On Icarus

They say that, overwhelmingly, the last phrase most frequently uttered inside of a commercial airplane's cockpit about to be demolished in a crash are, "Oh, shit."

The NTSB, the governing body charged by the United States government with investigating airplane accidents, reviews all cockpit voice recordings (CVRs) that are recovered after a fatal aviation accident. During the course of its investigations, this body frequently administers a test to measure stress in the voice of individuals in the cockpit, such as the pilot, the copilot, or the first officer. It is a neat way to tell if the pilots were surprised by whatever weather-related anomaly or mechanical failure or explosion that started the inevitably fatal chain-of-events, and it measures how calm they are able to remain as they struggle to reclaim control of a doomed airliner, whether they are working in concert with, or at cross-purposes, with each other in the final seconds of their lives. And the lives of everyone else onboard.

As a result of these stress tests, it has been determined that this often-uttered final utterance, "Oh, shit" isn't frequently said with high stress, with great force, or even as just a regular, run-of-the-mill exclamation. It is often said dryly, flatly, in a resigned way that indicates an experienced pilot knows, in the final milliseconds of his or her life, that this plane cannot be reclaimed, and into the Pacific Ocean, or mountaintop, or field beyond the desired runway it will go. It will just go.

Oh, shit.

Through circuitious circumstances, I got to thinking about Icarus yesterday. These things tend to happen when I have a week-day off. I'm here in the house, alone, noodling around-- tending to this or that, listening to taciturn, introspective folk music, and it just... happens. I hadn't thought of Icarus since 5th grade, when we all studied our mythology. I was assigned Hades, and I came to school dressed as him for the culminating project. I loved Hades, because he was dark and terrifying, and he embodied everything that I found dark and terrifying-- so I embraced him. I'll show you, mortals. Dip your toe in my little River of Styx and we'll see what's what.

Oh, shit-- right?

I don't remember which of my classmates were assigned the tale of Icarus and Daedalus, but I remember being impressed by-- and probably a little jealous of-- the wings-- fashioned out of string and popsicle sticks, glue, feathers, and sticks. I don't think Daedalus himself could have done better. I was sure their parents had helped them. But what of that? My mother made my Hades hat.

The morals of the tale of Icarus and Daedalus are plenty, and uninspired, and done and done over again.

Listen to your parents.

Don't fly too high.

Remember, you're only human.

Be mindful of danger.

Don't be prideful.

The sun is dangerous. Don't forget your Lancome Bienfait Super Fluid Facial, SPF-50.

Icarus is easy to dump on, from the comfort of an armchair firmly entrenched in reality's living room. Stupid shit-for-brains: what did you think was going to happen?

Well. I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for the kid. And I would think that anybody who is an enthusiastic participant in the uniquely American rat-race for popularity, for "Likes", for "Friends", for advancement, for prominence, for a legacy might do well to smile kindly on this poor, broken body whose wings are besmirched with melted wax.

I wonder what his last words were. Probably something more eloquent than, "Oh, shit." After all, this is mythology we're talking about here-- a high art-- meant to lift us up, ascending towards Phoebus.

On Monday, a well-intentioned coworker asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. "Surely you don't want to do this-- work here in a psych hospital-- for the rest of your life," she, a nurse, said.

"God," I sighed, "I don't know, Mary. I just don't know."

And my mind drifted away to the relaxation group I run for the patients. Seated on floral cushions in wicker rockers, they gently drift off to sleep as light Victorian piano music plays for them on the CD player, and I take them on a guided visualization. I always start by having them imagine they're on the beach, all alone, lying on their backs on the warm sand, the glorious sun warming their faces. Through the journey, they end up under water, gliding amongst the fish and the coral, and, the way I tell it, they inevitably end up giving the water a gentle kick and they soar up, up, and up as their heads break through the waves and they soar through the sky-- upwards towards the sun.

"I don't know," I said, smiling faintly, "but, for now, I love what I do."

"Well," she said, "I'm glad you're here."


Me, too.

No Comment

You guys are really super-doop good to me-- you know that?

You read-- you're loyal. You comment, some of you, and they're mostly insightful, interesting, engaging comments. Every now and then I'll get innocently flirted with, and that's always good for my ego. Sometimes you'll crack a joke, or reference an item in a column that's 200 posts ago, and that's pretty good for my ego, too. You're nice to me and respectful of each other, and you never ever whine that I'm not much for commenting on comments, probably because you know it's kind of a pet peeve of mine and that, if I have a comment that I feel requires one back, I'll leave one.

In short, you don't expect a lot of me and, in that respect, you're rather like my middle school math teachers. Except that I'm sure most of you shave regularly.

And there are a couple of you out there who stand up to me, calling me out on my rampant, AIDS-like hypocrisy, and I'm most grateful for those of you. (Not that I want all of you to start doing it, that would be a total suckfest.) Yesterday, Colleen was catching up on some of my blogs after returning from her vacation (I know that because, all of a sudden, seven comments showed up in my inbox on blogs from a week ago, not because I look through her mail and obsessively finger her kitchen utensils while she's at work) and she left a comment on a blog of mine about how much I hate my job-- a subject I touch on with frequency and aplomb. After reading my tautly-paragraphed whinings about my passive-aggressive chair and my boss that smells like farts, she responded with:

"'Boohoo, I'm one of the 90% of Americans who has a full-time job.'

Quit your bellyaching. And be grateful for your malodorous chair."

Oops. Was it something I said?

Of course, Colleen's right-- I'm a complete and utter crybaby because, no matter whether my office chair smells like fresh-baked croissants, industrial varnishing, or goat excrement, at least I have an office chair to befoul forty hours every week. Did it ever occur to me that under or un-employed individuals might take exception to a post about how much I hate work in a climate when 10.2% of Americans are unemployed? Yes-- the same way some of my pathetic, acne-ridden, hopelessly single readers might get turned off when I write schmoopie blooperings about my disgustingly adorable marriage, the same way my poor, unfortunate reader who tools around in a funkified, rusted out shell of a1987 Ford Festiva might get his panties in a barb when I complain about the fate to which I have been consigned-- a 2001 Chrysler PT Loser.

Here's the thing-- Colleen said something. She even managed to do it in a cute, hey-you're-a-jerk-but-it's-okay kind of way. In case you haven't realized, I can be pretty insensitive sometimes, I can run off at the mouth and I can alienate-- it has been known to happen. Hey-- I lost my best friend simply by opening my mouth. So, I know that.

I know.

And I don't want to lose any of you. I've lost too much in my life already. So, long story short, stick around. And open your mouths when you need to.

I still hate my job, of course-- that doesn't change a thing, and nothing changes.

My New Skill

There is a new skill I've been demonstrating at work of late, and that's good. It's always nice to demonstrate new skills.

Unless, of course, that skill is data entry.

Back in middle school, when crusty Mrs. Droopy Cheeks taught us typing on baby blue Remington electric typewriters, I averaged 60 words-per-minute, and I expect my pace has increased since then. My boss has frequently marveled at the speed and alacrity with which I bang out letters, emails, and other correspondence.

Sadly, she realized that I would be a right down reg'lar whizz-bang at this snappy little database enhancement project we've got going on 'round these here parts.

Street address. State. Zip. Name.
Street address. State. Zip. Name.
Street address. State. Zip. Name.

Lather. Rinse. Hate-fuck me raw with a broken Coke bottle. Repeat.

This, apparently, is what my life has become. I am now, unofficially, a data-entry clerk. Shall I introduce you to my Master's Degree? It's in the house somewhere, under some dust, shame, and possibly dog pee.

Rather than bitch and cry and moan about how I'm now a data-entry clerk, I think I'd (and you'd) be better served if I presented you with a list of things I'd rather be than a data-entry clerk....

* Tied up inside the trunk of a Gotti's Cadillac.

* Imprisoned & sharing accomodations with a prisoner named "Baby Fuck Johnson."

* Unemployed.

* A retarded rabbit being product-tested upon by crazy Revlon lipstick scientists.

* Trapped in a broken elevator with the Lawrence Welk Show.

* An ICU patient.

* Onstage with no trousers and no memory of what my lines are.

* Hairless.

* Have a disease that only enables me to blink once every New Moon.

* Naked, wrapped in cheesecloth and defecated on by the Oakland Raiders.

* A devout Catholic.

* A thong worn by any daytime performer at the club "Castle Muffenstein."

* Be a guest at Martha Stewart's house for Christmas.

* Sixteen and pregnant.

* Whole-Milk-Boarded by America's bravest.

* Conjoined twins with Jesse Ventura.

* A herpe.

* Forced to eat one (just one) of my late great-grandmothers blackened liverwurst hamburgers.

* A twitchy, one-eyed cat at a pet adoption agency.

* A night neighborhood watchman in Harlem.

* The butt of a Borat joke.

* Tased on COPS.

* A hemophiliac descendant of the inbred, chinless ruling class of the Hapsburg monarchs.

* Fingerless. Try giving me data to enter now.

You'll Be Fine

A few long years ago, I was working at a small optical shop, selling glasses, scheduling doctor's appointments, throwing out the garbage, and laughing behind the backs of customers with my boss.

Then I got this crazy idea into my head that I was going to become a cop. So I wrote my boss a letter saying that I was going to resign from my $10.55/hr job to enter a municipal police academy as a police officer candidate. I was surprised when he didn't tell me that I was fucking crazy, because that's what my parents told me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said how proud he was of me, which is just what I wanted to hear from my parents about this decision, but didn't. And then he said something that rubbed me the wrong way, even though I think it was meant as a compliment.

"You'll be fine," he said to me.

"Look, you know it doesn't really matter what happens to you in there-- if you make it or if you wash out. You're handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious-- and you're a white male. Opportunities are just going to fall into your lap. I mean, shit: they fell into mine."

And I guess they did, for him. He grew up dirt-poor in a trailer in a shitty part of New Jersey. His father died early and his mother, still living, is a trembling, alcoholic wreck. Miraculously, my boss survived a long-haired, drug-hazed adolescence filled with unprotected sex and behavior of a dubious nature at best. He bummed around life and held a series of odd jobs-- landscaping, construction, house painting, and being a traveling soda vendor. A friend approached him and suggested he ought to stop peddling suds and start peddling sunglasses, and so he became a rep for a recognizable sunglass line. Another friend suggested that he buy an optical shop and, when the opportunity presented itself, as it invariably does to all handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious white males, he did.

And, when he saw another handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious white male at the age of twenty come into his shop with a quick joke and a shaky handshake, well, I guess he decided to return the favor. Well, kind of. He started me at $6.50 an hour, and my first job was to soap, rinse and dust each one of the approximately 2,000 pair of glasses that surrounded the store. It took me the entirety of my first week of work.

I was annoyed by my boss's assumption that things would turn out okay for me because of the color of my skin, or because I knew how to comb my hair or because I used uncommon vocabulary words like "effecacious" and "remuneration" in daily conversation. Were any of these facts sturdy enough to act as a cushion or a safety-net against homelessness, mental illness, depletion of cash, unemployment, accidents, or the hopeless, unstoppable failure that radically alters so many a promising life?

As we all know, my good looks and charming personality were not enough to keep me enrolled in the police academy. I left after two days, forty-eight minutes-- despite an acceptable sit-and-reach score, and a blistering mile-and-a-half run time. I soon learned that my combed hair or my impressive vocabulary was no help when it came time to lift the barbell.

Neither of these elements of who I am stopped me from seven months of unemployment, and they didn't help me the first time I tried to pass the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's EMT Practical Examination. Fortunately, I passed on the second try, and that lead to a year and seven months on the street with a transport ambulance company, alternately freezing or sweating my ass off for $11.00/hr, transporting spindly, 90-pound cancer sufferers to hospitals and hospice centers, or schlepping around 400-pound gorillas to MRI appointments or up three flights of stairs. Or down. I can't remember which anymore.

Promotions at the ambulance company that seemed like they would be open to someone of my liberal arts qualities-- positions in management or supervision-- were routinely given to others with lower education levels, lower communication skills, and probably lower chromosomal quantities.

So I left.

After two years in my current desk-jockey job, I am emotionally exhausted, burned out and apathetic, and I am, at 29, finding myself once again at a cross-roads in my life where I am wondering if what my old boss once said to me will turn out to be true or false.

"You'll be fine."

I never put much stock into what he said, unless it was funny, and I'm not sure I believe him now. I want to, of course. But I think he might have been prejudiced, and it's hard to believe what tainted people say.

If he is to be believed, though, and if I understand him correctly, some tantalizing plum will kind of just... fall into my lap. I just hope that, if it does, it doesn't break my balls.

You See Yourself

I made the mistake a little while back of doing a favor for my boss.

You, I'm sure, would never commit such an occupational solecism.

My employer informed me that her friend, a published playwright, had written a play and her publishing company asked her to make multiple revisions on it before it could be published. My boss asked me to review this script and make suggestions, revisions, comments, criticisms, & c "as soon as possible."

Actually, before she asked me to do this, she volunteered my services to the playwright.

"Please don't do that again," I said to my boss when I was informed that my services had been volunteered without my knowledge or acquiescence.

"Do what?" she asked innocently, quite possibly resisting the urge to bat her eyelashes.

"You know what," I said flatly. I've known my boss since I was eleven, so I can talk to her this way, rather like the way we churlish boys abuse our mothers.

"I thought you'd love the opportunity to be more creative!" replied my boss, feigning hurt.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see slaving over someone else's bullshit children's musical and working diligently to further her career as an opportunity to be "more creative" nor do I see it as something I, or anybody else, would "love" to do.

But that's beside the point. I did it, partly because I was already commited to do it, and partly as a favor to my boss.

The musical, by the way, sucks donkeynips. It has all the hallmarks of a musical about high schoolers written by a fifty year-old woman, because that is precisely what it is. There are the stereotypical characters, even referred to in the character list as "The Jock," "The Nerd," "The Cheerleader," and "The Artsy Girl."

I mean, seriously? Shoot me in the teeth.

But I took several hours, on a Saturday, mind you, to review this woman's daft little musical, because her publisher was breathing down her neck to receive the final revisions by Monday. I reviewed and edited the work, even adding monologues and dialogue of my own, and emailed her four pages of notes. Then, I washed my hands of it.

Until she emailed me back not 25 minutes later with 10 more questions about the play, and other character ideas to consider and get feedback on. Now, I should have said, "Sorry, you got your feedback already. If you want more jumpy mattress, you'll have to put another quarter in" but, of course, I didn't. Because I am a slave, a doormat, an assfuck, a limpwimp. More of my weekend got pissed away making changes and suggestions and additions and deletions to this manuscript that I don't give a hoot in Christ's left nip about. I sent her another email, indicating in a very polite way that this was the end of my critique session. She emailed back and was appropriately grateful.

I didn't hear from the playwright until yesterday, when she called up my office.

"Oh, I'm actually glad you picked up the phone," she remarked. Gee, thanks.

She went on to say how helpful the revisions were and how they made the play much stronger, which was nice to hear. She also mentioned that the publishing company was pleased, which was also nice to hear, since nothing I've written has pleased a publishing company since 2001. She then mentioned that she gave me "credit" in the script for my aid, and I won't lie and say that didn't please me either, because it did, though a fee of $1,000 would have pleased me a good deal more. Unfortunately, she did not stop there.

"And I wanted to let you know that I'll be contacting you again in the future to consult on some of my other musicals that I have coming down the pike that need a fresh voice, because I really see you as a dramaturg. Isn't that how you see yourself?"

This is where I ceased being pleased.

From the ever-trusty Wikipedia, for those of you not familiar with the term: "the dramaturg will often conduct research into the historical and social conditions, specific locations, time periods, and/or theatrical styles of plays chosen by the company, to assist the playwright, director and/or design team in their production."

In short order, The Playwright's Bitch.

I think this is what one might call a "back-handed compliment." I have definitely been on the receiving end of such compliments before, and I know distinctly what they feel like when delivered. Now, this playwright may very well think that it's a high honor to be called upon to flush out and finesse her simple and fatuous theatre pieces, but I do not share that opinion.

Proud? Sure I am.

Snob? Probably.

I think, though, I was less offended by her suggestion that I be her own private, in-pocket, free-of-charge dramaturg than I was by her incredibly and outlandishly presumptuous question, "Isn't that how you see yourself?"

Isn't that how I see myself? As what? As chained to your hip, spending my free time reviewing outdated and ridiculous feel-good musicals about pimples and algebra?

No. Most definitely not.

"I see myself as a writer," I said to my boss this morning, recounting the conversation to her in a voice close to breaking, "but I suppose nobody else does," I said as I turned on my heels and walked out the door. On my way to go to Staples. To stand there for half an hour making photocopies. Of one of this woman's stupid plays.

And so maybe I'm just not.

Of course, I'm a blogger-- you know that. But, is that the same thing as being a writer? I vacillate on that point. I perform in amateur G&S operettas-- does that make me an actor? Maybe. Does it make me a singer? No, I'm no singer. Does affiliation with the arts always have to be dependent on whether or not you get paid? I don't necessarily think so, but that is how culture defines you. The insipid, scripted question you hear the most when meeting some painful new schmuck at a party, "So, whaddyoo do?" refers, of course, to what you doo, for money.

I don't know what titles or jobs or hobbies or anything really means anymore. One thing I do know quite clearly is that, at no point in my life will I answer the question, "So, whaddyoo do?" by saying,

"I'm a dramaturg. Nice to meet you."

Because neither of those statements will probably be true, especially if you write children's musicals.

What I Want

I know what I want now.

I know what I want to do with my life. I know it truly and passionately. Indefatigably even, if I may use so many syllables. I finally realized it this morning. I know what I want.

I want my own business. I want to work for myself.

I don't want to work for you. Or him. And I definitely don't want to work for her. Sorry, ladies, I've had three female bosses now and they all leave a lot to be desired. One of them used to leave the office mid-day and then would call me at 4:55 to make sure I was still there.

Tight.

So, yeah, I figured it out: I want my own business.

I don't know what it is, nor do I care much about what it is. I don't know what I want to sell you, or what sort of service I want to provide, I don't know how to start it or what to call it, or where to open it, but I know I want it.

I want it bad.

You want to know why I want it bad?

Because, when I work for somebody else, I have to behave in the manner and tone that they have set for the operations of the business, and I'm tired of doing that. I'm tired of kissing the puckered, pimply ass of the ungrateful world, I'm tired of bending to everbody's will, including my employer, I'm tired of small-talk and going along to get along and I'm tired of politics and I'm tired of not being able to take my balls out and swing them around a little bit.

Yesterday, I was dealing with a guy, a sniveling, manipulative, unkind and obnoxious bastard of a guy that I just wanted to kick in the knee over and over and over again, until his patella turned to dust. Now, I realize that, even if I were the business owner I couldn't really do that, but, if I were the business owner, I could have told him to fuck off and never come back here, because that's my right as the business owner. My business, my property, I get to call the shots. Unfortunately, I work for a gentle-hearted 60-year-old woman who would faint or implode before she told someone to leave. Unfortunately, I had to do likewise. I had to stand there and eat shit and defend our business practices, and myself, in a passive-aggressive, sychophantic way that nauseated me so, disgusted me to the point that I found that I was hating myself even more than I was hating this incomparable prickball, and that made me sad.

And it made me want my own business.

My uncle has his own business. It's a failing men's clothing store that is stuck firmly in the year 1958. Yellow shorts with lobsters on them. Madras dress shirts that cost $179. Cashmere sweaters at the cost of a monthly car payment. That kind of thing. Whatever you want to say about my uncle and his general ineptitude as a businessman, he doesn't take shit from anybody. If someone comes in and makes a comment about how high his prices are, my uncle merely smiles and points to the door. And he's absolutely right. He shouldn't have to listen to that shit in his own store. Yes, his prices are high, and that's why I don't shop there. I can't afford it, even with the family discount, and I have no need for lobster shorts anyway. However, when you walk onto someone else's domain, you play by their rules, or you don't play: simple. If you decide that $179 is too much for a Madras shirt, then you walk out, you don't stand there and make comments or, worse yet, try to haggle.

When I worked as an optician a thousand years ago, my boss would not only bend over backwards for insipid, cheap customers, he would bend over backwards and lick his own taint for them. He did anything they wanted, took hundreds of dollars off frames and lenses, because he was petrified of losing even one customer.

"You know," I said to him one day, "some customers you really don't want here."

He nodded his head, but he couldn't help himself. A while later, my old boss found his balls when he threw out an Indian couple who hounded me relentlessly about the cost of their glasses.

"Is that your best price? Is that your best price? Is that your best price? Is that your best price?" they repeated endlessly, as if it were some sort of tantric mantra. Finally, my boss walked over to us and he told them to pay or leave. They left.

My father has had his own business since 1987.

"Daddy can't work for anybody else," my mother said to me.

At seven, I didn't understand what that meant and, truthfully, I didn't understand what it meant for a long time, but I think I do now. It's not that my father couldn't do what someone else was telling him to do-- he was a soldier in the Israeli army, for Christ's sake, he knew how to take orders, even from people who weren't as smart or competent-- it's that he couldn't work under the tone set by someone else. If you buy a t-shirt or a thigh-support short from my father's company, you'd better know your size, because his policy is "NO RETURN, NO EXCHANGE."

That's it.

He set that rule because he's the boss and he doesn't take shit from people, and he doesn't want your smelly, stained, discolored merchandise back. You think you're an A cup and you're really a B cup? Oh well. Now, if he had a boss, the boss might say, "Hey, you know, I think we really ought to accept this return, I mean, we don't want to lose business here..."

Lose business? My father has screamed on the phone at his own customers, called them names, absolutely freaked out. And, yes, he has lost business. But the fanatics keep coming back for more, because he's honest and he's decent and he manufactures good shit. And, for lots of people, that's enough.

There is a definite danger in taking too much shit from people for too long. You become Willy Loman. And I don't want that.

So, let's be our own boss. I have two questions:

1.) What should I do?

and

2.) Wanna come work for me?

One Sick Weekend

Being sick for an entire weekend hardly seems like fair dealing-- unless I was John Wilkes Booth, Pol Pot or the creator of "Benson" in a previous life. Even if I was, I could understand maybe being zonked on the couch for a Friday night, or half of Saturday-- but the whole weekend? Come on.

I'm pretty emotionally fragile as I plod my disoriented way through this weekend. I pulled the final tissue from the box and I almost started to cry. Perhaps I'm menstruating. I don't think so, it's pretty clean down there. I know because I've been showering a lot to clear up my sinuses, but I'll bet I still don't smell too good. It's hard to smell like anything but sick when you're sick. At least I don't smell like Vicks Vap-o-Rub-- I don't use shit like that because it's nasty. I think linaments, balms and salves are things of a previous generation. It's hard to imagine someone who uses a bluetooth headset and polarized sunglasses rubbing some kind of foul smelling ointment that has the consistency of chicken fat all over his chest.

I'm not a good patient either. I regress heavily when I'm ill. How unfortunate for my wife. At least I haven't attempted to nurse. I require lots of hugs when I'm sick. Advil, Sudafed, Advair, Rhinocort and whatever the hell else I'm taking don't seem to do anything-- but the hugs are comforting and send my endorphins pinging around my innards in a very positive way.

It's amazing what sickness does to the body and to the mind. One minute I'm yanking out firmly entrenched weeds in our front "garden," and the next I'm flat-on-my-back useless. It's amazing, too, how it can make things like hugs seem like cancer curatives and things like pulling out the last tissue in a box seem like a nuclear catastrophe. Granted, you have to understand that, when I pulled out the final tissue in that box, I had a green goobity hanging down from my nose that was about as long as a BIC pen. Not to mention the ones that had adhered themselves lovingly to my shirtsleeve, pants, shoes.

You really forget what being sick is like when you're healthy. I guess this is why my boss could not understand why I could not help out with some miniscule, unimportant thing on Friday night.

"I doubt you're really sick," she said. "It's probably just the paint fumes in your house."

"I have a fever," I dryly retorted. "Is that from the paint fumes, too?"

"Oh, well, I don't know."

Right. You don't.

She's sixty-one and she works herself into oblivion because she's a martyr and loves to be regarded as the one-woman show who is capable of doing the impossible. When she gets sick she "just ignores it," which I have tried to convince her is a dubious medical practice.

"Well, I never get so sick that I can't DO," she said after I begged off the Friday night obligation.

Ah, I thought, but you should.

I guess it's difficult to blame healthy people for not understanding what it feels like to be sick. The cotton wool feeling in your ears, the brain-encased-in-jell-o sensation, the baseball bat to the kidneys, the baby sheep up the nose-- it's tricky business explaining this to someone who's in prime physical condition, bounding around doing this and doing that, and looking at you suspiciously as you cry over the last tissue in the box.

This Deadened Soul

I just spent a full hour standing in front of a photo-copier at Staples.

I feel like my soul has been effectively deadened by the experience.

It should have been more exciting. After all, I was commiting a federal crime: illegally photocopying musical libretti.

Look out, Gotti.

There are times in my workaday life where I feel like I'm making a difference in peoples' lives, but those moments are pretty fleeting. Most of the time, I feel like I am standing in front of a photo-copier at Staples, even if I'm not. It's a feeling I can get almost anywhere, a feeling that I'm stationary, that I'm a cog in a not-so-great wheel, that I'm, well, Xeroxing.

I realize that, working for a small non-profit, there are lots of unglamorous jobs to be done, and few exciting jobs to be done, and I do them all. I empty the trash and Lysol the can. I sweep. I clean up vomit.

I Xerox.

I have a funny, ambiguous non-profit title that doesn't mean anything. Program Specialist, Project Coordinator, Program Assistant, Program Coordinator, Staff Assistant, Project Manager, Assistant, Associate, etcetera, etcetera.

What these titles all mean is:

"Will photocopy until nauseated and then will clean up his own vomitus for $30K-a-year or less."

Of course, I'm pretty thrilled that I actually have any job to speak of in this economy, when so many people are unemployed, sitting around trash-can campfires and roasting their old shoes for sustinence. Believe me, I know enough to be grateful that I'm not sitting around jobless, homeless and stricken with Swine Flu. Still, bitching about one's job, especially on a blog, is pretty much human nature, and obligatory.

As I was standing in front of the copier this morning for an hour, illegally Xeroxing manuscripts, I could not help but feel that there were better ways to spend my time. I don't particularly mind working for peanuts-- because, like most people who work for non-profits, the absence of benefits and any recognizable salary or potential for upward mobility is supplanted by the warmfuzzie sensation that you're a do-gooder, like Robin Hood, only less gay looking. In my occupational existence, I've worked for two for-profits and two non-profits, and I always felt better about myself when I was working for the non-profits. I felt like I was sacrificing something, and I like that. Just nail me up on that old cross, boys-- it's quite a view from up here.

I just wish there was less Xeroxing involved-- but you can't have everything.

There are things about every job I've ever had that I didn't like, that I felt deadened my soul or wasted my time or insulted me in one way or another. When I was an EMT, one of those tasks was washing the ambulance. I could empty all the pee-filled foley catheter bags on the planet, schlep walruse-shaped invalids up and down dimly-lit, rickety staircases, clean thick goop from peoples' neck-holes, look at blood and poop and puke all day, make the stretcher nice and tidy five or six times in a shift-- but tell me to wash the truck and I would roll my eyes and do basically anything to get out of doing it. I suppose it comes from my own personal reluctance to wash my own car. Why? Doesn't it still drive the same if it's dirty? It's not like somebody rubbed feces all over the side of the thing-- why do I have to bust my ass to make it all shiny-- especially in the winter when it's just going to get filthy again in a matter of minutes? In the wintertime, we were supposed to wash the truck once a week. This notice, put out in writing on the Magic-Erase white board, was promptly riddled with ridicule and obscene protest comments from my coworkers. It was nice to know I wasn't alone.

When I was an optician, my first job out of college, the indignity that I avoided and dreaded was vacuuming the store. It wasn't hard, or taxing, or dangerous-- it just was something that, for one reason or another, I felt deadened my soul a little. It didn't help that my boss seemed to put the vacuum in my hand directly after I would return from a three-day-weekend or some other unusual time off, so that I equated being told to vacuum with punishment. I always did a shitty job vacuuming, too. I never tried to do a bad job, but I wouldn't say I ever especially tried to do a good job either.

As I stood at Staples, the warmth of the Xerox machine warming my crotch and legs, as page after page after page got spat out from the side of the great, whirring, rectangular object, I thought about all the soul-deadening things I've done for extraordinarly miniscule amounts of money. I tried to think about what soul-deadening things lay in wait for me in my jobs of the future, but my brain refused to let me watch that preview. Must be pretty bad. Could it be an unending, painful scene laden with collating, filing, sorting, organizing, paper-clipping, stapling, and being second-guessed, underminded, critiqued and patronized?

Oh my.

As Stephen Sondheim once said: heigh-ho the glamorous life.