In life, it is important to find something that you are good at and continue to do that one thing until all joy and creativity have been completely beaten out of the process and the only thing that remains is a profitable, tangible, homogenized product.
Think of the great bands of our time who started playing for love of the music but have now mastered their particular brand of rock and roll to the point where we all know that we are being manipulated before we even open the cellophane packaging. All you have to do is see the monochrome cover of the latest Weezer CD and you know what you're going to get and how it's going to make you feel.
Or how about your typical dining experience at any restaurant that has more than one location? I haven't been surprised by a single thing at McDonald's since I was three (unless you count the occasional joy I feel when I see that someone has cleaned the restroom in the past year). But I've eaten a ton of those little apple pies.
I know this seems backwards, I know it flies in the face of what any of us would want to do for our life's work, but this is how you make money in the real world. You find something that interests you, you master that skill until it no longer interests you, then you do that skill for as long as someone will pay you to do it.
The payoff is the paycheck. Nobody, (nobody I know anyway) actually does any job for any other reason. And this, I believe, is why most people fail at doing the things they love. Many people fail in the attempt to achieve. But there are also a great number of people who achieve but fail in the process of achievement to enjoy whatever it is they have chosen to do. It is very rare to find someone who achieves his goal and is satisfied by his achievement.
So what am I good at? What can I do really well? I can come up with baby names that will most certainly be rejected by my wife. Boston, Baltimore, Courage and Kitterman are all names that have landed with a resounding thud on the cutting room floor of my wife's editing room. She does get final cut after all.
One might say I've failed to achieve my goal of naming my kid something offbeat. On the other hand I may have achieved my goal of sounding comically pretentious and self involved to a large number of my friends and family in order to illustrate my opinion that a kid's name is important but it's not that important and somehow in the meantime just stopped thinking it was as funny as I once did. Either way, My child is not going to be answering to the name "Jedediah Durante," any time soon.
One other small point is that the pay for coming up with original baby names really isn't that good. It would seem I've managed to get the formula backward: First you make an unbelievable amount of money for doing something mildly entertaining or useful to others then you name your child after your favorite mode of transportation. And here I thought all it took to become a big time celebrity was the willingness to burden your child with a socially awkward handle for the rest of their life.
I turns out you have to be willing to drive whatever creativity and ingenuity you might have left in your soul into the ground by releasing "Home Alone 12, the Director's Cut," or whatever the equivalent of "Home Alone 12, the Director's Cut," is in your particular industry. And all the while you've got to pretend to like it or they won't let you make "Home Alone 13."
Maybe I'll end up naming my next kid Kevin.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Hanging Planters
My name is Chris, my wife's name is Chrissy, and we live above a coffee shop. It would be cool enough if we happened to live above a Starbucks or a Pete's but, as luck would have it, we found a large one bedroom apartment in the second story of an old Victorian with an independent coffee house down below. It is named the Naked Lounge and the walls are covered with tasteful paintings of undressed women in repose. We found this apartment by chance when we were looking for places to live.
We're what most people would consider old fashioned. We chose not to live together before we were married. So a few weeks before our wedding we were in the market for an apartment when Chrissy's mom asked us if we'd like to grab coffee with her. Chrissy has always loved this drink called the bowl of soul that Naked makes so she suggested that we go there. When we got to the shop, there was a rent sign on the front of the building. We called the landlord, and we got the apartment.
So this is our first house. And it's a great place to live. The neighborhood's a little sketchy at times. There's a park across the street where the city's homeless used to congregate before the police upped their patrols, and there's a light rail station behind us that can bring some interesting characters from all over the city into our neck of the woods, but the building we live in is peaceful.
There are only three tenants: ourselves, our next door neighbor Nisha, and the coffee shop downstairs. Nisha is a good neighbor. We rarely ever see her and she grabs our mail for us if we're out of town. She works for a non-profit that she's never really identified. She is in her mid to late twenties, but she has thinning hair. At first, I thought she might be undergoing chemo, but lately Ive just been thinking she's one of those rare unfortunate women who loose their hair. It doesn't seem to bother her too much though.
The Coffee shop is always busy. It is filled, mostly, with rich privileged college kids trying desperately hard to look like anything other than what they actually are. They're harmless really with their faux-hawks and their multicolored tattoos and their double espressos and their cigarettes.
You can tell which ones are really trying by their brand of cigarettes. Marlborough Lights are looked upon like training wheels. The obvious, and accepted, alternative to lights are Marlborough Reds. Then there are the novelty smokers. They smoke mostly cloves and cigars of varying, consistently low, quality. They're in it for the fun, and they don't think of themselves as smokers really. There is always some older gentleman smoking a pipe. He is older than the rest of the patrons and, by all rights he shouldn't be hanging out in this glorified soda jerk with all these kids, but his pipe is pretty cool and this is a tolerant youth group after all. Finally, every once in a while, you will see the Pall Mall unfiltered. Depending upon who is smoking these they are either the coolest damn leaves ever to be rolled into a paper and smoked, or they're the lamest attempt to curry favor with a realm of hipsters where one obviously does not belong.
The people working in the shop (They would punch me in the face if I referred to them as barristas) are mostly kids who used to sit out front. They probably would have continued to do so indefinitely except for the fact that their revenue stream dried up. Out of money, and with little motivation (but a lot of caffeine enhanced energy and probably a couple of Pall Malls left to share) they just kind of stood up, wondered inside and asked if anyone was hiring. The workers are the real deal whom the patrons are trying to emulate. They are disaffected, relatively poor, youth. I'm not sure whether they themselves are aware of the irony that they represent but I'm pretty sure I've seen them toss a handful of grinds into the cups of those customers which they have deemed to be the least authentic.
Finally, there's us. At the risk of sounding like an idiot I'd say my wife and I are the most normal people in our building. We work Monday through Friday, we help out with our church youth group, We have friends over and go out to dinner. We're pretty normal, by a certain definition of the word anyway.
The most shocking discovery of our first year of marriage has been that babies come from people having sex. At least, that's where ours is coming from. I know this may not sound revelatory to you but, trust me, when the theory of a thing, no matter how accurate, is replaced by the reality of life it can be pretty eye opening.
My wife is pregnant with our first child. I'm excited about it! I'm also scared to death. But she's great about all of this and she's confident we'll figure it all out. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get everything ready for the kid. Which brings us to the Planters.
Chrissy wants to do cloth diapers. I'm not as stoked on the cloth but am willing to give it a shot. However, our apartment isn't really that big and unless we come into some unforeseen load of cash we're gonna be here for a while. In light of that, I wanted to set something up so the diapers could be stored outside. We live on the second story, and I didn't want anything to look unsightly, so I came up with the idea of hanging large planter. I hung one for drying and one for the diapers once they've dried. It actually looks pretty good.
And that is life above a coffee shop for now. We don't have everything figured out, but we've got our planters up and we're getting by.
We're what most people would consider old fashioned. We chose not to live together before we were married. So a few weeks before our wedding we were in the market for an apartment when Chrissy's mom asked us if we'd like to grab coffee with her. Chrissy has always loved this drink called the bowl of soul that Naked makes so she suggested that we go there. When we got to the shop, there was a rent sign on the front of the building. We called the landlord, and we got the apartment.
So this is our first house. And it's a great place to live. The neighborhood's a little sketchy at times. There's a park across the street where the city's homeless used to congregate before the police upped their patrols, and there's a light rail station behind us that can bring some interesting characters from all over the city into our neck of the woods, but the building we live in is peaceful.
There are only three tenants: ourselves, our next door neighbor Nisha, and the coffee shop downstairs. Nisha is a good neighbor. We rarely ever see her and she grabs our mail for us if we're out of town. She works for a non-profit that she's never really identified. She is in her mid to late twenties, but she has thinning hair. At first, I thought she might be undergoing chemo, but lately Ive just been thinking she's one of those rare unfortunate women who loose their hair. It doesn't seem to bother her too much though.
The Coffee shop is always busy. It is filled, mostly, with rich privileged college kids trying desperately hard to look like anything other than what they actually are. They're harmless really with their faux-hawks and their multicolored tattoos and their double espressos and their cigarettes.
You can tell which ones are really trying by their brand of cigarettes. Marlborough Lights are looked upon like training wheels. The obvious, and accepted, alternative to lights are Marlborough Reds. Then there are the novelty smokers. They smoke mostly cloves and cigars of varying, consistently low, quality. They're in it for the fun, and they don't think of themselves as smokers really. There is always some older gentleman smoking a pipe. He is older than the rest of the patrons and, by all rights he shouldn't be hanging out in this glorified soda jerk with all these kids, but his pipe is pretty cool and this is a tolerant youth group after all. Finally, every once in a while, you will see the Pall Mall unfiltered. Depending upon who is smoking these they are either the coolest damn leaves ever to be rolled into a paper and smoked, or they're the lamest attempt to curry favor with a realm of hipsters where one obviously does not belong.
The people working in the shop (They would punch me in the face if I referred to them as barristas) are mostly kids who used to sit out front. They probably would have continued to do so indefinitely except for the fact that their revenue stream dried up. Out of money, and with little motivation (but a lot of caffeine enhanced energy and probably a couple of Pall Malls left to share) they just kind of stood up, wondered inside and asked if anyone was hiring. The workers are the real deal whom the patrons are trying to emulate. They are disaffected, relatively poor, youth. I'm not sure whether they themselves are aware of the irony that they represent but I'm pretty sure I've seen them toss a handful of grinds into the cups of those customers which they have deemed to be the least authentic.
Finally, there's us. At the risk of sounding like an idiot I'd say my wife and I are the most normal people in our building. We work Monday through Friday, we help out with our church youth group, We have friends over and go out to dinner. We're pretty normal, by a certain definition of the word anyway.
The most shocking discovery of our first year of marriage has been that babies come from people having sex. At least, that's where ours is coming from. I know this may not sound revelatory to you but, trust me, when the theory of a thing, no matter how accurate, is replaced by the reality of life it can be pretty eye opening.
My wife is pregnant with our first child. I'm excited about it! I'm also scared to death. But she's great about all of this and she's confident we'll figure it all out. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get everything ready for the kid. Which brings us to the Planters.
Chrissy wants to do cloth diapers. I'm not as stoked on the cloth but am willing to give it a shot. However, our apartment isn't really that big and unless we come into some unforeseen load of cash we're gonna be here for a while. In light of that, I wanted to set something up so the diapers could be stored outside. We live on the second story, and I didn't want anything to look unsightly, so I came up with the idea of hanging large planter. I hung one for drying and one for the diapers once they've dried. It actually looks pretty good.
And that is life above a coffee shop for now. We don't have everything figured out, but we've got our planters up and we're getting by.
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