![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Worktimes, realtimes, strangetimes
Strange thought blurb expose times! :D In lieu of fic, because my brain works funny when adjusting to new schedules.
Just came back from work a few hours ago; days go by a lot faster when you've got sleep on your side. But then a thought floated by: why do days at work crawl so much more than days at school did for me?
School life is this: I wake at 6am, get back at around 3pm earliest, sleep till 7pm, work till 1-2am, wash rinse repeat for 5 days.
Work life has been this: I wake at 10am, get into the office at 11am, work till 7pm, go home and relax for hours and hours and hours.
And yet school was and is vastly more interesting and less boring and less hard than work. Why? School should have been hard, damn it. It was hard. It was mathematics and economics and literature and project reports and endless stretches of philosophy and content everywhere and sleepless nights and having to organise thoughts, events, people. It was painful, exhausting, frustrating, furiously fast paced.
Work, work is earning me income, work is sitting at a desk for a few hours doing market research on a few competitors and typing a few research case studies on what they do and resisting the urge to go to the pantry every thirty minutes. Work is real people, calling them up and -- Being disappointed, somehow. The first couple of days, I was terrified of everything: of getting something wrong, of being seen as silly in my boss's eyes, of people who seemed so much older-therefore-wiser than I was.
But work's -- work's okay. Work's tiring, but only because my back aches from sitting in a chair all day, and it's mundane to have 8 hours to complete one stinking report. The boss is smart, but he's as human as everyone else -- but -- but.
But the working world is meant to be furious. It's meant to be full of people doing things and being productive and scary and, if not efficient, then sufficiently confusing that there's a challenge, a mountain to climb, something to tear down and stand on top of victoriously, ah ha!
It's like being a kid again, pushing away that curtain of sneaking denial that's always in place: the level above you, the thing you are not, the job you haven't got or the school you haven't got into - those things are always more exciting, more dangerous, more beautiful; but so often they're actually equally as tolerable, equally as manageable, equally as dogged as where you were before.
A job, a safe job, that isn't a dream; to borrow better words: a dream deferred. Something temporarily satisfying, momentarily conquerable, something to be good at until you're good enough, but it's not fire under your fucking veins pouring out and setting you alight until you burn and stay and stay and stay and keep going, breathless and with aching eyes but all right.
It's nothing like school. This is school:
School is the amalgamation of the geniuses of our lifetimes and all the lifetimes before us. It, and every syllabus, is the summary of every innovation and invention and crisis of faith that made men cry. In the lines of our textbooks are written the words of inventors, heretics, madmen, senators, lovers, fighters, tired old men and youth ready to be young until the end.
When you pick up an economics textbook to challenge Keynes, you are dealing with this: 80 years of history, going backwards to the Dust Bowl and the crumbling of lives, the Great Depression and the time before big government was big, an era that had heartache and heartbreak and then a revolution that remade the world when it'd been crushed by all the fucking stupidity of human idiocy, war and ignorance. You have to understand that. You have to claw against the insides of your brains to realise how that worked -
And then when you pick up a piece of writing about Kuhn and science, you are challenging thousands of years of the logical thought that ideas progress. You reject in hand the concept that science and methodology can produce a fair and unbiased system: you see the century of Enlightenment turn on the head of human nature's own failure to turn away from the theories that make us all sleep soundly in our beds at night.
Every book you pick up has more than a story. A literature essay is a quarrel of faiths and paranoias: when Orwell wrote, he didn't write because he had a good idea, he wrote against every injustice that seeped itself into the psyche of men and women he passed on the street: the injustice of the silent, the silliness of the passive. When Harper Lee came out, quiet and modest, with a book about the bravest man alive, she took that same human spirit in mankind and retold it through the eyes of children, who are braver and more courageous and than the mob that lynches and bloodlets and burns.
Learning is huge. It's putting yourself up against the ruler of the brightest minds and seeing how you measure up. It scares the shit out of me: it makes me fight for every idea I don't understand, for every concept that could be more, for something that pushes through the huge bulk of an entire race's collective inquiry, the one thing that allows us the lives we lead. To learn that is to fight for your life, tearing screaming and yelling through the blackness of confusion and to come out the other side better equipped and glad to be alive.
Work isn't the same. Work isn't harder. Work's more tiring, because I don't love it at the moment; I know, in the way that I guess we all know at the bottom of our hearts, that this job isn't in the field that I'd be glad to fall in battle in, wielding Blackberries and a 12-hour day as armour. There's nothing to fight in a "job": nothing but boredom and the thought of the end of the day. No obstacle to tear down en route to something greater, no end goal to surge towards with the intensity of rightness that makes what the greatest and worst men and women of the real and fictional worlds what they were. Which is the stuff that inspires, at the end of the day. How did Schindler save those lives? How were orders given to drop the Plate on a seventh of the city of Midgar? Did Julius Caesar sleep well at night? Or did Marc Antony, before Shakespeare woke from his dream to write the one of the greatest rhetoric speeches in the English language? How many hours did Lucifer spend planning his fall? What went on in the heads of the men writing God? Would Bruce Wayne have had any sense of justice as a policeman?
So I'll always keep looking for the next human being, the next book, the next fic, the next game, the next line, the next song, that makes me feel truly stupid inside. Since -- To burn through and gouge out the logic of the past, or to rebuild and rip up the sky of the future. There's some worth in doing that while a human is alive.
(To this song! Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Stronger
Work it harder make it better
do it faster makes us stronger
more than ever hour after
our work is never over)
AND THAT IS ALL OF YOUR STRANGE AND THOUGHTFUL K FOR THE WEEK. Coming next post: fic once more! With hope. And some effort.
Just came back from work a few hours ago; days go by a lot faster when you've got sleep on your side. But then a thought floated by: why do days at work crawl so much more than days at school did for me?
School life is this: I wake at 6am, get back at around 3pm earliest, sleep till 7pm, work till 1-2am, wash rinse repeat for 5 days.
Work life has been this: I wake at 10am, get into the office at 11am, work till 7pm, go home and relax for hours and hours and hours.
And yet school was and is vastly more interesting and less boring and less hard than work. Why? School should have been hard, damn it. It was hard. It was mathematics and economics and literature and project reports and endless stretches of philosophy and content everywhere and sleepless nights and having to organise thoughts, events, people. It was painful, exhausting, frustrating, furiously fast paced.
Work, work is earning me income, work is sitting at a desk for a few hours doing market research on a few competitors and typing a few research case studies on what they do and resisting the urge to go to the pantry every thirty minutes. Work is real people, calling them up and -- Being disappointed, somehow. The first couple of days, I was terrified of everything: of getting something wrong, of being seen as silly in my boss's eyes, of people who seemed so much older-therefore-wiser than I was.
But work's -- work's okay. Work's tiring, but only because my back aches from sitting in a chair all day, and it's mundane to have 8 hours to complete one stinking report. The boss is smart, but he's as human as everyone else -- but -- but.
But the working world is meant to be furious. It's meant to be full of people doing things and being productive and scary and, if not efficient, then sufficiently confusing that there's a challenge, a mountain to climb, something to tear down and stand on top of victoriously, ah ha!
It's like being a kid again, pushing away that curtain of sneaking denial that's always in place: the level above you, the thing you are not, the job you haven't got or the school you haven't got into - those things are always more exciting, more dangerous, more beautiful; but so often they're actually equally as tolerable, equally as manageable, equally as dogged as where you were before.
A job, a safe job, that isn't a dream; to borrow better words: a dream deferred. Something temporarily satisfying, momentarily conquerable, something to be good at until you're good enough, but it's not fire under your fucking veins pouring out and setting you alight until you burn and stay and stay and stay and keep going, breathless and with aching eyes but all right.
It's nothing like school. This is school:
School is the amalgamation of the geniuses of our lifetimes and all the lifetimes before us. It, and every syllabus, is the summary of every innovation and invention and crisis of faith that made men cry. In the lines of our textbooks are written the words of inventors, heretics, madmen, senators, lovers, fighters, tired old men and youth ready to be young until the end.
When you pick up an economics textbook to challenge Keynes, you are dealing with this: 80 years of history, going backwards to the Dust Bowl and the crumbling of lives, the Great Depression and the time before big government was big, an era that had heartache and heartbreak and then a revolution that remade the world when it'd been crushed by all the fucking stupidity of human idiocy, war and ignorance. You have to understand that. You have to claw against the insides of your brains to realise how that worked -
And then when you pick up a piece of writing about Kuhn and science, you are challenging thousands of years of the logical thought that ideas progress. You reject in hand the concept that science and methodology can produce a fair and unbiased system: you see the century of Enlightenment turn on the head of human nature's own failure to turn away from the theories that make us all sleep soundly in our beds at night.
Every book you pick up has more than a story. A literature essay is a quarrel of faiths and paranoias: when Orwell wrote, he didn't write because he had a good idea, he wrote against every injustice that seeped itself into the psyche of men and women he passed on the street: the injustice of the silent, the silliness of the passive. When Harper Lee came out, quiet and modest, with a book about the bravest man alive, she took that same human spirit in mankind and retold it through the eyes of children, who are braver and more courageous and than the mob that lynches and bloodlets and burns.
Learning is huge. It's putting yourself up against the ruler of the brightest minds and seeing how you measure up. It scares the shit out of me: it makes me fight for every idea I don't understand, for every concept that could be more, for something that pushes through the huge bulk of an entire race's collective inquiry, the one thing that allows us the lives we lead. To learn that is to fight for your life, tearing screaming and yelling through the blackness of confusion and to come out the other side better equipped and glad to be alive.
Work isn't the same. Work isn't harder. Work's more tiring, because I don't love it at the moment; I know, in the way that I guess we all know at the bottom of our hearts, that this job isn't in the field that I'd be glad to fall in battle in, wielding Blackberries and a 12-hour day as armour. There's nothing to fight in a "job": nothing but boredom and the thought of the end of the day. No obstacle to tear down en route to something greater, no end goal to surge towards with the intensity of rightness that makes what the greatest and worst men and women of the real and fictional worlds what they were. Which is the stuff that inspires, at the end of the day. How did Schindler save those lives? How were orders given to drop the Plate on a seventh of the city of Midgar? Did Julius Caesar sleep well at night? Or did Marc Antony, before Shakespeare woke from his dream to write the one of the greatest rhetoric speeches in the English language? How many hours did Lucifer spend planning his fall? What went on in the heads of the men writing God? Would Bruce Wayne have had any sense of justice as a policeman?
So I'll always keep looking for the next human being, the next book, the next fic, the next game, the next line, the next song, that makes me feel truly stupid inside. Since -- To burn through and gouge out the logic of the past, or to rebuild and rip up the sky of the future. There's some worth in doing that while a human is alive.
(To this song! Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Stronger
Work it harder make it better
do it faster makes us stronger
more than ever hour after
our work is never over)
AND THAT IS ALL OF YOUR STRANGE AND THOUGHTFUL K FOR THE WEEK. Coming next post: fic once more! With hope. And some effort.