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On Monday, I will put on my fancy shoes, give up my starving artist façade, and join the 9-5 masses. And it will only have taken twenty-five cover letters, ten resumes, six interviews, five months, and one very unfortunate phone interaction to get there.  In this economy, those aren’t high numbers.

Through all of this, I kept returning to the same frustration—“Why do I have to give them a resume?!” Now, I understand that a resume can be useful to people successful in their fields with years of experience, but I’ll be the first to admit that my resume does not make me look incredibly desirable.

But then again, maybe I’ve just been too good at following the rules.  I’d love to create a new resume that actually shows why I’d be good at a job or allows me to have some personality. Here are a few points I’ve been thinking of including.

1.  I can do ten push-ups. Really, I just did them. Now, this may not sound impressive or applicable to most professional positions, but the important point is that three months ago I could do no push-ups. Hello!

2.  I once fought a buffalo. Okay, I didn’t so much fight the buffalo as was stabbed while standing innocently nearby and ended up with nine stiches in my arm. I did go on to write a pretty powerful haiku about the incident.

3.  I have 818 friends on Facebook. That’s enough to show that people like me, but not so many to say that I go around “friending” anything that moves. I have standards.

4.  I can tell you that a semicolon is used to join two related, independent clauses. I can also explain an independent clause. Trust me, this virtually makes me a superhero.

5.  I always wash my sheets, but never make my bed. Mr. HR, I have just summed up your personality profile in one concrete example.

(Photo courtesy of Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr)

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