Sunday, January 10, 2010

Goosebumped

I was supposed to go to work today but I am sick. All night I rolled around with the cold sweats, the kind you only get by having the flu or disembarking from a roller coster after feasting on Tex-Mex. In my case it must be the former.

I'm glad I have a good family. All throughout the day one or two of them will come poking their heads in the door to see how I'm doing, bring me soup, medicine, or tissues. This is the part of living with your parents that really is cool, (the part that isn't cool being when you reveal it to your coworkers and/or attractive people of the opposite sex).

If you haven't just uselessly laid in bed for an entire day you really are cheating yourself. Tons of fascinating things happen when nothing fascinating at all is happening. Today, for instance, I stared at my legs for about 3 minutes. Before you dismiss me as a hallucinating fevered flu victim, allow me to explain. I spend every day in such a rush to get through the day that I have completely ignored my legs for months. As far as my consciousness of my legs goes, I only think about them when they hurt or when I am concerned that my pants are too short, a fear which stems from the brutal teasing I received as a middle schooler in "high-waters." If you were to ask me how I got around I'd tell you that I walked, but I doubt that I really ever actually think about it. I may as well be levitating everywhere I go. 

If we're really honest, life would be more interesting if we all levitated instead of walked. In my mind I just pictured a family at the mall, sitting Indian style in a meditative pose while floating into The Footlocker. See. Infinitely more interesting than the old ladies that power walk the hell out of those places.

After a while I just began thinking about everything in a peculiar way. Maybe this is because on a normal day I don't have the option to think about much of anything that doesn't somehow relate to better serving our members. I remember how alien the whole thing felt when I first got there. The thought that 80% of someone's waking time should be spent on doing well at work just baffled me.

"There are more important things to concern ourselves with," I thought.

Things like being a good friend, pondering the infinity of space and giving your cat a mohawk. Who could actually put the majority of their time and effort into the building or sustaining of a lifeless, dull, uninteresting entity like a company? The answer, I have found, is me. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up and despite what your mother told you, you can't be whatever you want to be as long as you try really, really hard. Most of us will line up single file and take our seats in corporate oblivion and what is really scary is that you will start to be okay with it. Not just a little okay, but really deep down okay with it to the point that you don't even consciously think about it being unworthy of your time anymore. Well, except on days like today when you have all the free time in the world to think about such things - and to stare at your legs, of course.

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