Cover letters

To me, cover letters are like papers, only ten times more horrible.  See, I can bullshit a paper.  I don’t like to, and believe me I feel like shit afterward (less so when it gets a good grade) but I do it.  I do it because I would procrastinate to the last possible minute to the point of absurdity.  And this “last possible minute” began to grow more and more (or less and less) as my time in college went on.  The “last possible minute” in my final semester at WAC had gone from the 24 hour mark freshman year, to an hour before my 10:30 a.m. class.  That paper needed to be five pages long with substantial textual evidence which I had yet to look for.  I got an A- by the way.

This brings me back to this cover letter problem.  Which is that I do not know how to bullshit them.  Because you can’t, because they actually mean something in life.  This isn’t going to get graded, this is a potential job or career.  And I’m not talking about a cover letter to fucking Target (pretty sure you don’t even need one), it’s for fucking Harvard University.  You don’t bullshit Harvard.  Plus I’m not one for lying.  I find myself to be a rather honest person – except about feelings, god knows I’d keep those locked about in an ivory tower if I could.  I don’t want to falsely advertise myself as my mother keeps trying to do. 

I’m going to be honest, my resume is not impressive.  I never got any other summer job besides the one I’ve had at the movie theatre since I was 16.  Every summer my mom bitched, prodded, and poked for me to get another job, and somehow, magically, I never did.  I’ve spent almost six years smelling like popcorn and butter, having to take shit from some of the stupidest people in the world, and barely scrapping hours together to have something to spend on booze when I got to school.  I never did anything else except for the summer going into college where I worked in an office building at a community college on the North Shore.  It was fucking murder, or it would drive me to murder, I can’t pick which would have been worse.

I was always too scared to apply to anything else.  Mostly due to the fact that I have zero self-confidence, and also partly because, let’s be honest, I wanted to spend my summer days sleeping until 10:30 until I had to go to work to 10:45 to work until 4:30 three days a week.  But the majority of the reason is because the only thing that I’m pretty confident about myself is that I’m not qualified to do anything with my life besides write sarcastic personal essays using a (mostly) anonymous blog.  How’d you like that run on sentence?

So here I am, sitting at my home computer attempting to write a cover letter and failing miserably.  What am I supposed to say?  Dear ______ I heard through the grape vine that you have a position for ______ and I would probably (not) be very good at that. 

Why the fuck did I major in History?