Cover Letters

The cover letter is quite possibly the most torturous thing since the birth of Swedish death metal. I sit down at my computer. I stare. I wonder what my potential future employer will want to read and I ask myself, will all of this angst and sweat, all of this frustration over perfecting every phrase to sound just right in hopes of securing some job even be worth it? Will the employer even care enough to read past the first sentence? Perhaps that's why I'm having trouble starting. I want to be professional, but I want to avoid the mundane. I want to be unique, but not to the point of exhaustion, where the reader can tell I'm trying to be unique. And how am I supposed to fit my entire life experience, ambition, and purpose in life into a meager 400-word maximum letter while simultaneously aiming to convince this Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. that I am precisely and exactly the sole remaining person on this planet that's perfect for this job? Do I even care enough to try? Well, I must at least pretend to care, if I want to succeed (or so society tells me). So I fake it. And I write. And I regret that the only way to truly get what you want in this life is to pretend that you're someone you're not, to brag about your qualities that are truly superfluous, and to hand out mere samples of yourself when really what everybody else needs is a closer look.