vocation...

My old cogitating friend Nick Baker suggests, "Once you decide on a profession, you riffle back through your past to find early random indications of a leaning toward your chosen interest and you nurture them into a false prominence..." [u and i, 99]

As much as I love my office, I can't say that I have always desired to be an Administrative Assistant. Grocery Bagger, Horse Trainer, Librarian, Teacher, and Movie Director, yes. Perhaps all of them indicate a desire to apply order to chaos, to help develop an intricate structure out of lowly beginnings.

For Baker and I, this nurturing is relentlessly circular. We are Thinkers and Orderers and Creators [one of us more skilled and well-paid, naturally], therefore we think about Thinking, we order the Order, and we create more Creators [or at least, he writes books and i encourage more appreciative readers]. If he were something other than a self-aware and self-depreciating writer, would he even consider the false or real search through the lumber of his mind for evidence of long-standing childhood card-cataloging? He thinks about falsely making connections within the Two Roads Diverged and ends up making real connections. Unending layers!

I love the playful edge to his prosal wanderings. His deep awareness of the light, floating bits of existence constantly feeds my own neuroses. In fact, he has enflamed my desire to study something I'll never actually learn simply to experience the joyous act of manipulating knowledge in its physical form:

"Above the single candy-stripe of the magenta line I wrote down the quotation, as well as I remembered it; below, on the blue pin-striping, was the source, if I knew it, and the date and time I made the card, and what number it was in the total sequence, and any other notes I felt called on to make. I saw myself...flipping through them at high speed in spare moments, like a language student studying for a final; laying them all out side by side on the rug and playing some sort of game of concentration with them. I very much wanted them to become dog-eared. I wanted to get good at wristily doubling the rubber band around them when I had finished with them for the day. But I half knew at the outset that they would prove less useful than the initial pleasure of filling them out would lead me to expect..." [u and i 99-100].

Ahhh, there's nothing like the smell of introspective abstraction. Gotta get me some notecards, notecards.