I don't have enough time to do any bit of writing justice today. I resent that. I find myself thinking as if I'm talking with candor to my students:
Be prepared. Unless you're part of the 1%, your dreams will be crushed. What about all that joy with which you contemplated your future? Useless, all of it. Forget hope. Forget the American dream of working hard at what you love and earning money at it. Just resign yourself doing drudge work that looks a little like what you used to like to do in your free time so that you can earn enough money to get by.
There's an inverse relationship between how much you like your job and how much money you can make. That's because nobody wants to do the truly crappy jobs, so they pay better. You can earn a decent living driving a garbage truck. Did you know that? Then, because you're unhappy, you can leave people's garbage strewn about the highway and drag the bin half way down the road in an act of weekly passive aggression because the kid put it in the wrong spot and you don't want to bother leaving a note. Nobody can read your writing anyway and you can't spell. But you can earn a decent living driving garbage.
Wait. You should check the color of your skin. There may be corollaries to that inverse relationship. If you have dark skin and smooth hair, you might earn more money doing what you don't like to do because your parents began to grill you in the second grade to get your math facts right and told you that an A- is as good as an F. No worries. If you play your cards right, you'll become a low-level manager at a fortune 500 company with a slightly larger dumpster-sized cubicle. You'll wonder why your workers stare right through you when you try your parents' management skills on them. You won't be any happier, but you'll have some money to spend on your misery.
If you have dark skin and curly hair, you're pretty much fucked because our current President makes it okay to keep you in shackles. You'll be harassed more often by teachers. You'll be accused of crimes you didn't commit. You'll be imprisoned more often. You might even get arrested while waiting for a friend too long in front of a store or shot in your own car by a police officer who believes you stole that car because he could never afford it even though your wife and child are inside it with you.
If you're a woman, you'll earn only three-quarters what your male cohorts will earn. If you confront your bosses, they'll tell you that the men have families to support and secretly call you a bitch when you leave the room. You'll have to learn how to dance away from the guy who you know will stick his fingers under your skirt if he thinks no one else can see. If you work full time and are married, you'll do most of the chores at home anyway because that's what you're supposed to do. Be smart, marry a man who knows how to plug in a vacuum cleaner and load a washing machine. Then, leave the cat puke lying in his shoe for a while and see what happens. Throw a red sweater in with his underwear and T-shirts a few weeks after the honeymoon and let him imagine wearing pink underwear until it fades. If he does the laundry after that, you're set for life. Then, without much effort, you'll have converted the home to a more equal place. If he yells at you, file for divorce without waiting to see if he'd change a diaper. That shit is not funny in the home.
And if you're a privileged white male, you still have to work. You have to make more money than your wife to be considered a real man. Don't even think of being a stay-at-home dad. The real word for that is 'unemployed.' You'll have to learn to fall down and not cry. You'll have to go to college when robots take over your manufacturing job and the mines become more automated. Even after you get a degree in computer science, you'll have to work ten hours a day in a warehouse containing a hundred and fifty cubicles each with a footprint smaller than a dumpster.
There will always be that guy who opens your lunch in the refrigerator in the break room and steals your cookie. There's that guy who interrupts you every time you have a bright and shining idea at the brainstorming meeting, then tries to pass it off as his own later in the meeting. It'll work and if you complain, you'll look like you're whining. There will always be someone who switches his broken chair for yours or his sticky keyboard or some other nonsense that the company handed out without caring if it worked or not. There will always be coffee so black there's an oil sheen on the top and a group-passive-agressive play over who makes the next pot.
There will always be a guy on the way to work who tailgates so tightly that you wonder what an airbag tastes like and you wonder how your very existence in the line of cars has become an annoyance to a person you never met in real life.
This is your future, that time you spend in your car, in your cubicle, on your couch in front of a television screen when the day's penance is paid. This is what you are destined to become. Welcome to the real world, asshole.
Yeah, I'm not sure it's a good idea for me to be honest with my students today. Candor is not always appreciated but it is an SAT word you need to memorize.
Thank you for listening, jb
Be prepared. Unless you're part of the 1%, your dreams will be crushed. What about all that joy with which you contemplated your future? Useless, all of it. Forget hope. Forget the American dream of working hard at what you love and earning money at it. Just resign yourself doing drudge work that looks a little like what you used to like to do in your free time so that you can earn enough money to get by.
There's an inverse relationship between how much you like your job and how much money you can make. That's because nobody wants to do the truly crappy jobs, so they pay better. You can earn a decent living driving a garbage truck. Did you know that? Then, because you're unhappy, you can leave people's garbage strewn about the highway and drag the bin half way down the road in an act of weekly passive aggression because the kid put it in the wrong spot and you don't want to bother leaving a note. Nobody can read your writing anyway and you can't spell. But you can earn a decent living driving garbage.
Wait. You should check the color of your skin. There may be corollaries to that inverse relationship. If you have dark skin and smooth hair, you might earn more money doing what you don't like to do because your parents began to grill you in the second grade to get your math facts right and told you that an A- is as good as an F. No worries. If you play your cards right, you'll become a low-level manager at a fortune 500 company with a slightly larger dumpster-sized cubicle. You'll wonder why your workers stare right through you when you try your parents' management skills on them. You won't be any happier, but you'll have some money to spend on your misery.
If you have dark skin and curly hair, you're pretty much fucked because our current President makes it okay to keep you in shackles. You'll be harassed more often by teachers. You'll be accused of crimes you didn't commit. You'll be imprisoned more often. You might even get arrested while waiting for a friend too long in front of a store or shot in your own car by a police officer who believes you stole that car because he could never afford it even though your wife and child are inside it with you.
If you're a woman, you'll earn only three-quarters what your male cohorts will earn. If you confront your bosses, they'll tell you that the men have families to support and secretly call you a bitch when you leave the room. You'll have to learn how to dance away from the guy who you know will stick his fingers under your skirt if he thinks no one else can see. If you work full time and are married, you'll do most of the chores at home anyway because that's what you're supposed to do. Be smart, marry a man who knows how to plug in a vacuum cleaner and load a washing machine. Then, leave the cat puke lying in his shoe for a while and see what happens. Throw a red sweater in with his underwear and T-shirts a few weeks after the honeymoon and let him imagine wearing pink underwear until it fades. If he does the laundry after that, you're set for life. Then, without much effort, you'll have converted the home to a more equal place. If he yells at you, file for divorce without waiting to see if he'd change a diaper. That shit is not funny in the home.
And if you're a privileged white male, you still have to work. You have to make more money than your wife to be considered a real man. Don't even think of being a stay-at-home dad. The real word for that is 'unemployed.' You'll have to learn to fall down and not cry. You'll have to go to college when robots take over your manufacturing job and the mines become more automated. Even after you get a degree in computer science, you'll have to work ten hours a day in a warehouse containing a hundred and fifty cubicles each with a footprint smaller than a dumpster.
There will always be that guy who opens your lunch in the refrigerator in the break room and steals your cookie. There's that guy who interrupts you every time you have a bright and shining idea at the brainstorming meeting, then tries to pass it off as his own later in the meeting. It'll work and if you complain, you'll look like you're whining. There will always be someone who switches his broken chair for yours or his sticky keyboard or some other nonsense that the company handed out without caring if it worked or not. There will always be coffee so black there's an oil sheen on the top and a group-passive-agressive play over who makes the next pot.
There will always be a guy on the way to work who tailgates so tightly that you wonder what an airbag tastes like and you wonder how your very existence in the line of cars has become an annoyance to a person you never met in real life.
This is your future, that time you spend in your car, in your cubicle, on your couch in front of a television screen when the day's penance is paid. This is what you are destined to become. Welcome to the real world, asshole.
Yeah, I'm not sure it's a good idea for me to be honest with my students today. Candor is not always appreciated but it is an SAT word you need to memorize.
Thank you for listening, jb
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