Music to Eat Fudge To!

At one point during my 11 years in corporate America, I worked in a fluorescently lit, windowless room half the size of a football field, filled with cubes with one foot high walls as far as you could see. Of the couple hundred people in that room, I was one of the few women, and probably the only person not wearing a French blue button down shirt and khaki pants. I refused to dress in drag no matter how much it was encouraged.

If we needed to communicate, we would email each other rather than walk over to each other’s desks. Since our cubes had no walls, all of our conversations would run together, so we communicated via jabber and email. I don’t know about everyone else, but the guy in the cube next to me and I were bored out of our minds. We were handling government contracts, which means you often get to impasses where you have to wait on the government, or for some higher level cog in the wheel to tell you what to do while waiting for the government, but you have to appear busy while doing this, which is hard. The year was 2001, and there wasn’t nearly as much to do on the internet as there is now. We worked our butts off appearing to be busy while doing nothing because we were not allowed to take action or initiative: we listened to music, we web-surfed, we sent emails.

Now thanks to modern technology, there’s wonderful stuff on the web to occupy people who have mind numbingly boring jobs and management they feel compelled to thwart. I recently met Paul Kontonis, whose company, For Your Imagination, brings truly entertaining content to the web. I haven’t had access to normal American television in about three years, but hear tell there’s hardly anything worth watching on it anyway. Every time I’ve attempted to watch iptv, I find nothing but amateur, wannabe tele-evangelists talking about the Lord. Since hardly a day goes by when at least one if not two people drop by our Washington Avenue headquarters to discuss this topic, (who can do it a lot better quite frankly) I saw no reason to go looking for it on the internet. But The Shitty Show Shoe reneweth my faith! It maketh me lie down in green pastures and restoreth my soul, (particularly after somebody tries to get me to sell it to them wholesale, and I need a laugh).

I look forward to perusing the wide variety of shows, both entertaining and informative. This Monday afternoon (the 24^th) from 1pm – 4pm Priscilla Ahn will perform live on LIVE@FYI. And I get to be in the studio audience! One time I got to watch a taping of the Dating Game out in LA, and this man periodically threw candy at the audience to keep them energized. I’m bringing some Brooklyn Fudge, and maybe they’ll let me throw it at the rest of the audience! What are you doing Monday afternoon? The same old boring old crap you can’t stand but do anyway because you don’t feel you have a choice?

Your body may be chained to a desk, but your mind doesn’t have to be! Join us for some music, entertainment, and a lifting of mental fog. If you don’t like what you do, or feel you have no choice in the matter, I strongly encourage you to reflect on that, because it can kill you. When I worked in corporate America, I received an email at least once a year that someone had dropped dead at their desk, and the last time that happened, it was a boy I used to travel with, who I’m sure was under 40, and had a wife and a new baby, and a new house. After that it didn’t make much sense forcing myself to spend so many hours doing something that wasn’t me no matter how lucrative it was, because it all catches up with you in the end, and all you have left are experiences and memories, and they best be good ones. Assumably, you will not be clutching your Blackberry on your deathbed, and as you gasp your last breath, you will probably not be regretting that you didn’t work more hours on something that ultimately meant nothing. The one thing worse than “damn, I wish I didn’t” is “damn, I wish I did.” Charlie O’Donnell graciously reminded me of that recently, as he does for many other people through Path101, a totally new approach to doing something for a living worth doing.