Job applications have no reason for being as long they are. When they’re not asking me for the street address of my grade school or the telephone number of an employer I worked for three years ago, they’re busy wondering if I’m legally allowed to be employed in the United States. Who’s going to admit to being unemployable in the United States? On a job application for a business located in the United States? If you’d admit to that, you might as well just stop filling out the application right there and go back to Canada.

Since I’m mainly looking for money that I can parlay into bigger things, all I need right now are consistent hours at a business that doesn’t completely humiliate me. For example, today I filled out an online application to work at a nearby bookstore that I won’t name, Boarders Group Inc., but for some reason their applications are actually longer than most of their books. The highlight was a personality test that—and I am not exaggerating—was 37 pages long, each page requesting five different responses. Now I’m not going to do the math, but that’s exactly 185 inquiries. The format was similar to a normal personality test in that they would list a statement and I had to say to what degree I either agreed or disagreed. Among those were the following seven award-winning examples, included here exactly as they appeared on the application:

You feel tense when somebody watches you work
No, I love it when creepy people stare at me while I stock bookshelves. I fucking love that.

You feel lively and energetic at parties
They mean drunk, right?

You usually disagree with people
I was going to say that I strongly disagreed with this statement, but then I realized that it’d be hypocritical and I’d be caught in a lie. Then again, if I agreed with this statement, I’d also–

You don’t like to be interrupted when you are doing something
Hey, man, slow down. You cut me off before I finished my last response, and you know perfectly well that that’s not cool.

There’s no use having close friends; they always let you down
Awww. Whoever was coming up with these clearly just had a huge fight with his best friend.

Any trouble you have is your own fault
This one just comes off as a really mean insult. In fact, it kind of makes me feel like crap.

People who talk all the time are annoying
Shut up with the stupid personality test already!

Man, sorry for not updating all summer. I wasn’t even that busy–I just kind of forgot about it. It’s kind of like those news stories you hear every once in a while about a parent who leaves his one-year old child in the car on a really hot day while he runs to the store to pick up some milk, but then ends up forgetting about his kid and instead of returning to the car stops off at the barbershop for a trim. Not that I would ever do that to a child of mine, especially not for the entire summer, but websites are a different matter. They are easy to neglect, even easier than children, because there are no immediate rewards for updating. I intend to remedy this by allocating two chocolates to myself every time I update. I will now eat my chocolates.

One might ask what I have been up to lately. Well, after some anticlimactic summer classes, I graduated college. Having written my last essay and scanned my last tron, it is unclear what I am going to do next. I am looking into it very cautiously and very carefully. The important thing to consider is that many of my classmates, some older than I, are still toiling about as undergrads. You might call these people “lazy” or “stupid” for taking so long, and that would be a fair assessment to make, even if it wouldn’t win you any friends. The fact is, these second-year seniors, who even as we speak are taking notes in class and purchasing overpriced textbooks, have allowed me the mental luxury of taking a month-long, anxiety-free break from all things related to my future. I am only now beginning to look for a job, and I will make sure to apprise this website of my progress in a timely fashion.

If you have not graduated from college yet, you might be wondering what it is like. Well, the rewards are very minimal. In fact, the only reward I did receive was two chocolates, and I awarded that to myself as the winner of the first-annual “Karjala Honorary Two Chocolates Award For Excellence in Graduating.” My diploma came in the mail the exact same day as did a notice from the Michigan State Library noting that I had outstanding overdue fines of $3.21. The notice informed me that my “borrowing privileges are suspended” until I pay this fine, which I’m not exactly happy about. After four years of college, I’m thousands of dollars worth of student loans in the hole, I don’t have a job, and on top of that my library borrowing privileges, once taken for granted, have now been suspended. It will be difficult relying solely on my library stealing privileges.