i alternate between days when i wake up with a steely determination to get my way and steamroller over all this unfairness, and those where i just sit at my desk crushed by the weight of my failure and waiting for the hours to pass. i'm told there's no shame in earning an honest wage, but i still can't help feeling like working in ******* is a prostitution of the soul.

anyway, from the gold bug variations:

We sat in front of the console and stared at the equipment, now completely changed. The phone rang, disturbing the empty hiss. I thought: Here is one of the few places where a phone call late at night doesn't automatically mean someone has died. Todd answered. "That was Dr. Ressler. "Bookkeeper is unique. And so, my friend, is your face." I smiled, already skilled at letting his moments of confrontatory zeal fall away without crisis. "What do I do for a living? I'm not sure the question has an answer anymore. Everyone, no matter what he does, is kept in the dark about his clients."

That was the moment of expansiveness that brought me compulsively to Manhattan On-Line to sit with this stranger after my own shift was over. "Do you know Ben Shahn's great answer to that question? I take a guilty pleasure in the man's paintings, knowing his whole pastel, representational aesthetic has been on the outs for a decade. But his essyas need no excuse. He tells a story of an itinerant wanderer traveling over country roads in thirteenth century France who comes across a man exhaustedly pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He asks what the man is doing. 'God only knows. I push these damn stones around from sunup to sundown, and in return, they pay me barely enough to keep a roof over my head."

"Farther down the road, the traveler meets another man, just as exhausted, pushing another filled barrow. In reply to the same question, the second man says, 'I was out of work for a long time. My wife and children were starving. Now I have this. It's killing, but I'm grateful for it all the same.'

"Just before nightfall, the traveler meets a third exploited stonehauler. When asked what he is doing, the fellow replies, 'I'm building Chartres Cathedral.'