Work

"You take the pieces of the dreams that you have
Because you don't like the way they seem to be going.
You cut them up and spread them out on the floor
You're full of hope as you being rearranging."

Recently, I reread an entry in my journal that I wrote a year and a half ago. I was so unhappy, I had to leave work early, and the only place I found solace was on the second floor of the now closed Donnell Library. I remember blindly walking there, taking out my journal, and writing out all that I could not say (at least without being reprimanded or fired) about how I felt regarding the whole operation. I no longer remember what made me so upset, because all those niggling details were, at the end of the day, extremely petty and not worth the turbulent emotions they elicited. Perspective is always sharper in the backward glance. Well, I reread that journal entry when I was sitting in my quiet little studio 3,500 miles away, right after I had finished printing my first job in San Francisco. The distance, physical and emotional, that has been traversed since was breathtaking. All I could do was feel happy for what has happened, and for what I've accomplished since leaving an undesirable situation.

"And so I tread the only road
The only road I know."

There have been idle days since leaving my old job. Those days were never truly leisurely, though. My mother never believed in idleness, and did her best to instill that belief in me. At the end of life, the only thing that remains is one's life's work. So beyond paying the bills, and gaining material possessions, the one fundamental lesson I learned wholeheartedly from unhappy work experiences is that I must feel that what I do is creative. I need something to be made by me. I can't live doing work that's all about money-pushing, sector-analyzing, meeting-attending, people-managing. I remember having to approach a colleague to question some pittance he charged for hand lotion somewhere in Asia, because it might or might not have been part of our expense policy. And while I know that that's not what most jobs are about, some singular moment of focus on an insignificant detail, that conversation summed up how utterly stupid my job was. I could not give an iota of a shit at that point, and looking back now, I am surprised at how composed I was dealing with a situation that was such a huge waste of life.

I definitely think about my work more now. And not in the paranoid "Did I fuck something up, even though I've triple-checked everything?" kind of way. Mostly, it's about how far I can take a pun in the form of a drawing, or how I can make image registration more precise, or how I can be more efficient using certain applications. Creative, utterly self-serving details, and boy does it feel fantastic! I don't ever want this to end, and funnily, I would do my old job again, if I knew that it would bring me back to this point.