Eagles Wings

I must be a little slow or stubborn or both. I’ve been spewing forth ‘wisdoms’ concerning happiness and positivity lately as if I’ve only recently made this discovery. But seriously, this is kindergarten philosophy. This is stuff everyone knows because it’s something our moms and dads teach us.

I spent some time going over my accounts on CD Baby this morning. This year I’ve earned a whopping $34 and change from online sales of my music. I have to admit that although the number is small it still feels good. I noticed though that a lot of people were streaming and/or purchasing the song Eagle’s Wings. That struck me as a little odd because although I like that song a lot, it isn’t the one that I thought would be a standout ‘single’, mainly because it’s under-produced compared to some of the other songs on the album.

It got me thinking about the song though. I wrote it before most of the other songs on the album during my first year of teaching high school Biology. Teaching was the job I fell into after failing to find a job in my chosen field of study. I was hoping to get an awesome, well paid, research job at Merck, Monsanto, Johnson and Johnson or Unilever. I don’t mind telling you I was a little pissed off that after 3 degrees and 7 years in University I got stuck teaching.

If you’ve never been a teacher of any kind I’d like to recommend that you volunteer as a substitute for a week at your local high school. If every adult person did this, salaries for teachers would skyrocket. It’s not fun. There are a few blessed people on this planet who love to teach but I’m not one of them and so my job was a bit like a punishment of some kind. I hope you’re getting the picture I’m painting for you…It’s a self portrait of a miserable man. That was me.

I couldn’t help but notice though, from the bottom of the pit I’d dug for myself, that the young people who I was teaching were vibrant, excited, full of smiles and laughter and joy. I also knew that a lot of them were less fortunate than I, to say the least. Looking back, I realize that writing Eagle’s Wings may have been the point at which I started building myself a ladder to climb out of my hole of despair. Let me tell you it’s been a journey.

The song is about rising above the troubles and woes of life. I figured if my students could do it then I could too. Some five years later I finally start to really get what I was writing about back then. So yes…I think I’m a little slow and a lot stubborn.

That Worky Me

So I have a facebook and a MySpace and a website and this blog and several other micro-sites around the internet that I established mainly for the purposes of promoting my music. Lately though I’ve noticed that the internet has started encroaching into my real life and into the lives of the people I meet.
I’m at work talking to a customer and I’m dropping the phrase, “you should check out my website” into the conversation, “I was just writing a blog about that the other day..ha ha ha.”. Now when people casually ask that old party favorite, “so what do you do?” I find myself wondering how I can work an URL into the answer.
I noticed during my years of teaching Biology to high school students that my colleagues had two personalities. They had the “teacher” persona which was strict and stern and conscious of the rules of the school and in very many ways this persona was very much like a jerk. I don’t say this to be derogatory to my colleagues because in general I liked most of them. I liked them a lot. But I knew the other “normal, average-joe or –jane as the case may be, every-day” persona because I hung out in the staff room with them and listened to their jokes and drank coffee with them.
I think that’s a pretty common fact of human life though. People tend to separate their job and their personal life. But it goes deeper than just a division of labor. It affects our personalities. Weekday dad is not weekend dad. Power-suit mom is worlds apart from sweatshirt-n-jeans, soccer mom. One of the reasons I couldn’t be a teacher was that I knew to be a really great teacher I needed to embrace the “teacher” persona and basically be an asshole for 8 hours a day, five days a week. I’m not saying all great teachers are assholes. I think the ones who get it right without being an asshole are amazing people though. I was the ‘nice guy’ teacher. I had a hard time enforcing rules and being strict so for me to do those things I felt like I was being an asshole. In any case I wasn’t being me.
I had a hard time being someone I wasn’t for the sake of the job. I know I can’t be the only one and that brings me back to facebook and other such social networking sites. I wonder how real our profiles actually are and I wonder how much thought people put into the candid pictures and comments they post. I wonder how many companies Google potential candidates to find out what the person is really like. I wonder if what they find out is really worthwhile information or not.
I could be the biggest jerk on the planet and still be good at my job. Would a ‘jerky’ facebook profile cost me a job or a career? I could be a totally different monster at work than I am during my free time. Should it matter either way? More importantly, will it matter and does it already matter? Maybe switching personas is a natural part of humanity and it’s ok. Maybe we should be allowed to be a jerk, or a nice guy when we’re not at work and whoever that ‘work’ persona is should be judged strictly on the merit of their ‘workiness’. Actually I suspect I have it backwards. Perhaps we are in a dangerous place in society when it has become so common to do the personality switcheroo every Monday morning. Maybe we need to be aiming for a more balanced equilibrium between ‘workiness’ and normality.

I’m imagining a time when the facebook profile (or its equivalent) becomes as closely guarded and masked as the work personas we now portray. Maybe this is some kind of golden age where everyone is using social networking as its creators intended, i.e. to connect with people, exchange information and generally show off to the world and be ridiculous in a fairly public but controlled manner. Are social networking profiles doomed to become just another résumé which only tell people what we really want them to know about our achievements and experience and leave the personality at the door?