Jan 30 - Forty Years Of Curse
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
This time last week I was putting in my last few hours of the week in the office, excited for the jam-packed weekend ahead. I had a friend’s birthday dinner and night out planned for the evening, the Gib Talks event in the morning and a relaxed Sunday with Leslie Knope and the rest of the gang at Pawnee, Indiana’s Parks and Recreation department. After a week of work nothing seemed more appealing; I was ready to take on the weekend with courage. I wish I had known how I feel about it now, then. I had a particularly heavy night, an alarm for half-eight in the morning on the Saturday, met up with my writing buddies Mike and Shameem (the same one from here) and somehow managed to make it to the John Mackintosh Hall without collapsing. I was dying. But I was determined to have a great weekend and part of that was watching every talk at the Gib Talks event, of course with preference to some over others. Long story short the event was a success, everybody loved it and I was convinced (and still am) that the half-eight in the morning alarm was the way to go. Good job!
I walked out of the hall at five in the afternoon, some six hours later, worse for wear, ready to get into bed but feeling a lot more inspired than I had felt in a long time. A lot of things stuck with me, I related to a lot of the speakers, but there was one in particular that really stuck with me; the title: “Work is a curse”, the speaker: our very own glorious leader editor Giordano Durante, an account of rubbish jobs he kept over a number of years. And it got me thinking about my own experiences, about work in general and about our attitude to work.
Sometime in your early twenties, and I’m pretty sure I speak for all save for a small minority, you realise that that’s you; you are going to be working for the rest of your life, it’s necessary. Hurdle one. I got past this one pretty easily, it’s the simplest, but it’s the trickiest. It can make grown men cry. And it plays a part in the realisation of the second hurdle: Unemployed or student life is great, you have all the time in the world and all the energy (because you wake up after ten and waking up early for once isn’t going to kill you), but you might feel like being a bit of a Willy (Fogg) or a Wally (Where’s) but you don’t have the most important of things. That little thing that comes in round pieces of metal and colourful paper and as numbers on a system and swipes on a plastic card. Money. Money makes the world go round and it’s absolutely true. Without money you can’t go anywhere. So you get a job, and at the end of the first month you pat yourself on the back, you have money! You have proven yourself as a functional adult and you probably still have that energy you had the month before, you feel grrrreat, Tony! But it has only been a month, so you stick it out for a little longer to save moolah and you stumble over hurdle three: Now you’re missing the time and the energy.
How are you meant to manage your time now? You wake up at half past seven so you can calmly have a shower, some breakfast and get out of the house with enough time to not have to walk into the office panting like a dog. You get home past five and all you’ve got on the brain is getting into bed hoping you’ll wake up feeling fresh the next morning. Spoiler: you never will. So weekends are your friends now. Two days, the true time-management test. And they soon become more like frenemies, they look great from afar, promising even, but once you get to know them you’ll realise they’re not that great. Take it from me, I walked out of Gib Talks feeling sorry for myself, got into bed, woke up the next day feeling fresh and ready for a relaxing Sunday and ended up walking home at midnight after dinner and a bunch of beers and gin and tonics; I wasn’t feeling so fresh on Monday morning, believe me.
So your only friend at this point is the time off work. But it’s one of those lifelines that like on who wants to be a millionaire? you have to think of and use wisely. Of course if your boss se tira el show you’ll get a good amount of days to cover everything you want to do and still feel like you’re winning in this hurdle race. But if your boss gives you the bare minimum of days off work, A YEAR, (and I’ve experienced it in the past) you end up even more stressed out. Now you have to deal with not only time-management of your every day life but the realisation that you have to plan as much as you can in the little time you are given and you will (most probably) crumble and shed a little tear as you realise you will need another break from your hectic, jam-packed break. Hurdle four.
And you’re losing. You just accept that work is a curse, one that lasts forty years. One that will at times make you think you would be happier homeless or finding some miraculous fast-track to becoming what you hope to become by the time you retire, soon after you have just started the race. But your legs are sore, you’ve stumbled over every hurdle and the race is long, you will get to the finish line, but by the time you get there, there better be a stretcher, because you’re done.
Stefano is an artist, photographer, translator and linguist. You can find more of his work at:
www.instagram.com/stefanoblanca
