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I’m not a fool.  Well, maybe I am a fool, but on the subject of earning a living, I try not to be.  I make a decent living at a job that demands little of me but patience and stamina.  I know the economy is not in good shape.  I know that New York City alone has lost 100,000 jobs since the 9/11/01 attacks.  I know that not everyone who needs a job has one; that there are people holding two or three jobs to meet their expenses; that there are jobs in the world which are demeaning and dangerous and humiliating and will not keep you alive.  If you’ve read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, or The Processed World Anthology, or any of the dozens of sociological studies of restaurant work, from Hey, Waitress! to Kitchen Confidential, then you know what I mean.  I think of an essay I read once, but can’t remember where—on Salon, maybe?  or Plastic?, in which the author was having drinks with an Irish colleague, and he was ranting about how boring and bourgeois and unfulfilling his job was, and how he hadn’t planned on doing this with his life, and his colleague answered, guardedly but nicely, that in Ireland unemployment had been so high for so long that everyone who had a job just felt lucky to have it.  Writer realizes, chastened, that he has been behaving like a whiny asshole, and he thanks his Irish friend for not giving him the lashing that he deserved.

I am not a fool about any of this, and yet I know my days at LuthorCorp are numbered.  They are not numbered because I’m in any danger of being laid off, or fired, or seeing my department wiped away in a tragic act of restructuring; no, they are numbered because if I spend one more year in this industry, spinning my wheels in the service of producing a product that will be wastebasket-bound as soon as the customer takes it home, I will die at my desk.  It will be a Six Feet Under moment:  I will be at my desk, fingers on keyboard.  The phone will ring.  I will pick it up.  It will be the woman I talk to on a thrice-weekly basis.  “We’ve had to shut our line down,” she’ll say, “because your plant sent us the wrong cartons *again*.” At that moment, my blood will get thicker and thicker and thicker until it just stops flowing.  My head will rock forward.  I will continue to receive e-mail, a steady bwip, bwip, bwip emitting from the speaker.

Call me a drama queen—hell, I won’t deny it—but I finally succumbed to the “spooky local news story” syndrome, the same one that I’m so cruel about when I see it in other people.  “Could a common household item pose a choking death to your children?  The story you can’t afford to miss, tonight at 11!” I fancy myself as being savvier than that, and yet last week I found myself watching a story about the effect of stress on health on NY1.  The reporter interviewed a 39-year-old computer technician at the station; he eats well and exercises regularly, and yet he has had three heart surgeries, and his cardiologist lays the blame on stress-induced depression.

This morning I think of that tech as I go to another day at LuthorCorp.  One of my colleagues has just given her notice.  She and her husband have bought a business; she has found a day job that looks fulfilling; they have bought a better and cheaper house than the one in which they have been living here in the city; she will be living a short drive from where she grew up, and where her family lives.  Even with the agita she will have to endure during her last few days at LuthorCorp, she looks bright and happy.

I come home, answer three phone calls from telemarketers with increasing levels of annoyance in my voice.  On the fourth call, I don’t bother to mask the irritation—and I discover it’s my mom, who I haven’t spoken to in over a week.  Normally we don’t let more than a couple of days elapse between calls unless one of us is on vacation, but lately I have been such a pill when I get home from work.  I’m afraid that I am the Typhoid Mary of the existentialism virus, that my terrible attitude will catch.  Silly me.  It is impossible for me to be existential in my mom’s company.  As we talk, I realize that I’ve been working in packaging, an industry that I pretty much fell into by accident, for 11 years, the major portion of my adult life.

Dear friends, I am tired of cutting bait.  It’s time to go fishing.