Escape!
There comes a magical time in many young writers’ lives, generally a few months after they graduate college and move to the “big city”, where they find themselves temping for some huge corporation, alone in a tiny cubicle, filling invoices or entering numbers into an Excel document. Most writers mitigate the depression that comes with this by telling themselves that they are secretly biding their time until they can just finish their novel, screenplay, poetry compilation, psychedelic pop-up book, whatever, their masterpiece that will catapult them out of this awful white-grey world of coffee and horrible inside jokes into a trendy, intellectually stimulating lifestyle where they get laid far more frequently. My advice though, if you find yourself working in a situation, is to take a deep breath and relax. It could be worse. In fact, in one way you’re incredibly lucky, because you have a magic portal that can take you out that office window, up above the clouds, past the city to anywhere you want to go.
You’ve got the Internet.
This is the stream of consciousness of the modern temp, as closely as I can approximate it: la la la, filing, invoicing, Excel, la la la, oh whoops, I clicked on Internet Explorer by accident, well, I’m just going to check out CNN, just for a second, where I secretly hope the biggest story will be some cataclysmic event that threatens the world, so that the cute co-worker in Accounting and I can split out of here and have a harrowing adventure where we try and make it up to Canada but… oh, dammit, the headline is Credit Card Fraud Lawsuit Settled… so boring… but then wait… what’s this other story, TV Anchor Airing Some Dirty Laundry? Click. And then you’re off, trotting down whatever virtual avenues you can, frolicking, free from the confines of your office. Maybe you even watch a little It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia if it’s a Friday and you’re feeling brazen.
What can be particularly depressing is if you get accustomed to this type of escapism and then your company wises up and throws some “browser protection” software on your network, which limits the types of websites you can frequent. Then all of a sudden you are alone again. Cut off. It can be scary. I know. But don’t despair. To quote T.S. Elliot: “When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost –and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.” The point is that you still don’t have to actually do work. You just need to be more creative with the parts of the internet you have access to.
A great example of a way to adapt to these new restrictions is the Wikipedia game. First of all, you are going to need a willing co-worker to participate. The rules are simple; you both start on a random Wikipedia entry page (Frogs, for example), and by only clicking on outbound links in the article, you have to navigate your way to another chosen random point (let’s say, MTV). You both start at the same time, and whoever can get to the final page the fastest wins.
This game is great for writers, especially those suffering from a bout of writer’s block, because 1) it forces you to think about the subtle relationships that exist between random things, which can in turn lead you to approach situations and characters in new ways and 2) by playing the game you learn all types of useless periphiral shit that could provide fodder for future stories, situations, etc. I’ve always believed that the trick to defeating writer’s block is to generate as much random and disconnected thought as possible, and then bring it all to bear on your writing — something usually ends up sticking, generally the most random thing you could imagine. The above example of the Wikipedia game could go like this:
Frogs – Mating Season – Fertility – Culture – Folk Music – Ballads – MTV
See?! Along the journey you learned so many wonderful things. Like who knew that Elephants have a 16 week Estrous Cycle (mating cycle)? And in fact, who had even heard of the term Estrous Cycle (which means “Cycle of Frenzied Passion” in Latin)?! It’s fascinating, the channels you’ll find yourself exploring, and the ways that you can bring all this . I highly recommend it; In fact, some nerds have already programmed this game on a burgeoning website, where you can play against similiarly constrained and disaffected temps: http://wikipediagame.org/ . You can even chat with each other, so you can argue about whose job is more profoundly depressing and spirit crushing.
But okay. That’s enough. I didn’t mean to imply that mindless office work is bad. Because it’s not. You’re very important. We all value your contributions. Don’t give up. After all, we’re all counting on each other to invoice our royalty checks after we get famous.
Image Courtesy of Fisserman/Flickr
