Rabbit Poem for JK

Those are rabbit ears

Sticking straight up, like television antennae

From that pile of meat and intestine on the road

And that is a patch of brown fur

Soft like my sun-warmed cat on a bright morning.

That’s what happens.  One day your body is a miracle

Of function, a machine that turns food into

Ideas, a bundle of engines and pumps and converters connected

By neat rivers of blood carrying oxygen

To cells, which are also machines,

A trillion of them, pumping in symphony,

A masterpiece.

And then another day, it could be any day, just,

Bam, you get smashed

In the street.  One bad day,

Wrong risk taken. The car, the gun, the virus,

The overdose, the heart

That just stops. The perfect thing

Crushed into a mess of sticky unfixableness.

I think someone wrote a poem about this already.

I think someone wrote ten thousand poems

About this. It’s just so

Obvious.  But I can’t help sticking on it.

Blood on fur, organs collapsed, tiny perfect ears.

Do you think someone loved him? Did he have little rabbit

Cousins, who used to hop by his burrow

For some killer carrot cake? Did he use

His little rabbit paw to stamp tiny

Rabbit paintings into the soft mud by the hedge?

Did he ever smack that paw

Against a friend’s face, say, “You need

To get your life together, stop running

In the street, before you get

Yourself killed.”

Not bothering to mention how the other rabbits

Said the same about him, that he scared them

That he had darkness inside him, that he

Sought out drama, danger.  That he was weird.

That the brightness of his anger, the

Fierceness of his pain was easier to set aside

To deal with later, to forget.

When he disappeared, did they say,

“Oh, that’s so sad.  But hardly

Unexpected.”  Were they just a little

Relieved?

I know someone wrote a poem about this already.

I know they wrote a hundred thousand

Poems, but it sticks with me.  No point

Dwelling on it. But I can’t stop

Piecing this stinking garbage pile back

Into a rabbit, gathering the stomach

And intestines and spleen, stringing veins

Like tinsel, puzzling together bits

Of skull and brain.

And last, those ears, sticking

Straight up like antennae, tiny ears striped

Through with tiny veins, tiny blood cells

Carrying the unmeasurable love and suffering of the universe
From ear to brain to heart.

Christmas

Generally speaking, I’m a pretty privileged American. I am white, I’m able-bodied, I have a good education, a professional career, all the things that get me an invitation to participate in mainstream American culture.

But then, once a year, that culture engages in a month-long ritual that I have absolutely no part in. It starts in late November, as the decorations appear, and the stores launch their special sales and promotions, and every commercial on TV tries to convince some other viewer that something not normally thought of as a gift (a power tool, gold coins, a lottery ticket, a donation to a charity) would in fact be just the right gift to bring a glow to his loved one’s heart.

This cultural phenomenon starts out subtle and easy to ignore. By mid-December, though, it is all anyone can talk about. It is on everyone’s mind: “Are you ready for it? Have you finished your shopping?” People bring desserts to their workplaces and have parties to celebrate its impending arrival.

And then this fervor builds to a climax, and the day arrives. Everything goes abruptly quiet. Streets are empty, stores are closed, an eerie silence reminiscent of Superbowl Sunday overtakes the city centers and shopping districts.

Then it’s all over, gone as enigmatically as it arrived, and I reacquaint myself with this culture that has seemed so alien and bizarre for the last month, my culture, once again.

Christmas isn’t even a religious holiday anymore, numerous snotty high school acquaintances of mine used to inform me. Why don’t you Jews just give it up and celebrate it already? It’s the same question that gets asked of every minority whose minority status is based on a behavior: Why can’t lesbians just suck it up and marry a man? Why can’t left-handed people just use their right hand? Why can’t those Muslim women stop wearing that crazy veil?

From the outside, the question makes sense: why not celebrate Christmas? It’s fun, it’s festive, there are presents; what’s the downside? But people don’t just start celebrating holidays they have never celebrated before. Who would be the first member of my family to declare, This year, we’re getting a tree and buying a bunch of ornaments for it! This year we’re going to sing Christmas carols and putting up tinsel! This year, Santa’s coming for the first time!

My family has never done these things, and they don’t hold any meaning for me. The Jews I know who celebrate Christmas do so because they have Christians or former Christians in their families. I do know a few Jewish people whose families just love holidays and so decided to put up a tree or some decorations, but they’re a rarity. Religious Jewish people abstain from holidays celebrating Jesus on principle, but the rest of us view Christmas about like Kwanza or Ramadan, just with a lot more publicity: just fine, but not something that belongs to us.

When I was in high school, I worked at a Jewish gift and book store. When customers would ask us if we were open on Christmas, my boss would arch her eyebrows and say, “We call that day December 25th.” This was meant to answer their question: that day is not a holiday around here.

The message wasn’t always received: “So, are you open on December 25th?” people would ask.

“Unless it’s the Sabbath,” she would reply.

Although I worked at the Jewish bookstore, my family was not very religious. We didn’t go to synagogue when I was growing up. My parents sent my sister and me to a secular Jewish Sunday school at the Jewish Community Center, meant to enhance our sense of Jewish identity. There we learned about Jewish history, holidays, and ceremonies, but not about what we should believe or what God—or G-d, as my teachers called him—wanted us to do.

Before Sunday school, I didn’t always know what it meant to be Jewish, but I learned early what it meant to not be Christian. When I came home from preschool one day excited for Easter, which we had been informed was taking place that weekend, my parents had the grim duty of telling me that we did not celebrate that holiday.

“Why not?” I asked, disappointed at the thought of the candy and Easter eggs I would not be receiving as predicted by my teachers.

“Because we don’t believe in Jesus,” my father said.

Jesus. I had heard that word before. I was pretty sure it referred to something important.

“What if I do?” I asked.

“You don’t,” said my mother.

Not only did Jews inherently not believe in Jesus, but all the other characters associated with Christian holidays. I had to learn to remember that some kids were pretty sensitive about their delusions. In second grade, I got kicked hard in the leg by a third-grade boy because I said that Santa Claus didn’t exist. But he’s eight, I thought to myself, baffled that someone could be so naïve at such an advanced age.

Now that I’m old enough not to miss the presents and desserts, I still feel like I miss out on something because of Christmas. My teaching semester ends about two days before Christmas Eve. This has usually been a dreaded time of year for me. I have all the free time in the world, but all my friends are out of town or occupied with visiting family. I’m too tired to do something useful like clean my apartment or write the syllabi for my spring courses. It would be a great time to go shopping for some clothes…but no, it’s two days before Christmas, a horrible time to try to shop for anything. It’s dark, usually raining, horrible weather to go for a run or a hike. Whenever I get my annual jury duty summons, I defer it to December 23rd. If they want to hold a trial that day, I’m there; it’s the most useless time of the year.

This year, I had several invitations to Christmas parties. They were all with people I like a lot, and would have been fun enough, so I wondered why I didn’t feel like going. Then I realized: I have started to look forward to not doing anything on Christmas. Just like the Superbowl, it’s a rare chance to withdraw from the stream of our cultural calendar, to enjoy the meditative pleasure of disconnection and focus on ourselves. So maybe I do celebrate Christmas after all.

Palo Alto

In a city of the future, it is difficult to concentrate.

—Radiohead, “Palo Alto”

During my first year in California, when I was nine, a group of local parents wrote and produced a theater piece called Perfect Palo Alto. It was a series of skits that lovingly mocked the eccentricities of my new home: Every single adult here works in computers! Our city is populated with well-to-do ex-sort-of-hippies! We’re all really liberal, overeducated, and self-righteous!

This is a weird place, I thought. No one would have ever written a play like that about Framingham, Massachusetts, or Nashua New Hampshire, the most recent cities I had lived in. What would you even say about those places? We’re a suburb of Boston! We have a big mall! And what practical New England parent would ever decide to write that play, much less be seen by their children and peers performing in it?

Palo Alto, I came to understand, was a weird town that prided itself on its weirdness. It was like that kid who makes sure to do everything on purpose to be as bizarre as possible; and, not surprisingly, it was filled with kids like that. Everyplace I went seemed haunted by a strange hippy heritage that traced back to the Sixties. Grace Slick and Joan Baez both went to my high school. My favorite coffee shop, Saint Michael’s Alley, used to be a hangout for the Grateful Dead when they were still the Warlocks. Only back then, the coffee shop had been housed in a different building, one that had long since been converted into the Varsity Theater, where you could watch Rocky Horror or Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation and imagine Jerry Garcia having a smoke there back when he looked like a Chasidic Jew.

The town reveled in its iconoclasm, the college-town in the midst of the Silicon Valley, the town only twenty minutes from San Jose that considered itself a steadfast satellite of San Francisco (an hour’s drive).

When my economics and government teachers explained the difference between liberals and conservatives, they would always say, “Conservative voters tend to be more prevalent in wealthier areas. Where we live is an exception, though.”

And was it ever an exception. Growing up in Palo Alto, Republicans were like polar bears; I’d only ever seen one on TV. Before an election, every front yard sign, every bumper sticker, every snide comment from an adult seemed to be preaching to a city-wide choir: Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton. A few of my fellow students claimed doggedly to be Republicans, in what always struck me as an Alex P. Keaton style act of contrarian rebellion. I never met a real Republican until I went to college—at U.C. Berkeley, a school I chose over a small liberal arts school primarily because I had heard there were Republicans there and I wanted to confirm that they really existed.

Palo Alto’s demographic and social weirdness, when I was growing up, seemed to stem from the fact that people mostly moved there for the school district. At a time when California’s schools were in a fast decline, Palo Alto’s schools were consistently rated amongst the highest in the nation. These schools kept the property values sky-high for the small, single-story, space-efficient tract houses that pervaded most of the city.

In nearby Atherton, every resident lived in a mansion, but they shared a lackluster school district with neighboring Menlo Park. This incongruity used to strike me as odd, until I realized that many affluent areas don’t care about the quality of their public education system, since the residents would all be sending their children to private schools.

But in Palo Alto, all of my friends’ parents were like mine: they had sunk all of their money into a small, expensive house so that they could send their children to a top-ranked public school. So while I grew up in a town with a high average income and high property values, no one I knew ever seemed to have much money. We all had parents who carefully budgeted, who fretted over the money we spent on clothes and food, who considered every purchase seriously: Do you really need that?

Thinking back, I realize that our parents could have been living in bigger houses, driving fancier cars, not worrying about every dollar, if they had chosen to live in cheaper cities with lesser school districts. Palo Alto self-selected for people who valued education—public education—over every other luxury in life, and that was what made it truly a town of weirdos.

The values of our parents seemed to have rubbed off on most of the students I knew. Certainly the interest in education did. Grades were so high that my school could not publicize class rankings for fear of keeping us from being admitted to universities. My 3.6 GPA put me in the 68th percentile of my graduating class.

But our view of money seemed to come from our parents as well. In a city with one of the highest real estate prices per square foot in the country, no one wanted to be seen as rich; instead, students tended to brag about how poor they were. Having a lot of money, or spending it frivolously, was something to be ashamed of. In my high school, it was considered horribly uncouth to have anything expensive or new. I knew one very rich kid whose parents bought him a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday, and everyone mocked him behind his back. He was one of the handful of people I knew who had a new car at all; most of my friends, like me, did not have a car, and none had a car manufactured after the Seventies. At the high school across town from mine, the newspaper ran a “Wreck of the Week” column featuring students boasting about the decrepit state of their vehicles. There seemed to be an acute understanding that we had not earned the money we spent on clothes or cars, and that wasting your parents’ money didn’t make you cool; it made you a spoiled brat.

This rule probably did not hold amongst the small crowd of “popular” kids, but no one cared about them. While they held some sway in middle school, by high school, they could no longer manage to lord despotically over the masses, hopelessly outnumbered as they were. All the horrors I hear reported from other high schools—the football players and cheerleaders and game days and school spirit—were all reversed at my school. Sporting events were under-attended, with teachers begging us to show up. School spirit was for losers. I never once heard a girl admit to being a cheerleader without an embarrassed disclaimer: “Actually I’m a cheerleader. But it’s just because I’m really into dance.”

I moved away from Palo Alto at what ended up being the dawn of the dot-com era. When I applied to college, I had visited the internet one time. By the time I graduated, my father was asking me whether I might want to put off the Ph.D. program I had just been accepted to and make a bunch of quick money as a tech writer, just like every other jackass with an English degree.

Whenever I came back to visit Palo Alto, every other car was a BMW or Jaguar, and there was a new yuppie restaurant in the place of each quirky old diner or bookstore I used to love. Saint Michael’s Alley had been converted from a grungy coffeehouse to a stylish gourmet brunch spot. The Varsity Theater became a Borders bookstore. All the eccentric little corners were swept clean, as if the weird haunted hippy town of my youth had never existed.

During those boom years, when I would visit my mom, I used to go for a run around my old neighborhood—a run that took me past Steve Jobs’s house, an unassuming neighborhood landmark—and each time, I would pass at least four houses knocked all the way down to their foundations. They were about to be built up again from scratch, now taller and with basements and bloated out to the far edges of their lots.

Like every affluent place, Palo Alto seems culturally improved by economic downturn. The bloated houses still stand, but I don’t see so many knocked down when I visit now. The roving crowds of dot-com twenty-somethings in cocktail attire no longer swarm University Avenue in search of mates. Palo Alto still makes me a little sad, seeing it from the outside, its sanitized plazas and former-dives where my teenaged friends used to write on the walls with Sharpies. Still, that is only from the outside. I have a lot of hope that the high school kids are still traipsing around like lost hoboes somewhere I never go, that young Grace Slick is there writing scandalous songs, hidden away somewhere my respectable grown-up eyes can no longer see.

Being Aggressive

A girl comes flying in at me, her arms whirling like a pinwheel, throwing punches and kicks all at the same time, a writhing ball of fury and rage.

What did I do to this girl again? I search my mind for some past offense. Did I make fun of her poor arithmetic skills back in fifth grade? Or did I unwittingly erect a shopping mall on top of her ancestral homeland? Did she think I was flirting with her boyfriend? Because I definitely wasn’t, but you know how some girls get. Or maybe she overheard me making a dismissive comment about her pink boxing gloves…

Oh right—this girl wants to beat me up because we are in a kickboxing tournament. So I suppose that’s her job. Come to think of it, wanting to beat her up is my job, too.

Why did I want this job again?

In the moments before this fight, I thought: I am going to lose, and I don’t care at all. Actually, that sentiment might be backwards. What I was really thinking was, I don’t care at all, and so I am going to lose.

I knew that’s a bad way to think, so I began saying a mantra to myself: Want to win, want to win. It wasn’t a statement but a command. You need to want to win.

I felt like I was faking wanting to win through the entire fight. I knew that body kicks were supposed to score the most points, so I thought, You want to win, so throw more body kicks. I made sure that every time my opponent threw any punch or kick, I would throw one or two body kicks in return.

That should be enough to win this thing, I thought, counting up the kicks. Because I want to win.

But this girl wasn’t counting her kicks. I’m not sure what she was thinking, actually. She was flying around so quickly that she never planted enough to hit me with anything that hurt at all. So I don’t know if she was really trying to hurt me—if that were her goal, she probably could have done it. (And I don't say that to dismiss her abilities, because I wasn't trying to hurt her, either). But she definitely wanted to win, wanted it with all her being; every movement manifested desire to dominate, to aggress, to be the best, to be on top.

This desire for dominance is perhaps something I just don’t have in me. I love “friendly” sparring, with my friends or with strangers. I love seeing if I can keep up with an opponent, seeing if I can withstand whatever that opponent throws at me, figuring out ways to trick that opponent into opening himself--or occasionally herself--up for a kick or punch.

I don’t know if those feelings will ever translate into me being a good competitor. I do get angry and competitive when I spar sometimes, usually when I feel like someone is hurting me. That never happened during my fight. I never felt scared, hurt, attacked, all the things I am used to feeling during my regular sparring with people who are bigger and stronger than me. I felt more annoyed, irritated, like being poked over and over by an annoying twelve-year-old playmate.

I had anticipated that once something hurt, my desire to hurt my opponent back would kick in. That’s what fighters always tell you: You think you don’t want to throw hard punches at this person, until he starts throwing hard punches at you.

I have experienced this enough times in my training, times when I was terrified, when I felt, with good reason, that someone was trying to hurt me. The thought that always comes into my head at these moments is: I am going to fucking kill you.

I've always thought I would be scared of my competitor in a tournament, and always expected that this desire to kill would be a central feature of any competition I did, for better or for worse. But that self-defensive rage never kicked in during my fight against this 106 pound ball of antagonism. I mean really, can’t we settle this in some more civilized manner? Why am I fighting you again? I felt completely calm, logical, aloof. That’s actually how I had wanted to feel, and I had worked very hard on being calm and collected as I approached the tournament. Unfortunately, being calm and collected may not actually be the best way to goad oneself into an irrational fury.

The worst part about my want to win mantra is that I then did feel angry and upset when I lost. But I was counting, I thought, indignantly. I threw like a million body kicks! If I just needed to look more aggressive to win, I wouldn’t have bothered throwing all those kicks.

Being disappointed that you lost is the most horrible part of not wanting to win enough, because then your not wanting to win seems like the most pitiful sort of sour grapes: well, I didn’t want to win anyway. So really, I am not sure if I did or didn’t. But I do know what I thought as I watched my opponent jumping up and down before each round began, barely able to contain herself, as I stood waiting quietly: Whatever she’s feeling over there that’s making her act that way, I can’t imagine feeling like that.

One of my teachers told me that I needed to do at least one more competition. “You need to do one more so that you can win,” he said.

“I won’t win,” I said. “If I’m doing it just to win, I’ll lose, and then I’ll have to keep doing them and it will just make me lose more and more.”

“Don’t think like that!” he chastised me.

But it’s true, or at least I can’t see any other truth at the moment. I know this is not a particularly objective or logical moment, a week after this fight, when I am trying to process what it meant and how to think about it. And I know that these conflicting feelings are part of the point of competing, that it is supposed to teach us deep lessons about who we are and what our place in the world is. Right now, I feel my place in the world is not in a competition or a performance, not testing myself in some formalized public way, or that if I do so, it’s only for what I got from this, which was some really helpful video footage that I can study to improve my sparring. Right now, I feel that I will always lose, because I just can’t imagine wanting to win enough to make it happen.

One of my favorite things I got from this fight are the photographs my friend Amy took of me, with perfect lighting for drawing. And yes, I did this one myself, with heavy coaching from Adam. I have been working on my coachability.

Cupcakes

It’s Thursday night at the tea shop, and the women’s knitting group has gathered at three of the small tables, which they have pushed together. One of the women has brought cupcakes to share. She’s testing them out for some kind of upcoming event, maybe a wedding. She has brought vanilla and chocolate cupcakes to sample with different colors and flavors of icing.

I watch her spread strawberry icing on white cupcakes. The pink color is lovely, especially against the fancy teal wrapper that she is holding up to the cupcake to check the effect.

This attention to detail is why they are knitters and I am not. Every Thursday, they sit for hours, talking pleasantly, showing each other pictures in knitting books, creating adorable fuzzy sweaters with intricate textures and embellishments. They show off their work to one another proudly. It’s an amazing amount of effort to put into something that you could buy at the store for forty dollars. Just like the cupcakes: the careful planning, the sampling, the color-coordination, all for something that will be admired for a moment and then gobbled up, distractedly, to become just a bunch of junky, non-nutritious calories in someone’s stomach.

Cupcakes are a precious kind of food. Adults like them for the same reasons that children like candy: they are self-contained and aesthetically pleasing. The visual contrast between cake, frosting, and wrapper provides the grown-up version of the tiers in a candy-corn or one of those giant striped lollipops that I once spent a month eating when I was five. The particular pink and teal combination being sampled by the knitting ladies appeals directly to that aspect of my six-year-old psyche that allowed me to spend a full half-hour staring at a plastic My Little Pony doll—purple, with a turquoise mane and tail—sighing to myself, “You are so cute.” The knitters are cooing over the cupcakes in the same way: “So pretty,” they say.

The flavors are just as carefully crafted for maximum grown-up fetishizing. The combinations at the trendy cupcake bakeries—lemon-rose, chocolate-chili, strawberry-mint—make us eager to try all of them. And we can, because this is not a cake, which provides a whole lot of one flavor, and is portioned out in little slices at events like weddings so that we are not allowed to go back for more—but a cupcake, a teeny single portion, so that we can get two or three, maybe some for later, especially since we can purchase them individually.

On this particular day at the tea shop, I have not been eating sweets for a month, which makes the cupcakes more appealing but also more egregiously unnecessary. As someone who sees food in a fairly perfunctory way, it’s difficult enough to fathom why someone would spend hours preparing a carefully layered lasagna when they could just dump a pile of noodles, vegetables, and cheese haphazardly onto a plate with the same end result. To expend so much energy on food with no nutritional value seems pornographically decadent, a flagrant disregard for the mores of my own subculture of healthy eaters. I take a kind of voyeuristic pleasure in watching them spread the frosting, peel off the wrappers, so reckless and debauched, seizing the day, because we could all be shot dead by takeover robbers in an hour and I would have squandered my final moments staring greedily while I sipped my sterile green tea.

Physically, these women are very different from me. I always notice it. Their bodies are soft and supple and padded. They don’t look like they spend a lot of time running sprints or lifting heavy things, although they might do these things. Sitting amongst their balls of yarn and padded knitting bags and colorful cupcakes, they look as soft and comforting as the fuzzy sweaters and scarves that pour from their needles onto their laps.

However, despite our differences, I feel a strong connection to the knitters. Maybe it’s because I see them every week, or maybe it’s because they, like me, choose to spend endless hours at a tea shop working on an artistic undertaking that will probably go largely unnoticed and unappreciated. I know in my heart that I am also a knitter, a cupcake maker, pouring my diligent effort into something that hardly matters to anyone but me. Then again, maybe that’s what we all do: spend our entire lives creating intricate little worlds that only matter to ourselves.

Thanks to Adam Caldwell for the illustration.

Work

It’s Wednesday morning. I am car pooling to work, and my ride will be in front of my apartment in four minutes. I am slapping peanut butter onto whole wheat bread, because I woke up too late to prepare a proper lunch. We have to be at work at nine, and work is a half-hour drive away. We can’t spare the extra twenty minutes it would take to cook the pasta with vegetables and tofu that I was supposed to get up early to make.

There is no actual reason we have to be at work at nine. My coworker’s first class isn’t until ten, and mine is at twelve-thirty, but my office hours officially start at nine. If I were twenty minutes late, my boss—the college dean—might walk by my office and find I wasn’t there during the hours that are part of my contractual obligation, and then he would have to have a talk with me and it would be awkward for everyone. Maybe a student would come looking for me, and I wouldn’t be there. Or maybe I wouldn’t get last week’s quizzes graded before my class, and the students would have to wait two more days to find out their scores.

Looking at the sad peanut-butter-and-nothing sandwiches that will be my breakfast and lunch, I ask myself: does it really matter if I’m twenty minutes late? Which begs the inevitable question: does it matter if I come in at all? And if not, then what is it I am spending my life doing, exactly?

This is the question that haunts us as workers, caught in the conflicting ideologies of working for survival and working to make our lives meaningful. Do we work to support our basic physical needs, or to feed some deeper need in our souls? Ideally both, our culture tells us: do what you love, and the money will follow.

But if we do what we love and the money doesn’t follow, we will be told: get a real job, you lazy bum. So the next best thing is to find a job that is bearable and pays okay.

On this same morning, my friend David is riding public transportation to his job at a nonprofit organization. He hates his job, but he can’t imagine a job he would like better. His believes that his job is important—he writes grants and solicits donations for a fund that supports indigenous workers in developing countries. The main thing he hates about the job is that it feels like begging. Also he hates having lunch meetings with wealthy philanthropists. And finally he hates the fact that he feels as if he is just moving money around, rather than producing anything tangible of worth. Then again, most of what gets produced at jobs is useless junk, like video games and whitening toothpaste and “flavor-blasted” crackers. So the problem may be less his particular job and more the simple fact of having to work at all.

This is what David thinks:

Once our jobs mattered in a tangible way, because if we didn’t do them, our communities would suffer in a visible way. If the tailor stopped working, the villagers went without new clothes. If the baker stopped working, there wouldn’t be any bread, and if the farmer stopped working, there wouldn’t be any food at all.

Imagine the gratification of knowing exactly why and how your profession benefited your community.

In a modern, capitalistic society, we bear the burden of choice, and the burden of having chosen our professions. If the tailor hated his job sometimes, that was just an inevitable part of life, like hating his family sometimes. His family and his job were the same thing, because that job had been handed down to him like his brown eyes and curly hair, and there was no point in hating any of it.

But when our work is a choice, then we are responsible for it, and when it is miserable, we can only blame our own poor judgment.

My friend Ruby is already at work; she has to open the office at eight every morning, so she gets in at seven-thirty. Ruby doesn’t mind running the office; the engineers are pretty nice and she finds the organization and paperwork kind of gratifying. But almost every day when she comes back from her lunch break, she becomes overwhelmed with the meaninglessness of what she does for forty hours a week. I’m wasting my life, she thinks, doing little chores to support a company that has nothing to do with me. What could be more spiritually empty than sorting legal papers and payroll documents for a company that builds machinery whose purpose you can’t understand?

Usually these spells of malaise only last about forty-five minutes; after that, she falls back into the rhythm of the work, and before she knows it, her work day has ended and it’s time to go home.

There are only sixteen hours left to work this week, she thinks as she walks to her car. And then seventy-two hours until the end of the month, payday. And 992 hours until her Christmas vacation. And 59,520 hours until she can retire—but of course, the company will probably be long gone by then, along with all that paperwork that she has spent the last three years of her life organizing.