Image Crafting Vs Honesty in an Era of Inauthenticity

"Oh hey, Chris.  How's the school year going so far?"

This is the question I get asked by acquaintances who don't know my story, yet.

They aren't meaning to bring up a sore subject. They know I am a was a teacher, and it's casual small talk.

In case you don't know, I recently lost my job. This is nothing new, as it's happened five times in eight years. I'm used to being "laid off," or whatever it is they consider it, when they don't extend the contracts of temporary employees.

Before this last time, I was merely the victim of circumstance. Jobs had to be cut to make budget, and I was always low man on the totem pole.

He got pwned 

But this last time, I'd had enough. I re-interviewed for the job I already had, and was passed over, again, by a nobody.  And I don't mean nobody in the derogatory sense; I'm sure this person is a somebody, but unknown to the district before the interview. Not like me. I was a known commodity.  A commodity, that apparently wasn't paying dividends.

And the passive aggressive anger of eight years of being bypassed and used by a district that moved me around like a pawn that it intended to sacrifice, led me to throw-up verbally on my Facebook page.

It was unprofessional and childish and honest. And I paid the price for it. The district found out, and nearly blacklisted me for my "outburst." I now have to walk on egg-shells around the people who didn't hire me, if I want to substitute teach in the district. I need to substitute to make ends meet and this is my only district that knows who I am. I am dependent on the very hand that struck me down.  

And it is so f---ing degrading to my soul. These were my co-workers, my equals.  We collaborated on projects, shared materials, learned from each other, and now, I'm on the outside. And I've never felt so humiliated in all my life.

Those words are hard to write. It's hard to admit that I have feelings. That I feel like a failure. That I'm angry. I'm 35- years-old. I shouldn't be unemployed, shouldn't be an outsider, shouldn't still be looking for what I haven't found yet.


Five years ago, I would've never said a word. I would've acted like it was all okay. I think that's why I was put on blood pressure medicine, back then. I pretended that everything was okay. That I'm okay with being pissed on, and I became more and more acidic internally.

---------------------------------------------

There's a term called image crafting. Where people use social media to create a carefully crafted version of themselves that is more appealing than what they really are.  You know these people...

*Their marriages are perfect, and their sex lives are documented by Eastern healing gurus.

They look like Janice, the
guitarist Muppet. 

*Their house is amazing and spotless even with their super creepy hairband-like Afghan Hound dog.
*Somehow they look 45% better in every photo then you've ever seen them in real life.
*Their children are better at everything, literally everything, than your own (or you, for that matter).
*They just ran the Everest 10K with the help of a sherpa.
*They are happier, in every post, than Ellen Degeneres in a celebrity dance off.

A salad should be at least 90% green.  That's my rule.  

*Their garden picked coriander, kale, blackcurrant, and onion compote "dinner" pics almost look edible.
*They're always posting from unique spots like Guantanamo Bay, Fallujah, or Pyongyang...and it looks amazing. Clearly they are LIVING LIFE!
*It was partially because of their job, that those American doctors survived ebola.

I've been guilty of it. We all have.

It's hard not to brag about feeding kale intravenously to Nepalese ebola patients right after finishing the K2-5K.  Believe me, it's hard not posting a picture of me doing this in this blog.

Except that I'm not doing anything remotely epic. I'm eating a lot of Doritos and playing hours of Clash-of-Clans on my iPad.  Those pictures aren't good for my image.  Neither are posts with the hashtags #fightingoffdepression or #prayforme.

Somehow, we've turned honesty into a bad word. We've turned straightforwardness into a negative work-force quality. We don't like hearing bad news from people we know, but it's the first thing we look for in the news, so we can judge the rich and famous. #howdareyouRayRice.

And it's phony as hell. And I'm not playing that game anymore.

I'm too damn old to be a fake.  I'm too damn old to care about my image anymore. I'm going to write honestly about the crap and the kudos. I have a fantastic wife, and good friends, an average home with an annoying dog, and I love my kids, even if they don't appear to be the next Tiger Woods of anything yet. And my professional life sucks. I don't know if I'll ever get out of debt.

So you take the good with the bad. So I'm done being a teacher, and it hurts to talk about.

But God's got something else for me.  It just currently isn't paying the bills or giving me much comfort. And if you aren't comfortable reading about it, or talking to me about it, then we probably weren't friends in the first place.

And now that I got that off my chest. I'm ready to be funny again...just right after I do this last Clash of Clans raid.

The Building Blocks of Disillusionment

If you've read my blog before my current long hiatus, you'll know I'm kind of a Lego nerd.  

The photo is too far away to see the suck

Well a few months back, I was visiting family in Bellingham, WA. and walked into a hipster-freindly antique mall.  Even my wife was enjoying herself, which is amazing because she absolutely hates the smell of musty old stuff.  I, on the other hand, love playing pop-culture anthropologist with all the neat stuff from the turn of the 20th century and beyond.  

In the midst of all the refurbished farm equipment and oil and gas signs was a corner filled with toys from my dad's era. I saw a familiar shaped cylinder that I would've swore was Tinker Toys...but no, it was a little known toy called American Plastic Bricks.  

Not Lego, or even K'nex or Kre-O or Mega Bloks, but AMERICAN Plastic Bricks.  

I removed the Mason jar-like lid and inspected the contents. They appeared all there. I gladly paid the eight dollars for this American treasure.  Even my daughters were excited, because they under packed toys for the mini-vacation. Who doesn't like building blocks? 

But it was fool's gold. There was nothing patriotic about these bricks. Unless you consider cheapness, bad engineering and frustration of 1980s Ford and GM vehicles--American ideals, then yes, this was American.

Being the most popular car in Venezuela is like winning "Best Smile" in
a Methadone clinic.  

"These are horrible, Dad," my daughter Lily explained within 30 seconds of me dumping the contents on the table.  

Horrible doesn't begin to describe it. It's as if all the Baby Boomer kids who were pushed into the burgeoning career of plastics but were D-students in plastics college all converged to the American Plastic Brick company.  

Some of the bricks might have been shale; or insect exoskeletons. They disintegrated upon attaching the pieces together. Most wouldn't even snap together...and if they did, they refused to get along or stay together for more than a few seconds. I wonder how many engineering and/or architects learned how to build with this crap? It does, however, possibly, explain my father's remodeling improvisations.

Some businesses, like the American Plastic Brick Co. deserve to go belly-up. Some plastics people are in the wrong field. There are better products, better jobs, out there, so...

"I will make this work, even if I have to Krazy Glue it!"

I'm done teaching. The bricks were stacked against me, and I couldn't force the pieces together even with Krazy Glue. Bad timing, bad engineering, bad schooling, I don't know...I just...I just can't do it anymore. I seemed to be in the wrong place at the right time, but now, for the first time...

I wasn't wanted.

I can understand budget cuts and being low man on the totem pole, and missing application deadlines, and having HR place "pet projects" in my place. But I was always promised something...always told I had a place. Everyone said it was the next retirement, the next opening...etc.   I was like that specialty Lego piece that is really interesting to play with, but only fits one exclusive set.

They did this to me for eight years.  Five years as a temporary part-time teacher, two as a long term substitute, and multiple filling-in-the-gaps during all those stints. I taught everything they asked. Of course my Lego coloring never seemed to fit the set.  Gov't, 7th grade block, Middle school computers class, Freshman English, 6th grade Title Reading...

But last year I was in my corresponding set. Teaching high school English and being the technology coordinator for the building. Everyone said I was doing a fantastic job. For once, I felt like my time had finally come. They had finally looked at the instructions and put me in my proper place.

But like a toddler sibling coming into the room and destroying your Lego models, my teaching world was destroyed overnight. I interviewed. Again. (District policy is that temporary positions are always reopened at the beginning of the next year). They knew my history.  And...and...they gave it to someone else.

Who, ironically, turned them down days later.  I got a district form e-mail telling me I didn't get the job. Like I was some unknown applicant fresh from college.

And the indignation and anger and frustration and pain...after eight years...caused me to break character and voice my opinion on Facebook. I was done. I was done teaching. And I vented some very calculated, but not personal, words on my OWN Facebook page.

But the job was going to reopen, because the hired applicant turned the job down.

But somehow my Facebook post had made it to the eyes of some higher ups (whom I'm not friends with). And this Facebook post proved that I was now "unreliable and untrustworthy," in their words. Two qualities I've spent my entire life trying to prove I am.

I was not granted an interview.  But I was called, that very same day, by HR offering me a long-term sub job at the district alternative school. Like I'm some booty-call teaching idiot. Like they could tell me with one hand that I'm not good enough, but then say, but you are good enough for this...

Teaching is a business, and I am a specialty Lego piece, and they are American Plastic Bricks, and we don't mesh well together. I get that.                      Now.

So now I sit here typing as my wife is in the classroom teaching, and my children are at school, and it's not easy being home, alone.  Education was what I WAS.  I should be in a classroom. And the 5 stages of grief are all there at the same time.  Anger, Denial/Isolation, Depression, Acceptance, and Bargaining.

Hopefully the keys to the house of David
will replace the stress in my shoulders.  

Maybe I'm a cheap plastic brick? Or Maybe I'm a specialty Lego piece? I just haven't found my place yet.

But I will someday.  God closes doors that no man can open.

Now, if only He could help getting one of these book publishing doors open. 

Losing a Decade: What Happened to My Life?

Not good. Not good at all. 

"For some reason I can only remember the live-action Mr. Magoo with Walter Matthau's from about six years ago," I recently said to an esteemed history teacher colleague who had referenced Jim Backus (the original Magoo voice and Gilligan's Island actor).

Never mind the fact that it was Leslie Nielsen, and not Matthau, who was in that forgettable movie.   

"Are you sure it was six years ago? Matthau has been dead a lot longer than that?..." the history buff replied. (Matthau died in 2000, Nielsen in 2010).  

I looked it up. 1997 was when Disney's ill received version of Mr. Magoo was released. 16 years ago! Exactly the same time I've been out of high school.  I was off by a decade. As a history major, one who prides himself on remembering how chronologically the world has been chugging along, I committed a cardinal sin.  

Patrick Stewart: Unstuck in time.  

A sin because I seem to be stuck in 2003. Still a newlywed, with my bachelor years full of insane roommates and imbalanced ex-girlfriend just recent history.  

I think I'm still 24, not nearing 34. I'm off by a decade. As Kurt Vonnegut says in Slaughterhouse Five, I seem to be "unstuck in time."  

My body knows I'm not 24 anymore. It reminds me daily. The athletic peak of the human body is said to happen at 28, and my softball skills would agree. I play for a team called the Aging Heroes. Irony? No--simply fact; although calling myself a "hero" is probably hyperbole. My role is more Aging Role-Player. I'm like a crafty veteran. Grant Hill of today, and not when he was Sprite's demigod.  

I'd call it a pre-mid-life crisis, but it's not. Simply, the world has continued to revolve while the lives of many of my generation have come to a standstill. My career, my earnings, my future, are all still question-marks. Seven years ago I graduated from graduate school, and seven years later I haven't really progressed.  

I look at my house and it is like a museum to a more prosperous time. I'm not complaining. I have a flat-screen television...but I've had it for eight years (don't ask how much I paid for it back then). My leather couches are cracking all over the place. My wife's furniture is aging ungracefully. Eight years of Jack Russell Terrier and two small raccoons (my daughters) have taken a toll on our materialism.  

My wife and I, ten years from now.  Still rockin' the Wii. 

And now I look around, and see that my once proud possessions are almost worthless. Almost everything in the house needs updating. The Joneses have moved three times, and I don't get updates, because I can't afford their housewarming gifts. I can't keep up with progress. I still own a Wii; which sends its ugly 480i transmission to my HD television...and I'm repulsed by its VCR-ishness.    

I used to be someone. I used to be a contender. But now I'm nothing. Now I'm a bum. A bum with a Wii.  

Oh, I'm sorry, that's just the feel sorry for myself mentality that is so engrained in every American. Other people got it good...why can't I? Every once in a while, I forget about my blessings and go back to that complaining DNA that resides in all of us. Is this what life was supposed to be like?  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  

Poppycock. Hogwash. Horseradish. Balderdash. Tomfoolery. Lies.  

It's all lies. Yes times are still rough. I sometimes wonder where I've been for a decade. A hiatus? Waiting it out on the doldrums? Where are the trade winds that will bring a financial windfall? Isn't the economy recovering? Shouldn't I be moving on up, to the East Side?  

I don't know what the future holds and I don't know where I'll be in five years, or if I'll still be teaching or blogging or whatever.    

But I know I want to be more content. I want to age gracefully and not live in constant stress. I want to surround myself in familial love and not material possessions. Because frankly, the way I'm living now is going to kill me.  

Because all that stuff is going to the junk heap eventually. I don't want to go with it.  

My wife and I will celebrate a decade married in July. It's been a joyous ten years, even if it hasn't been a professionally successful decade. When I wonder where the years have gone, I remember, "Oh yeah: I married the love of my life, and family became my top priority. So what if our kids and dog have destroyed the furniture and stained the carpet. We did this, together. That's what we've been doing for a decade. Wearing in, not wearing out."  

  

The 7 Idiosyncrasies of Moderately Successful People

Publishers balked at my
version of this book.  

Perhaps you are one of those people who likes to go out and buy self-help books, or go to seminars, or take courses at the community college to better your skills; I on the other hand, am the type that likes to get increasingly frustrated and potentially electrocuted because I didn’t read the manual.  This failure to do things by the book has often been my downfall.  One of seven deadly downfalls, which I, along with many other moderately successful people suffer from. 

7.  Too Independent.  Maybe it’s that good ole’ American ideology, “Don’t tread on me,” but I don’t like people telling me how to do things.    Tweaking things is one thing, but there’s a big difference between coaching and controlling.  When I worked for a fortune 500 company, the middle managers would say things like, “Don’t tell them the interest rate is 27.9%, tell them it’s 0% if you pay off the balance within 28 days.”  “Well, sir, that sounds a little deceitful to me…” I would say, and that’s when I stopped being a rising star in the company, and became the guy who got transferred to different departments every other quarter.  “If you could just shut up long enough, close off all your feelings, natural instincts, moral qualms, and intellectual need to know, you could really go somewhere with this company,” they might as well say.  Sorry, no can do.

Yeah, I'm going to need you to fill out a TPS report about the memo
 we got on Swingline staplers; can you come in this Saturday?

6.  Too Family Oriented.  Every mediocrely successful person I know is a good parent.  Too good.  Like their holistic, overly-involved, homeopathic, breastfeed, sympathetic, kind but firm approach to rearing kids is the new gospel of parenting.  If we weren’t already overexposed to their methodology of parenting perfection, we also get to watch their kids grow and succeed online through billions, literally, billions of cute pictures.  Sometimes it makes me want to yack, and then I think, what’s the alternative?  Parents that don’t care?  I was a school teacher at a low income school for five years, and of the almost 1000 students who I had the pleasure of teaching, probably only fifty parents ever came into parent/teacher conferences.  I was in a convenience store the other day, and an obese barefoot eight-year-old and her three-year old sister stood in front of me, holding an Oregon Trail Card (food stamps) a 2 liter of Pepsi, and each had a beef jerky stick.  They entered the card number, like they had done this a thousand times before, and then casually walked across the busy street without holding hands, actually forcing traffic to slow for them.  I got back in the car and cried for the predetermined future of suffering these kids will have.   Parenting is harder than any job I have ever had.  And I’m sure if I had a nanny raising my kids, or if I sent them down to the corner market for pepperoni sticks every time they annoyed me, I could get a lot more accomplished, but as it is, I’m a decent parent and it detracts from my career. 

            
5.  Too Time Deficient.  Raising kids is a full time job, but to the moderately successful person, it is just one, of the hundreds of things we do in a day.  Between making healthy food snacks and meals, hurrying them off to school, fighting traffic, actually working, doing errands on the way home, some of us don’t have a moments rest until we sit down at dinner.  Sometimes that can be at 8:00, and the kids should be in bed.  Then we try and communicate with friends or family online or on the phone, hope there are no emergencies or late bills that didn’t get paid, and before you know it, it’s midnight and you still haven’t replaced the D battery in the smoke alarm whose incessant but intermittent beep can wait another day.   Hopefully your sanity is fire retardant. 

4.  Too educated.  It seems like everyone has a degree nowadays.  The gas attendant at Costco, the waiter at PF Changs, the guy dancing with a Little Caesars sign, all have advanced degrees in fields nobody cares about.  My best friend has a sociology degree, and I often joke, “The only thing that’s good for, is to know how angry you should be at the injustice of it all.”  The jobs aren’t there for our degrees, so the mildly successful finds work elsewhere, hoping, dreaming for a chance to put his/her learnings to practice.  So we work, and complain about it, but don’t have enough time or resources to actually make anyone notice (especially the student loan collectors who will gladly put you on deferment, but not actually listen to your issues).  The worst aspect of it all, is the overly educated will see company newsletters and notice all the typos and grammatical errors, or listen to managers speak who have no public speaking skills, or see data with easily changeable outcomes for the better, and then be told by their superiors, “Somebody threw up on aisle six, could you clean that up? Thanks.” 

           
3.  Too entertained.  Rather than start grassroots movements to change the problems, like our parents' and grandparents' generations of the 60’s and 70’s, the current working generations find meaning in entertainment.  Counter culture guru Timothy Leary coined the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” in the late 1960s. Leary later said that the “PC [personal computer] was the LSD of the 1990s.”  Unarguably, the PC has lead to much more productivity than even the greatest acid-inspired creativity spell (yes, even Yellow Submarine), but has also been just as addictive and isolating.  Instead of hippies getting together for love-ins, overworked exhausted people are searching for love on Match.com.  Or they are losing hours, days, and weeks to virtual gaming worlds.  If gaming isn’t a vice, there are still the movies and television and music.  And then there is the actively showing off crowd, the brave braggarts who take a weekend off to climb Mt. Hood, or bike across state lines.  And then they pretend it’s no big deal when they ask about your weekend, “Oh, you stayed up late to watch the Game Of Thrones finale? I spent the evening in an ice bath after running my third marathon this year.”  But whether their eyes are blood shot from a 30-hour World of Warcraft marathon, a trip down bong-water  memory lane, or from swimming in the ocean in an Ironman triathlon, they aren’t ready or willing to give the same kind of attention to the workforce that would make them MVP of their job. 

Mom...I'm bored.  There's nothing to do!!

2.  Too socially connected.  I would argue that one reason the poor are poor, is because they don’t know how to interact nicely with other humans (just watch an old Jerry Springer episode, or a current UFC fight); and many of the rich are rich, because they don’t care about other people.  But the moderately successful are both socially skilled and usually show genuine empathy towards other human beings.  They take days off work to stay with a sick parent, spouse, or child at the hospital.  They find time in the summer to go on group camping trips, family reunions, and rent beach houses with friends.  The mediocre worker would gladly trade overtime for unpaid vacation time.  And maybe spend that whole vacation at home, liking other people’s active statuses on Facebook. 

Orange and blue, grey and green, they are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little avatars of the cyber world.  

1.  Too Nice.  The moderately successful doesn’t like doing the dirty work.  When I was a big-box store trainer, I was asked to let two employees go (the passive version of firing them).  It wasn’t why I took the position, and it really affected my soul.  The inability to be generals, dictating the game-plan, knowing that each directive will cost hundreds of human lives, is holding us all back.  Being one of the bunch, actively mourning each time a loved one falls in the battlefield of life, keeps us from advancing up the chain of command. 

And you thought you'd never see a Ziggy cartoon ever again.
RIP Tom Wilson.  

To sum up, the moderately successful are the way they are, because they care about others too much; want to enjoy their free time with friends and family or actively pursuing individual lifelong dreams; Are overly knowledgeable, but without enough time or resources to actively change the world; And too independent to ever join forces with a movement to actually cause change in the world. 

The only steps to riches and fame necessary are: to sell their integrity to the highest bidder; stop socializing and finding active enjoyment in life in exchange for more hours at work; take a passive role in parenting; get mean; and stop learning universal truths through higher learning and replace them with whatever the company’s hard truths are.  

Maybe it's not so bad to be average after all.