When I interviewed my boss, Leon, we got to talking about what the College of Business stresses to me. And I mentioned that one of the things that gets talked about all the time in job postings, in career development programs, and even in my classes from time to time is a “Work/Life balance,” which roughly translates as, “Time to spend the money you make.” Leon is in his seventies, a successful entrepreneur in a largely seasonal business, and probably works 65 hours a week in the off-season. When I asked him (because I was supposed to be doing an interview, not chit-chatting) “Do you think that work/life balance is important?” His response was, “Fuck that, that’s bullshit.”

Now Leon has the luxury of having a job that he absolutely loves, and in my estimation, wouldn’t be able to live without. So working 90 hour weeks during the peak of his fiscal year never seems to strain him much. And this is exactly what my generation seems to be going for, a job that can be their whole life. I addressed it previously here and here and I’m all for finding a job that makes you happy. I plan on doing it someday.

However, that doesn’t mean that I’m expecting it to happen the second I graduate.

Leon, like I said, is in his 70’s. It took him a while to get where he is. My generation seems to think they’re going to find the perfect job at 22 and work there, with reasonable upward mobility, for 43 years, and retire to the suburbs to see their grandkids grow up.

Finding, getting, and holding a job you love when you’re fresh out of college has roughly the same probability as marrying your first girlfriend. From 7th grade.

First, because you don’t know what you want to do. You don’t. You might think you do, you’re probably wrong. Second, sometimes, you have to work at a job before you get good at it. And sometimes you have to be good at it before you like it.

Plus, you might have to sell listings on Careerbuilder for a year before you figure out what it is you actually want to do.

We call this a “Learning curve” in business. As in “Learn by doing it wrong first, and learn to appreciate doing it the right way.”

Practical career advice aside, there’s another problem I have with the whole “get a job you love,” idealistic mentality. It ties your world view and your identity too tightly to your professional path.

If your chief conduit for enjoying life is enjoying your job, then there’s not much else to you, and not finding that job (or worse, losing it) ruins how you think of yourself. I plan on being an aggressive, blood-sucking corporate wolf, but the answer to “Who am I?” will never be “A sales rep.” And if I lead a successful start-up company someday, one that sells life-saving medicine to impoverished babies and still manages to turn a profit, I still won’t think of myself as just CEO and Founder of Wicked-Awesome Incorporated. There’s so much more to life than whatever comes between waking up Monday morning and cashing Friday’s paycheck. There’s a balance between selling your soul and renting it out so that your kids can go to college that is sometimes necessary.

And you shouldn’t ever let this, “I’m only going to do what I’m good at and love,” infect your mind too far, because even if you get that perfect career and change the world, or whatever it is you think is so damn important, this mindset can crush your soul in an indirect way. It can create the belief that people who aren’t satisfied with their career are somehow less worthy than you are (you elitist bastard).

“The world needs ditch-diggers, too.” Yeah, and a lot of ditch-diggers are happier and better human beings than you will ever be.

Back to Leon (who’s full of good advice, as the old, successful, and satisfied usually are). He once told me that he makes it a rule never to ask any of his daughter’s friends (myself included) what their parents do for a living.

“Say the kid’s dad is a plumber. Nothing wrong with being a plumber, plumber’s make a good living. But the kid might be embarrassed of it, because there isn’t a lot of prestige about being a plumber.”

Damn right, Leon. There really isn’t anything wrong with being a plumber. And yet how many of my classmates from high school grew up believing that being a failure meant not going to college.

I went home recently for my friend Phil’s graduation party. I’ve known Phil since middle school, in all that time I’ve met very few who rival him for ability to enjoy life. Phil graduated in February from a trade school and works for a heating and air company now, where he’ll make a good living as a union employee, and he has a long-term plan of starting his own business. He’ll almost certainly be the first among our friends to own his first home, and he’ll make more money (that is America’s standard for success, like it or not) than a lot of the people I know ever will. But he won’t ever define himself as an HVAC technician, he’s just Phil. He’s got a big Italian family, a lot of good friends, and a girlfriend of three years.

So when I see people in my generation who view certain jobs or careers as “beneath them.” Or even just people who think their work has to be their whole life or they won’t be satisfied, I get a little irritated. Who are you to think someone else’s job is beneath you? If you take yourself that seriously, you’ll never be satisfied anyway.

Remind yourself, “It’s just a job. There’s more to life than this.” That’s the real work-life balance.

Isn’t the news exciting? I’ve been watching more of it lately and boy is it thrilling. I watch CNN and MSNBC mostly, who pretend to be the most serious.

However, these days, being the most serious televised political program in America seems a lot like having the biggest dick in your kindergarten class.

The easiest way for me to explain why I miss watching the BBC is this: Every day, on every political channel, at least once a day, one of the tittering heads says this sentence:

“The Republican brand is in trouble.”

The brand. The fucking brand.

People talk about the bias of media all the time, and it’s all bullshit. It’s not political slant, it’s a bias towards the stories (and the method of telling them) that gets the most viewers. They’re all whores to various degrees. They read whatever story comes up on the teleprompter, written by whatever unpaid journalism intern was assigned to the story by an editor hired by a producer who’s job is to make sure they cut away from Wolf Blitzer in time to show the advertisements for pills to make your stool softer and your dick harder.

I watched Wolf Blitzer do an extended feature on Britney Spears’ custody battle, and knew then that journalism had been poisoned to a point of no return.

As I watch the current “political” news I see that truth itself is under attack. Lewis Black says the problem is that the way stories are spun now, for every issue there is a set of Democrat facts and a set of Republican facts. And that there aren’t any more “Fact facts.”

Just two different sales pitches.

Which is what is truly disturbing to me about the “Republican brand” comment that gets repeated over and over. That’s the direction that politics is moving in American culture. It’s just another consumer decision. Just a battle for market share, instead of the struggle to convince voters that the right they have to choose their elected officials is sacred and that the men who vie for them present their plans for the challenges ahead of this country and the world, and display their character as a way of judging how they would handle the challenges that lie ahead, waiting in ambush and unknown to all of us.

Instead it’s two different spokesmen, with marketing departments (press secretaries and speech writers), production staff (policy “advisers”), and all the other dressings of the modern American corporation. I believe that the presidency of the United States is a sacred trust that imbues one individual with the power to change the world, and it should be taken very seriously and we should discuss it in a manner befitting it’s importance.

Instead, all I hear is “analysis” from “experts” on how the candidates are being “perceived by the American voter.” And that’s not a testament to decisions or leadership, it’s a ratings test, just like the ones that have ruined televised journalism. Political news is a series of people (typically uninvolved in any current political campaign) playing eight second clips of John McCain saying “Czechoslovakia” And then they say things like:

“McCain’s strength is that he appears more experienced in foreign policy, and this gaffe will hurt that perception.”

Just like when I think of Buick’s I immediately connect it with reliability.

And this is separate from what the candidates are actually doing or saying, it’s in the coverage of it. I’ll be addressing the candidates at a later time.

It’s not the Race to the White House anymore.

It’s the fucking Pepsi challenge.

America as seen by political news teams

Nancy Pelosi (Who is the speaker of the house, I’m looking at you 85% of America) is in a little trouble. She said yesterday on CNN that George W. Bush’s presidency is “A total failure.” And the tittering heads are on talking about how Pelosi’s just name calling, and it was an inappropriate thing to say and blah blah blah.

George W. Bush’s presidency has been a total failure. That’s a declarative sentence. As in, it declares a fact.

My fear since November of 2000 has been (and remains) that somehow, by accident, I will meet George W. Bush in person. And he will offer to shake my hand, and I’ll have to shake hands with the worst president in the history of my country. Well, to be fair, I don’t know enough about Warren G. Harding to compare them. The worst president in my grandmother’s lifetime.

I would have to shake hands with Fucko (that’s what I call him when he says things like “Our economy is growing.”) because he’s the president. Excuse me, The President of the United States of America. The Commander-in-Chief. The Leader of the Free World. I’d even explain my cognitive dissonance to him if we met.

“You see, Mr. President. I shake the hand of the President of the United States. Because I have nothing but respect, nay, love even for the office you hold and the potential for good that it carries, and the power, such as it is, over the destiny of mankind. I shake the hand of the President. For you, George, I have nothing but contempt.”

But George can’t handle a thought that complex as far as I can tell. I’m not just making a “G Dubs is so stupid,” joke, I think Fucko’s sin has always been that he sees the world in black and white so that he can feel comfortable doing terrible things so long as he first convinces himself it’s the only option he has. His crime is thinking he understands, so to call him stupid is an over-simplification. His world view is shaped by the hubris of a man who thinks that he, alone, can conquer terrorism, a weak economy, and every other damn thing that he’s at least partially complicit in.

I was watching a national ad campaign for Direct TV, and that no-talent douchebag that does mediocre impressions on FrankTV was doing his Fucko impression to sell directv or some such shit. And the Good Doctor Plock said to me, “That’s still the president.”

And Funkmaster Howie P is exactly right about that. You don’t sell a product by making fun of a stupid president, because it doesn’t just denigrate the man, it shames the office.

This is my proof that the George W. Bush presidency is a total failure. Mocking him sells satellite subscriptions.

I spent the weekend in fabulous Louisville, Kentucky. If you get the chance, check it out, the city is wonderful.

I went to Louisville because one of my heterosexual life partners, Nick, is working in the Kentucky Shakespeare festival as an intern. Which includes performing in the branch of KSF’s educational outreach program in schools all over Kentucky about eight times a week for eight weeks, plus doing a short performance before the main stage festival shows. What this means is, Nick and his fellow interns work anywhere from 60 to 90 hours a week, for $100. Which is exactly what I make before taxes in one eight hour day. I don’t mean that to sound quite as snide as it does, no one gets into acting for the money and Nick loves what he’s doing and that is reward enough. He also doesn’t have to pay for his housing, which means he’s really getting paid at least another $100 a week in overhead. (A roof/business pun. I apologize).

Now, just because I’m a business major doesn’t mean that everything’s about money to me. I’m harping on it because I was thinking about that Confucius line, “Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Easy for you to say, Confucius. Being a philosopher is just sitting on your ass for a living. But I have a good number of friends who are seeking employment, or in between jobs, or whatever it’s called when you’re not making enough money. And they’re all children of baby boomers, and they’re job search is complicated by the fact that they’re not just looking for “some job,” they’re looking for a job they’ll enjoy.

Our generation is referred to as the “entitlement generation.” We’re all supposed to go to college, we’re all supposed to get upwards of $24,000 a year out of college, we’re all supposed to buy Camrys, and we’re supposed to wait until we’re 30 to have kids. Our parents, like their parents before them, strove to give us more opportunities than they had. And by and large, they were real successful. That’s the problem. We feel like we got something coming to us because we were given so much, and the idea that we’ll be more successful than our parents seems less likely, because our suburbanite parents did pretty well for themselves.

Among my liberal minded friends, with their slightly less liberal minded parents, somewhere along the way it stopped being quite so much about getting a degree to make a lot of money and pump out grandkids (although those things are nice, too). Our parents told us that we should do whatever makes us happy. Which sounds great when you tell your kid that, but then you have to deal with the reality of having a dirt-poor child. It gets harder to deal with that reality as they age. And it’s hard on us because if we really buy the whole do-what-makes-you-happy thing, we have to find what makes us happy and then get a job doing it, which is a real bitch sometimes.

Which brings me back to Nick, who’s parents are both lawyers in a wealthy suburb. And here’s Nick, losing money on a job. And it’s not what he thought it would be originally, in that the “green shows” he does are in front of audiences of 5 to twelve people. But we sat out in the courtyard of the dorm he’s being put up in and talked about it and I said, “If the work is good, that’s all that counts.”

What surprised me was that I meant it.

I used to be an absurdly well informed for my age when I was about 11. And I kept up with current events very well for a long time. Then I came to college, and for a few reasons, lost track of the world pulse.

One: I hate George W. Bush so much that I started to growl when I saw him on TV.

Two: I got sucked into the alternate reality that is college life, where the rest of the world doesn’t exist. I mean, music exists, if I can get to the concerts. And the Daily Show and Colbert Report occasionally reminded me that there was a rest of the planet. But then they’d show a clip of any member of the Bush administration and I couldn’t hear the news over the sound of myself barking.

But election season is upon us, and deep inside me, the angry young liberal awakens. And reads polls, and watches the news. Itching for information, pining for political insight, and coveting the best coverage.

OH WAIT:

One thing has changed since I was 11. The news has become increasingly less informative. The best example of this is not FOX, because saying FOX is a news program is like saying I’m an olympic swimmer.

I forgot you didn’t know I don’t know how to swim. See I left out the necessary information to imitate Fox’s style. Also, if a FOX “news” reporter responded to these jabs the story would go like this:

Foxer: College Blogger Carl Newman, in trouble today for using the racial stereotype that African Americans don’t know how to swim. We turn to our guests Black Guy and CrazyFuckFace for the ongoing debate. First question? Why does this matter?

CrazyFuckFace: Well, to me it’s really more of an intramedia story.*

* denotes a sentence I actually heard on a “news program” today.

The best example of the death of journalism is MSNBC. With Keith Olberman, Gregory Smith, and Dan Abrams all hosting basically the same show. Dan Abrams is the best example though. The show is marketed as spirited debate, like a modern day Cato, or Marcus Aurelius. It ain’t. It’s much more like pigs eating.

I’ve Got The Headline Blues

That metaphor works really well when you remember that pigs, left to their own devices, eat their own shit.

The best reason to not pay attention to this stuff is the same reason that the concept of journalism shot itself in the ass with a sawed-off shotgun. Metanews, I call it. When there’s not a story to cover, these shows just bring up something that isn’t a news story, and talk about why it’s getting attention.

Let me explain it much, much slower to keep my brain from exploding. They bring up something, like Jesse Jackson saying something when he thought his microphone was off at the end of a TV interview. And they play a clip of what he said. And the the host of the program asks the first of their “panel,”

“Why is this a story?”

Answer: BECAUE YOU FUCKING MADE IT ONE!

Self-fulfilling prophesy is what that is. When a news agency reports on a story and says “Why are people talking about this.” But it’s not even that sophisticated. It’s a news-hand job.

Note: I sometimes refer to blogging as a form of masturbation. This still makes metanews (a handjob) lower on the totem pole.

So I’m not looking forward to the coming election cycle as much as I thought I would. Because I’m already knee deep in bullshit. And Glenn Beck took my shovel.

I spent the weekend camping at Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin and seeing a ton of family. Originally, the idea of a family reunion seemed strange to me, because most people don’t even know they have fourth cousins, but I see mine a few times a year. But the idea of spending time at my godparents lake house and drinking beer with my cousins was pretty appealing.

I learned a year or two ago that tempers are genetic (to a degree at least). After spending three days with nearly thirty family members, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a smart-ass gene. If so, we got it.

When you’re a kid at a large gathering with family you don’t see very often, you see a very limited part of their personality. The g-rated part. My family, in their natural state, are not g-rated by any means, but they put on a good show. So when I was 11 or so, my godfather was that nice giant guy who gave me a Christmas present. I had no idea that he had wonderful (if often dirty) sense of humor, because he was censoring himself for me. Not any more though.

We were at the beach and I was sitting on the shore in my jeans when my godfather walked up.

My Godfather: Not going swimming, Carl?

Me: No, I didn’t-

My Godfather: Got your period?

Me: Yup.

The weekend involved a lot of drinking beer (mostly in a polite way) and telling stories, because as much as we’re all family, our knowledge of each other is pretty limited. And I spent night around a fire exchanging the funniest stories we each had with cousins.

I noticed that when my great-uncle asked me what I was doing and I had a legitimate “this is the plan I have for the next six years of my life” answer, that I must at least kind of have my shit together. In fact, I decided that the surest sign that you’re in trouble at my age is that you shrug your shoulders when your great-uncle asks you how college is.

Also, and I realize I just wrote about this recently, but there were babies. And I’m a big fan of those, even more so when they’re babies that are genetically similar to me. I’m convinced that people can recognize genetic similarity on an instinctual level, and even with the three year old, Ethan, I can already tell that he belongs in this family. Because I watched him throw two hot dogs straight into a campfire, not because he didn’t understand, just to be a little destructive and play with the fire. Of course, I didn’t behave that way when I was three (it started when I was 16), but the similarity remains.

And babies are a hot commodity at a family gathering of any kind, sort of the way my generation treats a really-expensive new cellphone. And everyone thinks everything they do is adorable, so we pass them around and make a lot of “he looks just like his dad” type comments.

When I left, I thought about how little I get to see my family, and how well we get along when we do. It’s sort of part of an overall trend I’ve been going through lately. I’m starting to realize how incredibly lucky I am.

I know I once said that I didn’t think it was possible for a blog to sell out, reader. But then I was contacted by a high-powered, super-corporate CEO, who made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. All he wanted in return was a place to publish his rants. So here, while I count my pay-off, is the first installment of a new series on Warrior Poet:

Dispatches From the Sinfully Rich

John “Cigar” Assplunderer

Many times when you’re shuffling back and forth from your gainless employment to your triple-mortgaged home, you sit in traffic and wonder:

“What does the owner of the conglomerate that owns the Swedish holding company that controls the distributorship that employs the company’s president that hired my boss do for fun?”

And you wonder what you would do if you had my money. Actually, if you had my personal manicurist’s money.

I know you wonder this because I have an executive summary of a marketing report that says so (which I’m going to have my accounting department write off). I didn’t read it myself, but my secretary, Sarah “Masters in English” Lemming, recites beautifully.

Actually, she’s also a useful reference guide. She had to explain to me several times what “traffic” was. I don’t understand how the “lower-downs” can live like they do.

Of course, I didn’t decide to start this online column series to answer your questions. I’m doing it for the same reason that I put millions into making Motley Crue successful, I lost a bet.

I told Ted Turner that no one would buy the story he sold about a certain dead actor. I can’t say who it was, but I can tell you that if I’d won, Teddy would’ve been taking my illegitimate children to the new Batman premiere.

Since I lost, I have to start telling the truth about the upper-one-thousandth percent in a public forum. I had my operations manager hire an intern working for middle school credit to locate something that would qualify as a “public forum,” and “it” found this “weblog.” We paid off the author with a burrito, I’m told, and I’ll be able to print on his site whenever I feel like it.

Of course, T&T didn’t know I wasn’t losing anything by writing these dispatches, because it will help me win a much more significant wager with Rupert Murdoch. Rupert thinks he has to disseminate lies, but I assert that Americans wouldn’t know the truth if it shat on their faces, and the faces of every resident of Connecticut (including the unborn, of course). Which is exactly what Rupert will have to do if I win.

This first piece is merely an introduction. I am John “Cigar” Assplunderer. CEO, Chairman, and Spawn of Satan at Evil Bastard Enterprises. It is impossible to calculate my net worth with human mathematics.

I received the nickname “Cigar” shortly after I came up with my first billion-dollar idea, The Chocolate Flavored Big-Gar. It was like those chocolate cigars for children. Only bigger. And a real cigar. But still for children.

I was so young and idealistic then. I would sigh, but I’m afraid I’m too wealthy to be capable of feeling wistful.

Since clawing my way to the top of Evil Bastard Enterprises I have found myself growing rather despondent. I was able to catapult up the corporate ladder by genius, malice, and a distaste for human beings. But I’m afraid I no longer take enjoyment from it. It seems to me now that my success was due not so much to my own brilliance as to everyone else’s stupidity.

This turned out to be the secret to American business acumen. You can sell anything to people if you tell them they need it. Even if it’s a complete piece of shit (start training your colon, Rupert).

I grew so upset when I realized this fact that I started trying to sabotage my own success to test my theory. But when I sold the Zoon, the eight-pound Oreck, and the Honda Element, I realized that Americans are idiots, and taking their money was ever so much like taking candy from 300 million babies.

I’ve now come to terms with it. I decided that if there is nothing left to challenge me, I ought to share my wisdom with humanity. You’ll be hearing from me again soon. Until then, remember:

It doesn’t matter if you buy American. We own everything everywhere else, too.

Keep consuming.

Sincerely,
John “Cigar” Assplunderer
CEO, Chairman, and Spawn of Satan
Evil Bastard Enterprises