(I’m running up against the deadline for a big project at work, so I’ll be working tonight and tomorrow night and all weekend, which means I’ll probably be blogging a lot. I got home this evening and took out the laptop, and it was still warm from when it had been plugged in at work 20 minutes earlier. That’s how I know I’m working hard, I guess…So I decided to treat myself to a bit of goofing off before getting to work.)
I don’t have the will to parse that Eliot quote and/or write about Lori Carson just now (especially because the female singer who is currently occupying my head is not Lori Carson but Patty Griffin—soon I’m going to need some kind of antidote for having “Useless Desire” from Patty’s most recent album running through my head in an endless loop, but right now, a day and a half into the loop, I’m still enjoying it, if “enjoying” is the right word for a song that tears me up as much as that one), so…here’s something more lighthearted that popped into my head the other day:
If, in a parallel universe, you could do something for a living that you are not, based on your skills and experience and natural abilities, actually able to do in this universe, what would it be?
Me, I think I’d be an industrial designer. In the real universe, I have no skills whatsoever when it comes to the visual arts (okay, I’m a pretty creative doodler, but somehow, I don’t think that counts). But after years of working on children’s books at a publishing house where the bookmaking process was way more hands-on than anything most editors ever get to experience—the company had its own camera-stripping department, among other now-obsolete things, and I used to do paper layouts by hand on resin-coated paper with FPO photocopies of photos, and pick colors and typefaces and stuff like that—I developed a really strong design sense (which turns out to be a good thing, since my current profession requires a certain amount of design skill—or a lot of it, depending on who you ask; in fact, there are people in the field right now who are claiming that it’s inseparable from design, which makes me nervous, because I have “I Am Not A Designer” tattooed on my forehead. In invisible ink.). And I love good industrial design. Ever since I’ve known that there was such a thing as an industrial designer (which I don’t think I found out until I was in my late 20s—I led a sheltered life, I guess), I’ve thought it would be an amazingly cool thing to be. We looked at a couple of design exhibits at the slightly disappointing renovated Museum of Modern Art recently, and the stuff in the permanent design collection wowed me, as it always does. In the current universe, I could never in a million years come up with anything as cool and brilliantly designed as the iPod, or even as cool as the little colored-plastic-circle bookmarks that they sell in the MoMA store, but I’d like to think that I could imagine them—that the problem is one of lack of technical skill rather than lack of imagination. It’s possible that I’m fooling myself about that, though. Anyway, I’m not sure that being an industrial designer would be the exact opposite of what I do now, or what I’m capable of doing; I suppose the polar opposite would be manual labor of some sort. (Or maybe the real polar opposite would be making information harder to find and more confusing, if we want to be literal about it.) Nonetheless, being an industrial designer is something that the actual me is incapable of, so I think I get to be one in a parallel universe.
So what would the paralllel-universe you do for a living?