Don't Ask Me About Work. Ask Me About My Mind-Numbing Hobbies.
"What do I do? Seriously?"
Has this ever happened to you?
You’re having a great time at a cocktail party, a fundraiser, or an illegal underground snake fight when someone torpedoes the mood with those dreaded five words: “So, what do you do?”
Seriously? What do I do? Is there anything more tired, more status-obsessed, than asking about what someone does for work?
Sure, it can seem like an innocuous question: after all, people spend upwards of 20 hours a week at their job, so it makes sense that they might have plenty to say about it. But look under the surface, and the question is revealed as the last resort of the clichéd conversationalist, or worse, a lame attempt to figure out how “important” you are. Why don’t you just come out and ask me “where does your money come from?” so that I can tell you, “I promote, operate, and license illegal underground snake fights,” and we can move on to something more meaningful?1
Have we been so indoctrinated into the capitalist way of thinking that we can no longer just make conversation?
So please: don’t ask me about work. Instead, ask me about my mind-numbing hobbies.
Why talk about the boring ins and outs of procuring and breeding venomous snakes and evading customs agents when we could be talking about my carved soap figurines? I spend a lazy hour or two each night just whittling away at a bar of Irish Spring, and I’d love to tell you about it. I even have some pictures on my phone that I could show you.
But noooooo, let’s all talk about our jobs. Yawn. Oh, you’re a claims adjuster? You’re an elementary school teacher? And I spend my days shuffling through airport security with dozens of tranquilized Inland Taipans duct taped to my legs and torso because my usual guy’s kid got sick and I have to make sure they’re fight-ready for a $100k buy-in match under an abandoned roller rink outside of Schenectady? Boring! Did I mention that I’ve been practicing soap carvings of figures from the golden age of cable television? Do you even want to see Paulie Walnuts carved out of a nice sandalwood-scented bar from L’Occitane?
I dream of a social landscape that’s a little less concerned with who does what, how much they’re making, how many passports with various identities are stuffed under the spare tire in the trunk of their CRV, the prestige of their firm, etc. For goodness sake, we’re all just people, and we have lives outside the dictates of the 9-5 workday.
Sometimes I act out little scenes from the shows with my soap carvings. You know, people think when they see my work that it’s easy, but it’s actually—what? You’re going to grab another drink? No sweat, man, I’m empty too—I’ll come with.
Notes:
Why did I write this? I occasionally hear people complain about this question, but I’m never bothered by it! It’s interesting to hear people talk about what they do, or hear about the personalities at their job, or whatever. By all means, show me your soap figurines, but at least let me do the acting out.
What I’m reading: I finished the first volume of my Library of America sci-fi collection. Flowers For Algernon was far and away the best—not hard to see why it has endured! The volume ended on—no disrespect—a bit of a down note with Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal, which LOA presents under Zelazny’s preferred title of . . . And Call Me Conrad2, which shared the 1966 Hugo Award with Dune. Funnily enough, the editor of the collection states in the introduction that Dune itself couldn’t be included: “lengthy and ambitious epics such as Herbert’s Dune or Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land (either of which might have precluded two or three other novels from being printed here).” I was a little surprised to learn that Dune and . . . And Call Me Conrad shared the award, as I would—personally—say the former is approximately one thousand times better than the latter. It suffered from (and I’m a bit of a sci-fi novice here so forgive me if this is gauche) “proper noun mania” where the reader is assaulted with dozens of names of alien/futuristic people, places, and things in the first few pages. Sure, you eventually find out what most of it means, but it’s—and I’m going to use a literary term here—pretty annoying. Anyway, read Dune or Flowers For Algernon!
This is why you’ll oftn see me wearing a t-shirt that says, “I promote, operate, and license illegal underground snake-fights… and NO, I don’t want to talk about it.” Weirdly, not custom-made!
Shocking, I know—shocking!—that his publisher made him go with This Immortal.