This Is a Blog Post

So I'm going to go ahead and skip the compulsory disclaimer detailing my feelings about narcissism and necessity and get right down to the big daydream idea that had me paralyzed in my car and maybe had the woman whose house I was parked in front of calling the cops on account of all the staring and not blinking I was doing.

I was deeply affected by Plato's allegory of the cave. And it's a big deal to get that off my chest, because once I was old enough to really get a handle the idea and what it means after a few thousand years in the context of this 21st century's pop-culture, I was a embarrassed by all of the cheese admitting that meant owning up to. But it's true, in the 10th grade when my World History teacher explained the allegory to us during the fist few weeks of class. Philosophy was almost completely foreign to me at that point, in its void the eminence of the Baptist Church. After i heard the allegory, I literally couldn't stop thinking about it. I was determined to see more than shadows. And by like token, I was determined to point out the shadows that I did see. But more of that came later in its own form of mistrust and the conviction that anything established was some sort of lie. In the early days, though, I was only concerned with finding the truth--what was real, and what really mattered.

Maybe I didn't ever really stop thinking about the cave. I got older, I started doing more things, I read Nietzsche, but always with me was this affinity for the word reality. Then there was also this awkward relationship with reality. A firm belief in shadows. Conviction that most of the things that I could do in a single day--high school, work, driving, going to shows, wearing clothes, most forms of talking--weren't real, but that they meant something, and that the meaning of those things needed to be discovered, understood.

That's why I started writing--to explain things to myself. Writing has come to mean a lot of things to me, but I think that deep under all of those meanings I still want to do it to explain things to myself.

Now enter the professional arena. I want to write for bread, job, occupation, career. But my current definition of writing doesn't jibe with that aspiration. Or at least, I'm not sure how I'm going to convince somebody to pay me a whole bunch of money for explaining things to myself. Work writing is much different, its essence found in the preposition for. For audience; for boss; for subject. For is secure in its purpose. I, on the other hand, am not. I've been talking to a real writer, though, and that has been helpful. I don't lay awake in bed thinking about things before I go to sleep, so I've been waking up before my alarm goes off to do it. Much more successful that way because I can think about what I find up there all day long. Organizations need somebody to explain what they are doing for them. And there are different organizations doing different interesting things. Good thing, because I've never been able to make up my mind about one interesting thing to care most about. Interesting like ||||

But I can understand how write for an organization because I have no trouble in explaining it to myself. I might even be able to understand what it means to do something like that, and why it happens. Much more difficult for me to adapt to this professional transition is the part of my personality that comes from Plato and that wants me to believe that everything is a shadow. Because it's hard to go to a job, or a boss, or a person who might be potentially in a position to give me a whole lot of money for doing something that I like, and convince them to do this nice thing for me when in some part of my consciousness I realize that I am doing this elaborate imitative act, shadow puppetry if you will, since what they are doing, what they are asking of me to do, and the procedure for me getting to work for them is not part of the serious stuff in life, doesn't really matter, and as a result of all that, shouldn't be taken seriously.

I think maybe a lot of people my age are hiding similar relationships with Plato's allegory, because it seems to me that a large part of irony comes from that.

Now, it's not that I'm laughing in the faces of future employers. No, I just feel weird because of some perceived separation between myself and professionalism. Like I've got to fake it because I'm really concerned with this other thing that has more to do with books and rocks than asking someone for something when they might say no. Of course, an accusation of overcomplicating something that could be much, much simpler wouldn't be new to me. I've been reading these books that claim to codify the whole professional gestalt, and preparing strategies of meaningful and confident impressions, because the whole professional thing is actually this game thing that most people do and that has nothing to do with reality. But that's been confusing the hell out of me and making me clumsy, insecure, and awkward.

Now I'll fault in the direction of simplicity and think of professionalism as part of reality and nothing more than asking somebody for something when they might say no.