Realisation
16 August 2007 - 3 אלול 5767 by Huw
I think I’ve finally realised why I like working in bookstores (as much as I enjoy technology) and why I have fantasies not about running a multimillion dollar website, or my own computer shop, but rather about owning a bookstore/cafe where I can serve tuna salad and sell arcane texts and dawdle with customers over coffee.
All of my tech support jobs (gay.com, CIIS and Bellsouth) for all that they paid me more money than my age… as well as my current job… and also my job at the Episcopal Church Center (to the extent that it was about doing off-the-book tech support, graphic design and hardware issue-resolution) leave me with a paycheque in exchange for critiquing people and repeatedly resolving for them problems which, if they but paid attention, would not have arisen more than once. To explain: my current job involves a night, weekly and final audit of every client’s paperwork during which I get to write reports about all of my colleagues’ ability - or lack of same - to live up to standards of medical charting.
All of these jobs eventually find me sitting with other persons who do my job making fun of the people we work with. At Gay.com, we’d sit and read the profiles of customers who wrote to us to complain about something and we’d laugh at them. At CIIS, we’d make fun of this professor or that professor. At Bell South we’d get off the phone screaming in anger. And currently I can sit and whine with my third shift coworkers about so-and-so who never does his paperwork right. All of these jobs play to my cynical side by playing to my naturally critical side.
Thing is: that’s a side of me I loath. It’s the side that makes me bitter and cranky. It’s my perfectionist side. My OCD side. It’s the side my Ex used to refer to as “pointy ears”. (Imagine a very cross rabbit glaring at you with his ears pointing straight up.) It’s the side I try to keep hidden from new folks as long as possible. It’s the side that embarrasses and angers me about myself. I’m ashamed of this side of me. The side my roommate has to swat around for a while to make it go away.
In all of these jobs I reach a point where I realise “No one is doing this work except me. No one is doing it to my standards except me. And I’m getting paid for them to shit on me.”
I never had these experiences working in a bookstore. I had a dream once, when I first moved to SF, of standing on the Second Floor of Borders Books in Union Square, just in front of the stairs. I was laughing so hard in the dream that I woke my self up laughing in bed.
Who dreams of work and laughs?
Perhaps, ultimately, this is why I’ve managed to avoid ordination in any traditional sense of that word. I have been ordained in two different traditions where the Priest is not seen as a corrective, preaching moralistic sermons. The Priest is a liturgist and a channel, but that’s all. Christianity - at least as practised now in a majority of places outside of the Emergent movements - seems to require a religious tech support agent resolving problems and writing critical reports. Eventually he would kick back with a beer and sit around making jokes. I’ve heard those jokes cracked in three different Christian traditions by clergy and seminarians. I see them now as part of the same pattern. The rare few - near saints - who didn’t fit into that pattern were clearly not of the same cloth as the vast majority.
I love liturgy. I love religious debate and conversation and praying and preaching and no… I think I would totally turn into a cynical bastard (yet again) cracking jokes to other clergy (or the “in crowd” on the vestry) about superstition or the public foibles of my congregation or my bishop. And I’d go home to my exasperated spouse who, if he had any sense, would quickly become an Atheist.
I think I’ve just had a major breakthrough.
I need to dream of work and laugh again. But where can I do it for 30+ a year?
I would love a bookstore myself…with a tripped out kid’s section and story times several times a week to indulge my inner hollywood star. LOL.
My other option is librarian, but I’m not going back to school so it may end up being “circulation maven” or some such title.
I hope you find what you’re looking for.
i have had several nice daydreams about having a bookstore like “agia sophia”. one day perhaps
http://agiasophiacoffeeshop.com/
well, ok “agia sophia” is a little more coffee than book.
When I graduated from the university, after working happily for five years in a privately-owned but university-oriented bookstore, my parents floated the idea of financing a bookstore in a nearby small town for me. Of course, I wanted to go to the monastery and become a priest, which I did. That choice was not a mistake, but now that I have moved on, a job at a bookstore — even as a clerk — or a library sounds like heaven.