Being good at something

"You are like Alexander Hale, Mommy. You are good at making people believe you are good at stuff. But you are a fraud," said Eli the other day.
"Why do you say that," I asked, slightly taken aback.
"You say those things that you went to South America and Africa and did all these things,  but it may not all be true.  I don't know why I have this feeling you are a fraud, but...you just are."

Alexander Hale is the spy who has never really done anything himself, but talks a lot about his supposed adventures that are really adventures of others in a new favorite book of Eli's, Spy School. 

I don't lie about my old adventures. But this conversation struck a chord because I came to the sad realization recently that I am fairly good at something I don't necessarily want to be good at: performing competently in an office job - any office job, really - where one must function in a medium-to-large corporate environment and carry out tasks deemed to be necessary by company management to support and advance the company's functioning or "mission." If the words with which I describe the tasks seem to mean not much at all then that is intentional. Most of the time, the tasks don't mean much at all, as we know from Bartleby the Scrivener, through Office Space and Then We Came to the End, among others.   

What to do when the main thing you learned to be good at in 15+ years of working life is something you can hardly bear? I can't say that I am quite where Laura Dern's character was on her (and Mike White's) short-lived, but really smart HBO show Enlightened. I haven't screamed and insulted any bosses yet or had a very public nervous breakdown, but I told a senior partner recently she made me feel mentally challenged during yet another conversation when she made me feel so. (It's not personal, she insults most of her employees' intelligence apparently because of her own extraordinary capabilities, but my inappropriate words just tumbled out and, once they were hanging in the air, there was nothing I could do but stare at her. I'd never seen her lose her ability to react before.)

So what to do? It feels like I wasted years during which I could have gotten good at something else and now, if I don't pay attention, I might be doomed to another god knows how many years of honing my unwelcome skills until, one day, getting fired for echoing Bartleby and admitting that "I would prefer not to."
 

The 6 Train

I try to avoid the subway. I bike to and from work whenever I can or take the bus (the M15 Select is a great bus!) when it doesn't work out. 

Sometimes, I still have to get on the subway.

I was recently slightly traumatized when I had to make a last-minute sprint out of the way of a surprisingly strong pee-stream (more like an arch between two sets of seats) on a crowded rush-hour 6 train a few weeks ago. My cue to leave was when the soon-to-be streamer, an older homeless man just waking up, fumbled with his fly and stated loud and clear: A man's gotta piss!

I wasn't happy but had to get back on the 6 train a few days later. It was crowded around 1 pm at 59th street and I moved away from the seats at the front end of the car because a bunch of people stood up and I wanted to give space to those who come and those who leave. As people were exiting, I noticed this slightly older woman (maybe 65?), with long hippyish hair in a brown dress (formerly attractive, perhaps) now focusing all of her attention on the seat freeing up behind me. A moment or so later, as she stepped in with determination, I noticed a balding older guy wearing a red and black checkered jacket to my right scouting out the same seat and the one directly across and making a determined move for it. Then he noticed her out of the corner of his eye. He stepped, she stepped, they collided for just a moment and he looked her in the eyes, took both her hands, spun her around as if they were dancing and, as he let go of her hands, she landed on the seat behind me like a graceful ballerina and he gently put himself on the seat across from her.

The whole scene took just a few seconds, but I'd never seen such a thing of beauty on the subway. There was so much possibility to it all. I watched, holding my breath, what was going to happen between them. But as I was leaving at the next stop, they were both back in their respective worlds, probably just happy to be sitting on a crowded train. I'd like to imagine they traveled together long enough to look at each other once more.