Developing fellowship skills in
young-adult life—when drinking or the like was a common enough “default” mode
for this in my hometown, and when (in my college period) developing workplace
skills and friendships at work was the healthy way
Subsections below:
Prefatory note on a forward-looking work-related theme
Changing times on pot remind me of a lost sense of why there was an
oblivion around the use of alcohol in my town 35 years ago
Developing not as a party
animal
Trying to come up with “what better road there could have been”
A positive conclusion
This entry might seem like a
spell of murky old memories packaged importunately for your dubious “benefit,”
but actually it has some unexpected relevance in one way, as I work on other
material. For one thing, I am mulling how I will start an entry or two on my
experience with Prentice Hall Higher Education in 2001 and 2002—and I know some
of my readers will find some interest in this, as my earlier entries on
Prentice Hall showed greater interest than I expected. (Was it all due to
PARCC?)
Prefatory note on a forward-looking work-related theme
One theme that seems to resonate
with one aspect of the PH Higher Ed story is the disadvantage you can expect
from supervisors (or colleagues) in editorial departments who have no formal
education above high school.
Something like this theme also
applies to another set of material I am working on, whose implications for my
blogs are less clear (at least to you): chapters of the old (1998) manuscript
(a memoir shaped like a novel) The Temps,
which I am preparing for modern-day use. The Temps story still has some solid relevance in terms of what I would
want to say about the publishing world: though the job experience it is about
(in 1995-96) is now almost exactly 20 years old, it was such a viscerally
affecting experience—in terms of the deep, numerous insults and trials it put
me (and others there) through, as well as the distressing problems posed by the
psychological bizarreness of at least one temp there—that when I retype and
edit the material today, the old emotions I had (often pertaining to defending
in very tough terms certain positions I would have had regarding screwy issues
then) come back almost as raw and “insatiable” as they were then. And in an
abstract way, the story of the female temp “Alison” still holds interest,
because it represents a sort of “worst-case scenario” of the implications of
classically young-female excess in a publishing context.
One aspect of Alison is that she
did not yet have a college education; but some other features of her make her
sound like a satirical portrait more than a real person. For instance, though
she could affirm that she was just looking out for herself as a worker, when I
tried to appeal to her decency to allow others (like myself) the ability to get
a permanent job there (i.e., do not smear me in management’s eyes), her idea of
“looking out for herself” still included complaining or reporting to management
about us other temps—about several of us, and more than once about more than
one of us—as if it were part of her job description. So she was someone
hypocritical whose corrosive effects on our job prospects—never mind the sheer subjective
anxiety she posed—made her an extreme version of the kind of young woman in an
editorial office who, under pressure, is a monster of practicing the “zero-sum
game” that such people tend to operate in. Combine this with her not yet having
a college degree, and you see why—among other reasons—this job was a tough
crucible in which to try to get somewhere (beyond it).
(By the way, the same set of
companies—while the ownership has changed [more than once]—is one I have done
seasonal freelance editorial work for nearly every year from 1999 to this year.
But originally getting this work meant my getting over hurdles with the company
between 1996 and 1999.)
So one rule of thumb about “what
to look out for in young coworkers at media firms” would be lack of college
education. (In the case of PH and the supervisor, the problem was less obvious
and less objectively effective than in the Temps
case. Actually, I can, offhand, think of four cases of this, three of them
having paid diminishing returns over the time of my involvement with them, in
good part because of their limited education’s—generally speaking—making them
less hearty or resourceful as workers.)
Another desideratum in a young
coworker is something that I can only make the formulation I do here in long
hindsight, and it is a good premise for the blog entry below. This desideratum is
that the person values developing fellowship in terms of being a coworker, instead of in terms of being a “partier.” This
may seem obvious, but it’s remarkable—you might think of examples in your own
life, if you’re older than, say, 30—how often a young coworker who is more
imbued with being a “party animal” than in being a solid professional turns out
to be rather prodigious trouble when the chips are down in a work situation.
And the fundamental reason has to do with one’s developing “fellowship skills”
along the lines of being a solid worker—which I think can be cultivated if
students (in college if not also in high school) had jobs outside their
schooling’s area of endeavor, in which to develop simple work skills—rather
than being, more than anything else, about “knowing how to have a good time,”
especially if this “skill area” is centered on substance abuse.
Now to the blog entry (which
might seem a little repetitive at times, due to how it was composed)….
Changing times on pot remind me of a lost sense of why there was an
oblivion around the use of alcohol in my town 35 years ago
When I see newspaper coverage including
a photo of a young person today working earnestly in a marijuana-growing
facility that is legal in the few states that allow this, showing no
self-consciousness as if there is anything socially untoward about this, I
think about how “allowing public exposure of your allegiance to the pot-smoking
ethos” used (in the 1970s) to be more of a matter of antisocial (or
“subterranean”) culture; and those of us (like me) who didn’t warm to it in the
clashing-values days of the 1970s were rather in the wilderness in some ways, in
the practical matters of social eddies and the clattery proclamations of where
young peers stood, when it came to getting our own preferences honored. (The
way this sentence rounded off originally seemed satisfactory, but now it
doesn’t seem bad.)
(Also note: I am warm to the idea of medical marijuana
for those who are judged by a doctor to need it or whose problem can’t
adequately benefit from anything else remotely similar to it. When you consider
the epileptic girl in New Jersey whose sad story is put in the state newspaper
now and then, the position of those like Chris Christie who think that “Any use of marijuana—even medical—is
toying with a ‘gateway drug’” is naïve. After all, there are widely used
pharmaceuticals that also have deleterious side effects over long-term use,
which side effects can seem like marijuana’s in some respects, and no one wags his
or her finger over the propriety of those
drugs.)
Here I’m adapting an entry I
drafted about two and a half years ago, and had considered fixing in order to
post it for some time, and only recently decided to tackle it—but I’m working
it differently from how it originally (in 2013) was angled. For one thing, when
I talk about my having engaged in drinking, this was not extreme, not like that
engaged in by close others I knew. When I give a whiff of regret in the overall
tone of this entry, it is more a fastidious type based in part on acknowledging
today that I didn’t like drinking at all, rather than a reflection of the
quantity (or any habitual dimension) of drinking I’d done.
When I had read in my
early-1980s diary in early 2013 (when, in that period, I was doing the Marvin
Center series that is mostly on this blog—the first installment is here; the MC was my college’s big “student union”
facility), I was reminded of the good, bad, and ugly of my drinking during
college. This brings up a number of things worth clarifying: (1) I was never a
big “partier” as if I loved doing it, but there was a period from about 1979 to
1985 when I occasionally drank with friends, as a sort of “default” way of
“being social”; and (2) even when I got pretty drunk, the whole “scene” was
something I didn’t warm to, and when I look back, the whole idea disgusts me
all the more—that is, I would especially be staunch if an old friend (from
about 30 years ago) said today, “Why don’t we go out drinking, like we did
during college”: I would feel that was about as desirable or in good taste as
going to a kindergarten with a friend my age and daring each other to eat a
garden snail, as if we were six. In the early 1980s I was willing enough to
drink, and this (on rare occasion for me) went to excess, but to me today, the
whole thing reeks of “total lack of imagination for what might be a good way to
have quality time,” though others I was with in those days didn’t dislike it
this way.
More relevantly, the idea that
the only way an old friend could nowadays have a good time, if we met up again,
would be at a local bar—just turns me off. As if it shows total impoverishment regarding
what it would mean to honor an old friendship, old times, or whatever. In fact,
I haven’t had a friend suggest this for quite some time, and even when I have
(in the last 10-15 years or so) been together with an old friend with whom I
drank many years before, actually drinking again doesn’t quite coalesce for me,
or I do it minimally.
Part of my antipathy toward
drinking follows the fact that, in the very late 1970s and early 1980s, I had a
few friends (from different circles) who liked to drink, and I willingly drank
with them to some extent, in ways that varied as to how regrettable this seems
in retrospect (with one circle, it was more regrettable—never mind how). In a
way, it was part of being young (late-teens, early-twenties) goofballs, as I
think is a “necessary stage of life” that we middle-class Americans in
different eras all go through. It also was “the only way to have fun together,”
as was the general thinking.
In part, I was not a very
sociable person, and so—partly issuing out of my own thinking, and issuing a
bit out of others’—the idea was to drink in order to “live it up” (I seem to
recall this involved a lot more of a sense of “obligation” on my part than
following what I really enjoyed doing). We could also do things like go to
movies (drinking sometimes preceded that), or (in the case of one set of
friends, and not that this usually involved drinking) playing music (i.e.,
instruments—we “jammed”…). There was no social club or social activity that did
not involve something other than drinking.
The fact that no such thing was
around in my county, or opted for, shows the impoverishment of the “kid
culture” then. (This all has some of the same banality as the explanation of
“peer pressure” that some in their older years will cite as a possible reason
for an episode of substance abuse, happening in their younger years or
otherwise.) I realize that this same problem—it seems the reason some say
“There’s nothing to do around here; that’s why drugs get a foothold”—still dogs
young people today in the area (and of course, broadly through the country).
Also, explaining my position
today, and as may seem a “wimpy, idiosyncratic” reason in my own case for
taking an apparent toughly moral stand on drinking, I actually have been more (unhelpfully)
sensitive to alcohol since 1986. (My theory as to why this developed is that I
went through a serious internal strain in 1986 based on a very difficult objective
passage I was going through regarding my career, and not only did I seem to
become more sensitive to alcohol that year, but I started to develop a fear of
heights I never had before. As a measure of this latter, when in a summer job
in 1983, I could stand near the edge of a roof of a 10-story building without
much concern; but after 1986, I could never do that without feeling nervous,
and wanting to buttress myself against falling more than might seem realistic.
This invites the question, what kind of intense experience did I go through
that resulted in these conditions? It’s a long story, and why I developed them,
technically and specifically, is hard to say; the before-and-after global
phenomena are clear enough.)
Developing not as a party
animal
I think the best way to explain
my more recent stand on drinking has to do with how I’ve developed as a person.
For years, when I was small, through about age 15, I had tendencies to
depressive and obsessive-compulsive disorders that manifested themselves fairly
clinically and dysfunctionally, and I was generally (in less clinical terms) a
bit of a wimp. I was the second-smallest kid in my grade, and got made fun of
at times for being a “fag” and so on—this most apt to come from a small set of
students who were by fairly common consent bullies. Starting in 10th
grade, just as I turned 16 (and as I physically went through puberty), I went
through some rather grim emotional changes, and then, amid all else, I was
rather un-social for a few years—I had trouble with making small talk, “feeling
myself” around others, and so on. At the same time, I focused on academics as
my only route to any sort of worthwhile adult life (which was quite realistic).
So from about sophomore year in
high school to graduation from college, about 1977-84, I was a rather
singlemindedly hard-working student, while feeling the need (both from others’
comments and from my own tortured self-criticism) to “be more social.” As it
turned out, “being social” in my “exurban” community in Vernon Township, N.J., usually
meant “partying”—though I was always amid a particular social group (not a
tightly associating one) that was considered a nerdy type, and not among the fairly
large group (not a tight clique) of “potheads” or “heads” at our school, as
they were commonly called.
Once I got to college, there was
a real strong expectation from peers that one should drink as part of
socializing, and in that milieu, that meant going to bars (if anyone from those
days at GW remembers, there were bars in D.C. called The Exchange, Abbey Road, the
21st Amendment, and a few others I can’t remember that were popular
among GW dorm residents).
There were also different mutually
exclusive circles of friends with whom I drank from about 1980 through about
1982: mostly dorm-mates at GW (and that mostly in freshman year), and (when I
was home on summer vacation in New Jersey) a small clique of friends in Vernon,
who were younger than I. Then, in 1983, the first year I spent summer in Washington,
D.C., I tended to drink with a Ron Diaz, who was my roommate that summer—he had
also been one of my dorm mates during junior year (1982-83). He was finishing
up at the business school at GW; I remember typing one of more of his papers
for him. It is a few accounts of the ridiculous drinking situations the two of
us got into, which I find in the early-1980s diary, that (in 2013) reminded me
of my drinking years enough to want to clarify something about them, while also
having rather irritable thoughts, and a sense of staunch “position-taking,”
about them.
Trying to come up with “what better road there could have been”
All this is summary and rough
about whom I drank with and when. And mind you, I was no more a classic partier
at college than I had been at high school. (In fact, at high school, which for
me was 1976-80, partying was so prevalent that I think among the top four
students—I ended up number four—I know I
drank now and then, and I’m sure one or more of the others among the top three
did—but that was pretty self-restrained compared to what went on among others,
especially those who were not serious students, at the high school. I’m not
sure if anyone in my high school class completely refrained from any drinking.
Marijuana is another story—but even there, I think of the top four in my class,
maybe two of them never tried pot, but I’m just guessing. As for my use of it,
it was so limited (and, if I recall, it was only in 1979) that, by late-1970s
standards, it was like not doing it at all. (Just like Chris Christie taking a
position against contraception even though he admits he’s used a non-rhythm
method a bit himself [OK, we’re not calling him hypocritical].)
Anyway, when I look back from my
late forties and up to age 53 (this originally said “51” when I first drafted
this; the retrospective view has a somewhat different mood now), and think
about the long roads I’ve traveling career-wise, life-experiences-wise,
personal-growth (and –alteration)-wise, I wonder if there couldn’t have been a
better way to “have quality time with peers I could really identify with” than
to drink—especially when there were the excessive episodes that occurred. (One
episode, in late 1981, when I was with my younger friends in Vernon, involved
my drinking so much brandy that I couldn’t stand up, and one of them drove me
home—and he didn’t have a driver’s license! Don’t ask….)
I wonder, If my family had been
brought up with more traditional religious life—such as going to church
regularly, etc.—would that have staved off any phase of drinking I (or a
relative, far worse) went through? Could there have been a sort of social club
I could have been in (that could have emotionally supplanted the “need” to
drink, on others’ parts if not mine), apart from what was offered at school?
About the only thing I did that
came close to this was my creative writing, but this was largely something I
did in my privacy, not something I shared with friends.
It’s really hard to say. One of
the big lessons that I’ve learned, and that I find others learning—and it is
actually one important theme of my writing overall—is that you get what succor,
“spiritual help,” inspiration, etc., from whatever
sources are available as you grow up—at whatever level, or however
incomplete, they are. If they’re insufficient for you, that’s the breaks—and
maybe you make up for their loss with character-building developments in your
life later.
Is there a better way to look at
having gone through “a phase of the accidental, deficient fellowship offered by
drinking and drinking buddies” than with a kind of regret, lamenting, or
retrospective indignation (if this is exactly what I’m exercising)? I don’t
know.
A positive conclusion
What seemed to work for me as
the 1980s started and went on was getting opportunities to advance my career,
and these came either by hard work (I can see something in the pragmatically-minded
notion—I wish I could recall who originated it—that the harder you work, the
luckier you get) or by happening upon opportunities simply because they were
among a smorgasbord of these offered by some larger community you were in. In
this regard, GW offered me a lot.
In particular, the Marvin Center,
where I worked for nearly all of my college years (and for a year-plus
afterward), turned out to be a very good help, because not only did it give me
the structure and discipline of a work schedule—and income—but I had learning
experiences there from the types of colorful people and situations you
encountered there. (And this work didn’t even have to be in a field I expected
to be in all my life.)
And more generally, I learned
the value of developing professionalism, which latter doesn’t mean just
developing petty skills like getting to work on time and writing coherent night’s-end
reports, but developing a voice in a community of workers that helps you shape,
if not the philosophy of some of what is done there, then at least part of the
culture for how problems are regarded and how you can contribute to maybe some of them being solved.
Though the MC would turn out to
have a tendency not to resolve some of its intransigent problems, which is part
of the reason I left, there were other ways in which your voice on this sort of
thing could be accommodated. In this regard, the media world, in which I was
ensconced from 1990 through about 2010 (as far as in-office work goes), seems
less receptive to hearing your complaints about intransigent problems and is
more about having you shoulder the same old burden until your indignant noise
about the problems tapers off because you leave, or the work project ends.
This might seem that, by about
1985, the only source of fellowship, of a type that would promote building of
adult skills, that I grew to have was tied
to work (not always career-aligned, which is healthy), but that is pretty
true, though (especially in 1984-85, as far as peer relations went) I also engaged
in creative activity that was centrally tied to partnering with someone, such
as in the form of writing songs with a housemate of mine from that time.
Once I returned to New Jersey in
1986, my life entered a more peculiarly isolated phase, at least isolated from
age peers, and my “socializing” would largely mean going to movies, whether
with someone else or alone. (There was a band of a mixed set of “peers” I hung
out with in 1989 and 1990.) There would be plenty of people I might engage in
everyday talk of various kinds with, but these were usually at workplaces, in
stores or the like, or with friends I might run into at random and rare times.
Of course, in my post-1990
editorial-work years, I met new work friends, several of whom are now LinkedIn
connections. But also the way these people are “friends” is, obviously,
different from how your peers are when you’re in your school years.
Just a few notes. Get back to
work!
