Comments on: Sleepwalking Through Work (Nuggets, Vol. XIV)

By: Bill

Bill — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:36:00 +0000

I don’t know why, but I woke up this morning with John Denver stuck in my head. I figured I would just yield to it. So as soon as I got in my car, I scanned to an often overlooked corner of my iPod and put on some “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. The entire way to work I’m stop-and-go-ing on 76 with the windows down and the radio up, yelling along to “Rocky Mountain High” thinking it would clear everything from my head. But I’m here in the office and every so often I find myself drifting off thinking stuff like “I wonder if the last people to hear him do ‘leaving on a jet plane’ feel odd about about the ‘dont know if ill be back again’ part?” The worst part about it is, I’m really not even a fan or anything. Its just stuck there for some reason.
PL: Not a bad artist. And as a counterweight to the stress and annoyance of sitting on that horrible road, it does take the mind to a much better place.
The most appropriate song for a ride to work on 76 would be a Talking Heads tune. You probably know which one I mean. One of their later ones.

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:14:43 +0000

How fitting that I first opened and read this at work.
Law school libraries you say? The law school I attended (for a semester) boasted one of the top 5 (? I think) most complete libraries in the country. Part of me wants to say it is second only to Yale. I’d be interested to see if they have it. I don’t imagine it’d be on one of the prominent display racks with the law reviews. Maybe if I’m ever back in town I’ll scatter a few copies on the tables.
PL: I was surprised at how many bought it. The goofy fucks who categorize books in the publishing and retailing industries listed the thing as a law book, but the title and blurbs clearly indicate it’s a bit different than anything belonging in a law library.

By: Jonathon

Jonathon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:40:02 +0000

I wasn’t being sarcastic. I actually enjoy that song.
I’ve seen Van Halen with Roth and with Hagar and while they were both enjoyable in their own ways, Roth blows Hagar out of the water when it comes to on-stage persona. Hagar always seems like he’s working. You’re just watching a guy try his best to make it through a two-hour shift. With Roth, it actually feels like a concert. Or, depending on the crowd and what you’ve consumed, a pretty decent party.
Good call on Drop Dead Legs. Haven’t heard that one in a while.
PL: I couldn’t take “Panama.” I was more an “And the Cradle Will Rock” and “Everybody Wants Some” kind of guy. I also liked a lot of the stuff on “Fair Warning.”

By: Jonathon

Jonathon — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:08:06 +0000

I think I love spacing out as much as the next office drone, but I think the come down from spacing out is one of the worst feelings I get during the work day. That one spot where you hear the person talking to you again and you snap back to where you are. God, it’s like a shitty beer hangover compressed into three or four seconds for me.
Thanks for getting Panama stuck in my head by the way.
PL: Could be worse. I could have gone with some of the Hagar stuff.
You know what’s a great riff? “Drop Dead Legs.” Why couldn’t they write all their shit like that?
I have so much disparate shit going through my head these days that I routinely lose track of what I’m saying mid-conversation. Unless I know something I want is coming immediately if I say the right thing. I still have that ability to turn it on when I need that immediate zero to sixty burst of concentration. Kind of a surprise… “Huh, I still have a brain… How about that?” In all other regards, my wiring’s quite torn & frayed.
And I kind of like it.

By: Rosie Palmer

Rosie Palmer — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:05:31 +0000

Been on a Bad Co./Free kick all day… Paul Rodgers, self-indugent bastard that he was could certainly lay it down.
I’ve also found that drinking 8 or 10 beers makes the chest pains and shocks that travel up and down my right arm go away. I assume it thins my blood and makes it easier to pump it through my bloated corpse-to-be…
Oh, happy San Juan Day!
And if I haven’t mentioned this lately… PIZZA! PIZZA!
PL: Mine have moved to my shoulder blade, neck and jaw, and I’m sweating like hell. On the plus side, cheese makes me sleepy now. Much cheaper than Ambien.

By: rhys

rhys — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:20:03 +0000

i wouldn’t say lecherous.
basically i lived at a muay thai gym hidden away in some suburb of bangkok and trained twice a day. the rest of my time was spent at the tiny internet cafe down the road or reading. it was an extremely simplistic, if grueling, lifestyle, and i was pretty homesick, but it was pretty rewarding at the same time.
i only went into bangkok proper once, and seeing all the whores and being dragged into bars by pimps and shit gets old fast.
besides, you see one dirty big city, you’ve seen them all
PL: Don’t be too hard on whores. Carradine might be alive if he’d chosen a pro over onanism.
Narcissism’ll get you every time.

By: notion

notion — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:50:03 +0000

The worst of it happens during conversation… I was on a date a few nights ago when my head casually sauntered to the right – where the plasma in the restaurant had a Cubs game going, while she happened to be mid-sentence, ahah.
But I think that’s the id at work. Amidst the shitstorm I was in a week ago, trying to cram a half-quarter’s worth of material into 8 or so hours of studying, I went through the usual motions… “Way to go, shithead.” “When the fuck will I need to know the merits of ‘activity-based costing’, when my immediate future entails staring at Bloomberg Terminal and 20 tabs of excel for 12 hours a day?” “Fuck this shit.” Most importantly, “Why do you put this on yourself, when even a modicum of effort throughout the quarter would put you in a much better position?”
It goes back to the bit you did about finding ‘direction’ through motion, about flying by the seat of your pants, being 15 minutes late, perpetually. Your mind–even if only subconsciously–won’t direct its full attention to the daily toil, on principle. When it does grant you all its efforts, it’s only because you’re staring down a deadline (or the clock, in your example) – when you’re in the moment, and going through the motions.
PL: It’s because we’re not wired to be bored as we must be to make money. It’s just not how humans are built to operate. We’re built to shift more often, react, change our circumstances, and the businesses we work in don’t value that. Oh, they say they do, but they value consistency above all else, and not consistency of results so much, but consistency of personality, a flatness that gets you the accolade most revered in the corporate world – dependability. The ability to be bored and accept it.
Try warping the situation, as I described, I think, in “Shiny White Shoes” (in the archive). I like to picture all kinds of strange shit happening. Picture the boss screwing the woman to his right. Hell, picture an orgy breaking out in the meeting. When you’re talking to the group, imagine what would happen if you started sprinkling coarse slurs or random rants about wild conspiracy theories through your discussion – the looks that might erupt on the faces of the people in the room. It’ll get you smirking/smiling, and that’ll make you look really interested, positive about the whole thing. They might think you’re a go-getter.

By: rhys

rhys — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:50:43 +0000

im going in october, but only for two weeks, sadly. might as well ride the current cushy (albeit worthless) job i have now while i still can. its already affording me a month long stay at a gym in thailand.
PL: A month in Thailand… That can be, uh, lascivious… lecherous? You know the words I’m looking for?

By: Jesse

Jesse — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:11:19 +0000

This specifically cracked me up:
“Sir, what size?”
“What?”
As it is pretty much how the majority of my interactions go about work, huh…where am I again?
PL: “The last summer job I’d known was driving to New York City at 3:00 AM in the morning to deliver computer files around Wall Street. I’d find myself on Canal Street with a 40 lb box in my hand, wheezing as I sprinted through clouds of exhaust fumes, running myself ragged just to save a minute or two of time. But I never stopped to question why I was pushing myself, or why I took a job that only allowed me to sleep four hours a night. The sooner I did the deliveries, the sooner I got home. If I pushed myself fast enough I could be done in six hours, back home on my parents’ deck, reading the paper before noon. Work was something to be done to get as much money as possible as quickly as possible, entered grudgingly and finished furiously so I could get back to living my life. The people I worked for probably thought I had tremendous “work ethic.” And I did. But who wouldn’t? There’s no incentive on Earth stronger than the promise that the faster and harder you work, the sooner you can stop.”
That’s how I’d describe doing any work but what you like. We decided to go with that as the final comment on the concept of “toil” in the book.

By: iijijiji

iijijiji — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:58:45 +0000

I still haven’t bought your book.
I feel a bit guilty. Brainwashing?
PL: Just steal the goddamn thing already. It’s not impossible to find one. If you haven’t the balls to honestly shoplift from a retailer, any law school library will have one. A person told me on Facebook he found one on the wall in a pub in London (I take that as indicator I’m hitting the right audience).
Seriously, I just reread it recently to make some corrections for the softcover version and I was surprised. I don’t read a lot of my stuff after it’s out there for consumption, but I was taken aback. It’s actually a good book. This cause my wife to reread some of it, after which she noted, “You really were an ass.” We then fought about my boorishness for a couple hours and slept in separate rooms. I must have nailed the picture of myself pretty well for a first time author.