Month: October 2006

Categories
culture life

Questions on Class Economics

I have been enjoying a variety of books and movies on late 19th century life lately and it has me thinking a little bit. I was reading one of the books in the Little House on the Prairie series and came across an interesting statement. The school children in a small, isolated town are trying to get home during a blinding blizzard. The first building they encounter is a hotel. All of the children continue to their homes, except one, because they cannot afford to stay in the hotel. The one boy who could afford to stay was able to do so “because his father had a regular job.” A regular job meant regular pay. His father managed a train depot – the 19th century equivalent of a middle class job today. Later I read this statement:

Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves – they’re good things to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on ’em.

That got me thinking about how we have so much talk about the importance of our large middle class today. It seems to me that the middle class is dependent on their “regular jobs” and is the most vulnerable to becoming dependent on railroads, telegraph, kerosene, and coal stoves or their modern equivalents (cell phones, cable television, internet etc.). That got me wondering, is society really better off having a sizable middle class rather than being broken mainly into the rich and the working classes?

I theoretically fall into the middle class today (minus cell phones and cable television) and I am not sure that there is much benefit being in the middle class and having a slightly higher standard of living coupled with greater expectations and demands on my wallet. To me that seems to breed greater discontent proportional to the supposed security that the middle class enjoys over the working classes.

Categories
life technology

Deals

I have been looking at the advertising by Comcast for their big bundle – three services for $33/month (each). I say to myself “that’s $100 a month to Comcast.” Then again, Cable can easily run $50/month so that’s a steal. Their internet service goes for $40/month so I guess $100/month to include phone is not bad. Of course I don’t want cable so it’s not a deal for me, but then I realize that they were advertising that their digital phone service would be about $14/month so it’s really only about $4/month worth of savings.

I save a bunch on Cable, a little on internet, and pay two and a half times for the phone. Nice marketing.

Categories
life

Not My Will but Thine

I have been thinking about the prayer offered by the Savior in Gethsemane – specifically the plea “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt.” (Matthew 26:39; see also Mark 14:36 or Luke 22:42)

I have had two realizations as I have pondered this plea. First, “let his cup pass from me.” Before I really thought about this I think I treated it as a line rehearsed for a play. I never really thought of it like that, but I did not recognize the truth behind those words. Christ really did not want to endure the suffering that he was facing. He really did wish that His Father would take the cup away. However, what he really desired was the results which that suffering would bring. The ability and opportunity to act as intercessor for men at the judgment bar, thus enabling mortal men to achieve exaltation.

The second realization (which came in the last few days) was enlightened by the first realization (which I had much earlier). “Not as I will but as Thou wilt.” Even as he sincerely prayed to have the cup removed, Christ knew the will of God. He did not merely have a pretty good idea of what His Father wanted from Him, He knew. Christ poured His whole soul out to His Father even where His will did not match the will of the Father. I have often prayed to do the will of the Father without knowing what His will was. I think it has often been an effort to avoid discovering what my own will was. “I want what You want so just show me where to go” or “I want what You want so, whatever happens I will assume that it was what You wanted.”

I think that the ideal situation is to know and own our individual will and to discover the will of the Father. We should then do the will of the Father whether it agrees with our own will or not. The reason that should inspire us to take that course is that we love our Father and our Savior and that our overarching desire is to return to them. That desire should be greater than any individual wish we may have that conflicts with what They want for – or from – us.

Categories
life

Running

I am currently trying to define what I want in my life. It’s like having a fresh start because I have not felt like I was going anywhere so I can pick any direction that I want. As I reviewed some old goals that I have had from various times in my life and decided which of those goals to begin pursuing in earnest. One of those goals that has been floating in the back of my mind for nearly half my life is to run a marathon one day. As I face this fresh start I thought about that goal and reasoned that you can’t just decide one day to run a marathon and then run it the next day. That goal requires that you start training months in advance. With that in mind I finally decided that I might as well start running so that I will be prepared when I am ready to select a marathon and run it.

Having made that decision – today marks my first run. It was raining and cool and generally the kind of weather that nobody runs in unless they are committed to running. In the face of all that I decided that I had better run today or else I would find a new excuse to procrastinate tomorrow. I ran a short route today – three miles. I did slightly better than I had planned (I had planned a very conservative pace) and based on today’s run I think I am going to set a goal to finish the marathon, when I get to that point, in four hours.

My younger brother will laugh when he learns that I have decided to take up running. He was an avid runner back in the day – before he rediscovered “the one true sport.” Of course he can’t complain that I have taken up running again considering that he recently convinced his wife to start running.

Categories
life

Reprise

I have been thinking about the comments I got from my personality posts I have to admit that I did not understand at first what Jason meant when he said:

“The trick, for me at least, is to find reasons to love whatever job you have. I’ve enjoyed forklift operating, fruit picking, yard work, construction, mail sorting and inventory control. None were exciting, none were interesting, and none made any real difference in the world. But I learned to love the work”

My initial reaction was to disagree with the idea that few people get to make a difference through their employment. After stewing on the comments I had received, I found the flaw in my thinking. I had been wanting to have meaning in every aspect of my life. I wanted to have meaning in my work, my family, my religion, my community, and any hobbies I might choose. When I said I have no personality it is because I had allowed those parts of my life that were not fraught with meaning to sap the meaning from the other areas of my life. I had abandoned hobbies unnecessarily and shut my eyes to other meaningful aspects of my life.

With renewed perspective I now recognize that I need to have meaning to my life as a whole and allow that purpose and drive, those goals that I am pursuing, to invigorate me and infuse meaning into the more mundane things which are necessary whether or not I find intrinsic value in them. That is what I understand Jason to have meant when he said he learned to love the work he had rather than moaning that he was not doing the work he might have chosen for its own value.

Categories
life politics

Moving On

I’m getting tired of dwelling on being unsatisfied with my life. I’m going to make an effort to move on to other topics. Either they will be happier topics related to my life or else I will write about things that are outside of my life, like the fact that I found an interview discussing torture that aired on on NPR’s Talk of the Nation two days after I had posted on the subject.

After listening to that show today I realized that we must continue to address this issue until we get this administration to change their policy on torture to a policy that condemns torture outright. I hope that more people will take an absolute position similar to the one expressed by Ariel Dorfman (from the interview) and make it publicly known that we do not condone any torture as Americans.

Categories
life

Clarification

Thanks to the astute observations of a friend, I have refined my perspective on my current frustration. I do have a personality. The one he described sounds very familiar to me. The fact that my personality may easily go unnoticed in crowded situations does not bother me. I’m glad to know that it could be noticed in individual interactions. The problem I face is that I have become buried by the minutia of my own life. I seem to have forgotten how to be myself and see the strengths of my personality. Perhaps it is a touch of insecurity at the annoyance of not finding a job as fast as I had hoped. That insecurity is magnified by the fact that the vast majority of job descriptions I find are looking for “6 to 8 years experience with increasing responsibilities” etc. Unfortunately some of us do not have that many years experience, but we still have to feed our families.

Regardless of how buried I had become there is also the fact that I have been undergoing an internal transformation over the last year and I am still trying to make sense of the implications of the changes I have chosen to make. I hope that the end result will be a greater sense of focus and direction in all areas of my life.

As for the job – I have to be clear if this is the impression my previous posts had left:

I hope I’m wrong, but reading between the lines it sounds as though you feel that having a high profile or highly paid or publicly perceived as “important” job is more substantial than simply doing your best to be honest and dutiful at whatever you do.

I do not care about the wages (so long as I can support my family) or how onlookers might view the job I hold. I mean only that I cannot be content doing a job where I have nothing unique to contribute. If every other person at the company can do the job that I have been given, then why am I there? If I am in a company where I am allowed to give my input, rather than just follow the prescribed process and churn out the desired product, then I consider that substantial. I have had (and enjoyed) jobs delivering dry cleaning and spraying pesticides where I had the opportunity to do more than just “the job.” I just want to find another opportunity where I can feel that I am making a useful contribution rather than just being an interchangeable cog in the mechanisms of the company commerce.

Categories
life politics

Personality II

Ever since I recognized my lack of personality I have been thinking about how that came to be. My first thought was that being highly introverted plays a part in it. I was thinking of a way to say that without implying that introverts lack personality generally but then I talked to Laura about it and she convinced me that it is possible for extroverts to lack personality as well – so my introversion is not a cause.

There is a difference between an extrovert without personality and an introvert without personality. An extrovert without personality is a chameleon matching the social climate around them. An introvert without personality is like the invisible man – going undetected in social settings. I have also begin to think of it as being something of an emotional albino – lacking any pigment of personality.

The question I am trying to resolve in my mind is, have I always been without personality or have I shed my personality. If I shed it – why? when? and how? If I have always been without it, why? Personally I lean towards having shed my innate personality. I have no hobbies, or substantial aspirations. My current goal is to get a job because I have to. That probably sounds really pathetic, but the truth is that I doubt my ability to be hired to do anything that will hold my interest. Everything that might set me apart from other people and make me interesting has been labeled (by me) unimportant.

Perhaps I have found something. I do have desires, but they seem to be so far outside the reach of my opportunities. I would like to make a difference in how we approach and manage education in this country, especially among our youth. I would like to make a difference in my community by making my voice heard about ways that we can make it an even better place to live than it is already. How can I do these things when nobody would listen to me.

Even if people would listen to me I am so caught up in trying to survive that I have no energy left after working full-time (back when I was) to expend the time and energy trying to make my ideas heard. The only way I could see to do both would be to get a job where I could work on some of those things as part of my work. Who would hire me to do that? Getting elected to an appropriate position is the only other way (besides being hired) to spend my time doing those things. I think it is patently obvious that getting a socially invisible person elected to any office is as likely as getting a squirrel to win the Kentucky Derby.

That is enough for now. I expect this is a theme I will follow while I try to unravel this mystery.

Categories
life

Personality

I was sitting – nowhere near the computer – and suddenly I was struck with a thought. It started as a recognition that the best blogs I read have an established personality. Concurrent with that thought was the admission that even when I had established blogs with regular readers my blogs had no personality. I considered this for a moment and then realized why this was the case. In a clear instant I realized that I have no personality.

It is not only my writing that suffers from that absence of personality. Who would have thought that you could have idiosyncrasies without any attending personality. That explains why my life is so flat. The only semblance of color in my life is a direct result of my family – I have no character to lend my own mark on the people and the world around me.

I wonder if there are any psychologists out there studying this phenomenon.

Categories
life

Walking Blind

I spent much of last night awake and thinking about my current situation. It is not the unemployed factor that I was considering, but the repeated bouts of frustration and hope. Each time I get an interview I hope something will come of it. Each time I hit a roadblock I just want to give up in the search. In the back of my mind is the omnipresent desire to be in a situation where employment was optional so that I could focus my time on just helping anywhere that I could be useful.

As I thought last night I began to wonder if I should be more focused on humbling myself so that I could accept whatever the Lord has in store. Another option might be that I need to be more humble so that I can hear the will of the Lord and follow Him. Right now I feel as if I am being tossed about. I hope for every possibility because I don’t know what the Lord desires for me with regard to employment. Neither do I know what lesson He may have in mind for me to learn from my unemployment.