On Fresh Starts, Growing Up, and Changing Expectations

1999's "Office Space" is either my favorite movie to loathe or my least favorite movie to love. It is maybe one of the five funniest movies I have ever watched (along with "Supertroopers," "Caddyshack," "Animal House," and "Amistad") and is painstakingly accurate in how it depicts the very worst aspect of very many of our lives -- that is, work.

(*ASIDE: 1999 was, by any set of standards, a fantastic year for cinema. Using Wikipedia as a guide, below is a partial and alphabetical list of good-to-great movies that debuted in 1999: "American Beauty," "Being John Malkovich," "The Boondock Saints," "The Cider House Rules," "Dogma," "Girl, Interrupted," "Liberty Heights," which is the most underrated movie on the list and perhaps the second-best piece of drama ever set in Baltimore, "Man on the Moon," "The Matrix," the aforementioned "Office Space," "The Sixth Sense," "South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut," and "The Virgin Suicides". You may not agree that every movie on this list qualifies as good-to-great, but I've just listed 13 movies and if we can even agree on ten of them, that's fucking amazing. I can't think of ten movies I've seen over the past three years that I've liked as much as I enjoyed the above 13. That's how amazing of a year 1999 was for cinema.)

Anyway, getting back to "Office Space." I can only watch this movie during times of my life when I am not actively a member of the American workforce. Why, you ask? Because it's just too damned accurate, I respond. Between the literal references to things that suck in the workplace (e.g., printers that don't work, commutes that don't work) and the more metaphysical references to things that suck in the workplace (e.g., that vague feeling that time is just slipping by and we're just getting older and there's not much that can be changed about the situation), "Office Space" just plain gets it right.

Here's the kicker, though. I think I really, really like my new job. I have an office the size of which I realistically shouldn't deserve for another 10-15 years. I have real responsibility and occasionally assist on "client calls," where I'm expected to exert actual expertise and answer statistical queries with precision and aplomb. Even my commute is not that bad. But I guarantee you that if "Office Space" showed up on the TV (or if my girlfriend, with whom I now officially reside, were to pop her copy into the DVD player), I would have to turn away.

Because "Office Space" is too real, and reality is something that we all have to turn away from on occasion.

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(*ASIDE: For the first time in the history of this blog, I was just disrupted by my live-in girlfriend; she walked into the spare bedroom, where the Internet is presently stored until we obtain a router, to pick out some clothes. Having to roll my chair out of the way, I did my best Jack Nicholson impression and faux-screamed 'I'm writing!'. She immediately knew what I was talking about ("The Shining," of course). I heart my girlfriend.)

Getting back to this whole reality thing, however. I am a pretty firm believer that reality is something that we actively construct. Our opinions about things, our attitudes, our feelings; all of these things are interactions between our brains and the immediate environment. The reality of my present moment is that one month ago, I was a graduate student of Psychology, living in Massachusetts. Right now, I am a Project Director for a marketing research firm, living in New Jersey and learning how to act like an adult, essentially from the ground-up.

For instance, I didn't know that I still had to cuddle. It's not that I don't like cuddling, as it were. It's just that, for the most part in my life, laying in bed and cuddling was something that I did because there was no space to stretch out and watch the NBA Finals on ABC. But no, my girlfriend still expects me to cuddle, pretty much all the time.

Also, living with your girlfriend is more or less like having a roommate (except much better, for obvious reasons). There will still be dishes in the sink and garbage to be taken out. I've learned that I can be the garbage taker-outer, and my girlfriend can take care of different, other chores! Isn't this lovely!

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My point is this: Because we construct our own respective realities, we have enormous power over deciding what we love and what we don't love. Some things are stable; for instance, I've loved my girlfriend for a number of years and I don't think this will change any time soon. Other things aren't; in five weeks, I may strongly loathe my job, for instance.

Since January, when I decided to leave graduate school, I started to love the *idea* of my life as it's presently constituted. As an immediate consequence, I began to dislike the life I was living at the time. Looking back, I have no clue how I made it through two years of graduate school, removed for the most part from the people in New Jersey I care for so much. (*NOTE: I think a big thing that helped was knowing people in Massachusetts who cared for me a great deal.)

But ideas are not the same as reality. Ideas are projections, and they are prone to being inaccurate. I consciously understood that my *ideas* were attached to long commutes, printers that don't work, and bosses like Lumbergh who may want me to come in on Saturdays. But life is good at the moment, reality is what I make of it, and right now I am completely digging reality.

Stay classy out there.