In the past week, I've sent out around eleven resumes.

It's crunch time.

Without verifiable income, it's highly doubtful that any landlord in this city will rent an apartment to me. If no one rents an apartment to me, I have to move back home and the world, as I know it, will come to and end. This places me firmly in the middle of a job search that could be described as frantic, were I energetic and hopeful enough to make it so. Abandoning all hopes of career-specific employment, I'm now applying to random unrelated openings for which I might seem slightly qualified.

I'd like to think that I'm somewhat smart and that I am competent at nearly every task I undertake, but it's easy to lose confidence in yourself when no one seems remotely interested in you. Almost every employer out there requires a bachelor's degree for even the most menial and pointless of labors, and so my potential employment pool is greatly reduced.

Just so you know, I was rejected from every college that I applied to.

I don't see how a degree in English connotes a stronger knowledge of Excel, but maybe I am ignorant of such issues. I suppose that an employer might find comfort in the knowledge that someone wasted four years of their life attaining a degree in Art History with a minor in keg and bong technology, and perhaps it could be theorized that if someone dedicates four years of their life to the pursuit of a piece of paper, they might waste eight years on a dead-end job.

Dead-end or no, I just want to work.

Even my "safety" school rejected me.

When I got that rejection letter in the mail, I called over to a friend's house to express my immense disappointment. The announcement of my rejection was met by a roomful of laughter.

It is an interesting experience to have your friends openly laugh at you.

I eventually found a home at a small trade school where I amassed an impressive store of knowledge regarding the production of film and video, and during my entire education, I missed a total of two hours of lab and lecture time. That's 1477 hours present out of 1479 total clock hours.

I can't ever prove how dedicated I can be when no one will give me the time of day.

So every day I wake up and make the rounds. I check the various employment websites and then fax out a few reams of paper in hopes of attracting attention.

In the last eight months, I've sent out one hundred and twenty-four resumes to various job openings, mostly in the film and television industries. Of those resumes, I've gotten a little more then ten calls from people who want to offer me an unpaid internship, and another three requesting me to come in for an interview.

One job interview was blatantly awful. I told them that I wasn't interested in the position, nor was I interested in wearing one of their matching company blazers. Visual unity does not increase your company moral, especially when you all end up looking like security guards.

The other two were various degrees of promising, yet both proved to be unfruitful. The last one almost perfectly fit the dictionary definition of "stringing someone along".

I've received approximately fifteen calls of interest out of one hundred and twenty-four resumes. That's a response rate hovering slightly above twelve percent. Not exactly the best odds, but I have no choice but to keep trying whilst growing ever despondent.

Somewhere a roomful of laughter is waiting for me.