It’s been a very long time since I owned a TV. In the good ol’ days, that meant that nearly all of my entertainment and news came straight out of the radio, in my case, WNYC. (I’m talking like, the pre-Hulu, pre-Netflix streaming days, if you can recall such a thing.) I downloaded episodes of …
When I was a kid there was a Ziggy comic that said something like:
The President should tell all Americans to drown themselves in the ocean. Those of us who are smart enough to ignore him can then figure out what to do next.
This plea from Texas Governor Rick Perry for people to fast “like Jesus did” is the closest I think we’ve come to the sentiment of that Ziggy comic.
That’s the question I often ask people when I first meet them. It’s just a little suffix on the more expected question “what do you do?” but I prefer the answers I get.
“What do you do?” is the after-school equivalent of “what’s your major?” You could tell me you were a business major or a puppetry major or that you studied ornamental horticulture at a vocational technical school and I still wouldn’t know anything about you.
I work for Norcom.
It’s not that I don’t care about how people earn the money to buy dog food… I’m sure I’ll learn that sooner or later, and it might be fascinating, but it’s more likely that prompting someone to think about their day job will instead dredge up thoughts of mediocrity, bureaucracy, frustration, or at the very least, boredom. If I’m trying to meet someone, I want them to feel positively, and not just for selfish reasons.
Most people don’t like their jobs. Most people like their hobbies, and that’s what I want to hear about. I encourage you to want the same thing.
Sometime before I hit puberty, during one of my family’s several annual trips to a square dance convention, we stayed in a hotel that had a restaurant and a small video game arcade, with both a Pole Position machine, and one for the newer Return of the Jedi video game. Pole Position was old hat to me at the time (though hats themselves were not), so I spent most of my spare time playing as much Return of the Jedi as I could.
Over the weekend, my family grew friendly with a particular waiter, because there were only so many waiters, and only so many tables, and only one place to eat. Imagine one of the younger and friendlier Jasons in your life, and that about sums up our waiter. Anyway, he also spent a lot of his free time in the arcade, and we traded high scores for a few days. I finally managed to get the #1 spot on Return of the Jedi, and during our last meal, the Jason-y waiter presented me with a trophy, homemade label and all. Nobody asked him to do that. I don’t even know where he would’ve gotten a blank trophy. Who does that?
I hope that someday I can be that awesome to a kid.
