First and foremost, I am a writer. When I’m not doing that,
however, I make money any way I can. Right now, while I am patiently waiting to
start my glorious teaching career in August, I work at a fast food restaurant
for $7.25 per hour.
Today was my first day off this week and when I woke this
morning, just one thing was on my mind: Tomorrow I have to go to work again.
Even as I had that groggy, half formed thought, another part of me screamed at
the wrongness of letting a fast food restaurant consume me so utterly. I know
it’s absurd and yet each work day, I push away the panic that rises in my
chest, breathe deeply, and dress in a disgusting polyester uniform, all the
while telling myself that it will all be over in eight hours. I can last for
eight hours. I think I can, I think I can…
Why does the thought of spending eight hours smiling and
taking orders, bagging food, and stocking fill me with such terror? I don’t
know. I really don’t. I have tried to analyze the situation. I’ve thought of
possible reasons – coworkers, customers; the stress of rushes; the heat of
spending summer in a poorly air-conditioned kitchen. None of this, though, adds
up to the amount of stress I go through every day. All I want, in fact, is to
be able to quit. Soon that will be a reality but I fear it may not be soon
enough.
This suffering affects my life beyond work as well. When I
come home I feel emotionally drained. I am incapable of writing and, usually, I
just fall asleep for a couple of hours and wake with a headache. My only
enjoyable days are my days off and even those are dampened by the awareness
that so soon they will be over and I will have plod off to yet another day of
mind numbing boredom.
Maybe that’s it. As I said it, the reasoning made so much
sense. The boredom is what gets to me. That is what causes me so much stress. I
am forced into eight hours of terrifying mindlessness. Questioning gets
reprimanded. Conversations are trivial (career fast food workers don’t read
Nietzsche. They read Danielle Steele). It is in these moments that I feel my
soul strangling for air.
Sadly, this is the environment in which most Americans spend
their lives -- the prison of the mind. For some, that prison of mundane
sameness may not be a prison at all. Some people find security in knowing
exactly what will happen day after day for the rest of their lives. There is
nothing wrong with that. Sometimes I long to be one of those people myself. For
the select few, though, who realize our predicament and long for escape, not
into laziness but into honest, creative productivity, I suggest guerilla
warfare. One day at a time we will storm the prison gates and take back our
lives from the clutches of those pudgy balding men in stained shirt sleeves and
ugly wrinkled women in power suits!
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