busy"Descending the Ladder"
"It was the worst day of my life!"
Chelsey complained, waving a hand
in front of her perfectly made up face.
"I broke a nail right before the charity ball,
and there was just no time to have it repaired.
I felt like everyone was staring at me the whole time,
and nobody donated more than a hundred thousand."
"Now that you've survived the worst," said Millicent,
"we'll see about your refurbishing your manicure
and then do some damage control."
Preston yanked off his tie and threw it
over the back of his dressing chair.
"I didn't get tenure," he said.
"I don't know if my career can
survive this. What am I going to
do now? This was my life's work!"
"I'm sure you'll think of something,"
Blaine said, patting him on the shoulder.
"There are other colleges where you can apply."
"He left," Clara said numbly.
"I love him, and he just dumped me.
This is worst thing he could possibly do --
it's not even a month after our wedding."
"Come on," Anne said, tugging her hand.
"This calls for some emergency chocolate."
José rubbed his hands over his upper arms
as he shifted from one foot to the other.
"Gang's not happy with me, man,"
he said. "They're gonna kick my ass.
If I don't survive this, you tell
mamí that I love her."
"Tell her yourself," Roberto said. "You can
hide out at my uncle's until this blows over."
"Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, it got worse,"
Latisha said. "Thanks to that robbery, now we got no tent
to sleep in, no food to eat, and no fuckin' coats."
The snow drifted down over the two girls
huddled in a grimy corner of they alley.
"Still got each other, sis," Quanda said stoutly.
Notes:
For this poem, I drew on Maslow's hierarchy of needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. I have replaced self-actualization with utter frivolity because I rarely see any evidence of rich people actualizing themselves.
March 6 2015, 23:05:27 UTC 6 years ago
March 7 2015, 07:02:56 UTC 6 years ago
"huddled in a grimy corner of they alley."
Shouldn't it be THE alley or maybe even THEIR alley?
:^)
March 7 2015, 08:59:06 UTC 6 years ago
If the professor (with or without tenure) would publish a book for the layman, and then perhaps move onto giving lectures to make his expertise more widely available... nowadays we have blogs like Ars Technica that do similar... then they would be more self-actualized than someone who traded one type of employment for another, but didn't gain the ability to amplify their expression of uniqueness, to the benefit of society and thus increase the wholeness of themselves by demonstrating gratitude.
A real-life example would be Steve Wozniak, who went into teaching and such, as opposed to Steve Jobs, who received a lot more material wealth but specialized in building business rather than young minds.
Of course, this is debatable and from a social perspective. Jobs likely felt rather actualized, and some people admire him, but I would say that Woz is a better example of someone who reaches a steady-state and focuses, from a position of post-rebirth, to devote some service to society. Woz's "death" might have been losing direct connection to Apple, but his engineering skills likely make him a better teacher.
We won't think of Woz as rich, but I think he still has stock options and such that make him quite wealthy, in the financial sense.