A win-win for fill-in-the-blank

Dear diary,

I admire people who can say “I do this one specific thing for a living.” Like if you meet someone at a dinner party and you’re trying to make small talk so you say “What do you do for a living?” and they answer “I’m a pelican breeder,” or “I’m a cufflink salesman,” or “I’m a stuntwoman,” or “I’m a snow scientist — it’s a branch of hydrology: I study the composition, dispersion, and movement of frozen water”.

How does one decide to fix upon such a specific aspect of the world, and dedicate one’s life to that alone?

You’ve got to be pretty severely obsessed with pelicans, to choose to spend ninety percent of your time trying to coax them to breed. Your family misses you, but you don’t spare a thot for your loved ones (not the human ones, anyway); for you’re off in Tasmania, carefully arranging chunks of fresh fish in a dotted line that leads from pelican to pelican. The idea is to get one or both pelicans to notice the fish chunks lying directly before them and begin to eat them. Your hope is that they will follow this line of food from one fragment to the next, like Pac-Man chomping the glowing dots in his maze, until one member of the intended couple bumps into the other and says (in pelican-speak, of course): “Oh I beg your pardon; I did not see you here, sorry that I nudged you; I was only trying to eat this piece of fish that I found on the ground right next to your body”; then they begin their mating ritual.

Instead of spending time with your children, you’re instigating the above allurement. And you must fly to work every day, which requires extra prep time; since you live in Pennsylvania, which is in the U.S.A.; whereas Tasmania is in Australia, which is only a vassal of the U.S.A.; yet you find that it’s all worth it, because you love pelican-breeding so damn much.

But your neglected family doesn’t blame you for your absenteeism. They say, when I interview them, “That’s just how dad is. We forgive him; we know that he loves us. His calling in life is to help the pelicans breed; nothing can change that. We enjoy what time he can spare for us — he is granted one annual 24-hour vacation: he usually comes home for Christmas day; and we all visit the theater to watch whatever movie happens to be popular; that’s our family tradition; so there’s nothing to complain of. It could be worse: I mean, imagine how it would be, if he were to transfer his operations to our house and attempt to ‘work from home’, so as to have more time with us, his family — then we’d keep encountering pieces of chopped fish throughout our living quarters, all smeared into the carpet; and stinking pelicans on all the furniture and countertops.”

So I ask the kids, “Do you plan on following in your father’s footsteps and becoming some sort of animal breeders as well?”

The boy immediately answers “No!” and explains that he wants to become a cufflink salesman; that’s why he’s keeping his grades up and focusing on getting into a good college. Whereas the girl says: “Maybe, but first I wanna see if I can do what mom does. If that fails, then I’ll breed pelicans.”

Now I turn to mom and ask “Well, what does mom do?” (The whole family agreed to participate in my documentary, so the mother is being filmed in the same shot with the children — I interviewed the father separately and then spliced everything together in the editing room.) And she answers:

“I’m a stuntwoman. Not for Hollywood, just low-level stuff for local commercials.”

So I say, “Wow, how’d you ever fix upon that career choice!?”

She answers, “I’ve always enjoyed leaping off tall buildings onto canopies or mattresses. It’s an added bonus that now I get paid to do this. I totally love it — I’m living the dream.”

Then I say, “Ah, so the American Dream is not dead, after all?”

She says, “Absolutely not. It is alive and well. I’m the proof: just look at my career.” Then she asks if I’d like to see a sample of her work:

“This is the most recent ad that I performed in — it’s for the ‘Soup of Soups’ Company...”

She puts a cassette into the VCR, and the screen shows an image of a gorgeous woman smiling, sitting at a dining table outdoors, with a bowl of soup before her. The frame zooms out to reveal that this table is situated atop a high-rise building. Cutting to a close-up, the woman lifts a spoonful of soup from the bowl, inhales its aroma, and, still smiling, exclaims to the camera: “I just love to sip soup from the ‘Soup of Soups’ Company: it’s superior” — here she winks and says: “Now I’ll jump to my death.” Then, rising from her place at the table, she appears to leap from the building’s top. The ad cuts to a long shot of a woman tumbling down the side of the building and ultimately bouncing off a canopy near the bottom, then gracefully landing upon her two feet.

“That’s me,” says the mother whom I have been interviewing; “they inserted the shot of my stunt work there, and now they’ll cut back to the original actress who was praising the soup in the beginning — it’s all an illusion to lure the viewers into believing that that pretty lady actually did leap off the top of the building; but it was I who did the hard work.”

Sure enough, the ad then cuts back to a medium shot of the gorgeous woman from before, who speaks one last line, directly to the camera:

“I tried to leap to my death, but the ‘Soup of Soups’ saved me.”

Lastly, a robust announcer’s voice booms on the soundtrack: “‘Soup of Soups’: it will save your soul.” And the ad concludes with the blare of a trumpet.

“What do you think?” the mom asks me.

“It’s wonderful,” I say. “I really like it.”

*

Now the reason I myself have a hard time choosing what I should dedicate my own life to (and my life is more than half over, so I really need to choose fast: time is running out!!! — soon they’ll have to tip my hourglass over again) is that I love every profession that I encounter. Consider the life-paths mentioned above:

A career as a pelican breeder attracts me sincerely — I could see myself doing that, easily; especially if it gets me away from my kids. Also the pelican breeder’s son’s idea to be a cufflink salesman strikes me as agreeable — imagine getting to be the person who displays the glittering cufflinks to potential customers: It sounds like heaven! And the mother-daughter stuntwoman combo interests me too: even tho I fear heights more intensely than the protagonist in Vertigo (1958), I would eagerly dedicate my life to diving off skyscrapers, or perform similarly rough-&-tumble stunts for local TV commercials.

And despite my hatred of cold weather, I can see myself as a certified hydrologist studying snow and ice in Antarctica. The attraction for me would be that I could live in a small hut that has a number of computers installed. I love the idea of squinting at colored graphs on flatscreen monitors, while wearing big puffy mittens... and sipping coffee from thick, large mugs... I might even take up the habit of smoking cigarettes, as long as I could grip them between the thumbs of my thermal handgear. But if the scientific community assigned me a lab partner who objected to being exposed to second-hand fumes, then I’d have to quit smoking. That’d be hard; I’d be annoyed constantly, due to nicotine withdrawal — the monitor graphs would lose a lot of their appeal, if, every time I gazed at them, I felt irksome and on-edge, with a low-grade headache.

But that’s why I chose to be a daydreamer, A.K.A. a writer. Cuz when you’re a writer, you’re nothing in the world; thus you can pretend to be anything: Any career is yours for the taking, until you grow bored of it — then you just drop it like a pair of old jeans, right into the hamper. It wasn’t a real job anyway; you just fancied that you worked there. And in order to daydream like this, you don’t even need a capable imagination:

For instance, I have no idea what daily life is like for all those lawyers who I saw dining in the cafeteria when I went to renew my driver’s license at the court building last summer, but I liked the way they were dressed — so crisp and professional! — so I just fabricated a cliché and wrote myself into their shoes without a care for veracity. And anyone who has a problem with my lazy-drab approach can go pound sand.

That’s the sole advantage of being an author: no one can force you to dream this way or that way. You just write how you like. And people can say whatever they want about it, after they read it. And their insults will hurt you; you may even regret composing your piece in such a style; but the good part about this sorrowful experience is that you learn to internalize your critics’ censures; and, eventually, modes of writing that are truly pleasing to them shall begin to flow naturally out of your fountain pen, without you even having to try! — the naysayers will basically own your soul.

But I’m not at that point yet. So let me give a shot to imagining a day in the life of one of those lawyers from that above-mentioned group that I saw...

(Incidentally, I wonder how many personages who enter the legal profession would still do so if the position possessed a less dignified title — say that, instead of “lawyers”, the law’s practitioners were known as “book thumpers” or “law-laws” or “whores” or “precedent addicts” or “fake rope clutchers” or “angels who’d rather humiliate themselves than revolt”...)

Alright, so now I’m a lawyer. That wasn’t too difficult. (Everyone complains about how hard it is to pass the bar exam; but I sailed thru with no problem and didn’t even study.)

What’s my average workday like, you ask? Well, the first thing I do after rising from bed at 4:30 a.m. is make myself coffee — strong and black — just like a snow scientist does (albeit not in a hut amid the tundra but in the comfort of my apartment in Manhattan). Then I shower, grease my hair back, spritz on some body spray, don my suit, and get in my car. Now I drive to the park-’n’-ride. The bus then speeds me to the airport, where a personal helicopter (made entirely of gold) is waiting to take me to my New Jersey headquarters.

Bounding thru the twin glass doors of the building, I greet my staff: “Hi Jen; hi Trish; hi Steph; hi Beth; hi Kate...” Then I enter my office and sit down at my vast mahogany desk. I stare at the phone. Now I swivel my chair around to the file system and pull open the cabinet labeled “High Crimes Currently in Progress”. I heft out a sheaf of papers from one of the folders and drop them on my desk with a thud. Taking the topmost sheet between my fingers daintily, I scan its contents. Then I slam the paper back down on the desk, reach into the top drawer, seize the giant rubber stamp, dip its face in the ink bucket, and stamp violently upon the paper, in fat red letters, the declaration: “MYSTERY SOLVED”. Then I press the button on the intercom and chant:

“Jen, come quick; I’ve won my first case of the day.”

Jen bursts into the room, snatches the paper, and brings it over to the xerox machine. She stands there for a while, gazing out the bay window, waiting for all the copies of the form to print. The machine whirs and clunks, and the sheets accumulate in the holding tray.

All this time, I stare at the rotary phone on my desktop. It is shiny and black.

Suddenly, Jen gasps: she turns around abruptly and informs me that the copy machine has run out of toner. “By the way, do you need any coffee? I believe I failed to remember to offer you coffee again,” she adds.

“Yes; I mean: no — I drank one cup, after I woke up this morning. Thanks, Jen. I’ll call the office supply help-line and see if we can get that toner cartridge replaced.”

Just then my desk phone rings. I answer angrily: “What. Who’s calling.” Moments pass in silence while I press the phone’s receiver against my ear; the look on my face is one of intense concentration. At long last, I lean toward the mouthpiece and say:

“Ah, I see; I understand. Well it sounds like you’re in a real pickle, Mr. Bleu-sky. You know my rate. It’s fifteen hundred bucks per hour. And I divide that into minutes. So even if you were to call me to ask me to dinner, as you did just now, it would rack up a bill of countless dollars. I don’t even know how much I’m going to charge you — the meter’s number is blinking red (truthfully, I’m beginning to pity you). Tell ya what; I’ll round the price down to the nearest twenty spot. That’ll be sixscore dollars. Can you do the math on that? That’s the exact number of years that mortals like you and I are promised to live on this earth: 120 on the dot; except in dollar units, not time. I arrived at that figure by dividing fifteen hundred by sixty, and then multiplying the result by five, since our conversation has lasted that many minutes. And now I’m hanging up, to spare you further cost: Goodbye, Mister Sky-bleu. — I’ll airmail you my invoice.”

So that’s probably nothing like working as a star lawyer is really like. In real life, you probably harass your staff with greater abandon; and the rates are much higher. Plus it’s more likely that a guy would take a golden chopper from New Jersey to Manhattan, rather than the other way around. But I write whatever comes to me in the moment. If you don’t like it, dictate a letter to the editor, and I’ll internalize your complaint, as I outlined above.

In closing, the other jobs available for a writer to imagine herself dedicating her life to are as follows.

• Accountant.
• Engineer.
• Teacher.
• Writer.
• Consultant (preferably for a U.S. political party).
• Retail sales-dog.
• Cashier.
• Bellboy.
• Food.
• Nursee (one who is nursed, as opposed to the nurser).
• Deadly Waitress.
• Administrative Assistant.
• Receptionist.
• Manager.

Yes, you can experience the thrill of all these careers and more, if you choose to be a writer. And you can charge whatever you want, and nobody has to pay you, because it’s all just imaginary.