Well, against the odds, I got hired. Finally. In aviation. 20 months of wandering in the wilderness and now...who knows. I was supposed to start this week. But car problems. But I got something similar to mono and thought I was dying. My brain still is not fully recovered. Hence the inordinate use of fragments without the justification of poetry. This is how I talk to myself, to my husband, and on the phone right now. Fragmentary.

I got a crock pot this week. I'm scared of it. Because I value food and I hate learning curves and the possibility of ruining a perfectly good meal if I wasn't so damn lazy (or busy) so as to need a crock pot. I'm scared of it because of the cult-like following it has engendered in so many. Go ahead, mention a slow cooker in a a group of 6ish people. There is an 80% that someone will profess their total dependence, undying love, or eternal gratitude to the machine.

Of course, I haven't made anything in said slow cooker yet. I've been busy trying to put more fluids in my body than my body can expel. A competition for which I am ill prepared.

Where were we? Slow cooker. No. Wait. Job. Job! It's not real until my toolbox moves out of the bedroom. I've had too many jobs fall through at this exact point. I don't expect this one to fall through, but I have never expected any of the others either. I have no idea what I expect. I finally let myself look at all of Tyler's student loans, at our prospective budget, and our wishlist of things (a trip to Austria? a newer car?). Turns out, we are probably going to make it. Of course we won't get everything we want. But we at least have the tools to make a life.

"Is it really that hard to explain to potential jobs that you were fired due to sexism? Because that makes me mad."

A friend of mine asked me this. Now, I don't think I was fired because of sexism. I was fired for 1,000 reasons and most of them don't have names. But this is what I want to say to her and about sexism today.

Sexism doesn't exist in aviation. It's like the most embarrassing version of the tooth fairy. Sure, some people believe in sexism. We call them the "F" word (because you don't use the word "feminist" in aviation anymore than sexism) and then we put them in the fanatical camp. In that camp, people also believe in the Illumnati, that WWII never happened, and that the lunar landing was a hoax. They probably hunt Big Foot on the weekend. In fact, if you are tempted in an interview for aviation to use the "S" word or the "F" word, you should probably just tell them that you hunt Big Foot on the weekend. At least then, you stand the chance of laughing after the awkward pause.

All metaphor aside. If you talk about sexism, people become afraid of you like you have a disease. Like feminists cause sexism. And in aviation, women are the most protected minority. Everyone else has to suck it up and try to be a white male. Except that they can't. Because skin and biology. So everyone else has to laugh when people make fun of them. (There are precious few women who are not white.)  They will make Mexican jokes, Armenian jokes, Russian jokes, nothing is off limits. If it hurts, then you are not a man. And that has crossed cultures somehow so everyone pretends to agree.  There are no public women jokes. And you are supposed to say "thank you" for that "luxury". They will find every other way of saying "woman" though. You will find words like "emotional", "logical", "innocent", "sensitive", "independent", "angry", "strong", "ambitious", "focused" and a host of others drip out of their mouths like graffiti tags. They are trying to talk of feminine and masculine characteristics. You can tell which are which because the masculine ones all are synonyms for "capable of doing this job" while the feminine ones all somehow rhyme with "almost" or "not a bad second choice".

Most men in aviation do not see their privilege and they don't even think about it. When someone comes in and drops the "S Bomb", they feel self-conscious because they feel an awful lot like they have a ton in common with that other guy who is apparently sexist. Then they get defensive. Sexism cannot exist because they do not feel active hate for women. They do not realize that defining a successful employee by descriptions only men have is sexist (and detrimental to men who don't fit those descriptions while still being valuable employees). They do not count themselves as antagonistic toward women, in fact, they themselves take more flack than any woman does! Therefore, sexism does not exist.

I simply cannot go into an interview and say, "I was fired because of sexism." All at once I would have committed every faux pax. I will have admitted a weakness, I will have drawn attention to how un-male I am, I will have shown that I believe in the tooth fairy, and I will have accused my prospective employer of siding with my enemy causing them to defend him without even knowing the man or the situation. And definitely without knowing me and if I am trustworthy...or if I am just an overemotional...person...who is over-reacting rather than analyzing the situation.

Thoughts on searching for a job in honor of my one year anniversary.

It gets easier to be rejected (most days).

You take a deep breath, you make the call.

You smile because they say you can hear a smile on the other end of the phone.  Now this is a game. How many seconds can pass before they finally say no?

Before you call, it is placed firmly in their mind. Before they answer the phone, they think it. They take a deep breath before they answer. They don’t want to make this difficult. They don’t want to think of it in terms of “rejection”. But you make them.

You smile so big, your arms do not have room to hold their rejection. You offer your armful of happiness to them. Suddenly, they realize that their two letters are heavier than they first thought. So they try to add a few more to disperse the weight, for your sake, of course. “We really liked you but…” And you hear about how qualified someone else is, about how little work they have, about the experience that you don’t quite have, about every good intention that they just found.

This is the point at which, if you are truly playing the game, you smile bigger, deeper, broader.

You say you understand. Smile again.

You smother any sort of insincerity right out of them with your magnanimity. You thank them generously and exit quickly to leave them believing, if possible, that they really did want to hire you.

Then you let out the breath that you took before you made the call, just as surely as they are also letting their breath loose. You let all of the hope and smile fall through your fingers and throw their rejection on the heap with the others in the corner of your mind. How long before they say “no”? And each time, you hope, you learn to hold your breath a little longer. Until one day, you learn to hold it longer than them.