Sometimes, we’re too busy concentrating on the door that’s opened for us that we don’t notice the one that’s about to slam shut, and when it does, we’re completely unprepared.
Archives for February 2004
Quote for today
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
— Helen Keller
Work and the self
I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of work lately (you do that when you don’t have a job) and how work has come to define who we are in American society.
Typical cocktail party chatter between two people who have just met usually involves the question “So, what do you do?” and by this they don’t mean “how to you amuse yourself in your free time?” or “what gets you hot and bothered?” When someone asks this they are asking “how do you earn money?”
Now, I understand that about a third, often times more, of a given person’s day is spent doing tasks in exchange for money. Despite this I still want to know: when did the work I do, when did the tasks I receive money to complete at someone else’s behest, come to define me as a person? Why not ask someone you’ve just met “what was the last book you read?” or “what was the last movie you saw?” or “what is your favorite place to go in the city?”
One school of thought says that simply because we spend so much time at our jobs, the job someone chooses tells you a lot about that person. In discussing this with one of my friends, whose age and life experience are vastly different from mine, she points out that to some, the job someone holds gives others an idea of what sort of power that person has in society.
I have to think that my own views on this are inherently influenced by my upbringing (poor enough to understand the intrinsic value of an honest day’s work done with your own two hands, well-off enough that most of my family wasn’t coming home with dirty fingernails at the end of the day) but to me a job has always been more about how you get money to do the other things you love to do than about accruing power in society. So aptly expressed by my mother’s succinct: your job is not your life; your job exists to finance the rest of your life.
I ran this concept by another friend, younger than I with similar, but not the same, life experiences, and his perspective on the matter was that society places too much emphasis on work. Why not ask about someone’s hobbies when you first meet them?
A lot of this thought about work and that nature of it has flowed from not having a job at the moment myself; some of it was sparked by my own 15 minutes of fame (I got to be one of the quoted for the “Question of the Week” in our local gay and lesbian newspaper and they insisted on having a job title to go with my name). Being unemployed doesn’t make me unique here in our third year of recession but I think the fact that I left a job that was making me miserable gives me a relatively unorthodox perspective.
We forget as we get into our daily routines that there is a whole different world out there during the day. Ever walk by a coffee place at say 10:37am on a random Thursday morning and wonder “who the hell are these people and why aren’t they at work?” (I know I have) Some of them are people like me, no job or killing time before an interview. Some of them are students, some are artists, some are just people who don’t work a 9 to 5. In some ways, I think those people are the happiest among us. They’ve the security of a steady income but they see life from 35 degrees to the side. The world they live in is just enough off center from the steady grind of modern America that they seem somehow at peace.
Either way, my musings will have to take a bit of a backseat very soon. Last night I accepted an offer for a good job at a decent salary working for someone I think will be a good boss in a great part of town. It’s back to being a wage slave for me.
The Perfect Score
What does SAT stand for these days? This film opens by positing that SAT stands for Suck Ass Test. In truth, SAT stands for absolutely nothing. ETS, the Educational Testing Service, which governs the lives of every single hopeful person on the globe who wishes to attend a university in the U.S. recently “rebranded” SAT from Scholastic Aptitude Test to just SAT. Whatever it means, this test standing between Kyle (Chris Evans) and his dream of architecture school at Cornell University. Like any self-centered, upper middle-class kid in post-modern America would, Kyle decides to steal the answers to the SAT (like studying, maybe, is so difficult? Yeah, the SAT is racially biased, yeah, the SAT is gender biased, yeah, the SAT is biased toward kids who live in urban areas. Get over it. We all had to take it.)
[Read more…] about The Perfect Score
Quote for today
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
— George Bernard Shaw