Lesson 5: Dull Roar
for my fifth lesson, I arrive at the studio in a free-floating state of pissed-offedness. The anger is not about tap; it's about my day job.
And that's exactly how I think of it. Not as "my career," "my vocation," or "my stepping stone to something wonderful." It's just my crappy day job. But even with that attitude, I care about what happens there. I feel heartsick because I joined an innovative company that now, four years later, bears all too strong a resemblance to a pointless joke. The company has been mismanaged for at least two years. We've squandered our technological lead, and companies we used to laugh at are about to lap us. We've just issued a press release to Wall Street explaining that we missed our quarterly earnings projections by millions of dollars, and thus are not profitable. The Street punishes our stock severely, driving it well below five dollars a share (when I hired in, it was around $80.00.).
We have a new CEO who promised not to change anything during his first 90 days on the property, so he could get his own sense of what's right about the company, what's wrong with it, and who's contributing to each. It's Day 100 now. The Chief Technical Officer has been fired. The Technical Publications department no longer reports to Engineering; now they're part of Technical Support. Everyone senses these are mere warning shots compared to what's to come. We feel besieged.
Here in the first decade of the new century, with the dot-bomb of 1999 fresh in our memories (and our resumes), no words strike more anxiety into the hearts of high-tech workers than "re-org," "downsizing," "restructuring," or "job search." When I interview candidates for writing and editing positions, some of them have been unemployed for 11 months. I wonder if I'll soon be joining them. My whole floor is tense and snappish. The middle managers who thrive on power are fighting to get more of it, assuming that will make them indispensable. The herd workers are pushing themselves to ridiculous, unsustainable levels of productivity, so as not to be the straggling elk who gets picked off. Everyone feels his or her job is at stake. Every conversation is Important. No perceived sleight is allowed to pass.
Sick of the tension, the other senior writer in Marketing quits without giving notice. Now on top of my Too Much To Do list, I'll have some of her tasks. And then today Microsoft released an unprecedented ten security bulletins in one day, seven of them critical. The team of security analysts I work with jump to warp speed as they assess the threat to Windows computers and rush to warn our subscribers as quickly as possible.
My company throws itself an emergency at least once a week. I've reached the point where I'm saying aloud around the office, "Not everything can be an emergency!" I have realized that we're working so hard that it would take two people to replace any one person on my team. And as long as we keep doing that, management has no reason to stop us. We thought by holding up well under pressure and achieving extraordinary things, we'd earn respect, perhaps a raise, and then adequate help. Instead, we're being regarded as "not broken" and thus not needing a fix. Working 55 hours a week is the New Normal. It ain't right. I cut out "early" (after a mere nine hours, no lunch) and make it to class as an act of defiance.
With my mood still on Simmer after a full day of Rolling Boil, I don't even find the yoga teacher amusing, even when I hear her tell her class to "move into Spinning Dog" and, later, "move your arms from Airplane into Jet." (If yoga is a "timeless discipline," this lady's got to be making it up as she goes along. Airplane? Jet? What's next, "move into iPod pose"?)
Instead, as tap class begins, Annette plays "Move Your Money" from Dulfer + Dulfer, the only saxophone act I know that undergirds its jazz riffs with electronica, house music, and rap. I pound the floor with my taps, purposely making loud sharp noises, but getting them as accurate as I can. After a day of fear and uncertainty, it is my non-verbal backlash, a way of throwing aside helplessness and taking authority. I am saying "I am here!" and "The beat is there!"
And something cool happens.
I start dancing really well. I am making crisp, clean tap sounds locked tight with the beat of the CD. Annette is pushing us tonight, to get a sense of how much we've learned. She tosses out instructions that used to throw me into a panic: "Now double-time!" "Keep doing it, only backwards!" Valerie and Debbie and I are taking it all in stride and keeping up.
Until this moment, I didn't realize that for all these weeks, I've been afraid of the floor. Or perhaps not afraid of the floor, but afraid of the noise my taps make on the floor. I don't know where the fear comes from. The best explanation I can think of is, when I was growing up with my big brother, every time we got the giggles or threw a Whiffle ball in the house or started a tickle fight, my mom would make us stop. And if we didn't stop, my dad would holler from the living room, "Keep it down to a dull roar!" That same phrase, every time. Whenever the kind of fun began that makes you lose track of yourself: "Keep it down to a dull roar!" This was such a common feature of my pre-school days, I didn't realize until much later that the phrase is inherently humorous, and my dad was leavening his command with gentle irony. It just meant to my little ears, Wild fun is wrong. Stop.
That thought drove deeper into my fabric than I realized. Tonight, in my anger, I broke through it when I didn't know it was there. No, I will not keep it down to a dull roar if I do not want to. In fact, if I so deem, I might possibly bellow, howl, shriek, or ululate. It is entirely up to me. Wow, it is really up to me! The guy in the mirror is smiling again. Something more than tap dance is happening to me.
Between exercises, Valerie whispers, "Wow, you've been practicing during the week, haven't you? It really shows!" When I shake my head, no, I haven't practiced at all, she won't believe me. "Well you're right on it tonight!" she states as we spread out for the next exercise. Every rock musician, every abstract painter is way ahead of me: sometimes you get better art from being a little angry.
This time, I am braced and ready for Hop. I want to face it. I survived it last week, and I will not let Hop dull my roar this week. Between last week and this week I have read about this guy, and inspired by the amputee tap dancer, I am no longer afraid. Sure enough, toward the end of class when Annette trots out the hardest stuff, we go into lots of Hops.
I can't do them.
Early in the exercise, I land on my left foot in a way that makes it go twang. I cheat on the next few Hops, never really leaving the ground; and finally on the last few, I do nothing, simply waiting for the beat to pass and resuming the exercise after the Hop.
Regardless of whether my attitude is good or bad, I am simply too heavy. I hate being reminded of this. I hate the inescapable reality of it. To comfort myself, I stop by KFC on the way home. This is such a classic loser gesture that when I get home, I don't blog, I don't read, I don't clean house, I do nothing constructive. I think about my day job and I boot up Metroid Prime on my GameCube and I attack Flaaghra, a giant sentient toxic plant, using a gratuitous number of missiles and bombs. The missiles are homing missiles that never miss. They make Flaaghra reel in towering pain. I kill Flaaghra, who keels over in shrieking death. As in most video games, the carcass conveniently dissolves. Unsatisfied, deprived of a target, I keep shooting missiles in all directions, a paroxysm of impotence.
When I get up the next morning, my left foot is messed up. I absorb this fact. Then I put on stiff boots to support my strained foot, and I limp back to my day job.
"Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent," Calvin Coolidge famously said. "The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." Like life itself, class is becoming a chain of alternating breakthroughs and defeats. The main thing is to keep showing up. Is it possible my day job, maybe most of life, is the same?
I understand my dad in a new way. I used to resent him for quenching my childish fun. But he didn't yell, "Shut up!" He didn't demand silence. We could have fun, we just had to do it in a way that didn't harm ourselves or others. I'm the one who decided, that meant stop entirely. No one has ever silenced me as effectively as I silence myself.
And that's exactly how I think of it. Not as "my career," "my vocation," or "my stepping stone to something wonderful." It's just my crappy day job. But even with that attitude, I care about what happens there. I feel heartsick because I joined an innovative company that now, four years later, bears all too strong a resemblance to a pointless joke. The company has been mismanaged for at least two years. We've squandered our technological lead, and companies we used to laugh at are about to lap us. We've just issued a press release to Wall Street explaining that we missed our quarterly earnings projections by millions of dollars, and thus are not profitable. The Street punishes our stock severely, driving it well below five dollars a share (when I hired in, it was around $80.00.).
We have a new CEO who promised not to change anything during his first 90 days on the property, so he could get his own sense of what's right about the company, what's wrong with it, and who's contributing to each. It's Day 100 now. The Chief Technical Officer has been fired. The Technical Publications department no longer reports to Engineering; now they're part of Technical Support. Everyone senses these are mere warning shots compared to what's to come. We feel besieged.
Here in the first decade of the new century, with the dot-bomb of 1999 fresh in our memories (and our resumes), no words strike more anxiety into the hearts of high-tech workers than "re-org," "downsizing," "restructuring," or "job search." When I interview candidates for writing and editing positions, some of them have been unemployed for 11 months. I wonder if I'll soon be joining them. My whole floor is tense and snappish. The middle managers who thrive on power are fighting to get more of it, assuming that will make them indispensable. The herd workers are pushing themselves to ridiculous, unsustainable levels of productivity, so as not to be the straggling elk who gets picked off. Everyone feels his or her job is at stake. Every conversation is Important. No perceived sleight is allowed to pass.
Sick of the tension, the other senior writer in Marketing quits without giving notice. Now on top of my Too Much To Do list, I'll have some of her tasks. And then today Microsoft released an unprecedented ten security bulletins in one day, seven of them critical. The team of security analysts I work with jump to warp speed as they assess the threat to Windows computers and rush to warn our subscribers as quickly as possible.
My company throws itself an emergency at least once a week. I've reached the point where I'm saying aloud around the office, "Not everything can be an emergency!" I have realized that we're working so hard that it would take two people to replace any one person on my team. And as long as we keep doing that, management has no reason to stop us. We thought by holding up well under pressure and achieving extraordinary things, we'd earn respect, perhaps a raise, and then adequate help. Instead, we're being regarded as "not broken" and thus not needing a fix. Working 55 hours a week is the New Normal. It ain't right. I cut out "early" (after a mere nine hours, no lunch) and make it to class as an act of defiance.
With my mood still on Simmer after a full day of Rolling Boil, I don't even find the yoga teacher amusing, even when I hear her tell her class to "move into Spinning Dog" and, later, "move your arms from Airplane into Jet." (If yoga is a "timeless discipline," this lady's got to be making it up as she goes along. Airplane? Jet? What's next, "move into iPod pose"?)
Instead, as tap class begins, Annette plays "Move Your Money" from Dulfer + Dulfer, the only saxophone act I know that undergirds its jazz riffs with electronica, house music, and rap. I pound the floor with my taps, purposely making loud sharp noises, but getting them as accurate as I can. After a day of fear and uncertainty, it is my non-verbal backlash, a way of throwing aside helplessness and taking authority. I am saying "I am here!" and "The beat is there!"
And something cool happens.
I start dancing really well. I am making crisp, clean tap sounds locked tight with the beat of the CD. Annette is pushing us tonight, to get a sense of how much we've learned. She tosses out instructions that used to throw me into a panic: "Now double-time!" "Keep doing it, only backwards!" Valerie and Debbie and I are taking it all in stride and keeping up.
Until this moment, I didn't realize that for all these weeks, I've been afraid of the floor. Or perhaps not afraid of the floor, but afraid of the noise my taps make on the floor. I don't know where the fear comes from. The best explanation I can think of is, when I was growing up with my big brother, every time we got the giggles or threw a Whiffle ball in the house or started a tickle fight, my mom would make us stop. And if we didn't stop, my dad would holler from the living room, "Keep it down to a dull roar!" That same phrase, every time. Whenever the kind of fun began that makes you lose track of yourself: "Keep it down to a dull roar!" This was such a common feature of my pre-school days, I didn't realize until much later that the phrase is inherently humorous, and my dad was leavening his command with gentle irony. It just meant to my little ears, Wild fun is wrong. Stop.
That thought drove deeper into my fabric than I realized. Tonight, in my anger, I broke through it when I didn't know it was there. No, I will not keep it down to a dull roar if I do not want to. In fact, if I so deem, I might possibly bellow, howl, shriek, or ululate. It is entirely up to me. Wow, it is really up to me! The guy in the mirror is smiling again. Something more than tap dance is happening to me.
Between exercises, Valerie whispers, "Wow, you've been practicing during the week, haven't you? It really shows!" When I shake my head, no, I haven't practiced at all, she won't believe me. "Well you're right on it tonight!" she states as we spread out for the next exercise. Every rock musician, every abstract painter is way ahead of me: sometimes you get better art from being a little angry.
This time, I am braced and ready for Hop. I want to face it. I survived it last week, and I will not let Hop dull my roar this week. Between last week and this week I have read about this guy, and inspired by the amputee tap dancer, I am no longer afraid. Sure enough, toward the end of class when Annette trots out the hardest stuff, we go into lots of Hops.
I can't do them.
Early in the exercise, I land on my left foot in a way that makes it go twang. I cheat on the next few Hops, never really leaving the ground; and finally on the last few, I do nothing, simply waiting for the beat to pass and resuming the exercise after the Hop.
Regardless of whether my attitude is good or bad, I am simply too heavy. I hate being reminded of this. I hate the inescapable reality of it. To comfort myself, I stop by KFC on the way home. This is such a classic loser gesture that when I get home, I don't blog, I don't read, I don't clean house, I do nothing constructive. I think about my day job and I boot up Metroid Prime on my GameCube and I attack Flaaghra, a giant sentient toxic plant, using a gratuitous number of missiles and bombs. The missiles are homing missiles that never miss. They make Flaaghra reel in towering pain. I kill Flaaghra, who keels over in shrieking death. As in most video games, the carcass conveniently dissolves. Unsatisfied, deprived of a target, I keep shooting missiles in all directions, a paroxysm of impotence.
When I get up the next morning, my left foot is messed up. I absorb this fact. Then I put on stiff boots to support my strained foot, and I limp back to my day job.
"Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent," Calvin Coolidge famously said. "The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." Like life itself, class is becoming a chain of alternating breakthroughs and defeats. The main thing is to keep showing up. Is it possible my day job, maybe most of life, is the same?
I understand my dad in a new way. I used to resent him for quenching my childish fun. But he didn't yell, "Shut up!" He didn't demand silence. We could have fun, we just had to do it in a way that didn't harm ourselves or others. I'm the one who decided, that meant stop entirely. No one has ever silenced me as effectively as I silence myself.
OK, life sets you back. Who said you have to take the hint and give up? If you persist, if you press through your fears, you can at least keep up a dull roar. ##
posted by ScottPinzonTest at 1:27 AM
1 Comments:
Marvelous post. I really hear the struggle here, and somehow in the struggle is beauty and redemption. It's when we apathatically disengage that we're beat, not when we struggle. And of course you're right that life is full of both choosing to engage and apathetically disengaging. I guess the important thing is not to walk away forever--not to remain in despair or cynicism for too long.
"Press on" is a powerful phrase. Another comes from Morgan Freeman's character in Shawshank Redemption: "pressure and time." All Tim Robbins's character needed to free himself from his prison cell was pressure and time.
Living in this way of "pressure and time" is a long slog; I don't think there's any way to get around that. The alternative--the way of apathetic disengagement--is easier. Maybe it even produces more happiness. But I think we all want something deeper than mere happiness. We want a joy that has walked through and touched suffering, and has come out all right on the other side. We want a scarred joy. Anything else feels cheap and artificial.
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