Tying Up Loose Beginnings

I’m a bit exhausted today. Spent the evening at a public forum being a rebel with a cause. A good crowd showed up. One by one each of us stood up and spoke our truths, experiencing that bearable lightness of being. I left thinking I could fly! As a fellow resident said to me six years ago, “it’s only a democracy if we participate in it.” 

The Original Giulietta

With only one week of musing left, it seemed appropriate to cycle back to my first entry where I mentioned my grandmother Giulietta and ripping up my resume. I’ve been working on acquiring my dual Italian citizenship for six years. It’s taken extra long because I couldn’t find the date of my grandfather Filippo’s naturalization. I spent a lot of time on ancestry.com trying to track his arrival through Ellis Island.

After going down many dead ends and on the verge of giving up, his name appeared one day out of the cyber blue on a ship manifest page I’d never seen before. A miracle? I think so. One of the columns listed his naturalization date. I took this date and went to the closest national record archives. Churning through the microfilm, watching the lives of immigrants blur by, I stumbled on my grandmother’s! In a name changing instant, I learned that her real name wasn’t Julia it was Giulietta.

I’d been baptized Julianne and changed it to Julie and gone back to Julianne and then back to Julie, but I fell in love with the name Giulietta. It most resonates with the person I feel like inside.

Ripping Up Resumes

As for ripping up your resume, it will take courage to come up with your own format if you choose the traditional job route or no format if you try the self-employment route. What bothers me most about resumes is their excluding, generic nature. Based on what you state on a piece of paper you are sorted into a yes, no or maybe pile. A person’s self and business worth distilled down to a sterile 8.5 x 11 sheet devoid of real story. A resume expert advised me once to take off my hobbies because it wasn’t professional. “But that’s the only thing on this flimsy piece of paper that reveals in any way who I really am,” I cried.

Why do we continue with this soul-less practice? Just think of all the amazing people that get tossed into the no pile because their paper self doesn’t measure up. Almost everyone singing on American Idol this season, had a job before making it onto the show that would have been considered “menial.” Yet, here they are shining all over that enormous stage week after week, belting their dreams out. Years hence, will that experience fit onto a rigid 8.5 x 11? Probably not.

Does anyone out there have any new ideas for replacing resumes? Or should we be listing our true geniuses rather than our skills?

Muse thx

Giulietta