Buttered Bread
The start of the semester at our college is always a hard, stressful time for me. Today I tried to blunt that intensity by saying an internal 'I like you' to every person I met. It's a technique that I applied willfully, and it worked. Instead of the 'edge', when my personality is covered with a veneer of irritation, I was more pleasant and for the most part felt at ease and less tired when I got home.
Still, there's always this pressing feeling that I've missed a calling, that I should be doing something else in life. These days I go in at 7a.m. and get home at 10:30pm. There are only a few of these long days, thankfully. Usually the days are a retailer's dream, plenty of time off and with a Thanksgiving and Christmas break! That time is spent handling book listings, returns of overstock, typical retail stuff. Market, market, market... numbers, look at the numbers, always drive the numbers higher. Our profits are earned on the backs of the hopeful who still believe a college education will lift them out to a higher standard of living. I see a darker side, where a college education serves as the gateway to crushing debt. It is precisely this moment when the banks start owning your ass. That hurts me to be a part of the machine that way.
The thing that hurts me most, however, is the feeling that I have no control. During one of my breaks (I can't really call it a lunch break, more like a furtive excursion to stuff something down my throat) I was thinking of a friend's question to my expressed interest in living simply. She asked if I thought this nascent paradigm shift would take me to a new 'place.' This happened 4 weeks ago, and I'm still tossing the many meanings of 'place' around in my head, trying to find sense of it.
I hate putting this post out there without more editing, but I need to write a little every day, and if I wait until it is perfect this week I'll not get any sleep. So whatever. The question of 'place' isn't going away.
In the meantime, I'll pay attention to what butters my bread.
Still, there's always this pressing feeling that I've missed a calling, that I should be doing something else in life. These days I go in at 7a.m. and get home at 10:30pm. There are only a few of these long days, thankfully. Usually the days are a retailer's dream, plenty of time off and with a Thanksgiving and Christmas break! That time is spent handling book listings, returns of overstock, typical retail stuff. Market, market, market... numbers, look at the numbers, always drive the numbers higher. Our profits are earned on the backs of the hopeful who still believe a college education will lift them out to a higher standard of living. I see a darker side, where a college education serves as the gateway to crushing debt. It is precisely this moment when the banks start owning your ass. That hurts me to be a part of the machine that way.
The thing that hurts me most, however, is the feeling that I have no control. During one of my breaks (I can't really call it a lunch break, more like a furtive excursion to stuff something down my throat) I was thinking of a friend's question to my expressed interest in living simply. She asked if I thought this nascent paradigm shift would take me to a new 'place.' This happened 4 weeks ago, and I'm still tossing the many meanings of 'place' around in my head, trying to find sense of it.
I hate putting this post out there without more editing, but I need to write a little every day, and if I wait until it is perfect this week I'll not get any sleep. So whatever. The question of 'place' isn't going away.
In the meantime, I'll pay attention to what butters my bread.
posted by Woodog at 10:52 PM
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