Rubric's Sash

What does your satin, rhinestone and lace trimmed sash say?

Are you Ms./Mr. Director of Technology 2013? Senior Graphic Designer? Executive Editor? Senior Software Engineer? Yoga Instructor? Grant Writer? Videographer?

We so often identify ourselves by what our job is. Of course! We spend 40 and more hours a week working, laboring, stressing and, often enough, NOT at something that fills us with deep personal satisfaction. Sure, sure — some of us are that lucky but it’s, sadly, not common enough.

My Aunt Mary Ann always advised me to ‘have a life, not a career.’ She was an editor at Scripps Howard and, later, CBS, working crazy long hours. Mary Ann lived by the corner of 45th and 2nd Avenue in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan — just around the corner from the UN. Every year, she had season tickets to the The Met, loved ballet and theater too. BUT she routinely fell asleep at all of these — that is, if she was even able to get herself out of the office to attend.

This was her biggest regret.

I followed her advice pretty much — spending much of my free time traveling to hear fabulous music (you know, make best use of the hearing while I had it). I saw John Martyn at Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. The World Drum Fest in Amsterdam. Tremendous jazz ensembles at Reduta in Prague  and folk fests in The Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland. I went to as many museums and galleries as I could stand — Palazzo Pitti and the Dante museums in Florence, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Secession hall and the Leopold Museums in Vienna and more.

When not traveling, I painted, potted, sculpted and spent crazy ass amounts of time in T.T. the Bear’s Place, The Middle East, The Rat, Jack’s and on and on.

Still, I had to work — there was rent to pay and the sorely needed health insurance,  which only came with the day job, the grind.

 So, if I had to spend such a huge chunk of my waking hours working, shouldn’t I engage my brain a bit and enjoy?  There was no money or time to go back to school (plus, I couldn’t give up the Blue Cross even for a minute — being all Miss Pre-existing Condition and all) so I looked for opportunities within the industry where I toiled — printing. It was there that I managed to score the BEST GIG EVAH!

Seriously. I was teaching AND writing training programs about preparing and preflighting files for print, layout musts, understanding and selling offset and digital printing. I wrote and delivered a four-part process improvement seminar based on the Deming model. There were classes on negotiation skills and litigation services, understanding legal terminology and sales techniques. Christ almighty this was fun stuff -- both the creating and the tutoring parts.

My rhinestone trimmed, neon blue sash read Print Empress and Training Queen.  It was the nads, the shit, the real, mega-watt high times.

Why did I get out of that most awesome of employments. Well, it wasn’t on purpose — that’s for damned sure. The company where I worked fell on hard times and was sold. The new owner eliminated the Human Resources department, where I was based, entirely.

Shortly thereafter my health hit an iceberg. I had fractionated stereotactic radiation in the hope of maintaining my hearing level and reducing the tumor’s size. In addition to being a raging non starter, I was as weak as over-steamed string beans and wretchedly nauseous for close to a solid year. I was putting in, at most, 20 hours each week.

Next up — surgery. By now Percival, my tumor, was the size of the Queen Mary (more or less). There were big complications so, five days after my initial 18 hour OR event, I was back in for a four hour repair round. I had to relearn how to walk, had double vision (which lasted six months) and was now effectively deaf.

Boyhowdy, that’ll put a big fat crimp in the ole’ job hunting plans, lemme just tell you!

I spent the next year or so recovering, doing some design and customer service work while trying to sort out ‘what now.’

The eventually found and snared new job was supposed to be so much more than it was. It would be a new start -- mostly research and data analysis but the prospect of teaching (or at least mentoring) had been dangled during the job interview.

Nope. Nada.

I have a friend who’s a tech writer and instructional video creator and editor at Google. I have a pal who’s a massage and yoga therapist. There are a couple of free lance journalist buddies. Teachers. Potters. Musicians. I have métier envy on top of job title wistfulness.

Way back when The Amazing Bob and I went to Cambridge City Hall to apply for our marriage license, we had to fill out a form. There was a box to write in our occupations. It didn’t ask what we were paid to do. Nope, just asked what we were occupied with.

Bob wrote poet. I printed artist.

Yup, that about covers it.