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04/04/2005 Archived Entry: "Picking up the pieces..."

Throughout the course of my becoming an adult, I think I've let too many things fall apart and left too many things neglected. But I don't want them to anymore and it's been frustrating. I have to pull my own weight and I don't know how yet, I know what I want to do and it's NOT work in an office.

You'd be amazed how difficult it is to get out of an office environment. I hate corporations on so many levels. Everything is virtual, I never saw the outcome of all my work while working at KONE. I was sick and depressed all the while and it -drained- me of artistic creativity. That's essentially draining me of all -life-! I don't want a life where I spent all day assimilating old data formats into ones that current computers now use as proprietary and what's proprietary will inevitably be outdated in five more years so that everything will have to be re-formatted yet again.

That's -ALL- that I did! But I think I felt I was achieving more as a print room worker than a computer assistant. I was working with an old 3M machine essentially taking old data and putting it into a form that -real- workers who actually -fixed- the machines could use. THAT made me feel like I was doing something, but... it was desolate. I got to move around and get some excersize and I was losing weight from carrying around so many boxes of paper and keeping tabs on the old card reader, it would have been fun if I wasn't already starting to really despise working there.

And it wasn't the people and part of it was my own fault. Depression makes you reclusive, reclusiveness makes you... it's hard to explain, but you get intimidated by anything you're not accustomed to already doing. It's a sad state of being when you're too timid to even use a fax machine.

I'm serious. I envy people who are ignorant but have the mind enough to drive a car without fearing they're going to cause serious injury to someone besides themselves. I envy people who can sit at a desk job for 8 hours straight and only complain when they run out of coffee. I envy people who can work at something to produces essentially nothing and not care. I wish I had a switch to turn on some of that in me, but I don't and it makes common things seem like gargantuan obstacles.

And then... I don't WANT to conform! I want something different that not everyone does, not so much for a sense of individuality anymore, either. It used to be that when I was younger. It used to be "I want to be a -PROFESSION- because not everyone does it and I'll get noticed!" It's not that anymore, at all. It's I want to create, even then it's always been that way. I'm left handed and right brained, through and through and it's bleeding obivous that it's that way in the things I do.

The only reason I fear change is because of social anxiety, but if you stuck me at a job on a conveyor where I did nothing but turn Screw #8 I'd die of pure boredom. When I worked at KONE, I was essentially turning Screw #8 like one of Terry Pratchett's clay golems. And even -golems- want something different! I envied the tech guys who worked for KONE, they were always moving with their little cellphones and getting things fixed so the "normal" people could do their little data jobs.

Data jobs drive me bonkers!! Plugging in numbers that I'll never see again, plugging in text on a proprietary format that I'll never use again, plugging in entries for people I know only the names of and I'll never meet in person,.... data data data.... numbers, numbers, padding, numbers.... Weren't we originally making machines to -avoid- this part of the process?? It seems like now it only makes the process more difficult by adding in extra steps.

And being the swabbie on a deck full of officers is humiliating. Three years of this got to me, they're real people and I can see them put on this layer of plastic over themselves and put on their corporate mask. I felt I was the only one still human enough to talk to everyone from the guys who worked in the mailroom (who will always have my respect, the mailroom is KILLER!) to the guys I made luggage tags for so they could take their trip to Finland for some sort of conference. It's like working with actors who never take a break, who are always in character. I can't work like that, I don't see how people live like that.

But anyway...
I want to create. I want to make. I want to produce things of beauty in a world where most things are manufactured by machines, where things are designed to be thrown away, where things don't withstand even a single generation of human beings using it. I can't imagine what it would be like for a great painter to be all of a sudden given a security badge and a briefcase and told "Okay, chum, here's your laptop, I'll need a status report by eight a.m. tomorrow." I've never been a great painter, but I can't even begin to fathom what it is he knows he's missing.

I don't want to be a stuck actor with no face of my own to come home to.