This morning I gave Phoebe a kiss and said, "Okay, I gotta go to work now." Phoebe said: "Mommy, why do you go to work again and again and again and again?"
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A few days after I started at my current job, I woke up early and took a shower and thought to myself: "I can't wait til this is over." Up until then, everything I'd ever done had been temporary. Summer jobs lasted two or three months. School let out for summer. College semesters were relatively brief. There was a definite endpoint for any misery experienced therein -- a bad biology teacher, the bratty kids I babysat for, 8:30 classes on Monday Wednesday and Fridays. But I realized, that day in that early morning shower, that this was it. This was grown-up life, it was working for a living. There was no "over" in sight, not for a very long time.
That wasn't the happiest revelation of my life.
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I can't drive by a construction site without thinking of the job held by one of Mallory's teacher's husbands. He evaluates building sites and determines how much dirt will have to be hauled away to accommodate the new structures. Every time I think of that, I also think: My job could be worse.
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I heard a program on the radio today about the collapse of the furniture industry in North Carolina. A large majority of furniture manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. The commentator noted, however, that in due time -- by which he meant forty or fifty years -- the rising price of fuel and the likely pay hikes demanded by the overseas workers will make it more expensive to make furniture abroad, and furniture companies will attempt to move operations back to the States. By that time, however, there will be no one left over here who knows how to make furniture. What a tangled web, etc.
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I often think about what my daughters will be when they grow up. In a way, it's fruitless to speculate; I'm sure my parents never imagined that I would be a web editor when I grew up, because up until a decade or so ago there was no such thing. Who knows what new-fangled Jobs of the Future my kids will wake up and not want to go to. Mallory says she wants to be a rock star, a model, and a TV actor. I think she'd be a good investigative journalist, since she asks questions incessantly and persistently. Phoebe says she wants to be a mommy, which would please me -- although she also says that she wants me to take care of her babies while she goes to work. She's going to have to wait a while to have her kids, in that case -- the way my 401k is looking now, there's no way I'll be able to take early requirement.
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A few days after I started at my current job, I woke up early and took a shower and thought to myself: "I can't wait til this is over." Up until then, everything I'd ever done had been temporary. Summer jobs lasted two or three months. School let out for summer. College semesters were relatively brief. There was a definite endpoint for any misery experienced therein -- a bad biology teacher, the bratty kids I babysat for, 8:30 classes on Monday Wednesday and Fridays. But I realized, that day in that early morning shower, that this was it. This was grown-up life, it was working for a living. There was no "over" in sight, not for a very long time.
That wasn't the happiest revelation of my life.
-----------------------
I can't drive by a construction site without thinking of the job held by one of Mallory's teacher's husbands. He evaluates building sites and determines how much dirt will have to be hauled away to accommodate the new structures. Every time I think of that, I also think: My job could be worse.
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I heard a program on the radio today about the collapse of the furniture industry in North Carolina. A large majority of furniture manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. The commentator noted, however, that in due time -- by which he meant forty or fifty years -- the rising price of fuel and the likely pay hikes demanded by the overseas workers will make it more expensive to make furniture abroad, and furniture companies will attempt to move operations back to the States. By that time, however, there will be no one left over here who knows how to make furniture. What a tangled web, etc.
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I often think about what my daughters will be when they grow up. In a way, it's fruitless to speculate; I'm sure my parents never imagined that I would be a web editor when I grew up, because up until a decade or so ago there was no such thing. Who knows what new-fangled Jobs of the Future my kids will wake up and not want to go to. Mallory says she wants to be a rock star, a model, and a TV actor. I think she'd be a good investigative journalist, since she asks questions incessantly and persistently. Phoebe says she wants to be a mommy, which would please me -- although she also says that she wants me to take care of her babies while she goes to work. She's going to have to wait a while to have her kids, in that case -- the way my 401k is looking now, there's no way I'll be able to take early requirement.
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