Like most fathers, my dad faked the usual heart attack reaction, when he heard about the most recent addition to the sports I play: boxing. Seeing that he was only reluctantly letting me play football, saying it was too violent, I can’t say I wasn’t expecting that reaction to boxing. I, therefore, didn’t expect him to pay for my boxing gear, and since they are quite expensive, I decided that maybe it was time for me to get a job.
Since I rarely look into it, I had lost track of how old I am, feeling a different, younger age, than I really am. I know for certain, that I haven’t reached the disastrous point of any woman’s life, where the words in sentences have to be thought carefully, before being thrown at her, being – if not entirely changed by a straightforward lie – at least rearranged. A simple sentence like ‘You are twenty five years old’ for example, having the order of its words rearranged, as an unpleasant, yet inescapable consequence to the change of the number in the sentence, becoming, ‘You are old, fifty five years…’
Comforted slightly, by the fact that I wasn’t at that point yet, but frightened like any other woman by its inevitability, I was at least sure that I was old enough to get a job. But age doesn’t necessarily mean qualification. I didn’t know whether what I knew was enough for me to get a job. My uncertainty vanished gradually, as I skimmed the newspaper for jobs, because most of them required three goods, good computer skills, good English and good looks. I knew I had the first two, and with a little bit of makeup I would have the third as well. Most of them were secretary vacancies, and though I knew nothing about being a secretary, I had seen enough secretaries, not many of them being too bright, to guess that it couldn’t be a difficult job. But with a bit of honesty, I went for a secretary position in a gym; thinking that I should at least know what the place I worked for is.
A surprise awaited me upon phoning that gym though; half of it changed my plan, and the other half made me laugh. The first half was, that the gym was actually looking for an aerobics instructor, and the second half, was their reply to my question of why on earth haven’t they said that in the ad, was that the newspaper thought that job to be too inappropriate to be published in a newspaper. Surprised and amused as I was, I didn’t feel the need to back out seeing that, I was as good an aerobics instructor as I was a secretary, so I took the job.
However, my childish perspective towards the world deepened, and the arrogance I felt, when I got accepted from my first attempt, washed off slightly, as I registered that it wasn’t I who took the job, but more like the job that had taken me. I remembered my father advising me to pay attention to my studies, so that I could get a high enough score, to get appointed in college, because it’s so hard to get jobs these days, and securing a teaching post in college, would save me a lot of trouble and, I, so immaturely, believed him to be wrong. But as I had no intention of telling him that, I was getting a job whilst still in college, when he thinks I should be devoting my time to studying, I couldn’t exactly tell him how I thought I had found proof that he was mistaken, to his face.
The usual feelings of false maturity, seeming freedom, and partial financial independence, hit me from the first day at work. But two weeks into the job, made me hate even the mere pretence of being a grownup. I was simply bored, like the kid I really am, would predictably become after trying something, and getting used to it. Or perhaps it was really work itself, that didn’t live up to my expectations; the freedom and independence I had anticipated, turning out to be a figment of my juvenile mind’s imagination, for the job had, if anything, decreased my already incomplete freedom. Apparently having a job, just adds another person who can tell you what to do: your boss. As this realization hit me, two weeks late, I quit.
Despite the short period I had spent working, the job wasn’t the only thing I’d gotten used to; I had also become used to making money. Thus, even after I had made enough money to get the boxing gear I wanted, I still wanted to get back to work. It would’ve been utterly stupid, and another waste of time to get another job like the first; working for someone that is. It took me a while to come up with something else, because unless I could start my own business, which I didn’t have the time nor the money for, then I had to work for a person or company. Eventually I found a way to be my own boss, without having to spend much money starting a business. It was going back to the basics of moneymaking really: making things and selling them. So fooling myself again, this time into believing that I had the talent for that kind of work, I set off to learn making statues.
Considering that I was a granddaughter of the pharaohs; that kind of work should’ve been second nature to me. If I said that I was making statues – miniscule ones, not the huge ones my great grandparents have made – but was still failing miserably at it, that would make me such a shame on pharaohs, that they should take my Egyptian passport. But the truth is, I wasn’t even making them, but was merely duplicating ones already made, making copies by pouring liquid chemicals into a plaster impression of the statue, where it solidifies on its own, and still failing at that, plainly meant that I was a shame on cavemen. To make things worse, the tiny statues I made kept blowing up, literally, one of the miniature pyramids had tiny explosions coming out of its chamber, and actually made hissing sounds when I took it out of its cast.
After wondering vaguely, if I was on the verge of accidentally inventing another explosive material, I gave up on that job as well. But not before I had sustained numerous injuries from it. The most dangerous of which, was when I missed the piece of plastic I was supposed to be cutting, and sank the sharp cutter into my thumb, with such force that could’ve made my hand one finger short.
Admittedly, that wasn’t when I had given up. Yet even persistence couldn’t have mattered much after I had set the paper napkin covering my bleeding thumb on fire by accident, as I held a lighter too close to it, because my slow brain was too used to my thumb being inflammable, and even slower to register what had changed that. So after I had spent a whole minute, wondering where the burning smell was coming from, suggesting that my brain was torturing my thumb on purpose, I eventually made the connection between the smell in my nose, and the pain in my thumb and I gave up on that job as well, admitted that I simply suck too much, that it was life threatening to carry on with it and hid my passport somewhere safe, just in case.
With these unprecedented levels of failure, I wasn’t sure whether I should find another job, or just admit to myself that maybe, I wasn’t cut out for working. I was inwardly thankful, that I hadn’t bragged to my father about my nonexistent abilities to get a job, for that had at least saved me the humiliation of admitting, that it was me who has been wrong all along.
My fear for my life, and the rest of my fingers, convinced me to stay put for the time being; at least until the image of the ape’s evolution into a caveman, who evolved into me, then turned around to the ape saying: “Go back, we have failed,” has washed off, and the shameful confirmation that Darwin’s evolution theory had been wrong, on more than one level, can be shoved away from my head by any unlikely-to-ever-come success.
Dr. Asmaa K. Marie
A Chapter from her Book: Like Most