Pigeons and bullshit
Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.
When I push my son in the umbrella stroller, he is alert for pigeons. If we come upon a few nosing through the sidewalk rubbish, he will lean his head out in its puffy hood, wait for the perfect second, and then scream like a man whose foot has been caught in the jaws of an escalator. The sound is nearly unbearable, but effective. From my vantage point behind the stroller, it looks like attack by angry oven mitt. Having roused one pigeon he is on lookout for the next. I support him in this endeavor because he seems to feel a real responsibility as pigeon-scarer. (“Janet!” my husband said yesterday, unrelated to this, “you are in charge!” Alas, I want what my children want.)
A child needs a job, I have learned in this year of all years. Toys are often bent to this notion: the doctor kit, the air traffic controller play set, toys for meteorologists, zoologists, race car drivers, entomologists, bakers, contractors, hairdressers. I once saw a Barbie-brand petrol station sat out by a hopper. For a time, if you laid out fresh paper and markers the night before, my daughter would get up and quietly perform work at her particle board desk in the mornings. By the time I put the kettle on, there would be pages of rain drops and wonky houses and swirls for wind. She still takes it seriously: she wants to be a famous artist. An artist is fine, I have told her, don’t worry about the fame. Isn’t that the lesson of two decades’ work?
I have been working since I was 12, which isn’t legal, but my first job, as a “junior sailing instructor,” essentially paid me in chocolate bars. This led on to a series of shitty jobs and bullshit jobs. If you are not familiar with bullshit jobs, here is the canonic description from David Graeber, who wrote about the phenomenon in 2013:
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Joshua Ferris wrote about the existential horror of white collardom in Then We Came To The End, which presents characters photocopying novels so they can sit at their desks reading for hours on end, and teaching the janitor how to work Photoshop for the sheer novelty of accomplishing their work without touching the keyboard for a full day. Layoffs are always imminent, and the days are absurd:
We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.
TL;DR:
The squeeze is that having a baby increases your spiritual awareness of this fact, at the same time as it increases the need for money, and for a safe perch performing (hopefully) bullshit work, as it pays more than shitty work. I used to quantify my work by the minute when I worked shitty jobs, and resumed this practice after I returned from maternity leave with my daughter. I remember the long lunch I once took so I could nurse her in Union Square Park on “company time,” when my husband brought her in on the train. How many gulps of milk did we fit into the extra hour under the big tree by the worn-out grass? Put that way, the compensation hardly seems worth our precious short lives, worth the stretch of time before our children are grown and off to work on their own bullshit. As Faulkner once put it in his resignation from the post office, “I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.”
Shitty jobs have their upsides. One of my earlier gigs was working in a supermarket deli. The 5 a.m.-2 p.m. shift saw you slice and shave what must have been equal to an entire corral of pigs, turning slippery basketballs of meat (and, on one occasion, the tip of my sister’s finger) into mountains of feathery cold cuts. We had to wear red mesh baseball hats and red aprons; degrading, but we had ways of restoring autonomy to our days. One such way was “deli legs,” whereby you would serve the customer on the other side of the case with a straight face and capable hands, but send your legs off on a robust silly walk below the case, dancing this way and that, a splitscreen of order and chaos, obedience and subversiveness. Another thing we liked to do was simply crouch down behind the case as though we weren’t there. Customers would get impatient and start to call out: “Hello! Is there anyone here? WHO IS IN THE DELI?” and whomever pulled the short straw would stand up as though they had just returned from a basement storeroom, ask “customer 57?” as though there had been no lag in the upholding of the duties, take the customer’s wrinkled ticket, and go on to shovel the chicken necks into thin plastic bags. We ate a lot of free cheese, and one of my coworkers used to routinely steal whole rotisserie chickens to take home to her family. Outside of that context, I never took work home with me back then.
I also worked as a checkout chick, functions waitress, bingo number caller, overnight shopping mall Christmas decorations putter-upper, and worker in a bread factory. Interspersed were the ski jobs. For $9 an hour, I worked as seasonal immigrant lift operator in Utah, a job that required you to tick a box to confirm you had raked the unload ramp once an hour, and occasionally to hit a big red “STOP” button if someone forgot to get off. On your breaks, you could loop the chutes up above the valley, dropping out of the sky down steep gulleys. I’m not a demonstrative person, but skiing down a steep hill has led me on many occasions to holler out of transcendent joy. On a powder day, if you stow yourself in the trees, you will hear people hooting as they work their way down the mountain through a cloud of powder, under a sky so thin you could tear a hole and reach your hand into outer space. I don’t think I have ever hooted sitting at a computer.
Much has been said (rightly!) about the toll the pandemic has taken on working mothers, who have been forced out of their jobs (by companies beholden to shareholder dividends and by lazy husbands), but no one is talking about how it’s all bullshit to begin with. “A man is always prey to his truths,” wrote Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. “One he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who becomes conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.” Every mother I know has a get-rich scheme up her sleeve — funny t-shirts, a craft, a mobile daycare business that allows her to tour state parks during the day. Mine is to write living obituaries for rich people — please pass along my details to any millionaires you know, I’m a very hard worker.
“You’re always working!” glared my daughter the other day. “I don’t even have a real job!” I might have replied. Nevertheless, I put away the relics of employment, and sat down to play. In no time, we had built an entire trainline, a cubby, a campsite. The kids then wanted to inspect my feet. They got out their doctor kits, and began to hammer and pinch and peer. On the floor of our apartment, I let them go about their work.
How it happened
Me (at right): moving through apartment, putting things back in their places.
Scout (at left):
(Click on the picture for the full clip, or just enjoy the butt as-is.)
Endless scroll
Snooki in my piece for the New York Times on celebrities monetizing their pregnancy announcements: “By the third [child], you’re just like, ‘Right, Instagram post. Here it is.’”
Gaby Moss on the tyranny of the overlords at a women’s media site: “She couldn’t be doing that great if she was here. This website was not quite where dreams go to die, but it was definitely not a place where dreams came to fruition unless your dreams were about receiving a lot of free Monistat swag.”
“The Very Beneficial Changeling Society” — Jesse Ball
“His politics have been guided by platform metrics,” reflected Andrew Gauthier, who was a top video producer at BuzzFeed and later worked for Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential campaign. “You always think that evil is going to come from movie villain evil, and then you’re like — oh no, evil can just start with bad jokes and nihilistic behavior that is fueled by positive reinforcement on various platforms.” — Ben Smith on how the internet created a monster
<3 <3 <3 Thank you for reading Kafka’s Baby