In the famous scene from Female Trouble, where Aunt Ida tells Gator that the world of a heterosexual is sick and boring life, memes leave out the first line of her speech: “I worry that you’ll work in an office.”
In Isaac Babel’s Guy de Maupassant (like you, I only read it because it was recently in Story Club with George Saunders), the narrator “was offered a position of clerk…not a bad job, bringing with it an exemption from conscription…I refused to become a clerk…better to suffer hunger, prison, and homelessness than to sit at a clerk’s desk…we have been born to delight in labor, fighting, and love.”
You have Bartleby, the most well-known office worker of literature.
When Melvin van Peebles was developing his character Sweet Sweetback (I was going to paraphrase this from a documentary I watched like fifteen years ago, but then I found it on YouTube so I wouldn’t misquote), he considered, “What should I make him, a clerk? [shakes head, grumbling] A musician? [shakes head, grumbling]…I said okay, I’ll make him a sexual animal.”
I remember being a teenager and reading Gen X icons (depending on your subculture) Gina Arnold and Pagan Kennedy write about the soul-destroying nature of office work. I entered the workforce, in Olympia, Washington in 1999, as a smart kid who’d been promised a certain future (I don’t remember what exactly it was), but employment opportunities were lacking. I found myself working at McDonald’s for the better part of five years. Where I soon found myself smoking weed (happy 4/20). I worked almost full time (and was stoned full time) the whole time I was in undergrad at Evergreen. After I graduated, I started working in commercial print shops, for the better part of the next fifteen years.
It was only after earning my MFA in Creative Writing, at age 40, the farthest I’d been from the sick and boring life of a heterosexual since I was a teenager, that I began working in an office for the first time.
Sitting in my own windowless room, which I decorated in green and orange, with plants thriving in the fluorescent lighting, with three large computer screens, learning how to organize information using the tool of Excel. Making an hourly wage sometimes spent at DEI trainings/discussions on cultures not my own, and presentations by activists and writers. Accruing vacation time. Health insurance, and getting to use my paid sick leave to go to appointments. A clearly documented process on how to ask for days off, and no one acting like you’re a little shit if you want to do something that isn’t work on a workday. The level of actual trust, like I have really never had in a workplace before. Getting paid enough that I can afford my own rent and life, living alone, single income. I’m sure this is NOT true of all office jobs! But it is true of my job.
I was mad all the time, about work, for years. And I’m not anymore.
And it is overall a good thing, of course.
But I understand now what office work takes away – that fire of working with the public, in retail/customer service, the bonds you make with your comrades in rage. I have noticed how much I swear, and how my colleagues in the office do not. I stopped myself from talking shit with a colleague the other day. “I don’t want to…I mean I do…but I’m not going to,” I said, with a half-salute. For two years before this, during my MFA, I worked part-time in an office at the school I was attending. We were always enraged, never polite. The office work I do now is the kind I’ve been warned about. It’s the kind that dampens your fire. Fire burning low is middle-aged embarrassment. I need to laugh and carry on and shout strong opinions in order to feel sexy. How do you stay naughty as you age, in unconventional ways?
I get misgendered in the office, despite they/them on my name tag and my email signature and introducing myself with pronouns whenever possible. If I am working with a group organizing some activity (we have treats, potlucks, birthday decorating), I get lumped in with “Thanks, ladies!” I wonder, would this be something I would give up in transition, fitting in easily with the office ladies? There are a few men in my department, most of them gay. I hear how the ladies in the office speak to them solicitously. That is not something I would have to sacrifice.
I take a walk twice a day, around the courtyard. I stand and windmill my arms and rotate my hips. I do a modified downward facing dog with my fingertips on the edge of my desk. Yet, my body has changed over the eight months I’ve been sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. I’m not in pain – the same series of stretches in the morning that prevented pain during the early part of the pandemic, when I walked 45 minutes to and from work and stood for nine hours a day, works for this gig – but. I remember when the idea of sitting at work was an unthinkable luxury.
Back when I was so mad about work, I thought I could not practice my art, my writing, if I had to work every day. I needed the space to wander and wonder; I wanted to be a flaneur, I longed to enact a masculine form of loafing that I associated with Kaden working on his master’s thesis at a table behind the Albuquerque food coop (if I’ve written about all this before, it’s because I’m still working through it). Now, I do fit my writing practice into my work week. I’ve fit it in enough to have been a local literary celebrity in Spokane for a few days last weekend, during the Get Lit festival, where strangers approached me again and again to compliment my reading at Pie and Whiskey (it was otherworldly and the coolest thing that ever happened to me). I think it helped that I have a distinctive haircut right now, so there was no mistaking that I was the person who had read the piece they loved (I had NO IDEA it was so funny until 300 people were laughing). I got misgendered all weekend, despite wearing a wacky tie and reading a story about three gay men, and having a distinctly queer haircut. Stephen took a photo of me reading, and I was heartened to see my feet firmly planted in a solid stance. I was utterly unaware of it – I don’t remember thinking of my body in space for a moment of my 6.5 minute reading. I asked Kaden over video call last night, whether I move like a woman. He unhesitatingly and emphatically said no. I was relieved (if you disagree, keep it to yourself, haha). When I was misgendered, it was just because she/her was the closest thing people could come up with, not because I held my body in space in a way that indicated such.
I finally found the note where I began thinking of writing this Substack post and made a list of topics, it was March 27. Obviously, I only hit a few of these. If you would like me to expand on any that I did not get to, drop me a line or post a comment. Except not Sonic Youth, because I don’t remember what I was thinking of. Maybe just that no one talks about how their music can be super fucking sad.
Middle aged body
Office work (history of disgust for)
Trans shit
Wounded healer
Mercury retro chiron aries
Call Me By Your Name
Sonic Youth
Megan Cummins (short story collection)
Fiery anger retail
Expression
Age difference [relationships] in fiction
There is a scene in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where Huck is dressed as a girl, disguised. But he can’t fool the wise old woman who then instructs him on the hints that gave him away, the movements – catching an object between his knees rather than throwing his legs apart when said object was unexpectedly tossed his way. I was 13 when I read that, gay for Huck Finn, gay for Mark Twain, gay for my twenty-six-year-old Catholic school teacher, Mr. H. I made it my business, then, at 13, to avoid ways of moving that would give me away as a girl. That must count for something.