I was raised with an intentional prejudice against video games — they are time wasters. This rule of thumb was allowed one exception for DDR, which as a tween I loved deeply, and which essentially counted as ‘exercise’. But on the whole, I have spent my life as a good video-game-hating Protestant work-ethic-loving Midwesterner.

Until, that is, my fiancé and I became a real American family, equipped with a television that is too large for our sitting room and a PS4.

I was biased at first, but after a few days I came around. Video games! What a revelation! They are like TV, only they give you the sense of being slightly more active, and you sometimes even receive the dopamine boost of having accomplished meaningless goals! Since graduate school is designed to make you feel you’ve never accomplished anything in your life, and likely never will, the appeal of such leisure activities is all too abundant.

Now my favorite time-wasting video game we got for free, and is called Hitman. In Hitman, you play a terse bald white man who kills people, and you do it for fun! Which is insane, I realize, but the controller shakes in your hand as you slowly cut off the air from your targets’ throat, and that is strangely satisfying.

But to get to my point. I began this silent blog to reignite my love of writing, or at least my sense that writing is something I can do. Sufficiently reignited, I turned my attention towards the humiliating task of writing cover letters. And in that process, all I can think is of the many ways my soul is being crushed. I will explain via Hitman metaphor:

Writing cover letters…

…crushes my soul like a garden baler crushes the dead body of a millionaire in the Sapienza level.

It dissolves my soul in radioactive waste material, like the body of the unconscious scientist I once accidentally put into the wrong sort of box.

It pushes my soul from the balcony of a large building, the way that the terse bald white assassin sometimes does to an elegantly dressed socialite in Paris.

It watches my soul enter the yoga balance of tree pose, self-satisfied, then tumbles it off the side of a remote cliff in Japan.

It sneaks behind my soul and punctures it with small needle carrying 20 milligrams of lethal poison.

It explodes my soul with a blinking red explosive rubber duck (don’t ask — clearly video game designers have strange minds).

It subdues my soul, crushing the life from my creativity with a strong one-armed vice hold, until my self-respect crumbles to the floor like a waiter whose uniform a terse bald white man needs in order infiltrate an ice cream shop.

Which is to say, I really dislike writing cover letters.

Perhaps one day I’ll be employed, until which I am yours,

M