I've lost it. I'm not sure what it was, but for a brief shining moment I was excited about all the possibilities of the world. About living them, cherry picking the best places, learning all the things that interest me, having an engaging career. A log cabin. A family. Making the world better.
I left my job at the climbing gym. Lets face it, marketing and budget meetings, bureaucracy, email strands, a cubicle. I wasnt cut out for it anyway. I have since started a new job at an art production company. It pays a little better and has regular 9-5 hours, so I can drop off and pick up my son from daycare everday, put him to bed every night. That part is nice. Except that by the time I get home from my mind numbing job, and my 1.5 hour drive at rush hour, I'm too exhausted and depressed to do much of anything,
Here is my new job. Orders come in on the fax machine, email or occassionally phone. I prioritize them based on delivery date. Which is pointless because almost everybody needs their order rushed, asap, shipped today. So I take these pages and pages of order codes, and I key the POs into our antiquated computer program that freezes on me 20 times a day, and then I have to start over.
85348Z,
71072L,
3102C.
This is my day, all day, for 8.5 straight hours in a cubicle. A cold cubicle. Then there are all the exceptions "this company gets blah prices, that company gets shipped every monday, this company get free samples, that one gets charged, this one gets custom sized......" Then there are all the people who dont check their orders before sending them in, so the codes dont correspond to any images, or they order the wrong thing and need it fixed ASAP.
Its sucking my soul out through my fingertips.
Every morning I start out enthusiastic, telling myself to suck it up, that I can do this, its not that bad. And every day by 2 o'clock, I want to cry and walk out the door. Sometimes I do cry on my drive home. Or when I go to bed at night. I feel hopeless. I feel like it doesnt even matter anymore. No matter where I go or what I do, its going to suck. I'll still feel empty.
This is your life, and its ending one minute at a time.
My friends are out rock climbing, training at the gym, getting stronger, travelling, learning to dance. I am wasting away in a cubicle, at a job that requires no intellectual input, or physical effort. Its actually making me weaker.
Is this what I hoped and dreamed for in my childhood? Is this what I fought for scholarships for, maintained a 4.0 for, studied and suffered, learned endless computer programs and formulas, volunteered, trained for?
Paul Hawken writes that for every pound of electronics in your home there are something like 2 tons of industrial waste being poured into the environment. Assembly lines and production facilities operate at "cheap" cost efficencies while gobbling gallons of petrol and chemicals and burning coal. Meanwhile millions of people are unemployed and cant feed themselves or their families. We are using more and more of what we have less of (natural resources), so that we can use less and less of what we have more of (people). What's the point?
I suppose that if natural resources cost what they were actually worth, they would cost more than labor, and people would be employed. That at least would be something. But they aren't. This leads to depressed, frustrated, angry people who have been made to feel valueless, useless, forgotten.
At night, once Noah is asleep, I pore over the internet looking for jobs, paid internships, funded graduate positions. There's practically nothing. Very little that I'm "qualified" for and even less that I can do as a single mother. Even the tons of organic unpaid internships out there that provide food and accomodation at least, don't accomodate children.
Its fucked up.
Seriously.
So I search and search for something, anything better. I dont find anything. And I can't help but feel that I am missing some huge part of the picture. Like I'm only looking at the ground, and I've forgotten about the horizon and the sky, and the trees.
There has to be something better. Doesn't there?
