Palest Ink

Dearest Employer,

I am pleased to announce to you that I am no longer of an age where baby-sitting is required. There is nobody else in this business who even understands how to do what I do, and therefor having them monitor me more closely is only an added layer of inefficiency that will both hinder my ability to work, and cause me to completely despair of ever finding an ounce of satisfaction in a job for which I am underpaid. If you MUST have someone oversee me, despite the fact that I have been doing my job more than satisfactorily for 7 years, please do not choose the one person who is the biggest slacker and self-important idiot that works here. Your employees don’t respect him for very good reasons, and if you try and put him in charge of a perfectly good employee like myself, the results will only be a degradation of quality, or the loss of said perfectly good employee.

While I am at it, may I point out, that the world has changed since you started the business in the 60’s? Employees now expect to do more than punch a time card, suck up to the big boss all day while being treated like dirt/slaves, and then go home to their tract house in suburbia, waiting for the next small dose of hell in the morning. We want to feel like we matter. We want meaning and some sense of control over our lives. If your ego is so small that you really have to treat us all like daft children in order to know that you are the boss, then you really should seek some sort of professional counseling. You own the business. We don’t need you to prove to us that you are the boss. You do not need to make arbitrary decisions that serve no purpose other than to deny us that control. Treating us like we matter is only going to make us actually want the business to succeed. It might also cause us actually like being here, which can’t possibly be bad for the business. These are just a few things to think about, which I sincerely hope that you will do.

Sincerely Yours,
A Good Employee That You’ll Likely Soon Lose

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I feel really crummy tonight. Life mingles with pms, leaving me in a murky soup of confusion and sadness. I feel like crying. I have, in fact, been crying, despite my desperate desire to keep Larry from thinking that I am any weepier than he already does. “You cry more than anyone I’ve ever known” he said once, and ever since, I feel weak and foolish crying in front of him, even though I know he’s only ever lived with three women, including his mom and sister, and meant the comment more as an observation than as a critisism.
I am not really sure what’s wrong. Lately I can’t seem to get my head together. I can’t make myself do what I want to do, and I can’t stop myself from doing what I don’t want to do. I am spinning my metaphorical wheels like crazy.
I have been lonely also, perhaps that is part of it? Even when Larry is around, he has not really been around. All his extra time and energy have gone into the computer work he has been doing for his Mom. I came along tonight, stuck in Spanaway with his silent concentration all night. I am pretty sure this was a mistake. If I am going to be alone, I should be doing it somewhere I have things to do, or at the very least, my bed. I guess I was just excited that he wanted me to come.
I called my ex just now, and I feel bad about it, like I am collously using him for my own gain. I know he still loves me and will overreact to the fact that I sound sad. He tells me that I am wonderful and talented, that everything will be ok. He sounds so personaly invested in whether or not I am happy as he inquires about “what is going on?”. I guess that’s what I need right now. That and a hug.

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Having been pretty much snowed in since Thursday, I have had an unusual amount of free time this week. Whenever this sort of thing happens (which is not often), my creative juices start flowing, almost a driving need to make something original, anything really.  Perhaps there is something about the mind numbing repetition of going to work that stifles this urge.  You are not aided by creative originality in an environment where you are required to perform the same sorts of tasks over and over. In fact, it may well be a detriment, because you become much faster at things you have done over and over. That is not to say that my job is exactly like a manufacturing assembly line, there are areas where a bit of creativity comes into play. But overall, it is not the prevailing mental operation and therefore must get shut off by my brain.

It may also be related to the different paradigm caused by having your time partially “owned” by someone else. I am sure we can all admit there are things we waste time on at work which we would not at home, simply because it is not on your own time. That then gets you into a sort of momentum pattern at work, a rut, and by the time you get home you can’t break free of it enough to be motivated to create something for dinner, much less make art.

In short, for me at least, having a job is not good for my creative self. At least not a repetitive, mostly non-creative job.  Not that I needed a snow week to tell me that, but it makes for a good reminder anyhow.

Side note: snow days are also excellent for getting housework done.

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