2007-02-11 - 3:58 p.m.
I get excited whenever I hear that someone is passionate about or loves their job in something that I could never ever get into. For example, a friend of a friend of mine loves to research iguanas so she travels around the world looking for iguanas. You know what? I would hate that. I would hate that. Or Irene, the girl from the train, who really wants to work in a job where she can implode buildings. I would not like that either. My friend Amy is passionate about marketing, a career that would make me the most miserable man alive.
The whole sick reason that I get so happy that other people love stuff that I don’t isn’t because “the world would be so boring if everyone loved the same things.” I actually don’t think that statement is entirely true—it would make conversations a lot less awkward, that’s for sure. The sick reason I love it is because statistically speaking, everything in the world has potential to be loved or appreciated and there is always going to be a percentage of the population that wants to have that thing or work with that thing.
What it comes down to with me is that I am a guy who will volunteer for something when no one else will or wants to. Mostly because I hate asking a task of people and no one is willing to help out—that makes me feel uncomfortable. So when other people ask a group of people for something, I’ll volunteer to do it because it has to get at some point and it might as well be me, right?
The scenario that my brain is literally thinking of all the time where the two above paragraphs collide is the apocalypse. Imagine that one day, 7/8ths of the world’s population is destroyed and we have to rebuild societies all over again, so we have to have a big conference. At some point, we have to redistribute jobs to everyone in a big meeting hall. “Ok, you guys—quiet down, now. Now what we need is someone to do physical therapy? Who’s going to be a physical therapist? We need a couple of people to do it, so don’t be shy!” And if we all loved the same thing, no one would raise their hands, I would get squeamish by the uncomfortable silence, and then I would raise my hand, asking the person next to me, “What the fuck? I hate physical therapy! Why am I doing this?” And then everyone else would get to do whatever they wanted, e.g. Be Paris Hilton or be Nintendo Wii Test Pilots or something way more amazing than telling someone to bend their knee gently and yes, yes, they can do it.
But if everyone proportionally likes everything, I have no need to worry that nuclear war is going to destroy the entire population of people who want to do a certain occupation or activities. Like, “All right, who’s going to be into bestiality? We always need about a .5% section of the populace that’s into goats and stuff, so who’s it going to be?” In our wonderful, multi-faceted world, I don’t have to volunteer for bestiality (or to be a dry cleaner or a dancer or a warehouse manager)—other people are DYING to do those things. Everything is already covered—we are so safe in the event of an apocalypse. We’re genetically safe!
So after 7/8ths of the population is killed by nuclear bombs or global warming or Dick Cheney’s Runaway Robot Revolution, I can still do whatever I want and the other 1% of the people who like interviewing themselves when nobody’s home can volunteer with me, atom-bomb-melted hands up in the air.
