Not to get all whiny on you fine folks, but I’ve had a rough month. Circumstances in the New Proofreaders’ Cave lately have left my work\/life balance extremely lopsided, and even though I haven’t had to put in any late nights this week, I haven’t managed to catch up on my sleep deprivation either. I’ve been shuffling along about three seconds behind the rest of the world, feeling like whatever wit or cleverness I may once have possessed caught a Greyhound for Miami round about last Tuesday. It doesn’t help that this is my favorite time of the year, and an entire month of glorious, mellow afternoons have slipped through my fingers while I’ve sat steadfastly at my desk in a dimly lighted corporate cubicle without even a decent window view.<\/p>\n
All of which is my way of explaining why the latest dispatch<\/a> from Tony Long, a.k.a. Wired.com’s resident Luddite<\/a>, resonated so strongly with me:<\/p>\n I was meant to be drifting through the back streets of Istanbul, clad in a white linen suit, flitting from one caf\u00e9 to the next, sipping tea on a Bosphorus steamer, wooing an olive-skinned beauty at the bar of the Hotel Bebek. … It would be nice if my worthy employer would change my job description to “boulevardier” and pay me a princely salary to explore various exotic locales — for the sake of appearances, I suppose I’d deign to dash off an occasional dispatch to the home office — but that’s probably not going to happen. We romantics tend to romanticize, not monetize, and therefore have little value in this hard-hearted, for-profit world.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Whatever. I want to be Bogie in Casablanca<\/i>… Alas, I’m not Bogie in Casablanca<\/i>. I’m Tony in California and it’s 2007 and it’s not about running a saloon, it’s about “core competency” and “entrepreneurialism” and the “global economy.” It’s about making the bottom line, being there 24\/7, upping those page views, closing that deal. It’s about making someone else rich off the sweat of your labor. It’s about living with constant stress that we, as humans, shouldn’t really have to live with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sigh. I’ve got a vacation coming up in four weeks, if I can just stave off my pending crack-up until then… but it would be easier if I had a white linen suit. Or at least a cure for insomnia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Not to get all whiny on you fine folks, but I’ve had a rough month. Circumstances in the New Proofreaders’ Cave lately have left my work\/life balance extremely lopsided, and even though I haven’t had to put in any late nights this week, I haven’t managed to catch up on my sleep deprivation either. I’ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}