Two days ago B. sent me an email from work. “I was just recollecting two dreams I had last night,” she said, and I paraphrase. “One was that I was climbing up a ladder to climb into a window in a house. The piece of the house I grabbed tore loose, and I fell really far, but I was fine. Another is that you quit your job, and I was upset.”
Yesterday morning I realized, suddenly and to my surprise, that the reason I keep binging on box-cookies at work (and by box-cookies I mean the kind you buy in a supermarket, in a box, like Peek Freans and Oreos, etc.), is because I’m stressed at work.
I don’t have a particularly stressful job, and my work environment is relatively pleasant (especially compared to the overall university environment, which can be quite toxic). The people I work with are friendly, if a little stand-off-ish. But still, there it is. I’m not sure exactly what stresses me out about it, but regardless, I am stressed when I am at work.
The same day that B. wrote me that email, I took my guitar to a luthier.* Being in Nicole Alosinac’s workshop was pretty amazing. There were beautiful bits of guitar hanging up all over the place. Nicole inspected my guitar from all angles, she peered down the length of the neck, she thumped my instrument on the back, she ran her fingers along every fret, plucking at each string along the way to hear how the beast played. She slipped a long narrow thing into the body of the guitar after she removed the strings, and then flapped it open. It was a mirror hinged into a triptych, narrow enough to slide into a guitar and then flap open so that with the help of a small flashlight one could view the underside of the top of the instrument. Nicole invited me to look at the inside of my guitar. It was amazing: a delicate lattice of beams bracing the rainbow arch that is the top of the guitar, a flat expanse, a single slice of tree.
Later, I was thinking about Nicole’s work, and wondering whether I would enjoy being a luthier. The thing about building and repairing guitars is that the work is the same, over and over again, and yet different every time. It is a craft. Nothing about my work is like that. My work is different all the time; I have an overarching goal that I am aiming towards, and I chip away, trying one approach and another, seeing if I can make a dent in the culture of teaching at the university, and support some folks in their own teaching endeavors in the meantime. That’s my job, and writing about it in that way excites me, actually. It sounds pretty damn good to me. But the reality is slow and progress is uncertain and circuitous. It is intellectually challenging much of the time, which is wonderful except that it sucks my creative energy away from writing my book. And my job requires a highly refined ability to delay gratifiction. I’m just not excelling at that at the moment.
Work that is the same, over and over, but different every time. That is craft, and it sounds so refreshing it makes me want to cry with relief to think of it. I thought about craft again when B. went to get her hair cut yesterday: it is the same thing! Cutting hair, it is just the same process over and over again, each time another head, and each time a new work of art, but using the same basic skills and tools. I went to the dentist this morning and I thought hmm, again, same thing. Every filling is the same, but then again, each filling is different.
When I was an undergraduate student, I worked at an infant research lab. Yes, we did research on infants. Specifically on infant speech processing. The main part of my job was to sit across a small table from the infant (who was in the parent’s lap) in the experiment room, and keep the infant just barely engaged enough to keep its head facing me. The experiment involved training the infant to turn its head in reaction to particular speech sounds, so I had to maintain the infant’s interest so that a head-turn would be obviously in reaction to a sound, as opposed to the general bobbly-headedness of an infant looking at every nook and cranny of the room. At the same time, I couldn’t get the infant too interested in me; the infant still needed to be able to attend to the speech sounds emitted by a loudspeaker to the left. It was the same thing, every time, and yet every baby was so different. Some babies needed three wind-up toys hopping around on the table, plus two spinning plastic rings, or they would be looking around the room, looking at the mom, looking at the ceiling… Other babies were so focused that even my hand on the table was too riveting. I loved the challenge of figuring out the babies; I got so that I could get most babies at the right level of attention within the first 30 seconds.
I don’t want that particular job again, but there are qualities of that work that I covet. The craft of it. The possibility of attaining competence, even expertise, without being bored. (OK, I was bored at that job sometimes, but being in the room with the babies was the most rewarding part. And it was a pretty good undergrad sort of job).
When I got B.’s email two days ago, I laughed at her dream and emailed her back. “Don’t worry, I’m not planning to quit my job!”
I’m still not planning to quit my job. But maybe I should pay close attention to B.’s dreams. And to other sorts of craft-work that I see around me.
*A luthier is a maker of stringed instruments. A guitar craftsperson.
