Don't Die Young

Eating plain yogurt, baby carrots, and whole grain pita bread, I sat on a park bench in Rittenhouse Square. I exhaled with a slanted smile when I remembered the divide in the middle of the bench that allows two people to occupy it without having to puff out one’s cheeks in a forced smile or to comment on allergies caused by the city’s bad air or mention the growing clouds that suggest that they will force people to eat at their desks tomorrow. To talk takes energy, and lunch is about obtaining energy.

I finished my food, leaned back, and then stretched out my feet. I took up Dostoevsky’s classic, Crime and Punishment, but before I dove into the mind of a crazed student about to smash the skulls of an old woman and her sister, I saw an old man sit on the bench across from me. He wore loose blue sacks, a pressed white and blue pinstriped shirt, and polished brown shoes. Looking nowhere, the man stared at the tip of his greasy nose with watery eyes lounging within grey eyelids. The corners of his lips stretched toward his jaw. A few hairs sprouted from a spotted bald head. I put down my book and fell into a dark daze.

I am afraid of death. I cling to life as desperate as black widow clings to her web. However, more to the point, I am afraid of dying young, insofar as sacrificing my life to something that has no meaning, like an office job in Corporate America.  Yet, despite this fear, I do not live much with the life I have. Why do I not? Society demands me to meet certain obligations, such as maintaining social relationships just because of some meaningless association like families, neighbors, or coworkers, or such as obtaining insignificant financial wealth. These demands drain me, so when I come home from work, I just want to recline on my couch and do nothing. As the weeks go on, I find new ways to force myself to live despite being tired, but the fact that one has to force his or her self to live because he or she are tired from a meaningless job is disturbing.

I do not want to die, but I cannot control that, but I can control dying while living. I intend this summer job as a glorified secretary to be my last purposeless endeavor. I do not want to be a tired old man sitting miserably on a bench reflecting on a life as corporate slave.

Knowing that one day I will lie on a bed waiting to die, I am motivated to make sure that in those moments, I will be able reflect on a life well lived. I do not want to be like Kurtz in Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness, and utter, “The horror,” with my last breath.

Why We Sweat the Small Stuff

A mug sits on the counter. Your girlfriend bought it for you a year ago, and the coffee stains mark ten-ounces, fastidiously, so you can control your blood pressure. Opening the refrigerator door, you nudged the leftover piece of pound cake and the bag of organic carrots to the side to grab the soy vanilla creamer. After twisting off the cap, you drizzle a few drops of creamer into the mug. Then, you grab the pot of coffee that your father had made an hour ago before he left for work and pour the coffee up to the line.

The same mug sits on the counter. It sits next to a thirty-two-ounce pot of coffee. You grab the pot and tilt it over the mug. Coffee cascades and overfills the mug, spilling on to the counter, on to the floor. The mug refused to accept the pot of coffee. It could only hold eleven ounces.

Today at work, I saw this description of a morning gone wrong at work, (not literally, although that would have been funny). A person’s brain is like a coffee mug. It can only process so much, hold so much. Just as a mug cannot contain a pot, the mind cannot deal with a substantial problem. For example, a small problem developed at work this morning. My boss had four of us around one computer, trying to solve an irrelevant problem. It took an hour to solve scrupulously this issue, because every time we had solved it, someone pointed at another “I” to be dotted or another “T” to cross. Then the phone rang. I answered. Something important had come up, something that needed our attention. Indeed, it would be difficult and require efforts, but it needed to be finished. I told my boss. He sat there for a moment. “No,” he said, “We can take care of that later. Now back to…”

His mind was like the coffee mug, it could only process so much so fast. In that moment, I saw myself, sitting on Tumblr, organizing my profile, updating my photo, changing the design, editing the profile description, changing the design again, filling my queue, changing the design back to what it was before I started, all while the FAFSA form sits incomplete online or while that novel still has not been written or while that seven-page research paper remains a thought or while the credit bill grows in length or while I still have not cried since my cousin died two years ago or while I ignore that I graduate in two years and need a better action plan than “graduate school.”

Like a coffee mug, we can only hold so much until we swallow what is inside, which is why we love to tackle small, inconsequential things – they are easy and the big stuff is not. This reminds me of the philosophy in which all the aspects of life that demand our attention are like screaming monkeys in a cage, and your brain can only handle so many monkeys. One must let go of a few quieter, less important monkeys so that he or she can feed the massive monkeys that demand his or her attention.

I hope we can all free our minds from a few of our insignificant monkeys in order to quiet the monkeys that will determine how the present moves forward into a better future.

An Introduction

During the spring semester, I had read Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in my American Romanticism class, but at the time, I had not realize that for my summer job I would be Bartleby the administrative assistant. My summer job as an administrative assistant started a few weeks ago, and now, I see parallels between the story and my experiences as I devolve into a typewriter with a heartbeat. Even though I do not intend to tell my boss that “I would prefer not to,” those infamous words sit on my lips when he asks me to perform another mundane task that negligibly contributes to my pursuit of eudaimonia, because in the name of financial stability, a civil form of the will to power, I remain silent in regards to my objectification of self and to my sacrifice of self-determination.

As one who is introspective, it is difficult for me to justify menial work, despite the significant pay attached to it, when it possesses no meaning for my life. When I insert an unrecognizable certification into a faceless file or when I type an agenda for a meeting that I will not attend or when I alphabetize names of people I have never meant or when I answer the phone to participate in the “casual comedy” of Corporate America, I feel existentially worthless, as my creative energy reduces.

My fourth week as Bartleby the administrative assistant had begun this morning, and in order to understand the purpose, if any exists, of this experience, I have decided to blog about working full time, Monday to Friday, as an insignificant mechanism in the immense machine known as Corporate America. In this blog, I will share stories, insights, and philosophies that I obtain while working this meaningless summer job, hoping to reconcile the time that I will lose as an office worker, which I could have used to write my stories, to read literature, to spend time with the love of my life, to see friends, and to reflect.

I know that to do these things, one needs financial stability, but the shortage of time due to obtaining this socially imposed goal creates a situation in which doing the things that help you feel purpose is difficult. I also know that if one really wants to do something, he or she will make the time. However, this cliché proves false for many who feel the weights of debt, of hollow labor, and of time. Nevertheless, I hope to post every night after work in order to log this experience, since I do not want to lose my reflective personality just because my job requires little need for insightfulness.