03 September 2001 ~ Helena is a success...

Worked nine hours and fifteen minutes today.

On FUCKING LABOR DAY.

I hate this job, I truly, truly do. Staff and management are so fucking disorganized. One person will say, "Helena, clean this." So I'll begin cleaning. Then another person will come by and say, "WHY are you cleaning that? I was WORKING on that pile!" So I'll leave the half-cleaned pile alone, and then the FIRST person will com back over and scream at me for not cleaning it. Multiply this by eight MILLION times, and multiple those eight million times by nine hours and fifteen minutes. Now, remember that it's LABOR DAY. A day to HONOR the working people of this nation.

I want a raise. I'm not making enough to justify staying at a job I hate this much. How about $40 an hour. How about I work two days a week, I pick which days. How about everybody tries to be a LITTLE nice to me. Then, I might actually enjoy my job.

What-the-fuck-ever.

I'm so angry and stressed right now that I'm shaking the entire floor by slamming this keyboard around...

Every Labor Day, I do two things. One, I go to the Johnson City Field Days, which I did last night. Two, I read a little piece of literature I discovered a few years back, one of the most agonized and passionate pieces ever written, even if it is a little dry... I shall reprint parts of it here... Do yourself a favor, especially if you've got a job, and MOST especially if you've got a job you hate, and struggle through this; I'm picking out the important parts for you...

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...On the basis of polital economy [capitalism] itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital [money] in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; that finally the distinction between capitalist [investor in business/employer] and land-rentier [investor in property] .... disappears and ... the whole of society must fall apart into two classes -- the property owners and the propertyless workers...

...What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself, but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies [kills] his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor therefore is not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it, he belongs not to himself, but to another. ... It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

...Hence, within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the position in which he finds himself as a worker. [Performance-based identity; such as introducing oneself thus: "Hi, I'm Helena, I am a salesperson. What are you?"]

...If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker's activity is a torment to him, to another it must be delight and his life's joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

--excerpts from Estranged Labor, by Karl Marx. [Underlining, as it appears in my book, is my doing]

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Happy Labor Day.

I was so much happier making minimum wage at places where I LIKED to work, than making a buck-thirty-five more at a place I despise.

Someday, my friends, I will no longer be a worker. I will no longer be an EMPLOYEE. I deserve better. I'm going to find a job I like so much that I don't give a shit about the money at all. I'll work for MYSELF; I'll be alive for myself and NOT for anybody else. I AM worth more than somebody else's profit. I am worth more than money. And I will find some way of proving that, and of living it. I will not EARN a living. I will simply live. I am alive, and it is my right to be alive; it is not my DUTY to degrade myself in order to earn that right.

I want to be a paperback writer.

I want to be a hitch-hiker.

I want to live in a van down by the river.

I want to live on my own terms. WITH other people, not FOR other people.

And to those of you -- former employers, former relatives -- who are reading this who are laughing at me, thinking about what a disgrace I am to the intelligent people of the world who are "successful" because they've spent their lives ("spend"? "life"? I prefer to KEEP my life!) breaking their backs... to all of you, you have no idea what "success" really is.

It's Labor Day, and I am a worker, and today I deserve a little bit of honor and respect. But today, I am honoring and respecting those who have found their pleasure in things other than money.

~Helena*