Tuesday, January 23, 2007
begin the begin: finally it ends, with goddam part THREE
yeah yeah yeah I’m still on about new crap, as if I’m the only blog-enabled protein tube in the contiguous hinterlands that’s ever started anything. but with me it’s different. because I said so. shut up. to wit:
And further on the topic of personal investiture and divestiture: I finally threw away about four expired years. The bulk of this material was a series of binders of annual day planner pages I’ve never looked at since I bound them away in their respective turn, but the part that really felt good was the time sheet file. Somehow I never looked at those squat brown calendar binders but I always noticed that stack of time sheets every time I opened my main desk drawer.
Though I’m ostensibly on salary, I still fill out bi-weekly timesheets to account for my vacation time and sick hours and such. They’re classic NCR forms - press down hard for your automatic duplicate. I’ve gotten a dupe for every timecard I’ve filled out since I started my job in aught-one, and stored each and every one of those cards in a hanging folder in my desk. That means over 100 heavily chem-treated slips of yellow paper have built up in that folder, each one representing a precious investment of my scarce personal availability. Inscrutable notations connect back to blissful weekends, miserable illnesses, serious trips for serious purposes and a nice visit to Korea to meet my son. If I were to cross-reference those time cards against my calendar (and possibly my bank register) I’d have a pretty decent diary.
The thing is, I have a pretty decent diary already and you’re reading it now. I finally got rid of those calendar sheets for most of those years without prejudice to my better interests, and frankly I am not interested in reconstructing my time-off usage from 2003. There’s just no point. It isn’t going to happen.
Those time slips represent accurate but irrelevant information. Unfortunately, that’s the sort of information it’s easy for me to acquire and hard for me to disgorge - until now.
For yea, I have yanked forth the file of defunct time cards and I have purged it of all materials predating last year. The folder has shrunk form 2 or 3 inches thick to a centimeter or maybe less. And yes, in this case, shrinkage is good. It represents freedom from a slavish fascination with the retrospect - cleaving to the past on the vague suspicion it may someday be the key to the future. But doing so kept my focus too much behind me, and my efforts toward progress were diffused and weakened by the ever-increasing litany of expired days I dragged in my wake. Each time I opened that drawer, that grave of days seemed to swell up and overwhelm me. Each new sheet I filed there tied back inextricably to every sheet that preceded it, creating a merciless inevitability of both future and past.
By throwing away those records of bygone time, I feel that I’ll be able to commit to the days yet to come with a singleness of purpose that just wasn’t there when so many months of my life squatted, mocking me, from inside my desk. It’s about time I took back my free will and random agency. My time is not a set of lockstep links, stretching drearily from the creation to my need to take a half personal day for a visit to potential preschools for Zach. Rather, I make of my time what I see fit. What’s done is done. And now, to the extent I didn’t need it, it’s gone.
But wait there’s more: In my office building we have inexplicably oppressive security. Honestly, I don’t get it - certainly, there are sensitive records and computers scattered around, but I don’t see why I need to use an ID card three times just to get to my desk. I can’t even go to pee without my ID card. Well, I could, but I’d be stuck there - I wouldn’t be able to get back to my desk. At my building, your ID badge is your only way anywhere. With it you can go from the mailroom off the lobby all the way to the gleaming 10th floor lunchroom. Without it you’ll be lucky to reach your floor on the elevator, but you won’t get any farther than that unless you call someone to let you in. Assuming they’re still around. The point is, don’t go out without your card.
That’s been a challenge for me because I can be so absent-minded. Oh yes I can, don’t even be that way. I remember everything - just eventually, not always at the most opportune moment. It can take me three or for shots before I can actually leave the house with everything I need. I’m entirely capable of losing anything that’s not physically attached to my person - and even then it can be a toss-up. So my ID card has had to become part of my basic costume or it would get left behind at any number of inconvenient times. I’d arrive in the morning, toss my card on my desk, get up for a cuppa corporate joe, and wind up stuck out in the elevator lobby like some frathouse pledge wearing granny panties and soaked in karo syrup. The card is in use too much to be secreted anywhere too obscure on my person, which is where it would be safest. It has to be accessible but not so that I am at risk of leaving it behind me.
Till lately that has meant tying it by a slender silver chain to my belt loop. From there the card gets slipped into a pants pocket and is always ready at a moment’s notice, or dangles by my knees when I don’t put it properly away. I cannot walk away from it any more than I can walk away from my pants, and I’m not saying that’s never happened, but it’s rare. The chain became as much a part of my daily dress as my shoes or my wristwatch. Its presence comforted me and gave me confidence. It swung low, like a delicate fob, yet it girded me. Loinwise, I mean.
This year, though, I’ve already snapped the little grommet in my card through which the chain passes. That busted grommet means I can’t leash my ID badge to my own hip anymore. That, in turn, means that I’ve got to start taking responsibility for my own ID badge. It’s a small thing - I still keep it in my pocket, just without the chain. Sometimes I have to search for it a little; I’ve even left it at my desk twice already. But in general, I don’t. In general, I have it with me when I need it. Plus, I don’t have a chain dangling at my crotch all the time anymore. What once had seemed slightly fobbish had started feeling distinctly more foppish. That silver strand was making me feel self-conscious. Sometimes if I went out after work I’d forget it was still on me until I suddenly realized that it had gone from office expedient to inadvertent fashion statement. That chain had begun to chafe.
Well, just as it was really getting to bind me, I’ve cut myself loose of my ID leash. Of course, not only does that properly render my habiliments less chainey and ostentatious, it also leaves me with an unfettered ID. That seems to me like a sound psychological orientation, whatever else it may mean in the long run. In the short run, I predict a downturn in chain-yanking in the general vicinity of my trousers. And is that such a bad thing?
And finally: I don’t wear much in the way of accessories, but I do wear a watch. I have always keyed in on matters chronological and I feel naked without a timepiece strapped to my wrist. I’ve got a sweet collection of nice watches that require some sort of repair or other and which, consequently, I don’t wear anymore. I just keep them, and wear my cheapie replacement. It’s a great wristwatch because it shows the day and date, has a stopwatch, is possessed of sofistikated stylin’, and - here’s the key - cost me a cool $20. Yes, I’m all about the lo-cost timepiece. I wore my budget chronometer with pride.
That is, until I noticed the rash. After two weeks with the new cheap replacement watch I got late last year, I couldn’t help noticing that my left wrist was all broken out and itchy and angry-looking. Reluctantly suspicious, I tried a little experiment - switching the watch to my right wrist for a week. That felt weird and required some mental reconditioning, but more to the point, it produced affirmative experimental results: the rash on my left wrist slowly healed up and my right wrist (the “control wrist,” though not for the obvious reason) got all lumpy and scabrous and infratweaked. The results admit no argument - I’m allergic to my own wristwatch.
That’s left me going out watchless now for a few weeks, and I must say - it’s been surprisingly okay. There’s usually a clock somewhere if I need one badly enough, and my cellphone tells time too. I’m learning that I’m not really missing out on anything by my watchlessness. After all those years of watchitude, it may be time for me to move on to the next phase, unsynchronized and strapless. It’s one more new frontier to explore this new year - the untracked realms of uncounted hours. I have plenty of those now ahead of me, and I’d like to think I’ll find a way to make decent use of most of them - at first, anyway. After the new year turns into just “the year,” though, in a week or three, all bets are off.
Dang, that was enough of a new beginning for a couple of years at least. I’m spent. Bring me a mojito and a foot massage, and I’ll be back later with something pithier. Perhaps, also, more vinegaraceous, but I’m not making any promises.