Big Fat Hairy Living

Sometimes I wonder about my co-workers’ genitals. What does Jane’s pussy look like? Is that project manager’s cock as ugly as the rest of him?

I wonder if they wonder about my cock. If they do, what do they wonder about it?

The engineer whose product I’m testing came into the lab and asked me how my testing was going. I’m never seen him show any emotion. He always speaks in an even, almost-flat tone. I’ve never seen him smile, heard him laugh or heard him get angry. Just bland, technical questions and answers.

I told him what I was doing, and he told me that I didn’t have to test that part of the product. But didn’t he want me to duplicate this previous report, just on the new revision to the product, I asked. No. He just wanted me to look at one part. The hard part that’s almost impossible for me to do on my own. The part nobody can help me with because they’re all busy.

I felt like I wanted to cry. I almost did.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my job and about why exactly I hate it so much.

When I was asked to do the product testing that I’m currently doing, I thought to myself that it would be relatively easy. It actually is quite easy, but when I got into the lab, I realized that it wasn’t quite as easy as I thought. The main reason that it’s not is because I’m not a very good engineer. I barely passed engineering school, and even though I’m better than the guy who doesn’t know what mono is, that’s not saying much. My lack of confidence in my own abilities, whether it’s justified or not, leads to frustration and mistakes and delays, which lead to bad performance reviews from my manager, which makes my self-confidence go down, and it all just spirals and spirals.

But even though I think my lack of self-confidence is a factor, I can’t deny the fact that I just plain don’t like my job. I’m reminded of report cards I got in elementary school: I was told that I was very smart, but that I just wasn’t applying myself. What kid in his right mind would bother to apply himself when he knew for a fact that the teacher wasn’t as smart as he was? Mr. Robertson from grade three didn’t even understand how the brightness of stars was measured and confused absolute magnitude with apparent magnitude. I was eight years old and I knew the difference, yet I was expected to learn from him? And now I’m thirty years old and I’m expected to take orders from people who spout words like “synergy” and admonish us not to try to “boil the ocean?”

My singing teacher told me many times that she was impressed that I would keep trying an exercise or musical phrase until I got it right; most of her other students would quickly get tired of doing one exercise and would want to move on to something else. She told me that I was one of her hardest working students, which surprised me, because I’d never thought of myself as being a particularly hard worker. When I look back on it, I think she was right and the difference between work and singing is that singing is something that I enjoy and that I do voluntarily, whereas work is something I do because I have to.

I think another big factor is that with singing, it’s easy for me to link a single tedious exercise with the final product, a song that I sing because I think it’s beautiful. With work, the little tasks that I do all fit together to form a boring electronics gadget that I don’t care about, and that nobody really does. I mean, who cares about networking equipment or computer motherboards, or graphics cards or telephones? Nobody spends time loving them or being moved emotionally by them. People do care about music.

I also can’t deny that the environment I work in is poisonous. As an example, I came into work today and the virgin who’s marrying a virgin and the guy who doesn’t know what mono is were talking about preparations for their weddings. The virgin who’s marrying a virgin is getting married next year, and the guy who doesn’t know what mono is is getting married by the end of this year, probably because he fucked his ugly (I’ve seen pictures, and she is ugly) girlfriend and gotten her pregnant. When I heard them talking about buffet-style weddings and wedding halls in suburbia, the first thing that popped in my head was “Shut up. I don’t want to hear you talking about your stupid heterosexual mating festivals.” Despite the fact that I’m openly gay, I still feel like I can’t be myself.

Part of me wonders whether I can be happy doing any job. I’ve already done some research into jobs that I might be interested in doing, but when I started doing engineering it was also something I enjoyed. Will the fact that it’s work turn anything I do into something tedious and boring? Maybe the key is finding a new career that can keep me constantly engaged by giving me new challenges all the time, and something that allows me to work towards a final product that I care about and that others care about.

I’m in the lab doing design verification testing on a new piece of networking equipment. I’m making sure that the latest revision to the northbridge still meets PCI bus, frontside bus, and memory bus timing specifications. Then I have to write a report with lots of oscilloscope plots. It’s tedious and boring.

I bet nobody reading this has a clue what any of that really means.

You see, I wish I had a job that ordinary people could understand. Mark doesn’t really have any idea what I do, and somehow I feel bad that he doesn’t. He’s not technical, not that it would matter if he was, because even my computer geek friends don’t really know what I do. Nobody really does. They understand that I design hardware, but they don’t know what that means. I wish I had a job people could understand.

I was in the lab doing some product testing when a big huge bearish contractor carded himself in. He wanted to know where the computer room was so that he could test a fire alarm that was recently installed there. I showed him. Now I have a hard on.

He was wearing coveralls and had a stubbly face and a big bushy goatee. He looked so cuddly.

I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I can’t do engineering for the rest of my life. It’s not just the people I work with. I could stand them if I enjoyed my job, but I’m not just ambivalent about my job. I despise it. I’ve grown to hate it and detest it.

I need to figure out what I want to do instead. I’ve been doing engineering for seven years and my feelings towards my job have gotten worse, not better. I’m not going to quit tomorrow, but I need to think things over.

Since I moved away from home, I haven’t spoken much to my father. The last time I spoke to my father at all was September of last year. Since then, I have had no interaction with him at all. None.

Mark and I were visting my mother and my sister on a Saturday for lunch. Instead of picking us up in the car at the subway station like they usually do, they arrived on the subway to pick us up. They had gone shopping and the car had stalled in the parking lot and wouldn’t start, so in order to meet with us in time they’d had to take transit to get to us.

The car was under an extended warranty of some sort, but my mother hadn’t been able to find the number to call. She’d called my father at home (she still lives with him, ostensibly for financial reasons but it’s really much more complex than that), but he wasn’t answering, so she figured she’d meet us and she’d tell him about the car when we got home.

So we went out for lunch, did some window shopping, and headed back home. When we arrived home, my mother knocked on my father’s bedroom door and told him to come out because the car had broken down and was in a parking lot somewhere.

A few minutes later, he came out of his bedroom fully dressed and cursing and swearing. “You stupid woman! Where did you leave the car, you idiot?”

I don’t like it when he talks like that to my mother. I can clearly remember my reply.

“If I ever hear you speak to her like that in front of me again, I will beat the shit out you.”

He looked stunned.

“And you know I’d do it. So shut the fuck up.”

My mom didn’t like that. I suppose I can understand why. “David…”

“Yeah. That’s right. So you talk to her politely.”

I lumbered out to the balcony and parked myself over the ledge, leaning down to watch some birds on the ground.

My mother, my sister, and Mark joined me. I could tell that my mother wanted to talk to me about what had just happened, but she knew that my intense feelings towards my father are not the kind of thing that I should talk about when I’m feeling so riled up. There was awkward silence, and I watched the birds.

My father opened the balcony window and poked his head in. “David, come out here. We have to talk,” he croaked.

I didn’t even turn around. “No. There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Why not?”

“Because I hate you and never want to talk to you again.”

He shuffled away. I know, I just know, that he doesn’t understand at all what I feel towards him. He has no clue what he did to me, to my mother, to my sister. He just doesn’t get it. That’s what hurts. How can he feel guilty when he doesn’t even realize something’s wrong?

I never go to Taco bell. But every six months or so, despite the fact that I make a point not to go to Taco Bell, I get a really strong urge to eat there. I go to the nearest one, order some tacos, and as soon as I bite into them I remember immediately why I vowed never to return last time. But six months later, the memory has begun to fade, and I get that urge to go there again.

Similarly, every six months or so, I get a really strong urge to surf over to Dean’s World. I’ve documented the questionable logic there many times in the past, but despite that, I get an urge to visit there every few months. And I immediately remember why I vowed not to return the last time.

This time, Dean is arguing that creationism (in the form of “Intelligent Design”) should be OK to teach in schools. And when I point to talkorigins.org his response is something along the lines of “They’re too long-winded and hard to read, and anyone who works that hard to debunk creationism has got to be fishy!” He claims to read scientific papers quite a bit (”they’re some of my favorite things to read”), but I wonder how that can be possible and yet still find talkorigins.org hard to read. (Note: Scientific American is not a journal.)

It gets tiring going back there trying to argue politely with people who don’t want to listen. So tiring. We’re not talking about matters of opinion here, but experimentally, empirically verifiable fact. This is not “Bush is a retard” versus “Kerry is a flip-flopper.” Evolution is a fact. Period. There is no question.

I vow never to go back there. For real this time.

I swear, if the virgin who’s marrying a virgin uses the phrase “hard core” one more time, I’ll bash in his prematurely balding skull.