Boy Genius has had another brain wave and, for once, it doesn’t involve using me to lift heavy objects. He signed me up with a career counselor—a job title I can no longer type without my eye twitching. At the time, however, I didn’t know any better so I grinned like the idiot I am and thanked him. Later that week, I showed up at the woman’s office, sat underneath a poster of some poor kitten hanging off a tree branch, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
She showed up thirty minutes late, drinking Red Bull straight from the can and screaming into a tiny, silver cell phone. Her heels were high. Her hair was blond. And her breasts were conducting their own personal journey of discovery after being stuffed into a Barbie doll’s dress shirt. She paced back and forth, squealing about how someone’s aura was a “dirty brown,” and I chewed my thumbnail off. This was my career counselor. This was who was going to springboard me out of a future involving cardboard boxes and overpasses.
For the sake of privacy we’ll call the woman Leslie and we will pray she never ever Googles my name because I’m reasonably certain she’d cut a bitch. Everyone ready?
Heh. I thought as much. And yet I’m going to do it anyway.
So here was the deal: Leslie said she was going to turn my life around in forty-five minutes or less by discovering, wait for it, my Inner Me.
Oh, yes, you read that right. There were flow-charts involved here, people. She had a pile of worksheets and an Excel spread to calculate, I don’t know, my Inner Me-ness. Or maybe they were just there so she could calculate how many other suckers would pile on this bandwagon, but I digress.
At this point, a decent person would have walked out. You can’t discover an Inner Me in forty-five minutes even if you do have an animated PowerPoint presentation and a laser pointer. But I am not a decent person and I am also unemployed so opportunities to be entertained must be embraced. In other words, I stayed and watched her run around like a demented hamster.
If anyone’s interested, the destiny of my Inner Me is supposed to be revealed sometime this week. Maybe it’s going to be a big surprise. Maybe my Inner Me is a shorter, browner version of Martha Stewart. Maybe my Inner Me just wants to hunt homeless people through Piedmont Park.
Which, if you think about it, ol’ Martha would be totally down with. As long as the homeless were dressed in matching sweaters and our weapons were whittled, but that’s another subject.
Honestly, I doubt it’ll be much of a shocker. You see as much as I gagged while doing those personality tests, I actually know my Inner Me. She’s a reincarnated Waffle House waitress who has the temperament of a pit bull with a toothache, but both of us are interested to see where Leslie’s going with this.
We’re open-minded like that.