Live To Work vs. Work To Live

So I'm at work doing my regular routine; stumble in late, but try to swarm in like a covert operative trying to evade being seen by those who hold me down. I'm working tirelessly; checking my e-mails, voice-mails, spam, and numerous forwards from "friends" that claim I must take some time out of my day to forward an e-mail with one of ten horrid subject lines--none of which I want to use--but I must use to prevent the world from being alien-raped by a meteorite at the strike of noon. So, I go ahead and carry through with my civic duty and forward the e-mail to thwart the world from it's ineviteable demise, with the subject line, "I had a sex change!" (You would have chosen that one too if you saw the other ones I had to choose from).

Okay, so that last part didn't really happen but you know something that did happen today? I realized something: It is not fucking normal to be in a cube all day, endlessly staring at an extremely bright 17 inch screen, and collating like there's no tomorrow. Now, the epiphany came when I used the last of my box of staples that I just opened 7 months ago. That wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that, in that time period, I've used FIVE-THOUSAND staples! I see something incredibly wrong with that.

I sat there in shock, and I finally said to myself, Self: I'm not going to count my existence staple by staple whilst the world zooms past and leaves me helplessly crawling behind in the dust. Is this really what I'm going to be doing until I die? How many more papercuts, e-mails, boxes of staples must I weather before I finally realize that this isn't living?

I tried reasoning with myself. I told myself that I need money to live life. That's true, but if you think about it, that's just surviving. You need money to survive--not to feel alive. That sounds ideal but not many people get paid to do what they love. Even if they are paid a pittance, they still love what they do because they are fulfilled by doing what they love. We're all envious of those who are doing what they love. I hope one day I figure out what that is. Maybe one day I'll learn to love receiving hate mail from the Account Executives and RUSH requests from brokers--or even stapling my index finger to the back of my thumb with staple number 4,235. In the meantime, I will just carry on with my aimless existence and drag the world down with me as I go.

Damn you people that know exactly what you want to do. Damn you to HELL. I'm just going to try out for American Idol. At this point I would kill just to make the out-takes.