Whatever happened to the notion that the quality of your work speaks more about your value to society that the quantity of your pay? Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of instances of people displaying the attitude that just because their job pays very little, is considered “unimportant,” or just all-around sucks, that it entitles them to perform poorly.
Here’s an example. Recently, I was in another state for work. I was taking a tour of a state “facility” with state employees, and one of the top people involved said, “State employees work like they get paid…VERY LITTLE. I’m a state employee, y’all.” I was appalled by the attitude that he was entitled to do less because he felt like he got paid less than he deserved. This was a man who presumably had YEARS of professional experience. I wonder how he ever made it past being an entry-level employee with that kind of attitude.
I’m not saying that everyone should have the “above and beyond” attitude towards everything they do. Quite frankly, that isn’t always necessary and can be detrimental sometimes (not to mention annoying as fuck). However, an employee should always be able to meet the minimum expectations of a job without regard to their personal or financial dissatisfaction with the job itself.
What I find truly alarming about this attitude is that it’s most prevalent in the jobs that just about anyone (or perhaps a machine) can do.
You’re a young kid with a shitty attitude? Guess what, you may hate your cashier job, but I bet you like getting paid, don’t you? Guess what else…I can replace your ass with a machine with the same personality, a better attitude, and that is never late. OR…I can replace you with a kid who really wants the job. OR…I can replace you with an older person who just wants an extra job and understands the value of a job well done (no matter how small the job). This brings me to my next point: Being a nice person and/or friendly to people while working doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have a shitty attitude. I have met plenty of people who are incredibly nice, perfectly polite, and generally liable, but are INEPT. Not being able to do your job correctly demonstrates one (or more) of the following things: 1) You’re not trained properly. 2) You’re an idiot or 3) You don’t take your job seriously. The first one can be fixed but the second one is, unfortunately, unfixable. However, the third item is the most alarming. Not taking your job seriously is the hallmark of the previously mentioned shitty attitude. Not taking the job seriously leads to poor performance, and all around makes you a lousy employee and demonstrates to the world that you don’t value the image that the world has of you.
I know I’m just complaining here, but I miss the work ethic that used to be so prevalent in the American psyche. I still believe that how we do something (anything) is more of an indication of WHO we as a person are, and not an indication of the importance or relevance of the activity that we’re doing.
I doubt any of my readers would disagree with the statement that the relationship between a child and parent is a very close and complex relationship. However, usually I hear people emphasize the special relationship that a son has with his mother, or the relationship that a daughter has with her father. There is no denying that the bond between mother and son and father and daughter are particularly unique, however, I think that the special relationship that a father and son have is often overlooked (I don’t know about mother/daughter relationships, because I’m not a woman).
From my mother, I learned a great deal about understanding how OTHER PEOPLE think and feel. Understanding other people is crucial to integrating into society, and I would have never made it very far in adulthood without the lessons I learned from her.
However, from my father, I learned to understand how the world works and I learned to understand myself. I learned how to think for myself, how to stand on my own two feet, how to be self-reliant, self-sufficient, and how to establish my own place in this world. I learned that if I cannot stand alone in this world, then I can never be there for anyone else. Without the lessons I learned from my father, I would have never made it to adulthood.
My father is one of the most determined, self-disciplined people on the planet. He knows how to rely on himself, and because of that, those of us lucky enough to call him “Dad” know we can rely on him. I can’t begin to list all of the amazing things my father has done for me in my life, so I’ll just say that I love my father very much and I appreciate everything that he has done and continues to do.
Here is a video of Shel Silverstein singing a song that he wrote about the special relationship between a father and son. Even though Shel is a little creepy, the song is terrific.
I believe one of the most important things for a Christian (or anyone of faith) to do is to understand WHY they believe what they believe. The other night, a friend and I were discussing the nature of man’s relationship with God and the role that religion plays in that relationship. It was a very deep and philosophical conversation that encompassed a lot of ground. I told my friend how I spent a lot of years distilling my faith down to the most basic elements in order to fully understand the nature of divinity. Simply applying the question, “WHY?” to my faith has removed a lot of what I perceive as “impurities” from it. In my opinion, a good number of those impurities are the misconceptions that I believe Christians have about God and the “rules for holy living” that he has supposedly imposed on our lives. The freedom to think and act with a clear conscience that I gained from the distillation process, along with the understanding about myself and about God that I gained has given me tremendous peace of mind in recent years. My friend, on the other hand, said that she had never seriously bothered to question her beliefs. She just always accepted her faith as she was taught it by her parents and mentors. She was comfortable with the way her faith was, and was “good at following the rules.”
One of the most intriguing parts of the discussion came when she told me of a lesson she heard one time where the teacher basically said, “Some people do things because they love God, and others do things so God will love them.”
Even though the phrase “do things” doesn’t necessarily mean “follow rules,” that’s how I’m going to treat it for the sake of this article because that’s how it came across in my mind when she said it. Christians love to come up with little sayings like this that are pithy and simple, yet sound so profound. This little Christian Cliché hit a nerve with me. On the surface it makes a lot of sense, and I wondered if my friend, like so many Christians, sometimes feels like she falls into the wrong group more often than she’d like. I mean, as a guy who pretty much treats the “rules” like they don’t apply to me, I even wondered which side I was on (since, by many peoples’ standards, I’m still kind of rule follower).
Now, over the past few days I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit. Today, I was listening to Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger album and there is an instrumental score of the old hymn “Just As I Am” in the middle of the album. When I heard it, my conversation with my friend flashed to the front of my mind.
The hymn teaches us that God accepts us and loves us “just as we are” and our own Bible portrays Jesus as keeping some pretty lousy company (shall we judge him by the company that he kept?). If you truly study the teachings of Christ, you find that Jesus wasn’t particularly interested in following rules. He was only interested in doing what was right. I mean, Abraham’s very demanding God only saw fit to make ten (10) rules in the first place and Jesus trimmed the fat on those and gave us a CliffsNotes version that only consisted of TWO. One was to love God and the other was to love everyone else. So, if righteousness is really as simple as Jesus said it is, then where did all of these “rules” that good Christians follow come from?
As I mentioned earlier, I believe that Christian theology has “given birth” to many misconceptions about God and his “rules.” After years of introspection and close examination, I strongly suspect that these “births” are the product of artificial insemination. For various reasons, man has added things to a simple theology until it has evolved into an unmanageable beast. I’m sure that in many cases the “rules” were added to help the faithful better understand specific scenarios that may not seem to fit into one of the two rules. Like children pester their parents in an attempt to understand new things, we have continued to ask God, “But why?” Since man has a habit of directing their questions to God through middle men, the answers sometimes have come back less than clear. The “holy men” that Christians have gone to over the centuries for answers didn’t know any more than anyone else. So, they decided to just make shit up.
This all makes me wonder…if God is willing to accept us as we are, then why have we been so reluctant to accept him as he is? Why have we, as a faith, been unwilling to accept that our magnificent God is magnificent in his simplicity? Instead, we have made him mysterious and complicated restricting our ability to understand him. As a result implementing restrictions upon ourselves in the form of “rules to make God love us.”
(You may notice a metallic sound in the background that sounds like it might be coming from my banjo, but a little quieter. I swear that’s not me totally screwing the pooch, it’s my clothes dryer in the background. On a totally unrelated note, my boobs look HUGE in this video)
While I was thinking about all of this tonight, I sat down and quickly plucked out the melody to the hymn that I mentioned. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out. Maybe when I have more time, I’ll actually get a version that isn’t just plunky notes.
Tomorrow, I’m going to take the concept expressed by the Christian Cliché that I mentioned earlier a bit further. So, check back in.
Today is June 14th, Flag Day. It’s Flag Day because on June 14th, 1777 the Second Continental Congress passed a resolution adopting the flag of the United States. However, the flag has an older sibling born on the same day. Today is the 236th birthday of the United States Army.
Today as I remember my brothers and sisters in arms, I can’t help but wonder how we as a nation have allowed these men and women to fight and die to protect our liberties while allowing our government to rob us of those same liberties. The President (like presidents before him) seems to think that he has free reign to use the bravery and sacrifice of our service members around the world to enact his foreign policy in the name of “security.” The truth is, he’s just taking the easy way out because deployed soldiers work better than diplomats in this day and age. Meanwhile, our leaders, those shining lights on the Hill, continue to disregard their duties and get very little of value done while members from both sides point fingers at the other side while pretending to care about the greater good.
I know I’m not ranting about anything specific, but do I really need to? We all know what’s going on. It makes me angry, and it should anger you too.
However, in the meantime, join me in being thankful for those men and women who continue to do their duty while the people that lead them neglect theirs. AND THE ARMY GOES ROLLING ALONG….
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” ~ Matthew 5:6 (NIV)
“This is what the LORD says: “In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you; I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances, to say to the captives, ‘Come out,’ and to those in darkness, ‘Be free!’ “They will feed beside the roads and find pasture on every barren hill. They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them. He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water.” ~ Isaiah 4: 8-10 (NIV)
“A man who dwells on his hunger and thirst suffers twice. He suffers first from starvation and dehydration. However, once he is satisfied and his thirst is quenched, he suffers from the fear of becoming hungry and thirsty once again. It is only when the man is eating and drinking that he is truly free.” ~ Absurdities 42:5
As I was sitting here on my couch this evening, I heard a lady scream, “Call the cops, blah blah blah! Gimme my stuff…. Screech, Moan, Cry!!!” I stepped outside onto my breezeway and heard the yelling was coming from the apartment across the hall. I’m not the freakin’ hall monitor here, so I generally don’t want anything to do with any of my neighbors’ business. I normally overlook people loud talking, being rowdy, raucous, or otherwise obnoxious as long as it’s just partying-style antics and isn’t anything violent or serious. However, I cannot ignore fighting, because in the words of Carr, the Floor Walker, “Any man playing grab-ass or fighting in the building spends a night in the box.”
When I heard the woman’s voice scream, “Call the cops.” I knew I needed to at least check out the situation before someone spent an unnecessary night in jail. Just as I was about to knock on the door, my neighbor opened it and walked out with a duffle bag and carried it down the stairs. I asked him if he wanted me to call the cops, and he said, “Please don’t.” So, I waited for her to come out and I asked her. She said, “I just want my stuff. Please help me get my stuff.” The two of them began to arguing over “stuff” and even though she claimed he had hit her, I didn’t witness any of that and she didn’t show any physical signs of abuse. So, I stepped in between them, convinced him to stand back just long enough for her to grab that bag, hop in a truck and drive away. Just when she was pulling out a security guard showed up. He proceeded to tell my neighbor all of the same things that I told him, which in summary is, “Dude, it’s just stuff. She’s hysterical, let her leave with the stuff. It’s not worth spending time in jail over.”
Just as the security guard was finishing his sermon, the genuine PO-PO showed up. Luckily for my neighbor, the girl was gone, the security guard and I had de-escalated the situation, and the cop was easily placated into making a note that the call was, in fact, not a domestic violence call as the person who placed the call had (probably rightfully) indicated. I say “probably rightfully” because even though I don’t know or think they had physically been fighting, I was pretty sure that if I hadn’t been awake and stepped onto the breezeway, it would have escalated into a physical fight.
Now, the title of this blog is “Things I Infer from My Neighbors…” but up until this point, I’ve just told you a short story about every typical domestic argument between a man and a woman. So, why the title? Because I actually did infer something from this whole mess. Here is the lesson that I am “inferring” from tonight’s drama:
If your fiancée disappears for three weeks and comes back after you’ve been getting friendly with a little redheaded lass (not your fiancée), you can pretty much expect a fight will erupt.
Now, the reason I chose the word “infer” instead of “learn” is because I don’t know the nature of the “friendliness” between my neighbor and the little redheaded girl, but I can say she was a real cutie. I never saw anything definitive that lead me to think that she ever even stepped foot in his apartment. However, based on circumstantial evidence, I made the assumption that the nature of their relationship wasn’t strictly platonic. No matter what their relationship is, I can’t imagine any woman being happy about her fiancé whiling away the hours chatting up a pretty redhead while she’s away.
In all fairness to my neighbor, though, the fight may have been totally unrelated to the redheaded stranger. It may, as he stated to the police officer, have been about money. In fact, the redheaded stranger may have been a known friend to both parties in the dispute, and I’m just assuming the worst. I’m going to continue to assume that my neighbor was being “Jimmy Two Times” with the redhead, because if I was in his shoes, I think it would at least be more fun to attribute this kind of domestic discord to shagging hot redheads than to empty wallets. I mean, any way you slice it, this guy is hosed. He’s lost his girl, annoyed his neighbors, had a run in with the contracted security AND had to deal with the cops. How much worse would it be to have to deal with all of those things and be broke ass? At least in the scenario that is playing out in my mind the shit sandwich he’s eating comes with a side order of hot ass.
Things People Say