Tuesday, May 02, 2006

A monstrous verminous bug

This describes my morning reasonably accurately:
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1916)
The meeting this morning involved several lengthy discussions (I mean an hour or more) of internal corporate politics that made me want to gnaw my own arm off in desperation.

I wonder what other jobs I could do?
If I had abs I would totally be a male stripper.
But I wonder if it's too late in my life to become a professional boxer ... because being repeatedly punched in the head would be a lot less painful than my morning.

3 comments:

mskp said...

are you finding it hard to type with only one arm? i daresay this will affect your professional boxing career too. i only know one other person who is a boxer - the editor of the magazine i work for! he is quite good, i've been told, and is some kind of amateur champion. i've been a bit soft and have put off watching him fight for nearly two years now. i resolve to break the deadlock in 2006. if you're interested, i could find out more...

_nothing_ said...

A friend of mine knows him I think, unless there is a bunch of boxing editors around (Nathan, I think she said his name was?). I was actually going to go to his next fight with my friend (who has also long promised to attend but never delivered), whenever that was.

mskp said...

wow - blogging really is like high school. everyone knows everyone.

yes, nathan is certainly one of a kind. it makes for very odd workplace situations. discussing the importance of realist novels in developing feminist consciousness with someone who's sporting a black eye etc. i love the dissonance of it, and i think he does too. there's a dissonance between the two of us also - i love watching boxing movies and nathan loves watching real videos of fights [is that what boxers commonly do?]!

we're all a bit slack with attendance though. i fulfil all kinds of stereotypes by being scared to see his face split open, and i get no end of grief for my "residual bourgeois squeamishness", "girls school fragility" etc.

sigh, overland can be a very blokey place...