Being the job

I used to work at an art gallery for a semester in school booking tours, mailing flyers, amongst a bunch of misc. other things.  It was pretty cool because when I went there I knew nothing about art whatsoever (it was an educational asst. position, no knowledge required) and when I left, I did.  When I was told how to do my job the very first thing I did was spend an entire day in my office recording the outgoing message on my phone, that part was suuuuper important, totally required a day of work.

After about a week of the ins and outs of all the technical stuff on how to input things and merging documents for printing our mailing lists, I asked my boss if she'd like me to write up a manual on how to do my job for my predecessors.   I didn't mean it as a douchey thing it's just I figured it would really save a lot of time.  So I did that.. and I put a clipart on the front that was the guy reaching for the stars!  A little ironic because my entire list of responsibilities took me about 30 mins to complete and either nobody wanted to point that out before or enjoyed having a black hole of time in the middle of the day.  Thankfully my boss found some other projects for me to complete which was nice.  I was able to contribute a couple papers on some history of their outdoor installations since Hamilton has lots of stuff like that to learn about and I get curious about those things.  I spent a lot of time getting to explore the exhibits.. one of which was the Hitchcock exhibit which included playing the movie Psycho on a continuous 8 hour loop.  Neat right?  I remember I designed some activities for the kids who visit the gallery and prepared a slide show presentation for some reason, too.  Maybe she ran out of tasks during my semester there but it kept me interested and that was pretty great as far as work goes.

Maybe I do sound douchey, I don't really know, but the truth is I've never been good at "being the job".  I definitely wouldn't call myself any sort of overachiever, uhh.. more like a consumer of interests who is competitive about random things.  I don't get it it's just my personality and there is not a thing I can change about that as much as someone who loves the opposite could change that, if they even wanted to.  That person would at least be extremely efficient!  I'm not entitled to a life doing only things that interest me and I know that, I'm a grown up, but I still have to say... Self, if I have to do these dishes I am going to DO THE SHIT OUT OF THEM.  The dishes have to really need me.  Kinda like my vague interest in Pintrest vs Wanelo. I don't even know how to count the many things I've been suckered into doing based solely on the nagging idea that I don't see anyone doing it as awesome as I would be doing it, if I cared.  Ah crap, NOW I CARE.  And there you go, I just explained the story of my life right there.

I thought of this as a post when I made the valentines for Ethan's class yesterday.  The already good and simple idea of hershey kisses in a bag (printable link) just wasn't good enough when I went to print them out because "you know, it'd be cuter to put blue Cookies & Cream hershey kisses instead of red to match the label, so I am going to spend an hour in photoshop changing the colours because now it just doesn't look right."  As if the candy will taste different.. I mean, the colours just don't make sense how can I eat this??  

If you're questioning why it took me an hour to do this it is because I couldn't find the right blue colours to match, so I took a picture of the actual candy I had and needed to carefully colour match from the pixels.   Waste. of. time.  If you don't count my personal sense of satisfaction obviously, which most jobs don't.

Aren't they so cute in blue though???

I suppose I am either lucky, or it was flat out necessary that I have a job where "being the job".. the one I both get paid for and being a regular Mom to my boys is a) pretty fun b) my personal satisfaction does count and c) wasting time is fine because I create all the tasks.

Oh and I win at class valentines these were totally the best :)  

Thank goodness I'm done this post because this wasn't one of my tasks today, of course.