how to become more respectable at your job in four easy steps by Marie Nunalee
step one: shave all extraneous body hairs. clip off all that five o’clock foreshadowing. grow out what’s on your head. chop short what's on your head. pull out the nose hoop your mother lamented for months. obscure the fang-sporting cupcake headlining your forearm. iron the wrinkled button down that sat in your hamper for three weeks. reserve punny band tees for the weekends. spray chemicals to force forth affability. step two: probably best to taper off that smoking habit. look busy. smile winsome at staring strangers who willingly enter your threshold. point people in the direction of what’s right in front of them. apologize profusely for properly following protocol. sweep filthy, invisible two-ton bowling balls across the floor at least twice daily. feather-dust the gray spectres of bunny rabbits situated on the shelving. conceive of fancies to be jotted only when the Man is off stuffing his mug full of sodium- pumped poison on lunch break. with big eyes and fast feet, furtively search for intangibles, say, true utopia. step three: if you date boys and girls, you should probably only let the opposite sex swing by and probably only on the day of the second full moon of the third month after the last time they visited you. g-d knows what the gossips’d say if your job is in a busy area and g-d knows you never will and one day the boss might comment, “she’s a little hottie,” and all you’ll know how to say is, “my boyfriend thinks so too.” bisexual erasure is the worst but yes it is nice to extricate your closeclenching elastic queer bracelet sometimes but step four: the fact is that to be respectable at your low-wage retail job you must store your lightning bug politics inside a tight-sealed canning jar until they suffocate. and it is best to say solely yes-sir-nosir, to acquiesce yes I will drop this to do that. and the fact is also that to be respectable you must simply be the best Disney World Hall of Presidents animatronic version of your self and not yourself.
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