A Case of The Perpetual Mondays

My grandfather was a firefighter in the Long Beach Fire Department for, I'm guessing, at least twenty years. On weekends, he had a side business installing and repairing doors.

I've never actually asked him, but I would be willing to bet his motivation for working these jobs was not his love of fire and risking his life for strangers nor was it a fascination with hinges and functional rectangles made of wood. I'm pretty sure it was because he had a wife and five kids to take care of and he needed the money. And you know, that was just fine.

How did our generation ever get so hypnotized by the romantic fantasy of "loving your job?" The phenomenon is not a myth, of course. There will always be a charmed minority who whistle while they work and can't truly ever understand what it's like for the rest of us. But when did that experience become the idealized standard for the American working man? Did we all just watch too many movies growing up? Is that what ingrained this notion that our jobs not just could be, but should be about anything more than bringing home the bacon? It is a debilitating, heartbreaking, enslaving concept.

Sorry, I shouldn't act like I speak for anyone but myself. I'm thinking I might be on the verge of a pre-midlife crisis. I feel like if I don't make a change in the very near future, I might literally go crazy.

Does anybody remember the movie, "Joe Versus The Volcano?" It was not a great movie, but the opening sequence portraying the title character (Joe, not The Volcano) entering his job like a mindless cog in a human assembly line. It reminds me of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," which is odd since I barely remember seeing that movie. Anyway, that opening scene in "Joe" really represents the sinking, doomed, damned feeling I get every night before I have to go to work and every morning that I have to walk in there. And you think I am being overly dramatic.

Every night is like the last night of summer, knowing that tomorrow another dreaded school year begins. I'm talking about elementary school when there wasn't socializing to look forward to, only teasing and lunch in the cafeteria. Anyway, it's like that only I don't have the comfort of a fixed and definite term that I know I just have to get through. Like Melvin Udall says, "What if this is as good as it gets?"

The scariest part of the whole thing, to me, is that I know I have felt this exact way before. It seems like the tension is building to some sort of climax now, but I am fairly certain I could comb the archives of this very blog and find an entry quite similar to this one where I whine about the same thing, probably even using the same references. So while a friend would say, "Hang in there, it's only temporary," I would have to reply, Okay, but that doesn't mean I'll ever get past it, just that I might forget about it for a little while before coming right back to where I started.

I was talking with my boss recently about how she always thought she would be doing something more creative, how she's not really interested in accounting, how she used to be a writer. I, of course, thought it sounded strangely familiar. I asked her "How do you do it then? Why do you go through it all if you're not interested?" She said, "Well, I have a house and I have a car that I paid for in cash..."

Maybe she's right. I just wish I could feel that way too. No, I don't. Fuck.