Eric and The Obligations of Men

                I have a great job, I have a job that feeds, clothes, and keeps my family warm at night.  I hate my job.  My job has gone out its way to make my life easier and it has forgiven me for most of my shortcomings.  I hate my job.  I try my hardest to push myself into doing well for this company that is far from perfect itself, but I get this nagging feeling in my gut that this is absolutely not what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.  I tell myself that nobody loves their job and if they say they do they are lying.  Lying to me, lying to themselves, lying to the whole damn world.  Not every day is like this, most of the time I can convince myself that this is what I’m supposed to do because, dammit, this is what people do, this is what men do.  Men work, men provide for their families, men don’t need to be happy. 

                I love my boss; he is one of the awesomest most well rounded individuals I have ever met in my entire life.  He is so smart and his sharpness amazes me on a daily basis.  I appreciate everything he has done for me in the 3 years I’ve known him.  He has given me a promotion, a promotion that most people, me included, didn’t believe I deserved.  Not only is he a great boss, I consider him a friend.  I love talking to him, more about music than work.  He has an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, particularly music.  The point is that he’s a great dude and I have a feeling that he doesn’t love his job all that much either, but it’s what men do.

I know that my hatred of my job has gotten in the way of me being a great employee.  I try to ignore my feeling and do my best every time but they get the better of me sometimes (more often now than before).  I have a perfectionist side that pushes me towards greatness, but it gets drowned out by the lazy procrastinator side more often than not.  I find that if I look at a project and tell myself that there is no way I can do it well then I’ll just quit doing it.

If I look back at this dream of writing that I’ve had since the fifth grade I realize that if I had started pursuing it back then I might be somewhere today other than where I am.  That’s the problem. I can’t change the past, I can’t go back and slap the shit out of a fifth grade me (because I would certainly be arrested) and tell him follow this to the end.  I have written a few things over the years but nothing consistently.  I know I need to accept my life for what it is now or I’ll never be happy.

Regular readers of this blog(I hate the word “blog”) know that I need quite a bit of practice before I could ever get anyone to pay me to write anything, but that has always been my answer to the question “what do you want to do when you grow up”?  Well that and photographer, but my photography is far far far from professional.  While I love quite a few of the pictures I’ve taken, most people tell me they suck. Whatever, it’s just for fun anyway.

Eric Anderson