This morning I don't have a ton of things to discuss, in fact I haven't figured out, yet, why the urge to type has hit me except for some very profound things I have just read. So I present this "letter from Vladimir Putin" (republished at Land Destroyer in case the NYT paywall kicks in). Now I will not speak to the veracity of the author because looking at text on a screen tells me nothing about whether or not this really is from Mr. Putin, but then I wouldn't know his handwriting nor signature, would I? Despite this potential of not being who it claims to be, the letter itself is very thought provoking and contains a pretty powerful and inspired message, which is something I feel needs to be read by a whole lot of people, otherwise, why would I have bothered to put it here, as I still have no idea why I am continuing to type.
There was also this blog entry "why we are confused" which aligns pretty perfectly with something I was mentioning yesterday, being the magic highlighter drawing focus to non-issues in order to divide us. It really does help to connect the dots and bring realization that demoting a religion or culture in favour of promoting another religion or culture serves neither purpose effectively. That said, there must obviously be another purpose behind it all... I won't deny that Marois has played her role as a racist nutbag well and that she likely has a great future ahead of her, starring in the Hollywood 'B' movie circuit as a deranged psychopathic killer for just how well she sells crazy in real life (if that's what this place really is)...
No. I no longer see real life in terms of actually being real, but rather see it as a bunch of cold and calculated cut-scenes thrown together apparently at random but with ultimate purpose behind them. It's unfortunately become so transparent, so obvious, so bourgois, so expected to me now that I often fail to realize that a majority of people do not actually see it, just as I now fail to become incensed by it. Don't worry, I know apathy is nobody's friend and I will get back on track.
I suppose part of this growing apathy stems from how I am seeing the world interact with me now.
Yesterday, I submit an application to a grocery store which was accepted by a manager who is likely no older than my son, and was met with a skeptical and sarcastic 'an application... *for you*?' comment (it was all about the tone of voice which is poorly conveyed in text). No, the irony was not lost on me, nor was the secondary irony that I likely have not been paid such a lowly salary as this job would be offering me since before said manager was born. Not that I am attempting to suggest that there is some conscious effort by everyone I interact with to keep me from earning a dollar, but rather, that I simply no longer know how to blend into the dreamworld enough to enter it even on the lowest rung of the corporate food chain. I have outstanding credentials in a particular field which is either too cheap and "best bang for it's buck" (honestly, I have no idea where these numbers come from because nobody wants to pay more than about $40K these days), or too specialized on one particular product to hire anyone of my generalized level of experience (because this describes exactly what I have been doing for years now, note the lack of 'named products'?), and stands out as being a reason not to hire me into any other field as I might leave were something in my field to open up... As if it's truly that huge of an issue to retrain somebody to 'stock shelves' or 'scan barcodes' for minimum wage while minimum wage jobs tend to have the highest turnaround already simply for their lousy pay rate.
I understand what the market effort at play, is. First and foremost, people with technological aptitudes are being corralled into specialities and reliant on the well-being of one particular software maker (like salesforce.com as my above specialized example, which isn't even a SOFTWARE but rather a web platform... What next? A facebook specialist? Go fuck yourself!), then the reliable slave who depends on the success of that single company for his bread and butter is now an unpaid promoter and sales tool of the company they are 'an expert' in, or are obsolete if they fail to keep the 'platform' boyuant. The secondary effect is to diminish anybody who has never had loyalty to any particular company, but rather can use judgement and critical thinking to counterbalance these competing solutions against each other to find the best solution for the precise situation at hand... Funny, I feel like I have just applied the exact same "how the mainstream media feeds you your opinion" argument to what the technology world is trying to do, because apparently, it too, is trying to enslave people into some form of branding and labelling exercise where critical thought and judgment are removed from all equations... I might have just figured out why I started typing, and why my efforts to 'learn everything' are suddenly failing so hard during the interview process...
Why must everything be so dependant on the creation of mindless automatons? This is why I can't seem to behave myself during important situations. I keep treating adaptability and creative thinking as though these are good qualities to have rather than the sign of a perverse and demented mind... I get into the interview room and think I am shining and glowing with 'hire me' but in the world of backwards I am really coming off as the next Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy. DAMNIT! I don't even know how to counteract this, since, until now, it has always worked exactly as I expected it would... I didn't forget how to behave, I simply never adapted to this shift from 'proactive' to 'obedient' employees being the desired thing because I somehow resisted that change over the past 5 years of working for a boss who literally said "I CONTROL YOU!" and other like minded statements. ...And by 'resisted', I was so close to not controlling my own desire to drop trow and take a shit on his desk right then and there and follow that by saying "then you must have wanted me to do that, because I certainly didn't"... I managed to control that urge because it really looks bad on a resumé to have a bullet point saying 'took dump on bosses desk' and the context of the act would really be lost to anybody who wasn't in the room at the time.
I realize that I have to turn whatever creative energies I have into something that yields some version of a paycheck, while still attempting to maintain some form of legality because I truly have lost the ability to blend in, act natural, and lie with a straight face, which suggests that any illegal activity would not bear fruit for long. The trouble being that the window of what constitutes 'legal activities' seems to have shrunk every time I examine it, regardless of the fact that the window of what constitutes 'moral activities' has quite possibly grown larger over the same period of time.
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