Professional Identity

Being the sharply observed repository of random musings that I am, there's an obligation I have to write a short explanation about career identity while supplementing evidence that I am really really dope.

Dolla'Dolla bills y'all!

That said, I might make $25,000 per year or I might make $831,600 per year as a journalist (not including my side gig as a back up joke teller for another publication).

What?! Was that some sort of gay joke dude? No, but good luck getting a straight answer about my salary. ZING mother fucker.

I hit up a young urban professional happy hour yesterday because someone informed me that it's what the deliciously wealthy, devastatingly successful and outright pompous socially elite twenty-somethings are doing these days.

Naturally I belonged there.

There was an urge spawning from the bowels of my soul to wash people over in waves of douchebaggery at the Belmont on 6th street. I had plans to douse myself in expensive cologne (imported from Africa and contains lion saliva), put enough product in my hair to last through the following calendar year, and pounce every opportunity to impress a girl with my large wallet and topical conversations that only discuss me and my incredibly superior station I have attained through my career.

But that urge died once I made it to the bar and asked the bartender for a Lone Star.

The request for our state's lower quality, cheaper beer revealed me as the lowly paid journalist that I might actually be. But I was fine with that, because I really have never tried to impress people ... unless you're a prospective employer or if you are of the attractive, smart and sexy ilk of the opposite sex. But even that's arguable how far I go to try to impress people.

So we schmooze it up all night with young twenty-somethings who all want to avoid lateral movement in the work place as much as they want to avoid impending debt. Skyrocketing to the top is the common ground we all stood on.

It was an aggregate of shiturgy, which loosely translates to a shitload of lameness, but not to discredit it too much, there's something intriguingly hilarious about handing out business cards.

I have an entire box of cards that never see the light of day. In fact, I use them when my joke material gets really bland while at work. It's an easy button for laughter.

"Having a bad day? ... Here, take this, it will do the trick." [hands business card to person]
"HAHAHAAHA ... it's a card. And look, there's your name. And even a job title! haha. Thanks JJ, you're the best!"

But people ask me for my business card and are mysteriously enthralled with my job title for some ungodly reason I will never understand. I delicately decline when I say I don't carry business cards with me.

Professional? No. But the cards literally won't fit in my wallet.

And I know people who strategically and creatively use their business cards to their advantage. For instance, one of my friends who will remain nameless, offers his business card to girls and even includes a fake British accent and gives the impression that he's a charming blue blood with a vernacular for otherworldly.

Another friend uses his business card to scrape bird poo-poo from his car windshield.

Me, I think my business card would find a happy home in a urinal at GSD&M. Someone would have the wherewithal to actually contact me, only to say, 'dude, your reputation is literally in the toilet" ... but I like you shameless attempt at viral marketing yourself.

I handed one business card out last night. I hope she maximizes its utility and studies my contact information with the proficient dexterity of a double-fisting alcoholic staggering in and out of consciousness. And emails me to say, "is that a real job."

So after the drinking barrage with the 30k millionaires and real estate agent girls looking for lawyers, we headed over to another bar that was more my scene on Red River. Cheap, grimey and real.

And it was there where we encountered a real life homeless man who approached me with an industrial size roll of aluminum foil. He asked me what my favorite animal was. I told him a zebra for some reason.

He wadded up the foil and created a fuckin badass zebra, even had stripes too! And he had his own assistant, who held his foil for him. I should have asked him to make a duckbill platypus or some shit instead.

"That's my executive assistant," he said. All I could think about was how cool it was to have an aluminum foil zebra. I was enamored and told the guy he was really talented and I envy him for his craft.

If I could make animals out of tin foil I'd take those skills to the Bellmont. I'd instantly become a class C celebrity. But I would only make doucheman, not to be confused with horse feces. But is almost interchangeable.

Speaking of class C elebrity and/or being freakin dope ... I was at a West 6th Street bar last night and ran into three girls who I know, who confessed that they actually read this.

I've never felt more stupid in my life. haha