The Chronicles Of Jessica

I had to wait in line at the post office for 45 minutes today, just to mail our tax returns. Apparently everyone else in America also waits until the absolute last minute to give Uncle Sam his booty. There was one guy handling a line of about twenty people. In Washington, DC. On April 15th. Gah.

Some jobs - it's almost unbelievable there's anyone willing to do them. There's a new baseball stadium that just went up around the corner from us, so the city is being super ultra mega jerks about making sure that no one is parked in the neighborhood that isn't supposed to be. On the one hand I guess I'm supposed to be grateful that they're getting rid of the interlopers so that I (whose car is in full compliance) will still have a place to park. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that people whose job it is to wander around the city and slap big orange stickers on people's cars and have them towed and charge them lots of money and ruin their nice outing to a baseball game - I can't help but feel that those people sort of suck and should get a different job.

In college the university would offer these part-time jobs to students writing parking tickets on campus. You never really knew who had these jobs because this was considered the lowest of the low, writing needlessly expensive tickets to other poor college students. We called them The Turncoats. I only found out years after the fact that my friend Dave Delauter had one of these jobs for a while freshman year; such was his deep personal shame that he was afraid to reveal himself for fear of hideous social retribution. It's probably not even a good idea to put that out on the internet, it could still have repercussions to this day. (Dave - if by some twist of Google fate your wife reads this and leaves you: My bad.)

The more I think about it, the more I realize that there are entire professions that I can't imagine people being willing to enter into. Proctologist. (That's too easy, I know.) Bikini waxer - worse yet, back waxer. (Shudder.) Reality television show producer. Prison conjugal visit supervisor. Republican political strategist. IRS agent. I wonder how these people get through the day. How hard up must they be for money that they are willing to suffer the slings and arrows of these odious careers?

Personally, I like to feel that I'm making a contribution to society, that what I do lifts people up, that....

Shit. I forgot for a second that I'm an actor. We tend to be employed so infrequently, that's a real occupational hazard.

Yet I suppose the inherent lesson is that no matter how demoralizing the artists' struggle, we can rest comfortably in the knowledge that at the end of the day, there's only the very slightest chance that we'd be called upon to put a finger or fist into another person's nether regions, or betray the planet or our fellow man. Or find ourselves being chased furiously down the street by an angry tourist screaming, "That's my car!!! I was just about to move it, you bastards!!!!"

And that's no small comfort, my friends.