Recently I’ve often been waking up before the alarm clock radio signals me at 5:30. Around 4:00, or maybe 4:30, my mind will start racing with new house exciting possibilities and depressing scenarios, and that does it for my night of substantive sleep.
The other morning, though, I managed to do more than doze intermittently, and I dreamed that I was writing down the plot line for a novel. When I woke up, I scurried out to the desk and scavenged the envelope of a letter from the Document Processing Department of the company that manages my IRA.
They’d written requesting confirmation of some of my personal information–employer, telephone number, net worth, etc. I’d ended up giving them what I could, and even included an estimation of my worth based on a quick draw from the grab basket of monetary asininity. The last time they requested such accounting of my personal value I simply wrote “priceless”; this time I wrote “$10,000.”
It’s interesting, considering the worth of a person in monetary terms–difficult, rather. In a study of coincidental investigation yesterday I stacked some of N’s blocks to say the word “hard.” When I pivoted the pile of letters, they spelled “uneq.” It must be difficult for employers, these days, having to lay off extra workers, each and every one unique but nonetheless expendable. In my school district, the average money saved when an employee leaves is $52,000. I might be worth more as a layoff option than investment portfolio.
Assigning worth to people is often a misguided venture not just when it comes to their personal monetary holdings. I recently received an email forward subjected “OBAMA HAS TO BE STOPPED.” It sounded dangerously close to personalizing national issues beyond an intelligently debatable point, so I didn’t read the email (since I do only things involving intelligence). Besides, could Obama really be The Problem? As a former fellow congregant once insisted, it’s Congress–not the president–about whom we need to talk, since Congress controls the purse strings.
Or maybe we shouldn’t even talk about Congresspeople. One of my former pastors once told me that when parishioners start talking political candidates, he politely steers the conversation to the issues, not people.
The worth of things, too, sometimes rests in the eye of the beholder–or under the butt, as the case may be:
Hopefully the eventual issue of my novel’s scribbled conception won’t end up valued as mere butt-worthy type. The envelope beckons from before me on my desk, charged with absorbing both of my previous novel starts as a chapter each and commanded by but a sketchy diagram of an at-best sketchy tale of my quite natural neuroses.