Not sure about the jobs (3) thing. It's a bad idea to focus on language popularity when starting out programming, because that changes rapidly. Javascript has only been really popular in the last few years. Who knows what will be popular five years from now.
Learn to program. Don't worry so much about the language.
2) Runs essentially everywhere
3) Practical (lots of jobs, syntax is close to that of other important languages)
4) Easy to share your creations with friends (see 1 above)
5) Has REPL, garbage collection, closures, objects, recursion, anonymous functions... soon to have TCO.
6) Can be a compilation target for other languages
7) Good libraries for media, 3D graphics
8) Hard for a beginner to trash the machine (at least with browser-based JS, Node of course is a different story)
Yeah, it's pretty ugly in spots (it's certainly not as aesthetically pleasing as Scheme), but there are some real advantages there.