Planning 19

Today’s Song: Happy by John Fulbright

You know what would be the most awesome job? A plane mechanic. You get to learn all about how planes work, you provide a great service, and I’d assume you’d have pretty good job security until the zombie apocalypse inevitably descends upon us. You spend all day dealing with the literal nuts and bolts of something that is magical to most people. And you only have to deal with planes. Very little of this silly people interaction.

I could be a mechanic in the Air Force or the Navy. Get to serve my country but never have to shoot at anyone. They’re reducing the size of the military but I’d be a great mechanic. My dad might laugh at that, but if you’d just give me a couple of hours alone with tools, an engine, and a schematic for reference, I could have that thing figured out. I’d want to be a car mechanic too, but then you have to do that whole price-setting thing and there’s a lot of customer service and cars are more dangerous than airplanes anyway.

I’d love to have a job where I get to work with my hands every day. One of my favorite things about my current job is that I get to do some mechanical troubleshooting from time to time, dealing with the projector or the dome. I’ve learned a little bit about computers too, but fixing computers doesn’t have the same appeal to me. It’s like Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman. Partway through the movie, he has the realization that he doesn’t make anything. He tears apart companies and sells off their pieces and gets money, but he doesn't physically create anything. I’d like to make something. I don’t need to build great big ships, but I’d like to make something. 

There are opportunities presented before us in all parts of our lives. I assume there’s a reason why a mechanical career was never presented as an opportunity in my life, but I think I could be content there. No grandiose vision. I would really enjoy being blue collar. I don’t need much to get by. Now, I’d have to be guaranteed a living wage, but other than that, it’d be nice to have this defined place in society, this useful job. “Oh, what do you do?” “I’m a mechanic.” Nailed it. No complex explanations. And you work 9-5 and then you literally have to leave your work at the office. It sounds really nice.

I was talking with a coworker who had done the same job for 25 years before moving to the job he has now. It blows my mind that he could have done anything for that long. 25 years doing the same thing every day? No forward momentum, nothing to aspire to, no new place to be. It’s amazing to me. But people have careers, you know? People get a job and stick with it and used to be, if you were a company man, you were guaranteed a pretty good retirement at the end of the line, and enough free time in the in-between to have a family and pursue a hobby and fill out the edges of your life. I can see how you’d pass all those years, I guess. It’s just an un-understandable expanse of time to me.

I am ready to be doing something, though. I am ready to know what I’m going to be for the next little while. And I’m ready to start a family. I’m mentally ready for that complication. Now, fiscally, I’m not, so it’s a good thing I’m in a state of perpetual singlehood. But I could knock out a few years in a given profession and I could learn a reasonable work-life balance and I could make a new little person to bring into the world and I wouldn’t complain about any of that. Wanderlust is still here, yes, but the desire to be warm, safe, and stationary is a real one, and not a bad one. And it’s not like you can’t mesh the two, the adventure with the quiet family love.

Can’t you just picture it though? The idyllic scene of coming home a little achy with grease on my shirt to help my kid out with his math homework? I’m pretty sure I could spend good long years thinking all is right with the world, with a life like that. I wouldn’t mind it one bit.