"Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem."
-- Henry Kissinger
That's why I never liked school as a kid. Because once you start, whether it's from nursery school or pre-kindergarten or kindergarten or whenever, the train ain't stopping. Each grade is progressively more difficult than the one before it; Grade 5 is harder than Grade 6, Grade 7 is harder than Grade 8, and so on and so on, all the way up until the end of university.
And what's the reward for all of our academic all-nighters?
Real life!
That ain't right. We study, we slave, we go without Springer on a daily, even weekly basis, only to be rewarded by the reality of having to find an actual paying job in the world outside of academia.
Oh, but it doesn't stop there, either.
Once we get a job, if we're any good at it, we eventually get a better job. And what does 'better' actually mean?
More responsibility.
More workload.
More headaches.
Just a few years ago, Bush was chilling as owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, trying to figure out who to trade and who to keep. Trying to line up which beer company would sell the suds at his Texas stadium, probably. And now? Now he carries around a suitcase that contains the secret codes that can launch nuclear weapons at a moment's notice.
Think about it.
Kind of a leap in responsibility, no?
Do we want all that added pressure in our lives? (Not that we all carry around nuclear launch codes, no, but some of us do.)
Maybe yes.
Maybe our reward for all of our hard work in school and on the job is more work, work that allows us to, hopefully, challenge ourselves, achieve our potential, reach for the top and possibly cure a major disease, if we're lucky. (Or even a minor one.)
Still.
Underachievement is underrated, in my book.
And kids need to know what's coming.
I think it's incumbent on every parent to sit their child down the evening before their first day of kindergarten and say:
"Tonight is the last night of your life. Stay in the bath a little longer, play with the rubber duckie, read The Cat In The Hat one more time. I'll even let you stay up late. Because after tomorrow morning, it ain't gonna get any easier."
Or maybe it's better to keep that particular speech to yourself.
If I knew at four what I know now, I might have played sick that first day of school.
And the next, too.
And the next...
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
ACCIDENTAL INSERTS
I found a photo in my desk at work. Never noticed it before. It's a man and a woman who I don't know, seated at a table I've never sat at. Strangers, in other words. They're smiling. Probably at a party. They are white and the people behind them are brown. Everybody looks like they're having a good time; everybody looks happy.
It made me feel lonely -- for me, for them, for the person who took the photo. Don't know why, really. There's something about a photo that's been abandoned that has a somewhat tragic feel to it. A photo should be in a photobook, or someone's wallet, or pinned on a fridge, next to the grocery list and little Becky's slightly skewed portrait of Granny. Not lying forgotten in a grey desk.
And who are the people in the photo? Are they married? Still together? Is one of them dead, while the other is alive, grieving? They've gone on and lived a life but this portrait of them, this piece of them, lay in a drawer in my desk, covered in dust. They've moved on, but this memory, this tactile projection, has remained static. Glimpsed only belatedly, by me, a stranger.
Whenever I look at old photos I've taken, I always notice the strangers, the people passing behind the people I've photographed. Where are all those strangers right now, those accidental inserts? Are they dead or alive? Content or miserable? Fed up with life or thrilled with the days they have left? And they don't know that they're in a photo of mine; nobody told them.
And how many photos am I in that I don't know about? Has somebody snapped a picture of me, unknowingly, aiming for their friend? Maybe somewhere in Canada, or Japan, or even Cambodia, there's a part of me -- a finger, a left foot, the back of my head -- that exists only in the corner of a stranger's photo.
Another me, incidental but still there, nonetheless.
It made me feel lonely -- for me, for them, for the person who took the photo. Don't know why, really. There's something about a photo that's been abandoned that has a somewhat tragic feel to it. A photo should be in a photobook, or someone's wallet, or pinned on a fridge, next to the grocery list and little Becky's slightly skewed portrait of Granny. Not lying forgotten in a grey desk.
And who are the people in the photo? Are they married? Still together? Is one of them dead, while the other is alive, grieving? They've gone on and lived a life but this portrait of them, this piece of them, lay in a drawer in my desk, covered in dust. They've moved on, but this memory, this tactile projection, has remained static. Glimpsed only belatedly, by me, a stranger.
Whenever I look at old photos I've taken, I always notice the strangers, the people passing behind the people I've photographed. Where are all those strangers right now, those accidental inserts? Are they dead or alive? Content or miserable? Fed up with life or thrilled with the days they have left? And they don't know that they're in a photo of mine; nobody told them.
And how many photos am I in that I don't know about? Has somebody snapped a picture of me, unknowingly, aiming for their friend? Maybe somewhere in Canada, or Japan, or even Cambodia, there's a part of me -- a finger, a left foot, the back of my head -- that exists only in the corner of a stranger's photo.
Another me, incidental but still there, nonetheless.
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