Ambition Is a Trap
In the mass of things I had to tell you about my weekend in yesterday's entry, there was one thing I forgot to mention, that happened Saturday morning. Shobhit seriously fucked up his own hair.
He came back from India last month with a hair trimming set, which I honestly assumed was intended for face and body hair grooming. That's a big part of it, clearly -- I just this morning used the attachment for trimming nose hairs! (Now that I'm middle-aged, this is one of my favorite inventions.) Shobhit, apparently, thought it was for buzzing his own head.
I mean, he wasn't actually going for something that drastic, although I remain astonished that he thought he could "trim" his own hair with clippers with any efficiency whatsoever. I was in the middle of getting ready in the bathroom, and he came in, grabbed the clippers, and grabbed the small metal bathroom garbage can. He set the garbage can on the floor in front of himself sitting on the 28-lb container of laundry detergent that sits just inside the bathroom door because it's too big to fit anywhere inside the washer/dryer closet.
I was immediately like, "What are you doing?" and increasingly horrified that he was bringing those clippers straight to the side of his head. "Shobhit, you shouldn't do this," I said, or something to that effect, several times: "This isn't going to work." He basically ignored me and went to work, and within seconds -- quite predictably -- he had a rectangular-shaped buzz up the side of his head, far shorter than he wanted to make it. He literally looked like a kid who had gotten into his mother's sewing drawer and went to town on his own hair with the scissors.
Completely unfazed, he got up and tried to "hide" it with the other hair around the square of buzzed-out hair. He said he was trying to clip off the gray on the side of his head. I mentioned this to Laney when she arrived later that morning, and Laney immediately said cutting the hair does nothing to hide gray hair. The gray goes all the way down to the root, after all. The only way to get rid of the hair would be to a) dye it; or b) shave it bald. But here it was short like a crew cut -- but just in this rectangular shape.
And we were about to go run some errands. He put on a hat. Then took it off again. Every time he turned his head, I had to say, "That looks ridiculous" or "that really looks terrible" -- because it did. I told him he really needed to go to a professional to get it fixed, and he was probably going to have to get one of those haircuts where the sides are super-short and tapered up to slightly longer hair on the top.
That's ultimately what he did, but not before he -- you guessed it! -- tried again on the other side. He theorized that he just had the setting on too short. He increased the buzz setting and tried to cut part of the hair on the other side. And he wound up with another rectangular slash on the other side of his heads that was nearly as bad as the first. Jesus Christ!
Shobhit's attitude through all this was like it was just a fun game; he was amused. If I had done this to myself I'd be having a panic attack. Shobhit finally did put a beanie on for the bit of shopping we went to do, and with just half an hour to go before I needed to be back when Laney was scheduled to meet at the condo complex theatre to watch The Departed, we stopped at the barber shop on 15th Avenue. The two working barbers were currently busy so I knew it wouldn't be so quick as Shobhit was thinking. So, he got out and I drove the car home. He came back not long after, satisfied with his cut but complaining that the place accepted only cash, which he believes means they don’t pay taxes. He's got this obsession with being lawful about tax paying, which is weird considering all the other ways he doesn't give a shit about breaking the law (most notably traffic laws). But whatever, I never claimed this guy was consistent. I suppose it could be argued that the consequences of tax evasion are generally more dire than driving over the speed limit. Or 30 mph over the speed limit.
In any case, his hair was fixed and it looks way better now. He would have saved himself the time and the money by not making that unbelievably stupid and quite clearly preventable mistake to begin with though.
I wound up wasting a whole lot of time this morning, both on my phone and on an online chat with Apple customer care, because I could not figure out why my Mail app was not receiving emails -- and neither was it allowing me to re-add email accounts that I had deleted with the intent to re-add to fix the problem.
After probably more than an hour, I finally tried all this again after turning off wifi and no longer being connected to my work wifi. Then it worked! What the shit? Why do we suddenly have this apparent block on email using work wifi -- which, by the way, allows me to check web based email on my desktop? I think maybe it's related to the other day when I came in and none of the social media sites would load in any of my desktop browsers. Justin in IT told me there was some update happening that was likely the culprit, and everything was back to normal again within a couple of hours.
So, now I have my Comcast, Gmail and Yahoo email accounts re-added and they all perform properly when on the LTE or 3G networks. They're still giving me errors when I'm on wifi but whatever. I'm relieved to have figured it out, except my battery is down to 37% before it's even noon -- because I updated software thinking that may be the problem, and even that came back, bizarrely, with "attempting to recover data" and went through all this rigmarole that ate up battery life. And I've been bringing my charger every day for a couple of weeks -- except today. The first day I don't bring my charger, this happens. Jesus Christ. I guess I'll have to spend some time this afternoon listening to music on my iPod Classic rather than more podcasts on the iPhone.
What about last night? Well actually, I went straight to the Uptown theatre after work for the 4:30 showing of the very good documentary Jane, about Jane Goodall and her early research on chimpanzees. I chose that movie because it was the only movie I still hadn't seen besides The Disaster Artist, which I saw with Ivan and Drew on Saturday, that appeared to be worth going to this week. Now it's going to be at least another week before I go to another movie, since this coming weekend will be filled up with Shobhit's and my trip to Wallace, Idaho to visit Mom and Bill -- and Christopher, since, as far as I know, he's still living there.
I walked home after that, wrote my review, and then I made myself a sandwich for dinner, and then watched the Noah Baumbach original movie on Netflix, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), which I've heard rave reviews of on several podcasts and knew I would like. Shobhit even got a little into it when he got home in the middle of it. Once that was done it was past 10 pm and time for bed.
Then: big news at work this morning. Our latest Meat and Seafood Merchandiser left about a month ago under somewhat secret -- and therefore mysterious and/or suspicious - - circumstances, and this morning the Merchandising Department was gathered for an announcement: a new Meat and Seafood Merchandiser had been selected. It's going to be Jared.
I wouldn't normally care that much, especially given the department, except that Jared once had the same position Kibby does for HBC and I do for Grocery, only he did it for Meat, Product and Deli. He was Shauna's replacement after she quit in 2008. Kibby and I were even part of the interview process, and we both had enthusiastically endorsed him as the hire. And now, although Kibby's and my jobs have evolved over the years, we're still in essentially the same position -- and Jared's one step up from us. He's not either of our boss since it's a different department. He had been doing a sort of project management position for a while, as Erica was doing the "store support" stuff for Deli, Meat and Produce that Kibby and I respectively do for HBC and Grocery -- and now Jared is indeed her boss. I wonder if that's weird for her? She seemed sincerely happy for him at the meeting, where everyone clapped for him three different times.
I never had any ambitions toward Merchandiser, though. I regard ambition as a trap, which sucks people into doing far more volume of more difficult work for a lot more hours than any accompanying raise would be worth. I'd just as soon slit my own throat. Granted, I suppose as long as Shobhit still doesn't have a full time job, any kind of upward movement on my part would be good for us -- but it would also make me unhappy. No thanks! Besides, any job position that would be direct ascension from where I currently sit would necessitate a car, and I won't get one. Indeed, when they were hiring for the position Noah is now in -- which is basically halfway between Scott and myself, in terms of hierarchy -- Scott actually told me he'd encourage me to apply if I were interested. My first and only question was, "Would I need a car?" He said, "Probably, yes." And I said, "No thanks," and that was that.
[posted 12:25 pm]