Thursday and a piece for tomorrow, how bittersweet. The vibe is just… a low-key emptiness. It’s like the universe is on mute, and I’m just chilling here, waiting for the credits to roll. Yet, here we are, just us, this is off the page. No cap. Just something between you and me, because the rest of the world, it just doesn’t get it. I’m dead. For the longest time, since way back, I wanted to be a writer. The intensity of that craving was sus, though, switching up like a mood ring. Sometimes it was a full-on obsession, and other times it was just a whisper. The grammar, though, was always giving. It was a whole other language, and I was just trying to talk, you know? It was the grammarless English staring at me, a real jump scare. It was like I was just spitting out what I had mugged, not what I had made mine, just without any pulverization, just a little bit of my color. The urge to write, it would surge and then it would just… subside. It was a constant cycle. A grind with no end in sight.
But don’t get me wrong, as I am here talking about a career written as a piece. An original piece. It’s a whole vibe, this question. What even is a career? No cap, it’s giving… a whole lot of nothing. I’m just sitting here, and my mind’s doing that thing again, a full-on mare’s nest. A chaotic, higgledy-piggledy mess of thoughts. I’m trying to excogitate some grand theory, some final truth, but it’s just this… welter. A jumble. A total tohubuhu. It’s Friday, and a new piece is due tomorrow, and it’s feeling less like a crowning achievement and more like a punishment. A condign one.
I guess the OG career is supposed to be about austerity. Like, living in this manner, they call it ascesis. It’s supposed to be for spiritual improvement. That Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was the main character of that particular aesthetic. He gave away his inheritance, and relied on his champions—Russell and Keynes, those Cambridge goats—to get him a job. He lived frugally, and in later life, his disciples were there to take care of him. It’s Lacedaemonian, marked by simplicity and self-discipline. It’s giving too much. Like, who even does that? Is that what a career is? A life of giving everything away? I don’t know. It’s a lot. A career is supposed to be about lifting the bar, setting a new standard. But whose bar? And who’s even watching?
The opposite of that, though, is the distracted life. Which, honestly, is where I’m at. It’s distrait, as in esp. because of worries or fears. The world, man, it’s all distrait. That’s a whole mood. The gap between the rich and the poor, the festering urban problems… it all feels so relatable. We’re all just… distracted. We’re all chasing rabbits. That’s the idiom, right? It’s notoriously hard to catch a rabbit. Like Bob Teeter, the pollster, his friend said he kept you focused on what counts, and not out chasing rabbits.
And then there are the employees. What even is a person in a career? Are you a factotum? An aide or an assistant, doing a little bit of everything? Or are you a hireling? One who works solely for a fee, a merc, doing dangerous, offensive, or menial tasks. It’s sus. And then there’s the salariat. They are the middle class, the upper-middle class of society, contrasted with the wage earners, or the proletariat. Way back big American corporations started subcontracting, and the salariat in big Fortune 500 companies felt less job-secure than small-town soda jerkers. That’s wild, right? So, your career, your whole identity, it’s all just… a mirage. It can disappear in a flash. Maybe you’re a boss, a padrone. Or maybe you’re just trying to get a sinecure, an employment requiring little work but paying an income. I mean, bet. That’s the dream, right? That’s what’s giving me main character energy. The idea of getting paid for doing nothing. But that’s not a career, is it? That’s just… a gig. A side quest. It doesn’t lift anything.
A career is supposed to be about achievement. It’s supposed to have a copestone, that uppermost stone of a wall, building, or structure. The figurative meaning is a crowning achievement or a final touch. My spiritual testament is probably just a pile of unfinished drafts and a whole lot of weird thoughts. But maybe that’s the real res gestae, the real deeds. Just the pile of stuff you left behind. Maybe that’s how you lift the bar, by just leaving something behind, no matter how messy.
A career is supposed to be creative. It’s supposed to be Promethean, like Frank Zappa. Or demiurgic, like Dave Hole. It’s supposed to be ingenious. You’re supposed to be a debrouillard, a resourceful person. But is it? Is it really? Or is it just a Dionysian mess, creative but also disorderly and undisciplined? Is your career your own Daedalian labyrinth of intricate design? Or is it just a Pierian spring, a source of creativity that you just tap into? Or are you a demiurge, a creator deity. Is that it? Is a career just making something useful, even if it’s ugly? Maybe that’s how you lift the bar.
And then there’s the difficult part. Everything is so abstruse, so hard to understand. It’s involute. It’s a via dolorosa, a painful journey. It’s a nodus, a complication. It’s recondite. And the difficulty of it all… it’s a cat’s cradle, an intricacy. It’s a tar baby, a predicament you can’t get out of. You just spend your locust years in hardship. And the hardest part for a beginner, the pons asinorum, the bridge of asses, is just a problem you have to get over. It’s like, why even bother?
And what about the group? The galère of liars and flimflam men. Or a gaggle of teammates. You have to taxonomize them, classify them. A congeries of objects, people, or ideas. A peloton of riders in a bike race. You’re supposed to colligate with them, unite with them. And you’re supposed to build a gemeinschaft, a community based on strong relationships and common values. But it feels more like a gesellschaft, an impersonal association. It’s all just a syzygy, an alignment of three things. A weird, disconnected grouping. It’s all so confused.
And the toil, oh, the toil. You moil for years in therapy with an overpriced shrink. Why? Why moil for years? Why accept the narrow definition of reality if you can have a much more expansive version? I don’t know, fam. I’m just trying to make sense of it all. It’s supposed to be a healing journey, Aesculapian. It’s supposed to be vulnerary and sanative. It’s supposed to be a roborant, a strengthening tonic. A balsamic balm. But it’s not. It’s just this grueling via dolorosa.
A career is supposed to have a reemergence. A pentimento, an image that was painted over but is now reemerging. Is that what a career is? Just a series of pentimentos? The reentrance of your true self. Or maybe it’s a metanoia, a fundamental transformation of your character or way of thinking. A conversion. But is it real? Is the change a copestone or just another layer of paint?
A career is also just a bunch of oddments, scraps or remnants. Like the artist Cornelia Parker, who makes a career from the unassuming scraps and detritus of our everyday lives. It’s a farrago of oddments. A career is a tasty dish, ambrosial. It’s supposed to be a paradise with high salaries and ambrosial benefits packages. But for many, it’s just unattainable. And what’s the point if you can’t get it? And what about wealth? The devotion to the pursuit of it is mammonism. The excessive desire for it is plutomania. A career is supposed to be a Golconda, a source of great wealth. But it’s also about plutography, the study of wealth in art. It’s plutolatry, the worship of money. It’s all about pelf. The chrematistic gaining of money. The wealthy are nabobs. The government is a plutocracy, or a timocracy. And you have the plutogogue who tries to portray them in a positive light. It’s all just… money. Is that what a career is? Just a way to get rich? Or to portray the rich in a positive light?
It’s all an insuperable problem. A problem you can’t get over. Like the so-called insuperable advantages of incumbency are weak defenses against the awesome power of the people. It’s all just… this. A collection of oddments. An assortment of words. A bunch of res gestae that don’t add up. It’s higgledy-piggledy. A welter of words and definitions. And I’m still here, at sixes and sevens, trying to write this piece for tomorrow. Is this a career? Or is it just… this? A never-ending moil for a paycheck, a series of distractions, and a faint hope that someday, you’ll find that copestone. I’m not sure. But I’m here. And I’m still writing. No cap.
Then I thought about some of the projects I have been involved in, like the school projects that could have given us the opportunity to sit and discuss, divide tasks, and have a common start and sense of closure. Yet, there all that mattered were exam grades, and the assignments used to be left to the few intelligent-sounding students. I worked for an enterprise reputed for not finishing projects and buildings that were forced to roof as a structural engineer ran away with project documents, as stairs are left with roofs. Projects were thought of as a right of way to employ a family member or, mostly, a girlfriend, just to have a way out for a day out. Oh, projects were sources of wild stories, sad but true, even acquaintances just from prison for whom it is hard to find permanent employment. It’s a whole thing. This is the opposite of lifting the bar, of raising the standard. This is just… lowering it, digging a hole.
A decade and a half ago, after a Ted Talk took place here in Addis, I was somewhere in the afterglow. The background was all garnished with this one painting by a friend. I had gone to his first exhibition, and I was so hyped for him. My mind was racing with all these thoughts, this friend, groomed in Italy’s art schools. His big launch, his exhibition at the National Museum. And in his keynote, Maitre artist Afework Tekle, he dropped a note. He said my friend needed to work hard, yet. He said that with his whole chest. And I didn’t even wonder, because I already knew this kind of endeavor, it just doesn’t have an end. Almost everything, as I proved later, is like this. There’s no sense of getting accomplished. You just… keep going. It hits different. It’s a never-ending journey. No closure. Just… the grind.
After that, I was in a whole mood, a kind of lament. I was complaining that as a longtime follower of Ted Talk, I should have been there. I should have partaken in the event. I was feeling some kind of way about it. And that background painting, it had a very strong presence in my mind. It was a memory that just lived rent-free. I was having coffee with a longtime friend, and I almost blew a fuse. Like, I was about to go full-on Karen. I was lamenting, just airing my grievances, and the response from my friend… it reconnected my blown fuses. He was this international NGO staffer, just from an overseas post, finished his term early, without completing it, looking for other posts elsewhere, awaiting his next gig, you know… And he was giving off this whole main character energy. This aura of being accomplished. And he lacked the ability to acknowledge others’ endeavors. Or at least, that’s the vibe I was getting. I sensed that in this era of positive reinforcement, he was just… off the vibe. He thought I had nothing to share. No cap, he said it. And of course, I had nothing to share, except my struggle. The struggle to get my “T” right. To say the thing. To articulate. To be precise. It was just the struggle. A struggle that saved hundreds of millions for my employer and billions for the state.
Almost three decades ago, maybe more, and please, understand my struggle not to make some of my college comrades-in-arms look old. My face tells it all. With my hard-earned money, I bought this Philips TV set, and on it, she, a college mate, articulated the need for passion for what we are doing, because life is just too short to fiddle. It was arguably the first talk show here, “Hamsa Lomy.” I was low-key happy. I pointed at someone on the TV to my mother, and she went to school with me. My mother, in her own way, was sarcastically questioning my turn up on the TV, if I’d ever be on it. But underneath all that, it was a token. A way to show my mother how important I was. It was a lie, really. It signified nothing other than the struggle my college companion had while running the nation’s carrier in flight service. It necessitated her, once in a while, to pose as an ordinary hostess, in an environment that was run amok with highly educated, mostly girls, workforce that struggled to seek a better posture abroad. Another one an epitome of why a girl should go to school, with her immense beautiful essence inside out had to start from ticket sales to cruise the carrier’s strategic apex, while the other with her no nonsense far sighted essence and amazing look ended up as such in the same apex. A career is supposed to be this, this slow, arduous climb. This lifting the bar from within the system.
It was this same struggle, this same hustle, that friends highly regarded for their intelligence, who went into medicine, had. Some languished in clinics, getting into loggerheads with clinic owners, after leaving government hospitals rife with appraisals of performances by less qualified yet more authority brandishing people, who were mostly from the professions, for immediately referring serious cases to an immediate referral, rather than getting some repeated visits. It’s like everyone was fighting for something.
Back in the day, I had it in my mind. I went to art school then, with an artist friend I had. I was swimming in joy as we saluted artists I never dreamed of shaking hands with. To a highly technically gifted friend of mine, their advice looked like a kind of conspiracy. They urged him to get out of reality. It was a whole “get out of your comfort zone” vibe, but like, in a way that just felt… off. As we left the art school, we both looked drunk. Just from the sheer, unfiltered energy of it all. Coming days proved that my friend changed course, derailed from the real art, and got into video recording and the likes. As my not well-articulated blabber created a distance, I focused on reading my school materials and IT. It was a safe space. It helped me join a private company.
There, as I struggled to augment my vocabulary with the likes of “walk the talk” that used to emanate from the NGOs, as I was not sure if I had enough talks for the talk, a new CEO joined our company. An American expat. And I heard from him while having lunch with him. He was talking about the “T approach” he claimed that successful American companies have towards their professionals, especially their engineers. I was so happy, because in those days, I had this avowal to look for a new idea everyday and to mutter it to myself, like a project. A secret project. My own personal quest. But my immediate investigation of the issue proved our accomplished scientist, engineer, and leader was completely wrong. He had grasped the inverted “T.” I was dead. He was so wrong.
Mind your p’s and q’s. Mind your T’s and Inverted T’s as well. Be very careful, precise. We have been using this expression since at least the late 18th century without any definite proof of where it comes from, and we still don’t know. Not that there is any want of theories. The obvious explanation is that English children learning to write the alphabet were told to mind their p’s and q’s, to be careful not to reverse the loops on the letters and make p’s look like q’s and vice versa. Why wasn’t the admonition mind your b’s and d’s, though? A similar theory holds that apprentice printers were told to mind their p’s and q’s, to be very careful in picking out type, especially since a typesetter has to read letters upside down. The trouble with this theory is that the reverse of a p isn’t a q but a d. Word delvers always come up with a good barroom story whenever it’s possible to work one in, and a third explanation has British tavern keepers minding their p’s and q’s when figuring up the monthly beer bill—being careful, that is, not to confuse pints and quarts. It’s all just fragments, right? Bits and pieces that don’t quite fit.
I reminiscence about Nietzsche’s “What good is a writing that does not even carry us beyond all writings?” My ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book. It’s a whole cycle of thoughts, right? Going back and forth, trying to get it right. I just want to pull a Houdini kind of writing, something worth waiting to come out, a magical escape from the obvious. Sometimes, though, I feel my writing tilts as a one-man tango, supremely self-confident but utterly alone. And you know, maybe the world is just better left to its music of the spheres, a perfect harmony that we, as mere mortals, just aren’t privy to.
But the real vibe? It’s Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah, popping up when something is said that doesn’t even need saying. “Well, Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah.” It’s all so painfully obvious, no cap. The fault, as Cassius said, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings. We are no-account, no-good, worthless, good-for-nothing. Like William Faulkner, one of America’s greatest authors, was known as Count No Count to his neighbors. He was just this strange, seedy little man. That’s what it’s like. Distance lends enhancement to the view, and up close, we’re all just “no-account.”
No word was dearer to me in college than Project. A Project was supposed to be about lifting the bar, an improvement on the present state of affairs. We were taught this stuff, you know? It made sense. But it all just falls apart. I worked for a place that had so many projects, it not only stifled it but also made it awkwardly archaic. The enterprise was so disorganized its closure immediately produced thousands of individual contractors. We just plow the sands, undertaking impossible, endless jobs, wasting time and energy. It’s all about laundering phrases, you know? Like how the saying “can’t fart and chew gum at the same time” got laundered to “can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” It’s all just words, really.
Anchor’s aweigh, my boys, anchor’s aweigh. Farewell to college joys, we sail at break of day! Through our last night on shore, Drink to the foam, Until we meet once more Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home.
These are the words to “Anchor’s Aweigh” that were commonly sung by sailors. It’s a good song. A feeling. But the original words are for something else entirely. Everything is like that, I guess. The version of the thing isn’t the real thing. It’s always some new, sanitized version of the same old struggle. A laundered phrase. A project that never ends. And a piece for tomorrow. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the project. This, here. This glorious, fragmented, no-account blather. A song for a voyage that’s not even a voyage. Just… being here. Still here. Still trying to lift the bar, even if it’s just for myself.
Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye