June 03, 2003

"The city, she eats too much, and shits too much, and can't get up out of the pool of offal that surrounds her."

Too true, especially today. The day began with the shuttling of my corpus from one enclosure to the other: from a car stuck behind other cars frightened of hills and curvy roads, into a stuffy train, sitting too close to a fat snoring man, and then onto the upper decks of a ferry, covered with a haze of sweat-stinking engine smoke. At either end of my river view, both bridges--the George Washington and the Verazano--were mostly obscured by a high wall of brown-yellow haze. The river beneath the ferry hull seemed a particularly lifeless shade of Hudson green. It teemed with wildlife, a mere two centuries ago, and now algae won't even grow on its muddied industrial shores. It's a toxic soup of long-named trace chemicals and asphalt runoff, traversed by unregulated ferries that belch black exhaust directly into its waters, and churn it up for good measure with their propellers. Just to make sure that the carbon monoxide in the smoke gets properly mixed in, so that the oxygen leaches out. Mmm...sterile!

So, I started off the day with an acute, in-the-nose sense of the environmental impact of a city of eight million plus. My nose being the font of misery that it is--think pollen!--once upon the dread island I was subjected to yet another marvelous assortment of city odors...dog urine and donut shops, auto exhaust and construction equipment effluvia. Such is my hyperolfactory curse that even the donut-scents were revolting...oily butter vapor and bleached sugar notes suspended in miasma of burnt coffee and whatever it is they use to clean their floors, all mixing together and wafting out of the open doors with the force of projectile vomit.

Have I mentioned that I'm not a fan of the city?

And, once at my desk, a numbing onslaught of paralytic, panic-attack laden, this-job-is-sucking-my-life-from-me tedium. The last time I was this out of my mind at my workplace I ended up curled into a little ball on the floor of the handicapped stall, and it was twenty minuted before I could even think of leaving the bathroom without my head threatening to crack open. It's ths sort of sensation, I think, that leads less functional people into moments of eye-twitching shotgun loading.

Functional people, though, take John Holland's Self-Directed Search, in a blindly grasping search for career change information. Non-functional people without immediate access to firearms can also take Mr. Holland's test, but I seriously doubt that paying $8.95 to determine their three-letter RIASEC summary code will do any more than postpone the bleeding and the screaming and the dying.

I, myself, am an ARI. I went to school with an Ari, actually. He was kind of a prick. But I am not a prick! No, ARI means that my interests are mostly a combination of Artistic, Realistic and Investigative tendencies. In the six-tendencied world of Robert Reardon, PhD. (who created Mr. Holland's test), I've got artistic skills, I enjoy creating original work, and I have a good imagination.

Gosh. Ya think?

To a lesser extent (six points lesser, actually), I have mechanical and athletic abilities, and I like to work outdoors and with tools and machines. Now, I can fix and build many things, it's true. Sometimes I fix and build things outside, if they're really big or there's a danger of fire, explosion, or fission. But my tremendous gut makes a liar out of you, Doctor Reardon! Bastard.

To an even lesser extent, I have math and science abilities, and I like to work alone and solve problems. A much lesser extent, apparently. My math SAT score was a third of my verbal. Or maybe it was a fifth. At any rate: I do like the bit about working alone.

The "described as" listings for each of my tendencies are mostly bunk...except for the Artistic (A): complicated, disorderly, emotional, expressive, idealistic, imaginative, impractical, impulsive, independent, introspective, inutitive, nonconforming, open, and original. Nicely done, Doctor Reardon. That about sums me up, especially the bits about being complicated, disorderly, and emotional.

The test selected 11 suitable occupations from the 12,000 listed in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Given my ARIish tendencies, my top jobs are: Model Maker, Costumer, or Modeler (Brick and Tile).

Uh-huh.

And down at the bottom of the list, the two least-suitable jobs that still involve my A-ness, R-ness, and I-ness: Surgeon. And: Veterinarian, Poultry.

Now, while Pea is often over in her office sewing Elisabethan corsets for herself, I have never made an article of clothing, and the last thing I sewed together was a leather pouch I made at Boy Scout camp to hold my D&D dice, which doesn't really count, because that was all awl-punching and thick stringy-lanyard slinging and involved the skins of dead things. "Costumer," it seems, is right out.

And, uh, I've made models of things. They came in boxes, and I put them together with glue, and hung them on my bedroom ceiling until they fell off and broke. Then I moved out of my mom's house.

So. Perhaps I can model brick and tile, however that works.

What do you think?

Fine. Can I sit down now? This jacket weighs a ton.

Perhaps not.

Should I take the evil, goateed mirror-image IRA job, reversing the point-order of my tendencies, and become Ian Wood: Chicken Doctor? Dramatic, late-night runs out to the farm? Thank God you're here, doc! Betty's egg's all sidewise!

Um...no.

In between these extremes there are vaguely interesting things like Architect, Landscape Architect, Concrete Sculptor, and Biologist. Every single one of them requires at least a technical degree, and a minimum of 1-2 years of specialized training to be any good at the task.

I'm not particularly inclined to cough up the dough to attend the Harvard School of Concrete Sculpting and Brick Modeling, though, ignoring for a moment that that program is just impossible to get into these days.

Maybe I can become a Purveyor Of Online Tests That Desperate Unfulfilled People Will Shell Out Nine Dollars For.

Sigh.

This is going to get worse before it gets better.