Eschew obfuscation!

On the train ride home yesterday, I was sitting with the usual suspects. They are the loudest group in that car and they annoy the hell out of everyone, so I find them amusing and I sit with them when I don't have studying that I want to do on the way home.

When I have to study, I sit in the quiet car. People bitch at you if you so much as whisper in the quiet car. I have gotten dirty looks from people for turning the pages of my homework too loudly. Fun folks, as I'm sure you can guess. These are the same people, mind you, who will not wake up a snoring passenger or otherwise make the chainsaw sinus noises stop, but who will stare nastily at you if you get on the train and whisper, "May I sit here?"

So anyway, we were watching through the car windows this woman trying to find a seat in the quiet car, which was full. One of the guys made a comment about the responses of the people in the seats (glares, etc.) and I responded that the people in the quiet car could be a little bit surly. He said to me that I was a master of understatement, and asked if I was an English major in college. Bwah! No, but I was a journalism major the first time I went to school.

Wanna guess why I gave it up? (Well, part of why I gave it up, anyway.) Because I started to see that the facts of news stories very seldom related to the printed stories about them. I found it rather disillusioning to see how much of what we read is spun into whatever will advance the views of the writer or publisher. Kinda like all of those priests who become atheists or agnostic after leaving the seminary. (Which, I might add, never ceases to tickle my funnybone.) If you learn enough about a topic, you run the risk of losing interest because you might realize that it isn't what you thought it was or that you couldn't get out of it what you thought you would. The mystique is gone, you know?

For some reason, this topic keeps coming around to me. I know so many people who started out on a path that they completely diverged from, never to return, disillusioned. Some of them are happy where they ended up, some are still looking. I'm exactly where I planned to be when I was in high school. Bizarrely, I took entirely the wrong path to get here, but I still got here. In fact, I ended up here more or less against my will because of circumstances beyond my control. I wanted to do other things, but none were practical or could make a living or I just wasn't good enough, so I knew that accounting would be the way to go for me because I'm good at it, I like it, and it pays the mortgage. I would rather have been a marine biologist. Or a dolphin trainer. Or a National Geographic photographer. Or a dressage rider. Or a dog trainer. Or a chef. Or an artist. I find it really ironic that I ended up doing exactly what I intended to do before the Big Divergence of 1989. This is when I came to the conclusion that I couldn't afford to go to a "real" college after my community college years, and I ended up entering the work force.

That was a huge mistake. Even worse was getting married. I had the factory job in which I got carpal tunnel syndrome, had to have my hands operated on, and then couldn't return to that job. While I was on light duty, I worked in the accounting department, where they placed me permanently when I was taken off of light duty. (There is a lot more to it than that, but I won't go into it.) That is also when I ended the whole marriage mistake and set out on my own, as nature intended for me. Ultimately, I ended up in accounting by getting injured on the job in a factory. How often does that kind of thing happen? My guess is that it is pretty rare. But it did put me back on track, and now I have pretty surgery scars that itch if I touch them wrong. I finally got back into school, which is currently torturing me, but it is for the best and I don't regret it. When I start paying the loans, my attitude about that might change.

Looking back, I really wish that I had gone on to a university accounting program after my two years at OCC, but it worked out nicely nonetheless. I often wonder what would have been different, and in particular how I would have been different, if I had gotten on this path earlier and stayed on it. Would I have been better or worse than I am now? Would I still live in Washington? Would I have stuck with accounting if, at university, I had realized how many other options were at my disposal? Am I missing out on something better, more interesting, more fun, more exciting? Or would I have ended up majoring in something more interesting, fun, and exciting but working at McDonalds, chain smoking, 50 pounds overweight yet insisting on wearing fishnet stockings and denim mini skirts with tank tops that showed my gut, bleaching my hair, drinking MGD, living in a trailer park in Kansas, and having black eyeliner tattooed on because the DTs in the morning kept me from getting the lines even?

Sigh... I'm probably better off in my middle-class suburb and conservative Eddie Bauer attire.

And now I'm off to the inventory product launch update meeting. I get to sit for an hour and listen to marketing, product managment, and manufacturing argue about when the new lines will be launched, how much of the old product we will sell before then, and how much of the new product we can produce in the interim. It can be amusing when their veins start popping out on their foreheads. They get so worked up. Silly executives. Better go to Starbucks first for this one.