What Ptolemy Knew

Obviously this post is much belated. Apologies.

I have been living in Connecticut, Minnesota, and, now, New York. I have been making sandwiches, coffee, and lousy excuses. But for some reason, I feel happy. There are no more ghosts walking through the quad (in fact I see the real living breathing people of Wesleyan on a nearly regular basis). There is, as expected, still a lingering existential doubt. But now I work through it, rather than wait for it to work itself out. Now I feel like a living breathing person figuring herself out.

That's the cheesy first bit. I needed to get that out of the way to get on to the cheesy later bit.

What Ptolemy knew, then, was a complicated bit about the nature of the stars and the planets and some math, maybe. He knew about cartography, the mapping science, and he was extremely good at it, better, in fact, than any one else of his age. Long before Galileo stood before the pope and denounced his brilliant discovery--the earth rotate around the sun, blasphemy--Ptolemy insisted that the world was round. He made a map for it and everything. Now, today's scientists will tell you that Ptolemy was wrong, he shorted the circumference of planet earth by more than a small margin and (if memory serves me right) still stood by the whole planets-in-glass-balls theory. And he was wrong, strictly speaking.

But Ptolemy was on to something. Even more than that, he knew something that no one else cared to figure out: world-round. Important stuff, right? But try putting that on a resume. In today's job market, the young Ptolemy would have undoubtedly ended up working at a coffee shop. No one really goes in for original thought these days, especially not as the sole qualification on one's resume. Can you imagine his cover letter? It would have looked like little more than hot air.

So, the moral of the story: today's job market sucks. Not because there aren't very many jobs for far too many applicants, or because nothing pays much of anything, but because there is so much automated bureaucracy in the hiring process. A human being can no longer hire another human being to work under him, instead, a computer sifts through other computer databases and picks the job candidates based on key words.

The human element has been completely eliminated. Which means, in short, that it is very difficult for me to get hired.