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.

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.

George Carlin died (which I am disappointed in the coverage of). I remember being nine years old and downloading all of Jammin’ in New York with my friends and memorizing every word of it. George taught us how to swear, (and by the way, my grandmother stopped reading my blog because I’m such a potty mouth) and he also taught us what funny was and how to find it.

“I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”

When it comes to someone like George Carlin, there is no such thing as hyperbole. Allow me to expound.

Here’s how important George Carlin is: Before Carlin, people thought Bob Hope was the funniest guy ever.

Repeat: Before George Carlin, people thought Bob Hope was funny.

Then they saw George and realized he was the funniest fucking guy ever (and there would be no “fucking” in that sentence if it weren’t for George Carlin).

If you could express humor in terms of geography, and The Funniest Place In The Universe is home plate at Yankee Stadium, then Richard Pryor is at bat, Carlin is the catcher, and Lenny Bruce is the umpire. Eddie Izzard is in a skybox, and I am (generously) in the west end.

Of Cleveland, Ohio.

Carlin changed what comedy was. It became, under his leadership with a few others, the most important form of social criticism today. Carlin’s humor had one basic premise:

People are completely full of shit, and I can prove it.

Carlin forced people to examine nonsense that they put up with because it is easier to swallow the bullshit of life than it is to question, and life’s hard enough without having to worry about the self-important language of airline announcements. Not that anything Carlin ever talked about seemed like “light” subject matter.

Of course, I still think I haven’t heard a legitimate defense of war since Carlin described the first Gulf War as a bunch of men in the desert, waving their pricks at one another to see who’s was bigger. And pacifism gets a reputation for being a bunch of softies like John Lennon and the Dali Lama anyway, so warhawks have a tendency to characterize them as a pack of pussies. And we were lucky to have George change the image of pacifism from “Give Peace A Chance” to “Hey, Dick Cheney! Go Fuck Yourself!”

Carlin was one of the greatest skeptics of the twentieth century, and having made it only eight years into this century, is yet to have a true peer in skepticism or comedy in the twenty-first. Further, anyone who does rival him will be one of his own disciples in comedy. And that’s a legacy he can be proud of, although if I suggested that to his face he would say,

“Hey blog-man, you limp-dick cocksucker. Why don’t you let me decide what, if anything, my life means. You can go back to writing about burritos, you no-talent, self-righteous, condescending shithead.”

Rest In Comedic Rage, George.

I saw Eddie Izzard last night, and he is the funniest man alive. Really, he is. If you don’t know Eddie, he’s a British transvestite, actor, and comedian. He’s comedy is a combination of accidental humor and humorous comparison. Most importantly, he likes to show his audience that anything can be funny. For example, how funny do you think the Ice Age and the origin of language in homo sapiens is?

“Language started about 100,000, and the ice was still here until 10,000 years ago. So for 90,000 years people were just standing around shivering. And all they could say was-

Person 1: (shivers) What do you think the temperature is?

Person 2: Minus…a lot.”

I have a strong personal connection with Eddie (not in a stalking creeper fan way). The first time I saw one of his specials it was right when my grandfather’s tumors were catching up with him. And in one of the bad months near the end, my sisters and I would come home from my grandparents house and we’d alternate between the three Eddie videos we had. It helped a lot.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my dad bought tickets for us to see him on the Sexie tour, but then I asked this girl to go to homecoming and the dance was the same night as Eddie. So my dad bought an extra pair of tickets for the two of us to go a different night. Then the date fell through (and that’s a story for another time) so I got to see Eddie twice, which helped considerably with my romantic problems at the time.

I did something last night that I’ve never done for any performer ever, I (along with a good portion of the audience) gave Eddie a standing ovation the second he came onstage. On the drive home, my mom said it was a little much to give a comedian the O before the show starts. My dad replied, “I was doing it for everything he did up til now.”

Someone, at some point in your education, probably made you read a book by John Steinbeck, and they probably ruined it for you. I apologize for them.

Smarter teachers, who want to expose their students to John’s work, but at a minimum of building hatred towards him, put Of Mice and Men on the reading list. Or even The Pearl. These are his weakest two novellas, in my eyes. So while they did probably ruin them for you, they didn’t ruin the really good stuff.

I started with The Pearl in seventh grade “Extended” English, with the second of the two great Maggies in my education, Mrs. Oberg. And I remember when I was reading it at the tender age of twelve (the year I was fat, for reference) “Hey, this kinda sucks.”

My Mother, English teacher as she was, recommended I take a look at some of the other novellas. Cannery Row, The Moon is Down, The Red Pony, and Tortilla Flat. Something clicked in me. They were all fucking awesome. I mentioned to my grandmother that I had read them and she gave me The Wayward Bus, a light novel of John’s. Still awesome. So I embarked on a two-year journey through Steinbeck’s entire catalogue, some 37 novels and novellas plus a compilation of his WWII dispatches. I read them all cover to cover.

(Which is a silly cliché. You don’t listen to an album “note to note” or watch Rock of Love II “confessional to partial nudity)

It became an obsession because Steinbeck’s prose is both elegant, and plain. He doesn’t typically hide his meaning under many layers. I learned later that this is why Literary Critics (read: douchebags) don’t take kindly to Steinbeck. They say his work is too simplistic. They prefer Faulkner.

Hey, Faulkner! Use Fucking Punctuation, You Tool!

Nearly all of Steinbeck’s work has a sort of central underlying theme of the need for human compassion and empathy, which is like, the fucking basis of all western literature. But I guess chapters written from the perspective of a retard are of more “significance” to the academic community.

I like Faulkner, too. I just prefer John’s work.

Anyways. I learned a lot from John, and I capped it off with Travels with Charlie: In Search of America. If you haven’t read it, it’s the story of a summer that Steinbeck spent driving around the country with his American Standard Poodle (Charlie is a pioneer in combating my hatred of foofy dogs like poodles). What makes the book significant isn’t just John’s cataloging of change in America, but his profound love of his country. And he doesn’t even so much love the country, as he seems to love every American in it.

I once heard a theory about Shakespeare not being a real person (also, bullshit) and there was an argument made that someone with the level of empathy required to write some of Shakespeare’s tragedies would most surely have committed suicide. But Steinbeck is the proof that you can feel what everyone feels and live through it. Even find hope in it.

Of all the men I never met, Steinbeck had the biggest hand in who I am.

Thanks, John.