Job Hunting

I haven't been posting quite as much over the past few weeks as I typically post -- on any of my blogs. The reason is that I have been spending most of my time online looking for and applying for jobs. As they say, if you don't have a job, your job is to look for one.

In other words, I am no longer working at the hotel. From the perspective of time available to read and write and blog, it was a great job. From the perspective of pay and good use of my skills and education, it was a horrible job. Having that job was a terrible misallocation of my skills and education -- not, it seems, that anybody else is interested in making use of any of them. Nobody can quite seem to figure out what it is that I do. "Interdisciplinary scholar" isn't on anybody's radar.

So I've gone from being a mere misallocation of human resources and underemployed to outright unemployed. What is a B.A. in recombinant gene technology with minors in chemistry and English, a M.A. in English, and a Ph.D. in the humanities who writes on spontaneous orders to do? I have made no headway in academia or think tanks. And apparently education is no longer considered equivalent to experience (I applied for a technical writing position that required a B.A. and 2 years of experience, and was told that I wasn't qualified for the position -- never mind that if I in fact were hired by an English department, they would no doubt ask me to teach the technical writing class precisely because of my technical background). The only advice I get is the generic kind, that I should try to get into academia or think tanks (I agree). What I need are specific leads, specific jobs, and people helping me to get a specific job.