I'm in DC, have time on my hands, and no place to call home. My condo was just packed up in preparations to move it to Pittsburgh. Which means I had time to wander a bookstore, and am now sitting in a local food establishment offering free wireless.

In both of these places I've come across people talking about their jobs. Overhearing the interaction between speaker and the spoken-to, I've become sad, in a real existential sort of way. Not weepy, just sort of washed over in an unwanted empathy with these people and the work they do.

First was a published author talking to an audience of aspiring novelists. The speaker was fine, but I could tell from his voice that he was somewhere else, disengaged, making a rote speech about what it's like to be an author. The hopeful faces in the audience all glowed with the same concept of vague accomplishment. This, they seem to so desperately want, is a real first step. Come, listen to the author talk about his experiences, and learn about how the publishing system really works. As if the publication-worthiness of their own book was a foregone conclusion. In reality, 99% of the work produced by those hands is utter crap. It's no fault of their own, and no indication of their personal worth. Most writing is crap. THIS is crap, realtively speaking. But since the cost of publication is so low, the drive towards quality loses steam. So there, in the top floor of the bookstore, is the bored moderate success of a thriller-writer giving the same tired stories and platitudes to a gathering of writing-circle attendees all flush with visions of acceptance letters because, after all, everyone at the writing group on Tuesday over at Panera Bread really liked the latest draft. Just a little more work, some tightening up of the descriptions, more flash to the ending...

Which brings me to the restaurant, and within eight feet of some woman built like a retired linebacker with years of stool-piloting at the local Applebee's. She's fire-drilling a woman with the air of the slightly befuddled through the process of becoming a Mary Kay sales rep. It's all directive and dictation. You're going to do this, then you have this, and wait give me that I'll read it, and just to make it easy we'll do it how I've done it for others, and you can see here how others have done this with me, and it's all here in my program since I'm a computer buff and really you just should...

It's exhausting, really, and I understand the slightly resigned nature of the woman being signed into the world of pyramid marketing. She's being hit with a process like a fat-cushioned mac-truck, hand-held and spoonfed through online registration. Will she be able to recreate any of this tomorrow as she tries on her own to start the new job? Instruction by lecture works in some cases; this one looks like it's being lost on the audience.

Would it be wrong to mention the fundamental problem here? To say that this right now, this hook-in-lip dragging onto the Mary Kay boat is the only way to make money? She'll have to be prepared to be on the other side of the table, being the middleman taking larger orders and distributing them to her own stable of sellers. Frankly, one tough question about how one wins the pink Cadillac, and I'd bet on tears.

25 years from now when the houses are for sale and the stuff of their lives is detritus in the basement, discolored and warped, these people's children will collect the unpublished manuscripts, the cases of foundation and eyeliner, and wonder. Just what the fuck were mom and dad thinking with this crap?