Some days I have a hard time coming to terms with my new cubicle drone identity, and I don’t even work in a cubicle. (Hey, if I didn’t invent the phrase, at least I can beat it to death.) Four other interns and I share an enormous corner conference room with a 20-foot stretch of fifth-floor view, and my desk is twice the size of the desk of the VP I work under. I certainly can’t complain about the setting.

Nonetheless, returning from lunch today I caught my reflection in the shiny metallic elevator doors and I realized that, in complete seriousness this morning, I put on a striped polo shirt and tucked it into my beige pants. Furthermore, I had forgotten to take off my ID badge when I left the building and had been wearing it around on the street. Jesus Christ, I used to laugh almost out loud at that guy. Granted, we all know that the men’s business casual palette is limited, so not all the blame lies with me. It’s almost impossible to compose a biz-cazh wardrobe without some shade of brown in it. If it’s not tan, something’s going to end up being khaki, or at least beige.

Whatever. I can get used to the uniform. I may possibly even be able to learn to find satisfying ways to spend the two or three hours each day when there is no work for me to do. But I can’t get used to one thing that seems to come with working at a huge company: the waiting in line, the filling a chair until the promotion comes along, impressing the right people, shaking the right hands and knowing the right names, remembering who owes you one, or who you owe, always looking back over your shoulder, or peering over the shoulder of the person ahead of you in line to see what’s coming up next and who’s already jockeying for it, the callous recognition that mediocre is good enough except when someone’s watching. Shouldn’t we demand excellence of ourselves at all times? If not, what’s the point? This is a horribly unhip and unfun notion, sure, but it’s a nagging feeling I just can’t shake. This particular place definitely seems better than most, in that the majority of people seem genuinely to care about what they do and take pride in what they’re working toward, but I suspect pockets of that political undercurrent still exist.

Certainly not everyone who tucks in his shirt and works in an office is so lazy and self-serving. I’m exaggerating for effect, and I’m infant-new in a world that I have emphatically and consciously avoided for my entire life for exactly this reason, so my biases may be clouding my vision. But I hear that mentality every so often in small comments that fall unthinkingly from people’s mouths as it imperceptibly and incrementally creeps into their lives. When young, brilliant, energetic people, weeks out of college, who could do anything they want talk about “putting in a few years in such-and-such department,” or “doing some time under so-and-so, who’s really tight with the CFO,” as if it’s prison, what I hear is that they have chosen instead to hop onto a conveyor belt that ends much sooner than they realize in middle-aged disillusionment and regret. It is not always so, but often enough that it should frighten everyone who does not actively choose anew every single goddamned day to live consciously and deliberately with the whole scope of her actions and their consequences in mind. I’m not talking about the corporate world in general; I’m talking specifically about the attitude with which we approach our work, whatever it is, whatever aspect of our lives we choose to call “work,” for it can be much broader than it sounds at first. Of course there’s the personal ineptness caveat: by no means have I yet figured out how to live properly, but if you had state the goal, in a perfect world, wouldn’t that be it?

I assigned my Czech university students an essay each semester. First semester we worked on formal writing: the five paragraph essay, dreaded beast of freshman rhetoric students the world over, or so I thought. The Czechs had never heard of it, and knew not wherefore to fear. They objected most indignantly to the constraint that they not use the first person pronoun in any formal writing. These essays, however, were painful to read, and ‘painful’ might even be a euphemism for what they really were to read, which was excruciatingly, mind-numbingly, castratingly dull. While reading the first hundred or so, I developed an unfortunate nervous tic: pulling out the hairs at the edge of my forehead one by one. Over the course of the three weeks it took me to read all the essays during my evenings and weekends, I developed a noticeable bald spot at the top of the my forehead which took a few weeks to grow out. I learned such respect for all of my past teachers after that experience.

Can I share a sample? I hate to make fun, and Jesus, if any of my students had heard my Czech they would have seized with laughter. Nonetheless, the history of mankind thus far apparently begins, in someone’s mind, like this:

From the very beginning of the human age people traveled.There used to live so-called pickers who began it. After them came hunters.

Then first farmers went on, behind them people from the Iron and Bronze Age came. Nobody knows how many people in bondage of thousands kings and gueens there were on the world and all of them traveled. We must not forget a big move to the new world behind the ocean. Kings and queens have gone and people still travel. There are so many places waiting to be discovered. It is peoples naturalness moving around lookig for something no one can surely say what exactly it si .

But let us start from the beginning.Small,poor maybe happy pickers. Whole day consisted from picking food. Everything could be eaten. Every little animal, no berry was safe from them, if nothing else was around even the little tiny rootlet was good enough for empty stomac. The time they realised that everything was eaten was the right time to move on.First travelers were born.

Tribes of hunters had not more difficult way of living. Their only thing to care about was how to hunt as big animal as possible. It surely took a lot of time to keep whole tribe well fed. Not only plenty of time but also plenty of animals. As soon as the animals saw something is hunting them they moved.No mammuths, no supper. So the people moved too. Some moved, some started to cultivate land and plant first corn and plants. When the ground stoped to give good food they went to find another good place to make new fields.

So second semester I decided to lighten things up a bit, hoping that if I assigned essay topics that were enjoyable to write about, they might be more enjoyable to read, and they were. One of the topics from which the students could choose was “What do you hope to be doing in ten years, and what could you be doing now in order to make it happen?” (Note the use of the present continuous in the second part of the question. We use the present continuous in English to indicate a current, ongoing action, in this case, doing.) It proved to be one of the most popular essay topics, though students often told me as they handed it in that they regretted choosing it because it had seemed so easy at the outset, but required not only some difficult introspection, but a thorough understanding of English conditional structures as well, which are very difficult and counterintuitive if you didn’t actually grow up speaking English natively.

What surprised me were the number of responses that involved something along the lines of “I have never considered this question before, but . . .” and after reading several in a row I began to suspect that introspection just isn’t a Czech cultural value. But that, of course, is a ridiculous assumption. And then I thought about all my American friends and wondered how many of them had thought at any length about where they want to be in life in ten years. And by “where they want to be” I don‘t mean at what job, at what point in their career, but who they are progressing toward being, and how far along they expect to be. Are they all just on a conveyor belt too?

What’s more likely is that I am in fact overly concerned with the future, I who, at an unspecified age between 27 and 35, have not yet really decided what I want to do when I grow up. Whenever I choose one thing, I feel overly constrained and can only obsess about all the things that I will then not be able to do. I feel like my sister, who admitted to me one day sitting on our brother’s front porch that, sadly, she has had to face up to the fact that she will never work in metal. I, too, will probably never work in metal. Nor will I ever be an organic farmer, a truck driver, an engineer, a publishing tycoon, a magazine editor, a rock star, a recording engineer, a political activist, a diplomat, an artisan of any kind (including cabinet maker, ceramist, or graphic designer), a research linguist, a mathematician, or a cognitive scientist, all of which I have considered and even worked toward to some degree or another. Instead, thus far this life, I have had 29 jobs and 23 addresses, if you count various dorms and a brief stint when I lived in my van (but hardly ever actually slept in it), all in the name of exploration and keeping my options open. After a while, your options become so open that they in fact disappear.

Nonetheless, if I may return to the tone of emphatic proclamation I copped in paragraphs 3–4, I would say this with an additional note of conclusionary table pounding: If I had to distill the manifold lessons taught me by the deaths of my parents into one sentence, whether or not it sound like trite Robin Williams seize-the-day crap, the truth seems incontrovertible that this life is simply too short to underestimate the moments that in sum make it up. There will not be nearly enough time to spend with the people you love and the things that matter, and time wasted waiting for things to happen is just heaved onto the one-way conveyor belt into the irretrievable past. Said another way, in the words of impeccable rockers No Means No, “I got tired of waiting because I found out there only a fine line between biding one’s time and wasting one’s time. Know what I mean?”

maybe you should take up knitting for those dead times. then when it came time to retire you would have a golden handshake, possibly a nice watch, AND a pile of sweaters. or you could blog through it. that's what all the bloggy people do.

what you need to not do is start taking projects that are not serious, seriously. then the fact that you wore your name tag outside, like some disoriented grade schooler lost from a field trip, risks become less of an moment of oversight and more of a part of Your Identity. "i've can just take a quick lunch and then i've got to get back to alphabatizing these cards, because blah blah blah STAT". ick.

this post makes me sad. although i am also laughing at you a bit. beige pants. nice dockers, dude.