Bread and Bitter

I never intended to work in an office. Not for real anyway. It was temporary you see. It was a "scheme". It was "I will make my millions really fast and then use it to travel and afterwards I'll get a real job!" It was complete and total denial.

You see, sitting in an office acquiring paper cuts was never on my agenda. Let's face facts, it's never on anyone's agenda, ever, it just happens because the world is a great, big fucker with a warped sense of humor.

When I was six the teacher would make us write lists of possible occupations we'd like to try once we reached adulthood. Naturally, I'd be full of enthusiasm. "Why, I will fly planes of course! TO JUPITER! I will be one of Charlie's Angels. I will invent a time machine that will allow me to come back to the '70s and kill whoever told my mother that dressing a little child in a geometrically patterned pant suit was a terrific idea. I will eat candy for every meal, like Willy Wonka. I will be a long distance truck driver." (Seriously, I was a weird kid, it's lucky I'm not a serial killer. Not yet anyway. I don't think...don't you need like...three confirmed kills to be "serial" or something? Hello, is that the FBI at my door?)

You see, when you're a little kid there's no bullshitting involved. You never hear a six year old say, "You know, I think I'd like to answer other people's phones all day, photocopy endless pages of useless crap and find inventive ways to express my buried rage by pulling paperclips apart and stabbing them into voodoo dolls of my boss." Not once do you rub your hands together with glee thinking of all the travel plans you will make for other people only to alter and remake them twelve times before canceling them altogether the day of the trip.

This is because when you're little you have a plan and that plan is...there IS no plan. You can be whatever you want. You have stuff to do. Your expectations are high but they're simple. You will be an astronaut. An astronaut who will zoom all over the universe at the speed of light, chasing aliens, saving the world and slaying monsters with a large laser gun and when you're not zapping monsters you will eat Tremendous. Amounts. Of. Pudding. And of course you see no obstacles to this plan because you are six.

By the time you're twelve, however, you're already getting jaded. You're like, "Astronauts indeed! That's the dumbest thing I ever heard, I am going to be a rock star. And all the boys/girls in the world will fall in love with me and my poster will hang on every kid's bedroom wall in every nation in the whole wide world." Producing colorful spreadsheets and detailed bar graphs featuring fourth quarter sales of tampons never once crossed your mind. And there is nothing in the plan that says, "sometimes your entire day will be ruined because you will run out of staples."

When you're fifteen you've put away childish things. You are going to be a marine biologist, although you have no idea what that is. You're going to be a doctor. Maybe you want to make people better and maybe you're just a fifteen year old boy-doctor who just wants to see a naked lady's sweater puppies.

The thing is I don't remember anyone exclaiming excitedly, "I know! I want to spend the only youth I'll ever have extracting chewed up paper from a Xerox machine and I will look forward every morning to filling the coffee machine because no one else ever does it and if I could leave school...like right now? I'd be like...SO stoked to perform a really slammin' mail merge in Microsoft Word, which I could send to seven hundred people informing them of lots of great things they don't give two shits about!"

Yet suddenly one day, there you are, sitting at a beige desk, in a beige cubicle staring at the beige printer by your side and listening to beige people around you talking about their beige lives and you realize that when you were six, you knew shit. And you hate six year old you. In fact, if you had that time machine and you COULD go back in time, you'd kick six year old you right in the kishkas.