enthusiasm is contagious

Some people have jobs where they build things out of legos. I have a job where I watch a lot of people continue to be paid a lot of money for making mistakes over and over again. How does a person stay motivated to perform well in an environment that does not reward competence?

Yesterday I was walking around on my lunch break thinking about becoming a plumber. The magnolia trees are in blossom and New England is a place where small animals are raising babies and the light off the Long Island sound makes a person want to keep breathing. Negative ions and tanker ships live in harmony. There are tulips everywhere promising that color wasn’t something you imagined, it appears in nature, thanks to the horticulture of the ottoman empire. 

When I was in California, I rarely thought about how it was January. I thought about how to get the kind of job where you get to enjoy that weather ALL THE TIME. The allure of being a forest ranger does not diminish. The older I get, the more I want to get out of this dark cave and do something far more awesome than making pretty charts that only I seem to pay attention to. I am no good at skateboarding, but I gather that there are lots of common things to complain about: the man, the job, the weather. I complain about the job and it feeds me well. I complain about my job and I am still here in a windowless office wondering about the weather outside.