I walked into the classroom across the hall from my office this morning to water my plants and saw some objects that were begging to be photographed. The middle school science teacher/friend/coworker whose room this is lets me keep some of my orchids, bromeliads and carnivorous plants in a sunny window; I like going in to check out the latest projects in process – kids working on rockets or IDing dragonfly nymphs – you get the idea…
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“I’m passionate about exceeding customer expectations every day as I greet people entering this lovely Wally-Mart”.
“Um, no.”
Passion is not enthusiasm. It is not love. It is not enjoyment, and it is not flow. Passion is an unstoppable overflowing of emotion that destroys in its satisfaction, that torpedoes lives and marriages and nations, that shoots husbands or coworkers or strangers in rage. It is the hot lava of the soul, and it burns what it pours over. It is not the positive team-building thing your supÂervisor would have you believe. Passion causes wars and brutal killings and divorces, and has astronauts wearing Depends and the headmistresses of girls’ schools going to jail, and gets husbands run over in parking lots. To say that a bunch of software engineers or graphic designers are passionate about their work is to try to interject sex and confusion and addiction and desire into a kind of work that is essentially asexual, organized, left brain, and sober.
…bamboo. Phyllostachys aureosulcata to be precise – a picture of the the new growth – I’m trying to get a grove established in the side yard. Once it’s really going it’ll shade the house from afternoon sun, block headlights as they come around a corner up the road a bit, and act as a windbreak in the winter. Very useful – even before I start harvesting shoots and messing around with the wood.
