If a cow ever got the chance...

Lately my job is an exercise in being kind. Which is something I'm not especially good at, so it's all actually OK.

But for example, what I've been doing all week so far (and on and off for about three months before that) is working on this book about bodybuilding (or, as my book would have it, "reaching the dizzying and frightening heights of your size and strength potential.") [I promised myself I'd stop quoting from it, because it could get me fired, but I just can't help myself. I had to delete my much earlier entry about this book because I quoted it at great length and made several witty remarks which unfortunately were utterly stupid and transparent.]

Anyway, what I have been doing specifically is e-mailing the author, over and over, trying to get him to get this photographer to send me a release form saying that I have permission to reprint his twenty-year-old photo of the prejudging round of the 1981 Mr. Olymp*a contest. (Don't ask me why I don't just e-mail the photographer myself, it's all bureaucracy.) Because of various snafus and uncooperative people, this one minor issue has actually taken up most of the last two days. Although I have to get this release for legal reasons--the book can't come out without it--I don't give a flying fuck, otherwise. I think bodybuilding is possibly the dumbest subculture in the world, and this book is a particularly dumb example of its genre, and who could possibly care about one unremarkable day in one best-unexplored subculture, twenty years ago?

But my job at this point is to pretend that I care very much, that it's a life-and-death matter whether I eventually get this piece of paper from this photographer, who (the author tells me) has said he will send it. Expending so much effort to act like I care about this has made me wonder how I'd feel if I actually did care: if I was one of the people who do care about this book. If I was the author. I mean, this could be the most asinine book ever published by anyone, but the guy who wrote it doesn't feel that way. He's excited for it to come out. He's happy with it! The people in the photo are probably still proud of their achievements, you know? And to me it is all a vast forest of meh.

I've begun to realize that nothing matters too much. I know that sounds like something a nihilistic seventh grader would say, but right now it's a freeing concept. None of my little issues with C or my weight or whether I will ever be able to unpack all the boxes from when I moved, are really that important in the larger scheme. But to me these feel like life-or-death problems (even the boxes, sometimes). So I have to be kind. I'm trying to put myself in this author's shoes and remember that practically everything, no matter how stupid, is so important to someone. Okay, done preaching now.

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