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Showing posts from November, 2013

Things We Think We Want to Do

The joke goes: Two circus laborers were shoveling piles of elephant shit. It was a hot day, the flies were awful and one of the elephants had diarrhea.  A gorgeous woman walked by on the arm of a well-dressed, obviously successful man.  "Ya know, if we got office jobs, we could afford a dame like that," said the first guy, pitching an enormous, soupy elephant turd onto the pile. "What?" said the other guy, aghast. "And give up showbiz?" There are jobs that everyone wants to do because they sound cool and interesting:  writer, actor or theater designer, architect, artist, fashion designer, bar owner. But most people realize that you really should only pursue those careers if you absolutely, positively can not do anything else. Those are jobs that actually require a lot of much of the time very, very dull, tedious work with huge possibilities of ridiculed obscurity, thankless poverty and heartbreaking failure. Most of us who labor in these creative sal