the phones, they keep calling me
i'm gonna make this short and sweet.
as the need for funds grows larger and larger, i decide that working is probably not such a bad idea. an e-mail circulated through the school that was offering a position calling alumni and asking them for money. i apply, i get the job, and now i'm back on the phones, like i never left them.
i go into an alter-ego when the phone is up against my ear, especially when i have to pretend to care about someone that i've never talked to before. but sometimes they catch you off guard and you start to actually care.
i don't know if this is legal or not, but i'm gonna tell you a story.
i tried calling one alum who graduated a long time ago. his wife answered the phone and i asked for him. she said it was funny because i was like the 14th call she'd gotten that day asking for her husband. she assumed i wouldn't get the humor of the situation and then proceeded to tell me that it was funny because he was now spending his few remaining weeks in a nursing home. all of a sudden it dawned on me that it was funny because this gentleman perhaps doesn't usually get so many calls, and it's only when he moves into a nursing home to die that people want to ask him for money. that was a little depressing.
the fund-raiser in me thought it would perhaps be a good time to suggest making a donation in his name (as she had already stated how fond he was of his time at our school), but then a flash of humanity came over me and i made what i considered to be a moral decision - to not ask her for money. granted, i'm not going on any humanitarian aid trips and devoting my life to saving others, but given my circumstances, i think i acted appropriately. i would say more at this point, but this happened a few days ago, and suzanne demanded my attention when i wanted to blog about it while it was still raw. any complaints about the brevity of this emotional story should be directed to her.
another alum told me that the only parallel to going to grad school that exist in nature is when "lemmings go to the north sea." what an asshole.
life, death, work, education, love and lemmings...not a bad week.
as the need for funds grows larger and larger, i decide that working is probably not such a bad idea. an e-mail circulated through the school that was offering a position calling alumni and asking them for money. i apply, i get the job, and now i'm back on the phones, like i never left them.
i go into an alter-ego when the phone is up against my ear, especially when i have to pretend to care about someone that i've never talked to before. but sometimes they catch you off guard and you start to actually care.
i don't know if this is legal or not, but i'm gonna tell you a story.
i tried calling one alum who graduated a long time ago. his wife answered the phone and i asked for him. she said it was funny because i was like the 14th call she'd gotten that day asking for her husband. she assumed i wouldn't get the humor of the situation and then proceeded to tell me that it was funny because he was now spending his few remaining weeks in a nursing home. all of a sudden it dawned on me that it was funny because this gentleman perhaps doesn't usually get so many calls, and it's only when he moves into a nursing home to die that people want to ask him for money. that was a little depressing.
the fund-raiser in me thought it would perhaps be a good time to suggest making a donation in his name (as she had already stated how fond he was of his time at our school), but then a flash of humanity came over me and i made what i considered to be a moral decision - to not ask her for money. granted, i'm not going on any humanitarian aid trips and devoting my life to saving others, but given my circumstances, i think i acted appropriately. i would say more at this point, but this happened a few days ago, and suzanne demanded my attention when i wanted to blog about it while it was still raw. any complaints about the brevity of this emotional story should be directed to her.
another alum told me that the only parallel to going to grad school that exist in nature is when "lemmings go to the north sea." what an asshole.
life, death, work, education, love and lemmings...not a bad week.
posted by R. Peeps at 1:25 PM
3 Comments:
Wait, he was only gone to a nursing home and you had trouble asking his wife for something? Geez you'd never make it as a journalist. I'd've been all like, "hey, yeah, tell me about it. What kind of guy was he?" and then I'd get a story out of her. Now if he was dead I might have backed off. But if he was dead and I was calling her there was likely a story to be sucked from her.
And the two callers you mention meet in absolutly union by their seemingly diametrically opposed comments...long and laconic, humanity and cynicism, seriousness and humor...and grad school is nothing more than a lemming journey north, and the lemming journey north is nothing more than death, and death forces you to disaknowledge the tyranny of money, and the tyranny of money sends you to grad school, and it all meets in a horrible masturbatory circle, like that snake that devours its own tail, which is absurd and pointless, but beautiful too, and ancient cultures make this snake into transcendent symbols for infinity, and it is on the cover of that book that the little kid read in the attic in The Never Ending Story, and it is never ending, and it is true...
...but at least, in between, you feel.
e
ps - and to Andrew (above)...he did get a story out of it...
Pfft... yeah. A story. Published on a blog. Nobody pays for blogs. Therefore it's not real writing.
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