Life as an Extreme Sport

There seems to be an interesting backlash against glamour growing. You can see it in Discovery Channel’s “The Most Dangerous Catch”, a show about crab fishermen off the coast of Alaska, and perhaps more pointedly in their “Dirty Jobs” show, which sounds like it is – a show about a man travelling the country to witness and experience first hand the dirty jobs people do to keep our way of life afloat.

And now there’s a book based on that same premise, ‘Uncommon Carriers,’ by John McPhee. Seems he did much the same thing, and travelled around the country to witness these jobs that are considered dirty and unglamourous, and are a source of great pride by those who do them.

We all know people like this. People who take great pride in what they do, even though that might be joining pipes, or washing cars, or mucking out drains and gutters. And since we all know people like this, why are they being highlighted on thse shows and in this book? I think we might be witnessing a backlash against the glamourous lives that most of us will never lead, a tired reaction to the dangling gems we’ll never wear and the awards shows we’ll always watch on TV.

These jobs are our jobs. (Well, I probably can’t say that, since I’ve not held a dirty job in well over a decade. But the premise stands!) They’re the jobs that were the butt of jokes in sitcoms, the jobs that most of us wind up with regardless of our degrees (if we even have them). And I think that this surge in showcasing these normal, boring, dirty jobs is a way of highlighting the gritty realness of life, in a way that glamour and reality television cannot.

I woke up early this morning, a little before 9am. Granted, this isn’t early in our typical scheme of thought, but given I didn’t go to bed until nearly 3am, it works as early for me.

I pulled on my robe and stumbled downstairs with a pair of magazines in hand and cats trailing around my feet. We shared yoghurt, I kept the cats out of my coffee, and the three of us curled up on the couch as I read through an older issue of The New Yorker and then started working my way through the Al Gore issue of Wired.

I realized as I read the magazines, sipped my coffee and petted whichever cat closest, that this was one of those ideals I’ve had in my life as long as I can remember. In fact, my clearest defining moment of this is sitting in an apartment in Fremont, the cold and crisp light of an early winter morning hitting the table through the window, watching the birch trees, birds and stream outside, listening to the Cowboy Junkies, reading a magazine and realizing I was near heaven in perfection. That has stayed with me to this day, but is also something I’ve largely discarded in my “busy” life.

Thing is, life is as busy as you make it, and I often make mine much more so by spending so much time online. It’s something I not only should stop, but need to stop – I need to maximize my time for education and work, certainly, but I also need to make room for reading magazines in the early morning, robe wrapped around me for warmth, cats on my feet, coffee in my hand. The magazines are a small break from the reading I normally have to do, and reading them ends up making me feel both more connected to the world, and smarter than I likely am.

This next month is going to largely be about, not only surviving my parents, but attempting to get myself back into habits that are good for me. From the mundane, eating right, brushing my teeth and doing laundry, to the soul-nurturing moves of reading more and staring at a computer screen less, this is the chance to reboot.