical or neurological reasons for being depressed.
3. It is possible for me to enjoy something and hate myself at the same time. Wallowing has the same obsessive-compulsive quality that drug use has. Take the 15 episodes of Arrested Development that I watched during my most recent wallow. I enjoyed each episode, but I never quite silenced the inner voice that told me that I was wasting my life.
4. Great advice is annoying. “Buck-up”…”take baby steps”…”let go and let God”…”this too shall pass…” I’m wallowing right now, please leave a message at the tone. No matter how well intentioned, advice on how to “fix” my attitude and get out of my rut annoys me. I have learned to nod and thank the advice giver, then go back to watching crap TV.
5. Philosophy will not get me out of a rut. Big ideas tend to reveal big tragedies when I am wallowing. It’s all meaningless after all, what with us dying in the end and God being either dead or invisible. When I am wallowing, I am feeling, not thinking.
6. Simple things will - I like to work from the bottom up. No matter how stuck I feel at the beginning of a wallow, I will come out of it at the end because I’m ready and because I start doing something simple like:

• Waiting. See #2.
• Cleaning. A clean room may not give my life meaning, but it will put me in a better mood.
• Taking a shower. There is nothing more depressing than smelling your own butt.
• Taking a walk. Although I will reject this piece of advice if someone offers it, getting out of the house can often lead to miracles.
• Accomplishing a very small task. “The day wasn’t a total waste, I took the trash out!”  During this last wallow, I made an origami picture frame and caught some ladybugs to eat the aphids off my girlfriend’s houseplant. I was a whirlwind of activity!
• Making a plan. At some point, I decide that tomorrow I will reenter the land of the living. It helps to have a few tasks written down.

And oh yeah…I’m still not drinking and it is day 32!

Today is my 26th day without drinking. I haven’t felt inspired to write a great post, so I’ll serve up this essay I wrote several years ago. It is, perhaps, an answer to the question, “Why smoke cigarettes?”

Cigarette

The first fifteen minutes of my drive to campus wind past a field which is topped, for a second, by a glimpse of Budd Inlet and Cooper Point beyond. There is a horse lying down, a sign in front of a Lutheran church that says “Anger’s best solution is delay.” There are some goats that I noticed for the first time a couple days ago, there are two parks, a lonely Shell station with a convenience store that is stocked more like a general store, with bacon, nails, coffee beans, cans of soup, video rentals, copies of a locally authored book about geoducks…

I often have my first cigarette of the day on this drive—the nicotine creeps into the back of my neck, my stomach, my nervous system, my brain. Nicotine initially causes a rapid release of adrenaline, the “fight-or-flight” hormone. It also causes increased release of acetylcholine from my neurons, leading to heightened activity in cholinergic pathways throughout my brain. This in turn promotes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in my brain’s reward pathways. The nicotine also causes the release of glutamate, a neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory. My first cigarette stimulates receptors in my hypothalamus, hippocampus, thalamus, midbrain, and brain stem, as well as my cerebral cortex. Besides acetylcholine and dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin,vasopressin, growth hormone, and ACTH neurotransmitters are released by the nicotine’s actions.

Many smokers enjoy their initial cigarette more than any other, but I consistently feel sick after the second puff. My nausea is always accompanied immediately by an emotion like depression, but it comes on with more urgency, with the sharp edges of terror.

McCain's Hero.

Whatever tide of neurotransmitters and hormones washes through my system, it pushes me up against a familiar, yet mysterious shore. It is a low-lying place where I’ve lost shoes in the sucking mud. I stuck my kindergarten teddy bear under a bush there. I had accidentally carried it halfway to my first grade classroom, suddenly seized by the fact that I was way too old to have a teddy bear at school. When I returned, the stuffed animal was gone. When I visit this foggy place, I am still the shortest in my class. In the murky air, I pass an anguished earlier self and know I can’t help. I can’t stop him from asking that girl to marry him, from throwing dozens of pages of horrible poetry at her feet and crying on no sleep. “You don’t really love her,” I might yell at my earlier self, “You are on amphetamines, or in withdrawal from all that Codeine and Vicodin. You are just desperate for some meaning.” I can’t make him hear, no matter how urgently I whisper, “You are embarrassing yourself!”

When this sharp edge of self-pity, this familiar amorphous violence, hits me after the second drag of my first cigarette, when I am suddenly balanced precariously on this side of tears, it takes me a moment to realize that this happens every time. Every morning I smoke a cigarette. Every morning I am momentarily washed away, spun around, sucked up. Every morning this bad tide quickly recedes and I forget that I was drowning a second ago. The day comes crowding in, happily, and the moment is forgotten.

Today I know the terror passes, but I didn’t always. I haven’t always been able to visit the darkest spot on that gloomy shore. At one time, those desperate memories were inaccessible, even though they were fresh. From the flat uncomfortable place that the people in the recovery business call “post acute withdrawal syndrome,” I couldn’t quite believe that my paranoia had been so imaginative, that terror was a thing I had actually felt, sharply and recently.

There are thoughts I had in the days before I went into rehab that I still don’t want to write down, thoughts that I would imagine a schizophrenic might have: parasites, poisoned water, someone hiding in my house…everyone knows, they all know…One night I collapsed face down on my couch, every light in my house burning, my mind was still racing but I hadn’t eaten or slept in days, so my body collapsed. As clear
as if it was in the other room, a voice called my name, a voice I was sure belonged to someone playing a trick on me, maybe the neighbor across the street was hiding in the basement. I am sure, now, that I hallucinated this voice, but I was as sure, then, that the voice was real when I answered it: “What? Leave me alone.” All this was insane, but what strikes me as more insane, more pitiful, is the fact that I did not get up, I just remained face down on the couch, allowing the conspiracy of killers in my basement free reign.

In the rooms of NA and AA—that is what they are called, “the rooms”—you hear a lot of things over and over; the experience of the addict is universal and clichés proliferate: One day at a time. You’re right where you’re supposed to be. My best thinking got me here. Let go and let God. Most recovering addicts insist that they
never want to forget what brought them to the rooms, their “bottom,” their last high. This is the redemption that my first cigarette of the day brings me: the reminder of how bad it got. Addicts don’t know much about what feelings are. They have suppressed them for a long time, pressed them into the feeling of being high and the feeling of not being high. So, when Bernard, the drug counselor at my outpatient facility, a big black man who had a weird kind of non-greasy jerry curl haircut and fingernails that had some type of fungus on them, demanded of me how I felt about an experience, I was often at a loss. He helped me out by saying, “There ain’t but five,” pointing at piece of oak tag on which someone had written:
F ear
L oneliness
A nger
P ain
P leasure
S adness

There ain’t but five. In one way, the reduction of my emotional range to an acronym has been a good thing. It is a comfort to be able to grasp my feelings, write them down, safely label them and place them back on the shelf, certain that they will all make an appearance at one time or another, that no matter how they mess up my apartment and demand my attention, they are only here to visit. Nevertheless, my emotions are calling the shots, even when they linger in the background. I’m not sure, but I think that all my choices are dictated, in the end, by my desire to comfortably balance my emotions. I try to live so that sadness doesn’t dig too deep, so that loneliness doesn’t penetrate as sharply, so that pleasure doesn’t leave me washed up, writhing.

But there is more to a thing than its name. I cannot describe all the things that happen when I am on that morning drive by looking at an oak tag poster or researching the psychopharmacological effects of nicotine. That sudden drop, that shaky dark vision that the cigarette brings on is something more. It serves several functions. Its transience assures me of its transience. Its darkness shows me light. It is contrast.

I have a warm apartment, fifteen minutes from anywhere. I am looking out window at the water and the hazy silhouette of the Olympics. I have my neighbor’s beagle curled up on the couch. Spring is coming quickly. I will never run out of good books to read. I have a good stereo and my favorite radio station comes in clear. I am my parent’s prodigal son. I have goals. I am in college. I am incredibly happy and light. I will float away.

This is why I thank gravity. This is why I do not want to give up my daily moment of darkness, of heaviness. My moment of nostalgic terror is a glimpse at what my life is not, what it was, what it could be: contrast. When I smoke my morning cigarette, it is the beginning of my prayer of thanks, my ablution. My moment of terror is not just payment for my blessings, but reassurance that all things pass, and all things return.