Well, so much for daily blogging. It’s been wild around here, and I’m not even talking about Christmas activities – but it’s been wild in a good way.
I thought I’d combine two blog posts in one, by combining two themes from the NaBloPoMo prompts: “If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?” which is tomorrow’s, and “Do you enjoy your current job (or your last job)?” (today’s prompt).
When I was working, I was most enjoyably employed as a secretary. Being a secretary has a bad reputation nowadays, being seen as a scutwork job for the nearly brainless; in reality, it was the gateway to a wide variety of fields. Working solely as a secretary, I worked in textiles, publishing, education, law – and law enforcement – and advertising, this last as a secretary in one of the top three advertising agencies on Madison Avenue.
My last job in this field was as a secretary for my parish church, and that was the most fun of all, because the office had been neglected for so long that it was in complete disarray, and I got to construct it from the ground up, creating the filing system, a tracking system for parishioners’ contributions, a parishioner database, the Rolodex for the parish, and a means of tracking parish vendors, as well as keeping track of work done to the physical plant – this way, it was easier for the Parish Council to see when a contractor had last shown his face in the door, and to follow up on jobs in progress. I actually was not finished setting up this last vendor system when I was replaced with someone younger and – I can only assume – more ethnically desirable, since I was not of the same ethnicity as the rest of the parish. That still hurts, though not as much as it did at the time (see beginning posts from January 2010).
So. If I could have any job in the world? It would be my old job, or something similar. The problem is, I’m now of official retirement age, the point at which your shelf life in any field has basically expired, and you’re expected to go out to pasture and vegetate, until the point where the goal of your life becomes providing an income for the health-care industry. No, thank you.
Since this line of work is now closed to me for good, I’ve made the adjustment – somewhat – to the idea that hey, I’ve worked hard all my life and earned my retirement, and I’m going to get what I can out of it. An education in art, something I’ve always wanted to understand. Expanding my knowledge of music, my chief recreation in life. Most of all, I’m going to focus on the things that matter most: spiritual warfare, reconciling the demands of this age, and of old age, with the requirements of eternal life; becoming, as best I can, more conformed to the life of Christ, without losing one iota of the snarkiness that is the hallmark of any good New Yorker. I figure, if God put me in New York at the beginning of my life, He must have meant it to shape my personality. Now I just need to develop it into a tool for introducing people to the novel notion that Christians aren’t necessarily pious wusses.
Hah!