“Projectionists,” answered Jerry Seinfeld as George Constanza sat on the floor wondering just what the hell he was going to do with his life now that he’d rather abruptly quit his job in a fit of tantrous rage.
I just made up the word “tantrous”. It means “having the quality of being a tantrum”. I also like to put the punctuation outside the quotes. This is from years of writing computer scripts. I guess I could change, but why?
Do they pay people to make up words? Obviously I check my emails and job alerts and I look for things along the lines I was doing when I was summarily executed by people who didn’t know who I was or what I actually did at the organization – that was my fault, I’ll have to write an entry on that at some point too.
But I also find myself, at the start of a long slog of a job hunt with a fairly long severance period in my back pocket, completely rewinding my adult life and thinking about doing other things. Like ANY other things, for a living.
Like the Zero Percent Solution. Remember that? Remember all those people in their Planes Trains and Automobiles, going to who the hell knows where to do who the hell knows what, but whatever and wherever it was it wasn’t where and what I was about to do?
Well, now I’m kinda like them. So I’m like that old Russian Babushka after Gorbachev caved and Glasnosed all over the place, standing in the grocery store blown away by the concept of “store” and perplexed by having a choice of toothpaste and not having to stand in line for toilet paper.
So yeah, I think about crazy shit right now. One thing I can do is cook. Maybe one day I’ll do a blog post about how to make the perfect chaffle (actually that’s bush league, I just wanted to write the word “chaffle”), but the point is, even after a long week of working for people who would eventually spit in my face and call it champagne, I could stand up all day in the kitchen preparing food for guests or holidays or just batch cooking – from 9 to 5 I could basically pull a shift on my feet and smile and be happy the whole time, and I used to think I could do this for a living.
Of course, the emphasis was “I could do this.” See doing that, unless you’re Grant Achatz or Thomas Keller or Gordon Ramsay or Wolfgang Puck or Tom Colicchio or Emeril Lagasse or Rick Bayless or Daniel Bouloud or Eric Ripert or Anthony Bou- oh wait. Well unless you’re one of those guys, running a restaurant may be personally fulfilling but it doesn’t come close to the compensation I got for my previous gig.
That’s because when you run a restaurant, after last call, you’re done for the day. Unless there was salmonella in the spinach or e. coli in the bratwurst, nobody’s gonna call you up at 2AM to let you know your platform is on the fritz and if you don’t get it running, we’ll be losing a million dollars a day – or the like.
But what comes with responsibility is the dollars to keep your ass in the chair where you’re needed – until they decide they don’t need you anymore.
I promise I’ll think out the next blog entry a little better. This one I just had to bang out on a cloudy day. I do like to write these blogs. Do they pay people to write blogs?
That’s a great question, Creepy Tim Ferriss. You’re definitely a survivor though. So I don’t know if I should take your advice.
I guess the point is that I’m slowly realizing the world is my oyster. But it may be a Rocky Mountain Oyster.
Later!