Separate but Unequal
Jun. 8th, 2007 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldLife is an all-you-can-eat buffet plate. You can call it my Ponderosa Steak House Theory:
School is your appetizer. It exists separately from the buffet in the same way that school is a world that exists separately from real life. Your choices are limited (in some cases, predetermined) and the rules are all different. It's basically a construct to simultaenously delay and prepare you for the next step. Some people see right through the inherent socio-economic imperialism and long to proceed to the real thing with real freedom. Others prematurely fill up on the experience and find it difficult to move on. Really ambitious individuals go to graduate school, which is like getting a second appetizer. This is fine, but if you're going to double up on the buffalo chicken quesadillas, you'd better be able to stomach a lot of shit.
That's when the buffet kicks in. Work is like your vegetables: important in a traditional, practical way. Work, and the money obtained therefrom, sustains critical processes, much like vegetables provide the essential vitamins, oils and fibers required to maintain high-level bodily functions.
Sex and drugs are the dessert: incredibly fun and inevitably harmful. "Drugs" is an umbrella term here, referring not only to controlled substances of various potencies but to any high-risk behaviors that provide a psychological "rush" such as gambling, international soccer competition or Ben and Jerry's Mint Chocolate Cookie ice cream. Which brings us back to dessert. No person can exist on dessert alone. If the sheer unhealthiness of it didn't kill you, you would ultimately be gunned down in a violent soft-serve machine turf war.
Everything else, like friends and family, culture and entertainment, is the main course. The starchy, stick-to-your-ribs entrees in bottomless heated containers. It's the whole reason you're eating. It's the point. Without the entree you might as well be moping at the salad bar or drunk at the regular bar.
In life and in the buffet line, I have always kept my plate segregated. Just as I don't want the green beans anywhere near my barbeque shrimp or my cherry pie, I seldom think or talk about my work on the weekends. I am even fairly reticent with my friends about my dessert-style indulgences, certain earlier essays in this space notwithstanding.
In fact, since college I have been all about avoiding my "vegetables." This doesn't mean that I have been bereft of pride or ethic in my work, only that I have never felt personally invested in the job or derived any joy from it. I simply did it and went home. At the risk of carrying the metaphor too far, I basically ate all the vegetables at the beginning of the meal, washed it down quickly and moved on to the more savory morsels. In that time I have dabbled in desserts, without much fervor, and gorged myself on the main course. These years have made me fat and happy.
Now, I am 30. And I even as my plate is getting bigger, I feel like there's so much stuff on it that it can't help but get all smushed together.
Last week, my employers gave me a promotion. It's a pretty significant promotion, with a fancier title and a higher pay grade. It's not an outrageously sexy title like "Lead Guitarist, U2" or anything, but it looks good on a business card and is enough to make my Mom giddy, which for me is itself profoundly rewarding.
And it's a lot more work. Since they gave me this throne I've been so swamped that I'm genuinely writing this during my lunch break. I've basically taken over all of my previous boss's duties -- and kept all my old ones.
Today they gave me a Blackberry, which is a cute little name for an electronic leash that gives you a brief electronic shock every time the company president gets an idea. (I had been looking forward to deep-sixing my land phone line upon possession of my new apartment next week and using my cell as my only phone. Now I have this monstrosity. It is as if the gods are making sure that they have an alternate method of reaching me in an emergency, apparently in the form of "a thought about next week's media campaign.")
For the past seven days I've felt a surge in baseline blood pressure and a creeping malaise as I scan the paper accumulating on my desk. I worry that it will be too much to keep in this office, that I will take it home with me -- or worse, take it to bed. That is not the new roommate I had in mind.
Some people love their jobs. For them, their work is their passion. While I admire these "vegetarians," I don't necessarily believe that it is feasible for some people. For people like me, the main course is our passion, and everything else is just a means of -- or an obstacle to -- getting there.
And there's a part of me that worries about these people who love their work so much. After all, when your food is all mashed together, one bad vegetable can spoil the whole dish. I'll have my vegetables on the side, please.
You folks are probably used to the fact that there isn't much action on this journal anymore. That's probably not going to change anytime soon. I'm going to need my lunch breaks to catch up on my breathing.
School is your appetizer. It exists separately from the buffet in the same way that school is a world that exists separately from real life. Your choices are limited (in some cases, predetermined) and the rules are all different. It's basically a construct to simultaenously delay and prepare you for the next step. Some people see right through the inherent socio-economic imperialism and long to proceed to the real thing with real freedom. Others prematurely fill up on the experience and find it difficult to move on. Really ambitious individuals go to graduate school, which is like getting a second appetizer. This is fine, but if you're going to double up on the buffalo chicken quesadillas, you'd better be able to stomach a lot of shit.
That's when the buffet kicks in. Work is like your vegetables: important in a traditional, practical way. Work, and the money obtained therefrom, sustains critical processes, much like vegetables provide the essential vitamins, oils and fibers required to maintain high-level bodily functions.
Sex and drugs are the dessert: incredibly fun and inevitably harmful. "Drugs" is an umbrella term here, referring not only to controlled substances of various potencies but to any high-risk behaviors that provide a psychological "rush" such as gambling, international soccer competition or Ben and Jerry's Mint Chocolate Cookie ice cream. Which brings us back to dessert. No person can exist on dessert alone. If the sheer unhealthiness of it didn't kill you, you would ultimately be gunned down in a violent soft-serve machine turf war.
Everything else, like friends and family, culture and entertainment, is the main course. The starchy, stick-to-your-ribs entrees in bottomless heated containers. It's the whole reason you're eating. It's the point. Without the entree you might as well be moping at the salad bar or drunk at the regular bar.
In life and in the buffet line, I have always kept my plate segregated. Just as I don't want the green beans anywhere near my barbeque shrimp or my cherry pie, I seldom think or talk about my work on the weekends. I am even fairly reticent with my friends about my dessert-style indulgences, certain earlier essays in this space notwithstanding.
In fact, since college I have been all about avoiding my "vegetables." This doesn't mean that I have been bereft of pride or ethic in my work, only that I have never felt personally invested in the job or derived any joy from it. I simply did it and went home. At the risk of carrying the metaphor too far, I basically ate all the vegetables at the beginning of the meal, washed it down quickly and moved on to the more savory morsels. In that time I have dabbled in desserts, without much fervor, and gorged myself on the main course. These years have made me fat and happy.
Now, I am 30. And I even as my plate is getting bigger, I feel like there's so much stuff on it that it can't help but get all smushed together.
Last week, my employers gave me a promotion. It's a pretty significant promotion, with a fancier title and a higher pay grade. It's not an outrageously sexy title like "Lead Guitarist, U2" or anything, but it looks good on a business card and is enough to make my Mom giddy, which for me is itself profoundly rewarding.
And it's a lot more work. Since they gave me this throne I've been so swamped that I'm genuinely writing this during my lunch break. I've basically taken over all of my previous boss's duties -- and kept all my old ones.
Today they gave me a Blackberry, which is a cute little name for an electronic leash that gives you a brief electronic shock every time the company president gets an idea. (I had been looking forward to deep-sixing my land phone line upon possession of my new apartment next week and using my cell as my only phone. Now I have this monstrosity. It is as if the gods are making sure that they have an alternate method of reaching me in an emergency, apparently in the form of "a thought about next week's media campaign.")
For the past seven days I've felt a surge in baseline blood pressure and a creeping malaise as I scan the paper accumulating on my desk. I worry that it will be too much to keep in this office, that I will take it home with me -- or worse, take it to bed. That is not the new roommate I had in mind.
Some people love their jobs. For them, their work is their passion. While I admire these "vegetarians," I don't necessarily believe that it is feasible for some people. For people like me, the main course is our passion, and everything else is just a means of -- or an obstacle to -- getting there.
And there's a part of me that worries about these people who love their work so much. After all, when your food is all mashed together, one bad vegetable can spoil the whole dish. I'll have my vegetables on the side, please.
You folks are probably used to the fact that there isn't much action on this journal anymore. That's probably not going to change anytime soon. I'm going to need my lunch breaks to catch up on my breathing.
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Takin' what they're giving 'cause I'm working for a livin'
Date: 2007-06-10 06:56 pm (UTC)Second, my hobby more or less is my job. It's always on my mind, I take it home and night, I buy it drinks and whisper sweet nothings on weekends. Does this make me one of those people who goes around snacking from a bag of baby carrots at all times?
Re: Takin' what they're giving 'cause I'm working for a livin'
Date: 2007-06-11 03:39 pm (UTC)I actually admire people who go around snacking from a bag of baby carrots at all times. If only I had such discipline. I actually tried to consume only healthy snacks for several months a few years ago -- dl004d can attest to the fact that I once brought a bag of baby carrots to his place to watch an NCAA basketball tournament game -- but it was only a matter of time before I became frustrated and started dipping the baby carrots in beef gravy.
I'm not really sure how to resolve the analogy from this point. I look at you as defense Exhibit A, though; if you can really make this work, you will have given me some hope for a well-integrated life. I must admit that I worry, though, that one day either your work will make your hobby less enjoyable through the simple fact that it is work, or if your love for your hobby will render you incapable of making objective judgments.
In either case, I wish you luck, and simply urge you to see a doctor if you find yourself turning yellow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotenodermia).
Re: Takin' what they're giving 'cause I'm working for a livin'
Date: 2007-06-11 03:39 pm (UTC)Re: Takin' what they're giving 'cause I'm working for a livin'
Date: 2007-06-11 08:12 pm (UTC)Anyway, some of us have to slip a vegetable or two into our dessert (carrot cake?) but it is a fair trade for having bites of dessert during the vegetable course.
That is, I work best when I have the chance to putz around. My sister and her roommate used to study in college by imposing "power hours," in which each had to study continuously and not leave their room for an hour at a time. I peppered my studying with rounds of email and other puttering around. Then again, it likely took me two hours to do the amount of studying as in one "power hour."
Re: Takin' what they're giving 'cause I'm working for a livin'
Date: 2007-06-11 08:46 pm (UTC)I look to music reviewers to describe the music in such a way that I'll know whether or not I wish to buy it myself. What I don't want to know is brilliant ______ is just because they don't sound like any of the other 20,394,857 bands the reviewer has listened to this year, or how crappy ______ is just because the reviewer has heard too many alt-pop records lately. And, of course, I want to hear the reviewer mock Ashlee Simpson mercilessly.
If you don't care about objective judgments, what does that mean? Are you just listening to what ed002d is saying because he's been anointed as some kind of arbiter of what's hip? Because that would be so not rock and roll.
And anyway, that would not be the biggest fear at play here. Obviously, the biggest fear at play here would be ed002d becoming a drag queen. Or worse, a ferret.
Re: Takin' what they're giving 'cause I'm working for a livin'
Date: 2007-06-12 12:11 pm (UTC)Re: Takin' what they're giving 'cause I'm working for a livin'
Date: 2007-06-18 07:33 pm (UTC)As for my objectivity, it is necessarily subjective, given my line of work -- musical taste is not quantifiable, though my opinion is informed by having listened to a ridiculous amount of music. That said, I strive to be fair, and I promise that I'm not out to praise acts solely because they're different or rip them solely because they are not. Hip is not always good (see: Stevens, Sufjan) and vice versa, but good is good regardless of whether it's hip.
Ashlee Simpson is a waste of cells.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately ...
Date: 2007-06-25 03:40 am (UTC)As a long-term vegetarian, I found your analogy to be intriguing and, ultimately, an apt description of my life. At various intervals--usually when my work of saving the world feels overwhelmingly time-consuming and/or stress-inducing--I have flirted with doing something other than what I do. Like I could be a pilot, travel for free and make enough money to support my travel (and philanthropic) pursuits. The problem? I thought about this for a few minutes--imagining, scheming, planning--how nice it would be to not feel respobnsible for "fixing" things that are hard to fix. But then those thoughts were replaced by these: "Well, if I were a pilot, I could fly rescue missions for Mercy Corps or food drops for the UN."
Some of us were just born to eat a lot of vegetables, I guess.
Re: I've been thinking about this a lot lately ...
Date: 2007-06-25 06:00 pm (UTC)Your comment actually got me thinking. With UN food drops, do the people receiving the dropped food observe the five-second rule?