My Jobs, An Overdeveloped Imagination, And A Brief Reflection Upon The Nature Of Satisfaction

I have a job. Well, I have three jobs, actually. And I know it is probably generally in bad taste to blog about one's jobs, but I'm not criticizing them. Or if I am, it's only a little bit and it's a fairly just criticism. I will say this: I am trying to be very, very fair about this, and I feel the need to post about this because I think it is just so important to have a job that you enjoy doing, or at least one that does not leave you drained physically and emotionally at the end of it.

However, I am nineteen, unmarried, in charge of making my family dinner only once a month, in charge of doing my family's dishes one night a week, and in charge of taking care of my laundry every other Wednesday, because every other Wednesday I have no work. I don't work Saturdays or Sundays, either, but those are 1) my mother's laundry day and 2) nobody does laundry on the Sabbath in my house. It doesn't happen. So I feel that I can put up with one of these three jobs in particular that tends to drain me physically and emotionally, because I have had the job for maybe a month now, and while it neither pays well nor is fun to do, I am composed in the belief that I, Sarah Eliza Abramson, can do ANYTHING for a summer. Except sell my body, because while prostitution is no doubt a lucrative profession, I would feel somewhat guilty about paying for my tuition at a Mormon school with money that I earned by breaking the law of chastity.

That was a joke. Don't get too mad. I'll admit it was off-color.

These are my jobs:

Job #1: I have no problems with this. The company I work for sends me a big pile-o-papers once a month. I take these papers, I find certain little numbers and things on them, compose them into an organized and detailed list using Microsoft Excel, and I email this list back to the company. I do not mind telling you that while the hours on this job come in spurts, it pays quite well, and I am able to earn more than you would think.

I like Job No. 1 because it contains exactly the right amount of mind-numbing tedium for me to turn on Spotify or Pandora or Windows Media Player while I'm doing it, and then I can just kick back and listen to music and enjoy myself while I'm working. The pay is also good, and I have a very fair employer/supervisor who forgives me when I'm occasionally late with something, bless his heart. It is a very good job and I am well satisfied with it.

Job #2: Two days a week, which vary, I go to my employer's house and babysit their children. They have two tiny girls, age three and age eight-ish months. Both are adorable and quite well-behaved for their age. Frankly, I've seen kids behave much worse, because I've been one and because with the Beast, the Beauty, the Angel, and the Prodigy in one family, there are bound to be various shenanigans. I work from the morning to any time in the afternoon from three to five. They also pay me pretty well, although for the sake of anonymity I do not choose to disclose how much they pay me, nor their names, nor the names of their children. I'll just say that they are very fair and they treat me really well.

I like Job No. 2 because the kids are cute and relatively low-maintenance, although I am keeping busy. I don't mean that I neglect them; I mean that my brain is free to occasionally drift off while I work, and the constant change of pace involved in the job makes it interesting. Taking care of an infant is also a good experience for me to have, and I have learned a lot, and I mean a LOT, about babies in the past two and a half months. It's good stuff to know, considering that my ultimate life goal, like many other Mormon girls' ultimate life goal, is to eventually get married in the temple and become a wife and mother. Having experience with babies is probably a good idea, and three-year-olds even more so, because I caught this three-year-old in mid-potty-training, and that, too, has been an experience.

And finally, there is Job #3: Two or three days a week, depending on the week, I go to my other employer's house and I babysit their nine-year-old daughter. This is an okay job. It pays okay, though not enough (trying to strike the balance between honest and fair) and on some days I will even admit that it is fun. It is however, an immense drain on my brain. To illustrate why this is, I shall introduce to you the imaginary world that I am forced to live in, two or three days a week, from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon:

It all began before the Pixar movie Brave came out in theaters. The lassie I babysit shares certain quirks of nature with the main character of that movie, Princess Merida. Princess Merida- P.M.- this shall be the code name for the young lady whom I have been entrusted with. P.M. meets me on the first day, we play soccer for half an hour, she shows me her plastic bow and arrows, tells me about Brave and how excited she is for it, we play outside most of the day. She is Princess Merida, from the movie Brave itself, and her character is gleaned from the snippets of previewed scenes she's seen on the Disney Channel. My character is one that I mostly made up; the long-lost sister of Princess Merida. I had no name at first, but eventually I was christened Casey, to be called Christina when I was in trouble (because it was my full name and our evil stepmother Grizelda enjoyed calling me by my full name, which greatly annoyed Princess Casey.) We lived in the forest and I used shotguns to kill things and she used the bow and arrows and all was fine and good. I even enjoyed this game, for a while. We had an aunt who lived in the woods and was the guardian of the forest, named Lily (Lilianne, but Lily for short) and we were both thirteen years old and we each had a pet bear, because bears evidently feature strongly in the movie Brave. I have no idea, having not yet seen it.

Basically the premise of the game became to avoid our stepmother, Grizelda, because she made us wear pink, sparkly gowns with brass buttons and high heels and corsets and all sorts of horrid things, instead of us running free and wild in the woods as God intended, or perhaps just the fairies, because P.M.'s parents are not religious.

I was just FINE with this game.

One day, P.M. wanted to stay inside and she watched High School Musical 2. I hated the HSM series already (mostly out of a desire to be contrary to the Beauty, who loved them) and this confirmed my hatred, because P.M. adopted a character from the HSM movies as yet another sister of Princesses Merida and Casey. And who did she pick? Not nice Gabriella. Not sweet little Kelsey who plays the piano. Not Taylor. No, she picked lovely obnoxious Sharpay.

And with the addition of Sharpay to the party, the game began to bring itself indoors. Sharpay was the tattletale. She told on Merida and Casey to mean stepmother Grizelda. She got her own pet bear, a welcome-to-the-family gift from enchantress aunt Lily, and the three of us were the crown princesses of Scotland and these bears were magical, and they were called "the bears of our country," and then we would have sessions with the bears where P.M.'s bear screeches were as realistic as any baby howler monkey in the zoo, but twice as constant and much closer. Princess Merida's bear was Fluff; Princess Sharpay's bear was Beary; and mine, with my desire to bring the game to a higher linguistic level, was named Sylvan. Mine was a vain hope.

Grizelda began to hold balls and make all of her stepdaughters go to the salon for constant makeovers. Sharpay loved this, but Merida did not. And before you ask, I was always Casey. P.M. did the constant switching from role to role, and she still does. She does this so seamlessly that I sometimes wonder if she has schizophrenia.

I beg your pardon. That was not a nice joke to make. I won't do it again.

We had to take "dates" to the balls, of course, and just because it annoyed my character and made P.M. laugh personally, the "songs" we had to dance to were about makeup and the color pink and "girly" things, which annoyed Merida and Casey. Grizelda, in the spirit of the movie Brave, was always trying to pair her stepdaughters up with various uncouth gentlemen by the names of Walden, Waldini, and ongoing variations of the name Wald-anything. Eventually, Casey got to pick a date, and we called him Jack. I was fine with this. I was able to pretend, for a while, that Jack was Captain Jack Harkness of Doctor Who/Torchwood fame, and I was able to shut out the rest of everything. But I forgot that P.M. was also Jack, and because she was Jack and every other character, it became her primary object to torture my character in the field of romance. Jack, after the manner of every soap opera ever invented, became... guess who... our long-lost brother.

Yeah. I dated my own brother. How's that for drama, huh?

Going outside had at this point died; it rained one day and P.M decided she was going to wear pajamas all day. Ever since then, she has worn pajamas all day. We don't go outside anymore. In fact, we don't leave her room, except every now and then to use her parent's room or the stairs or the upstairs bathroom as the realm of our imaginary universe.

The next person to be kidnapped from perfectly good fiction to this game was Hermione Granger, of the Harry Potter series. P.M. and I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban one day. The next day we watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The next time I came, lo and behold, we had a new sister in the ever-growing family! I know that most of you are going, NOOOOOOO NOT HERMIONE! HOW COULD YOU!?!? I will defend myself here by saying that I tried to stop her, but P.M.'s response was to this, "Oh, it's a DIFFERENT Hermione Granger." Right. A young female magician with curly brown hair, and P.M. even has and uses Hermione's wand, bought in Orlando, Florida, at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios, and you tell me it's a different Hemione Granger. Right.

Upon reading back through this, I sound quite bitter. I sort of am. It's Hermione Granger. YOU DO NOT KIDNAP HERMIONE GRANGER. Nuh-uh.

Well, Hermione became the fifth long-lost sister in the Evans family- did I mention we adopted Sharpay's last name? Yes, we did. Merida, Casey, Sharpay, Jack, and Hermione EVANS. Shudder. The five of us each had a pet bear by now; Hermione had an infantile bear named Fairy (named by me) and Jack had a bear named Willow (also named by me, thank goodness). We had several days where all the bears did (and P.M. was all the bears, too) was attack each other, and every time this happened it was Casey's job to separate all the bears from each other and tell them not to hit each other. I suppose the expressions on my face when I pretended to scold the bears was mildly amusing, because P.M. would roll about laughing every time I said the word "No." In retrospect, this is probably the primary reason why I am not a huge fan of this job.

What happened next was that the five of us underwent "princess/prince ceremonies," where we underwent an awkward coming-of-age ritual in which we answered "would-you-rather" questions (toned-down ones, of course) and repeated solemn oaths to be faithful and good princes and princesses. After that, our aunt Lily had an epic showdown battle with stepmother Grizelda, and then aunt Lily took the five of us to Ireland on vacation, along with the bears.

Now, let me clarify something here. When P.M. is being Aunt Lily or Merida or Hermione or Jack, she is perfectly bearable. When she is being one of the many suitors of Princesses Merida, Casey, or Hermione, she is only slightly less bearable. It is when P.M. manifests her inner drama queen in the form of Sharpay Evans that I begin to wonder if I ought not to be committed to a mental institution for accepting this job in the first place.

On our Irish vacation, Aunt Lily was to be out of the room every "night" from ten thirty to seven o-three. Why this mattered so much, I had no idea, until P.M. told me that her favorite number was three. And Sharpay, in comparison with Merida, Casey, Jack, and Hermione, is fifteen years old to their thirteen years old. (How are we all thirteen anyway? Are we quartuplets?) She is therefore left in charge. Sharpay turns the imaginary television set (because we're in the Scotland of antiquity and 2012 at the same time) onto a channel called the "Pink Girls Channel," in which the characters talk about clothes and boys and makeup and the color pink. This is meant to drive Casey crazy, which I obligingly allow her to see, and it annoys the other siblings and the bears, whom I usually have to calm down. Then Sharpay goes to sleep, and the sleeping arrangements are such that Sharpay has to sleep with Casey, of course, even though they get along very badly, and what ends up happening is that Casey (by will of P.M.) kicks Sharpay off the bed because Sharpay flops on her, sleeptalking about her boyfriend Troy (name and character also borrowed from the HSM series; evidently he broke up with Gabriella for Sharpay) and about makeup and things, and then Sharpay wakes up and yells at Casey and picks up one of the baby bears and throws it; Casey has to calm it down (being the bear expert) and then gets in trouble the next day with Aunt Lily because Sharpay tells on her. This occurs some fifty-odd times in your average playing-with-P.M.-hour, which lasts about four in imagined time. Also in Ireland, Casey got a new boyfriend named Austin Powers (guess what movie P.M. had watched the night before?) and proceeded to go through various dramas with him, culminating in him cheating on her with some man-stealing floozie named Princess Leila, who is unimportant except that she's a man-stealing floozie.

As a result, Princess Casey Evans turned from a carefree, wild forest child into a bitter, thirteen-year-old, man-hating cynic who is unpleasant to be around. She is my only character in these games. P.M. dominates everybody else, which is fine by me.

I play this game with P.M. for seven hours a day, two or three days a week. She asks me as soon as the garage door closes on her mother's car, "Hey, wanna play Brave?" That's the title of our game- still based on where it was started, although it now does not remotely resemble the movie Brave. And I, because I am thinking about getting fired and not getting money and starving during the school year, smile very naturally, without gritting my teeth even, and say, "Sure, let's go." And then we sit for three hours in her bedroom. And then we eat lunch, which if I'm lucky I can stretch to half an hour, and then we sit for another three hours in her bedroom. And then she worries about the weather for half an hour while she waits for her dad to come home.

I hate this game, because it is doing a very good job of ruining several movies for me. I will never be able to watch HSM the same way ever again, because for a tiny, twitchy redhead with energy to spare, P.M. does a great job being a sixteen-year-old bratty, bipolar blonde diva. SERIOUSLY, the kid should be an actress. I never want to see the movie Brave, because she has effectively managed to ruin it for me. I'll watch the movie and I just know I'll end up thinking about "This isn't how it was in the game!" and then I will say to my brain, "SHUT UP!" but it won't work, because the louder you yell at your brain the louder it thinks at you.

I hate this game, because it's the same thing, over and over and over and OVER and why do you always want to play this, can't we play something else? Can't you stare at a T.V. all day like every other kid in the history of ever? Can't you read a book like me? Can't we just sit there and write stories? Can't we play a board game? Can't we do SOMETHING BUT NOT THIS AGAIN?

I hate this game, because occasionally I do enjoy myself when I'm playing, and then when my character is happy, with a boyfriend, for just a few minutes, P.M. gets a devious twinkle in her eyes and decides that she wants to cause Casey untold misery and bad luck in the realm of romance. And Sharpay rubs it in: "Why can't you keep a boyfriend? Because I'm so much better than you, that's why." And really, that kind of hits close to home. Not with my own sister, but with my girlfriends who were skinny and pretty like Sharpay from High School Musical, who had boyfriends and dated and stuff and I didn't and don't, and Casey, poor Casey, gets a boyfriend, and for a moment the girl inside Casey Evans who is Sarah Abramson can imagine that she, too, has a boyfriend, and it's kind of a nice feeling, and then that is torn away by someone who has never understood what it is like to lose someone you love, be it to skinnier, prettier girls or because it just wasn't right.

I hate this game, because Casey takes care of these bears and teaches them to sit still when they're being groomed and not to hit each other and not to scratch and bite people, and P.M. decides, because she thinks it's funny, to make them disregard everything Casey ever says, because she finds my facial expressions and voice funny, and it makes me wonder if my own children are someday going to laugh at me when I try and teach them things, and I am never going to laugh at anything my mother tells me to do in seriousness ever again, because it hurts.

I hate this game, because I am trying to be a good person and participate in the game. I am trying to earn my wages, as piddly as they are, and I am trying to enjoy myself because in the brief moments when the game is fun, I look at the clock and lo and behold, a whole half hour has passed, and that's a lovely long time in a playing-with-P.M.-hour. I am trying and trying and trying to enjoy myself and with the constant influx of bad luck that happens to me in this game, not because God ordained it but because P.M. did, and I find that every time something happens I have to fight the urge to ask her why it happened, why does everything bad happen to Casey, why can't something bad happen to Sharpay or Merida or Jack or even, God forbid, Hermione.

I hate this game, because no matter how hard I try, it always ends in disappointment for me. And I feel like I'm drowning in this disappointment, like it's mirroring my life, like it hurts so much to play because my life has nothing serious in it right now, and yet many of the exact same things are happening in my life and in this stupid, stupid game.

But I will tell you this: as low as this brings me, it gives me confidence in this: my imagination is deep enough that I can understand it. Honestly, the only reason P.M. probably wants to play this game so much is because I do a credible enough job with my role that she feels free to express her roles. P.M. is an only child, and I am very sorry for her. She doesn't have ready-made playmates. If I ever got bored I would say to Judy, "Let's have a play," and we would play that our bunk bed was a camper and we would play with our Beanie Babies and Maggie the Magic Cat and Savannah, the pony with magical pink hair. P.M. doesn't have that, and she probably appreciates being able to do that with me. I suspect that this is the only reason I am not fired from my job yet, because when I'm not there, I doubt her parents are going to play this game with her. Not that that's a bad thing.

And yet, that's probably why I take this so seriously: because in trying to be enthusiastic and do a good job, I am developing my skills as a soap opera actress (like seriously, I could probably get a job on a soap if I can't make enough money for college) and my imagination, as occupied as it has to be with finding dialogue suitable for Princess Casey Evans and for movement and watching and imagining that P.M.'s pink-trimmed bedroom is a ritzy hotel suite, a salon and spa, a bus, an automobile, and everything all at once, is being involved and drawing these parallels to my own life and adding things, occasionally, to the world that I'm building with P.M. Someone who didn't care as much, or who didn't have as deep an imagination, would probably laugh this off and say in a bored, condescending tone: "Yeah, what a silly little game." They would laugh at P.M.'s whims and when they got tired of it, they would go downstairs and watch T.V. and leave P.M. in forlorn loneliness. I don't do that because I'm afraid that she'll tell her parents and I'll starve this year in college, not because I don't want to.

So even though I go to P.M.'s house every day and I play this stupid game where I never come out on top, I am exercising my imagination and keeping it fresh and new, and I am making money, as piddly as that amount is, and I am trying to make a child's world a little better, because I suspect that P.M. is lonely and that she enjoys it when I come over and play with her all day. And really, how many other kids have jobs where you get to play "Let's Pretend" all day? I shouldn't complain. Maybe I can think of something new to add for the game tomorrow. Wish me luck, because when I'm there I won't have this perspective and I'll wish I was home, and/or knocked out, again. This knowledge is satisfying, and that is a spoonful of jam on a piece of bread, even if this bread has gross little crunchy things in it.