It’s official. I’m an employee again.
Making ads just like I was when I realized I hated cubicles and took to the skies. Just like I was when I decided that I would NEVER do this again: Hurried lunches at my desk, REALLY IMPORTANT meetings about things that really aren’t important, inventing more and more ways to annoy the general public with polished product info. It’s much better than picking poo off the floor of a video store, that’s for sure. But it’s not saving lives. It’s not teaching something useful or helping to change the world. Instead, it’s convincing innocent citizens to eat burgers they don’t really want and drive cars that may or may not fall apart after a year. This hurts because it goes against all my beliefs.
Just when i was feeling despair and failure about landing back in this same exact place… just when it was getting more and more difficult to get out of bed in the morning, I got an email from my friend Pete, the photographer I met in India, who snapped this one.
He sent me some shots from his time in Indonesia:
The dude went swimming with a monkey. SWIMMING WITH A MONKEY. You might think I’m about to complain about the amazing adventures this man is having while I’m stuck between cardboard walls arguing the uses of a semi-colon. But, no! I am again revitalized. There are millions of adventures to be had in life. And whether they come in the form of monkeys doing breast stroke or huts in Papua New Guinea or walking to the beach from my apartment, I will have them. Because I want to.
And this little advertising stint is what’s going to catapult me there. It’s just for now. And for now is going to get me to later. So, I no longer hate advertising. It’s my friend, my catapulter. My ticket to a slightly older swimming monkey. Although it takes away from my blog time and inflicts tiny bursts of internal conflict several times a day, I’m at peace with it. Phew. It feels good.
I hope all those who aren’t too thrilled with their current careers arrive at such a point. As long as you have faith that there’s a way out and that the present will lead to this way, those meetings about meetings and conversations about kids you don’t know and hastily written Excel documents all seem kinda worth it.