-Blueprints for Self Construction

I'd already turned in the rental car, spilled on my tie and shirt front eating fast food and thoroughly examined all the magazine racks in the area behind the security checkpoint. So I wandered, strolling past the gates at a deliberate pace with my my leather resume cover, shiny shoes and smart business suit.

I was waiting after what I hope will forever remain my worst moment in an office setting--one that I'd flown all the way to Detroit to enjoy. On the way to the interview, it seemed an endless series of just-in-time connections--rise, shower, dress, drive, park, check-in, sit, fly, shuttle, rent, drive, elevator, check-in, meet, shake hands, talk small, talk tall, suffer. I think I waited all of two minutes in the lobby before being called in to the conference room--five of them in a line across the table.

I won't dwell on the particulars--conveying the fullness of defeat and distress I gained from the exchange that day is not interesting to me. Suffice it to say that I was sure I would not get the job, that perhaps I didn't want it. I walked past the airport gates, rehearsing the answers I should have given, avoiding all eyes. I would have preferred the tight timing of the trip in. The wait for a plane out gave me lots of time to think.

Before my flight began boarding, I visited the bathroom. I rounded the 90-degree turn that seems to be a favorite of airport bathroom designers and found myself among business travelers discharging their bar tabs, surrounded by grey wool and wing-tips. I finished, turned to go and found myself nearly colliding with a suit and tie guy at the bathroom exit. I can't get away from these people, I thought.

There may have been a flourescent missing, I'm not sure, but the dark just inside the entrance fogged things, and as I turned to avoid business boy, I came to the stark realization: I was he. Between the burned-out bulb and the sharp turn entering, I hadn't noticed the wall-sized mirror at the bathroom's entrance. I'd seen and despised the man in the suit. Um, oops.

Back at work, I lost the jacket, but put on the tie and put in my time. The man in the mirror gave me a gift to take back to the office. It was one I used almost every day: I sat beside myself in meetings, I watched me answering e-mail, I listened to my helpful input and saw myself laughing at jokes not that funny. Chrismas parties, hallway hellos, copy-room chatter and day to day to day, I judged all that went on around me. I found it wanting, all the time, and especially me--this was years.

Most nights last summer, I took to running maybe three miles around our neighborhood. One year prior to my first surgery, almost exactly, I ran a local foot race, the Park Avenue 5K. I came in 835th place. Not exactly competitive, but my total time was 29 minutes and 21 seconds. That's an average nine minutes and 26 seconds per mile.

While my work life progressed like some mind-d/numbing interactive film strip--BING-all staff meeting, talk talk clap clap BING-email inbox, type type, type some more BING-employee discipline, talk talk cry cry BING-copy machine jam to fix BING-drive home--my health improved exponentially. I could do hundreds of crunches. I broke a ten minute mile.

I did Pilates, too, just a couple of times, by following a video off the internet--a "for dummies" version that took some basic positions and movements and wove them into a half-hour workout. Its difficulty took my muscles by surprise. My legs and back burned the next morning when BING-back to work.

Pilates taught me the concept of "core". I now see it all the time on television in ads pushing fitness programs, but at the time it was new to me. Wikipedia defines core training as the, "attention of training to the abdominal and back muscles". I took from the video a sense of core as my center of gravity, the place at my center from which health, energy and bodily stability flow. Dictionary.com yields several results for core--here is number three of twelve: The basic or most important part; the essence. The core, center of gravity, foundation of everything from the waist up.

In just eight hours from the moment I type this, I will be cut loose officially from my employer of a decade--a man without a corporation. I worked there for better than one quarter of my time on earth.

A unique opportunity for making a different person has presented itself to me. It's as if I were somewhere in the midst of the summer vacation preceding freshman year of college--of course, I haven't applied anywhere, and I have no idea who's going to write my recommendations--but I know I get to start anew.

Here is number 11 of the definitions dictionary.com supplies: The base, usually of soft or inferior wood, to which veneer woods are glued.

For six months now, I've lived outside the suit I've worn for ten years--the veneer, director of operations, company man, is no more. It took three operations to excise it, but it's all gone now. Those same procedures sought to shore up my core, though perhaps that's been less effective.

Now when we meet people, the "what do you do?" question (read: "what kind are you?") is awkward. Well, I sleep poorly and late, then watch judge shows, you know, like Judge Judy, read a lot, ride a scooter aimlessly and think too much and take darvocet and stuff--I'm that kind. The layer of achievement and respectability available to me as "Director of Operations" (capital letters intact) has been stripped. It never fit all that well, but its loss leaves me naked.

I walked up one flight of stairs at the library last week. My legs burned. One flight. Pants I've worn for years feel tighter, though I vacillate between placing blame behind my eyes or around my waist.

Senior year, just before graduation, I wrote an article for the school newspaper about the impending reality of life after college. Somewhere I am sure there is a copy, but I can remember comparing suits to uniforms, using the word "lockstep" and listing in attempted Kerouacesque fashion all the paths preferable to the one ending in a cubicle--poet, prophet, painter, you get the picture. My dance teacher told me she knew what I meant, that my sentiment provided the perfect reason to study dance. My history advisor just shook my hand. A year later he wrote me a recommendation for graduate school.

Surfaces and structures are temporary, and not to be relied upon-- now I know this. Buildings burn and crumble, then we build again. I can't dance anymore.

42 days and $55 worth of medicine from now, I hope to be able to break ground. The easy thing to do, the path of least resistance, involves re-application of the veneer. But then I consider the prospect of actually sending resumes, interviewing and enthusing over reports and reviews, wearing the suit again. Emotionally, intellectually, I know that I do not wish to see it in the mirror again. I find myself wanting . . . more.

So I won't do it--that end-justifies-the-means thing. Not if the money is right, not for a title, not to add to my resume, not to build the nest egg, not for a bigger house, or a new car or the bank account. I find my thoughts echoed/amplified (but better) by a writer I'm rereading for no other reason than that it was free to download the words. In constructing a new self in the world, looking to someone so avowedly outside the mainstream for instructions might be foolish. Given the opportunity my spine has handed me, it feels right.

I close with these thoughts that ring in my mind, from Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay to life itself, than this incessant business.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living, how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious, for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.

-Henry David Thoreau