10 December 2007
Future Post in Progress
I think my next post will be a list of rants/complaints about *drum roll* Statesboro! It is a town I hate to love. To do some freshening of the memory, I will be running normal errands today in town. I can't wait.
A House Filled with Thoughts
A house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms and one girl. It's lonely with my thoughts sometimes. It, at times, terrifies me.
07 December 2007
The Game
Although I feel uninspired, I feel compelled to write in this blog. After all, it has been a few days and I want to write in this blog often so that strangers and friends will eventually become regular readers. I like to think someone out there is interested in what I think and write. It's a part of my emotional needs to be wanted and genuinely cared about... yet I don't know how genuine a reader is. I would just like to think that, as a reader, he or she will care about the writer, as I do.
Having said all of this (unnecessary stuff), something has been plaguing my thoughts about the "grown-up," or business world. It has been on my mind ever since I started playing dress-up not for myself or because I felt like looking nice, but for an institution (thank you, Education Department). Do we all have to play that game? It's the game we play in order, we claim, to get success in the business world. My father, for example, is a good example. He started with night shifts at a well-known southern lumber company. He worked in the mills and did the dirty work and the shitty hours. He also worked in the mills before they had certain safety regulations (which explains his early partial hearing-loss and why, up until three years ago or so, my mother had to translate what I said to him because I was so timid and soft-spoken). If I had to guess, he was in this early stage for about five to six years. He was then in a good place for the company to move him and my mother around to a couple of different places. This perhaps happened three times within four to five years. Finally, my father worked his way up the corporate ladder all the way to a office on the whatever-th floor in a building located in Downtown Atlanta. We were able to move to some average, middle-class suburb and into a (pardon my gasp) two-story house with a big foyer, a basement, and a huge master bathroom.
Warning! Tangent: Two-story houses are nice and grand and all, but eventually you will grow old and weary of climbing stairs all the time and long for those one-story houses you lived in when you were young and not so wealthy. Then you'll retire and probably decide to move to a one-story house near the beach somewhere. If you had thought about it, you could have moved into your one-story beach dream house twenty years ago when houses near the beach weren't so damn expensive.
Did my father end up doing what he loved, or was he just a man that happened to be good at his job? A man who, after some twenty-five years of working for a certain lumber company, got thrown away as though he were some sort of Willy Loman? (he's not) Luckily, after the certain lumber company tossed him and decided my father's days as a juicy orange were spent, he went on to find another job at another southern lumber company (which relocated us to Statesboro, and my personal hell for a few years).
I appreciate my father doing all of this, playing the game, because he has given our family so much security. I have never really had to worry about where my next meal was coming from, new clothes for school, or getting a car when I turned sixteen... or a college education. I appreciate him doing all of this, but I always wonder if he is appreciative of what he has done with himself. Did the game satisfy him, or was it all just for the end result (and it hasn't ended yet, so I wonder, when it does come to the end...)?
Will it satisfy me?
I need to find a career where you get hired and are appreciated for what you do and not how you dress or how easily you are pushed around by the company. A career I do because I love it, not because I need it to satisfy some sort of end result. Like that'll happen. Any ideas?
Finally... a customer! Back to work.
Having said all of this (unnecessary stuff), something has been plaguing my thoughts about the "grown-up," or business world. It has been on my mind ever since I started playing dress-up not for myself or because I felt like looking nice, but for an institution (thank you, Education Department). Do we all have to play that game? It's the game we play in order, we claim, to get success in the business world. My father, for example, is a good example. He started with night shifts at a well-known southern lumber company. He worked in the mills and did the dirty work and the shitty hours. He also worked in the mills before they had certain safety regulations (which explains his early partial hearing-loss and why, up until three years ago or so, my mother had to translate what I said to him because I was so timid and soft-spoken). If I had to guess, he was in this early stage for about five to six years. He was then in a good place for the company to move him and my mother around to a couple of different places. This perhaps happened three times within four to five years. Finally, my father worked his way up the corporate ladder all the way to a office on the whatever-th floor in a building located in Downtown Atlanta. We were able to move to some average, middle-class suburb and into a (pardon my gasp) two-story house with a big foyer, a basement, and a huge master bathroom.
Warning! Tangent: Two-story houses are nice and grand and all, but eventually you will grow old and weary of climbing stairs all the time and long for those one-story houses you lived in when you were young and not so wealthy. Then you'll retire and probably decide to move to a one-story house near the beach somewhere. If you had thought about it, you could have moved into your one-story beach dream house twenty years ago when houses near the beach weren't so damn expensive.
Did my father end up doing what he loved, or was he just a man that happened to be good at his job? A man who, after some twenty-five years of working for a certain lumber company, got thrown away as though he were some sort of Willy Loman? (he's not) Luckily, after the certain lumber company tossed him and decided my father's days as a juicy orange were spent, he went on to find another job at another southern lumber company (which relocated us to Statesboro, and my personal hell for a few years).
I appreciate my father doing all of this, playing the game, because he has given our family so much security. I have never really had to worry about where my next meal was coming from, new clothes for school, or getting a car when I turned sixteen... or a college education. I appreciate him doing all of this, but I always wonder if he is appreciative of what he has done with himself. Did the game satisfy him, or was it all just for the end result (and it hasn't ended yet, so I wonder, when it does come to the end...)?
Will it satisfy me?
I need to find a career where you get hired and are appreciated for what you do and not how you dress or how easily you are pushed around by the company. A career I do because I love it, not because I need it to satisfy some sort of end result. Like that'll happen. Any ideas?
Finally... a customer! Back to work.
01 December 2007
Why? I'm glad you asked...
So, basically, I wanted a blog that was somewhat more private than the one on myspace. What I mean is, I don't want all of my "friends" reading my blog. I feel that less "friends" will read what I put on here, especially if I choose to decide not to post this address up on facebook or myspace. Paranoia + vanity? Me.
I did this also because I did some facebook stalking of an old friend and found their site on this provider... and since it is powered by Google and I already had a Google account, I figured what the hell, it was simple.
The third reason I did this was out of boredom. I was working earlier today and there was a dry spell in customers and I needed something "productive" to do. This is a product of boredom (boredom at work and boredom of life in general).
The title I chose as well as my address includes the phrase "the Cog Life." Some people, when I mention "Cog People" to them, do not understand what I mean. I'm feeling generous, so I'll explain in case you do not understand.
The Cog Life refers to a lifestyle which I want desperately to avoid. Let's define "cog." Dictionary.com says this:
–verb (used without object)
–verb (used with object)
—Idiom
"Cog" is a word that instills fear in me. The Cog Life implies uniformity, suits, clopping heels, Starbucks, a white picket fence, "working 9 to 5;" a life, in my opinion, where everyone is so caught up in what s/he is doing in a machine-like manner and pretending he/she loves their job and coffee or just believe s/he does because real passions have been surpressed in the depths of his or her unconsciousness. I do not want to be a cog in the Earth clock. Don't misunderstand me too much, I know that some people prefer the Cog Life; it's stable, it's comforting, it has a schedule of sorts (1... get a job/career. 2... get married. Oh, don't forget to have two kids, one boy and one girl, and a dog and/or cat). That's fine... I enjoy stability in some things, but I don't want time to control my life. (Don't get me started on what I think about time... maybe I'll save that for later).
The Cog Life tried to swallow mine this semester. I was pursuing a major in English Education. Fortunately, I found the courage to withdraw. (I say courage because I was on the brink of graduating and perhaps on the brink of getting out of Statesboro; I do not hate Statesboro, I am just done here, it has done all it can for me... well, except give me a degree. I also say courage because of my father and his expectations and my fear of disappointing my parents.) Moving on, I have changed my major to English (minor in Writing), and I will be continuing classes in the spring. This moves my degree away from me for a semester, which is unfortunate, but I'll make do. Now that I have changed my major, I get remarks (even from a certain family member) such as, "Do you know what you're going to do?" "What do you want to do?" "What the hell are you going to do with that? It's totally useless, you know?" (The last remark was a drunk semi-friend, so we'll take that with a grain of salt and a whole lot of margarita.) My shaky, half-filled with fear but mostly filled with hope and a soaring feeling that I guess can be called a great uncertainty (like not knowing what you're getting for Christmas) answer is "I'm not sure."
That's how I want most of my life to be like. The pleasure of uncertainty but knowing you're going to do something... even if it means having a crappy job just for the means to live yet still pursuing something greater. Not settling for the night shift stocking job at a Wal-Mart, even if you could become manager and work your way up to becoming a bigger and better Cog. So, I figure, as long as I pursue things that I love, I will eventually get the perfect job, maybe a husband, maybe a crazy orange picket fence, all of those things we look to for stability... but without the Cogs.
Hm, don't know if that made sense to anyone out in blogworld, but the important thing is that I get it.
***I would like to credit my friend, Zack, for the phrase "Cog People." It is from him I first heard about Cogs.
I did this also because I did some facebook stalking of an old friend and found their site on this provider... and since it is powered by Google and I already had a Google account, I figured what the hell, it was simple.
The third reason I did this was out of boredom. I was working earlier today and there was a dry spell in customers and I needed something "productive" to do. This is a product of boredom (boredom at work and boredom of life in general).
The title I chose as well as my address includes the phrase "the Cog Life." Some people, when I mention "Cog People" to them, do not understand what I mean. I'm feeling generous, so I'll explain in case you do not understand.
The Cog Life refers to a lifestyle which I want desperately to avoid. Let's define "cog." Dictionary.com says this:
| 1. | (not in technical use) a gear tooth, formerly esp. one of hardwood or metal, fitted into a slot in a gearwheel of less durable material. |
| 2. | a cogwheel. |
| 3. | a person who plays a minor part in a large organization, activity, etc.: He's just a small cog in the financial department. |
| 4. | (of an electric motor) to move jerkily. |
| 5. | to roll or hammer (an ingot) into a bloom or slab. |
| 6. | slip a cog, to make a blunder; err |
"Cog" is a word that instills fear in me. The Cog Life implies uniformity, suits, clopping heels, Starbucks, a white picket fence, "working 9 to 5;" a life, in my opinion, where everyone is so caught up in what s/he is doing in a machine-like manner and pretending he/she loves their job and coffee or just believe s/he does because real passions have been surpressed in the depths of his or her unconsciousness. I do not want to be a cog in the Earth clock. Don't misunderstand me too much, I know that some people prefer the Cog Life; it's stable, it's comforting, it has a schedule of sorts (1... get a job/career. 2... get married. Oh, don't forget to have two kids, one boy and one girl, and a dog and/or cat). That's fine... I enjoy stability in some things, but I don't want time to control my life. (Don't get me started on what I think about time... maybe I'll save that for later).
The Cog Life tried to swallow mine this semester. I was pursuing a major in English Education. Fortunately, I found the courage to withdraw. (I say courage because I was on the brink of graduating and perhaps on the brink of getting out of Statesboro; I do not hate Statesboro, I am just done here, it has done all it can for me... well, except give me a degree. I also say courage because of my father and his expectations and my fear of disappointing my parents.) Moving on, I have changed my major to English (minor in Writing), and I will be continuing classes in the spring. This moves my degree away from me for a semester, which is unfortunate, but I'll make do. Now that I have changed my major, I get remarks (even from a certain family member) such as, "Do you know what you're going to do?" "What do you want to do?" "What the hell are you going to do with that? It's totally useless, you know?" (The last remark was a drunk semi-friend, so we'll take that with a grain of salt and a whole lot of margarita.) My shaky, half-filled with fear but mostly filled with hope and a soaring feeling that I guess can be called a great uncertainty (like not knowing what you're getting for Christmas) answer is "I'm not sure."
That's how I want most of my life to be like. The pleasure of uncertainty but knowing you're going to do something... even if it means having a crappy job just for the means to live yet still pursuing something greater. Not settling for the night shift stocking job at a Wal-Mart, even if you could become manager and work your way up to becoming a bigger and better Cog. So, I figure, as long as I pursue things that I love, I will eventually get the perfect job, maybe a husband, maybe a crazy orange picket fence, all of those things we look to for stability... but without the Cogs.
Hm, don't know if that made sense to anyone out in blogworld, but the important thing is that I get it.
***I would like to credit my friend, Zack, for the phrase "Cog People." It is from him I first heard about Cogs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)