Wed, 10 Dec 2003
The gift that fills the emptiness within
My company threw us wage slaves a catered Christmas Lunch today. And of
course, we got our seasonal gift of meat: A Pillar's gift box,
featuring some cheese, a box of crackers and cookies, but largely,
meat.
This is mostly all well and good. The meat will find itself a good home
though perhaps very little of it will be my home. The ham will probably
go to ecogrrl and clvrmnky who will almost
certainly prepare it for some sort of holiday meal which I will attend,
for example. The Christmas gift of
meat symbolises a lot of the negative feelings I get from my company.
Not that I am in general a disgruntled and unhappy employee, but here ya
go.
In my mind, there is a very conformist atmosphere about my workplace. It is
in no way mentioned, but I always get the feeling that you must
fit in, at my place of employ. Which is really bizarre, because I know
of no larger collection of free spirits, misfits and generally speaking
perpendicular people then where I work. Nevertheless, it seems that
the aphorism "A family that plays together, stays together" has been taken
to heart a little too strongly. There is some pressure to attend
(all) corporate events, and to have a good time with your work mates.
The problem with this is that, sure there are work mates that I like to
spend time with. These people have become my friends. But I spend time
with them, whether or not Work mandates it. I don't want to be forced
(even if not explicitly so) to spend time with people I have at best a
casual acquaintance with.
So how does this all come back to the box of meat? Well, simply, giving
meat to someone feels like a very aggressive way of pushing one's own
views on the recipient. Most specifically, it feels like my Work is
telling me "Vegetarianism is bad. Non-Christian points of view are
bad. Here, you should eat Christmas meat."
On a more general level, I can't escape almost a similar quality from
Work, that in a lot of ways, I should think what they want me to think,
and not worry about it.
I think that my view probably comes across as a little extreme in this
medium. I do appreciate my company, and I believe they treat me rather
well, on the whole. I'm not a vegetarian, and I do celebrate Christmas.
So why do I react so strongly? I don't know.
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A Sense of Newness
Alright, so I've been really bad about updating my blog in any shape or
form. I noticed last night that the fine folks at pair.com now have a bunch of new services,
including a blogging script. So, why not?
We'll see how this goes. No art just yet. I may get back into
that too, but for now, I'm just as happy to just have some outlet
for typing random things that stroll across my brain from time to
time.
Blosxom's newer incarnations seem to
make that relatively easy, to boot. So, here goes nothing.
Update: It looks like it's fairly easy to incorporate my old
entries. I'm going to spend a bit of time and get that done tonight.
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