I started working at my place of employment about 11 years ago. At first I was filled with this naïve desire to work tirelessly doing my absolute best. Over time and several really good figurative beatings I started to lose the edge on my idealism. I walked into a situation with faulty assumptions, that adults were somehow mature, that stupidity had no place in the echelon of higher learning, and that people were naturally curious about their surroundings. Over the years I’ve ‘grown up’ and realized that a lot of these assumptions I had made very early on were wrong, and very wrong at that. At the start of my career I was a sharp tool, ready to chew up problems and spit them out. Now I find, after a decade of constant wearing down that I’m more knowledgable than I was before, but I’m also more worn-in. Like any component in a great machine at first everything works very well but there are slight vibrations and squeaks until all the parts wear-in and really hit their stride. In the intervening years I would feel cyclic waves of stress, as I tried to cope with the disconnect between what I assumed was obvious and what reality really was all about. Where am I now? Still sharp, still on top of things, but the turkeys don’t get me so worked up anymore. I used to rail, to go on at length, trying my best to wake up people I regarded as hazardous sleepwalkers. It took years of constant wearing and truth be told, I resisted the lessons with the very fiber of my being because I knew they were corrupt and wrong. Now I don’t care so very much about things. If I stop treating the things in my life that have little importance as if they were of monumental importance then the stress and suffering actually evaporates. I suppose I was stubborn, not wanting to accept how others truly are. That people are single mindedly driven to maintain the status quo, if they are sleepwalkers they will actively fight being woken up. I can’t say that things actually matter as much to me as they once did, now things are tempered through the lens of the past few years and things don’t bother me so much anymore. I have only to assume that this wearing-down will inevitably progress as I continue doing what I do and eventually I will no longer be a working part but rather resemble a worn-smooth river rock, not going to sleep, but extricating the awake parts of myself out of one section of my life and moving them into other sections. Professionally speaking, I can expect this smoothing out to continue until there is a minimum of abrasion between my working self and my job. I have already discovered several good places to start, namely not allowing the events that transpire at work to be places where anger can sprout and stress me out. I don’t actively hate my coworkers, I actively don’t care about them. I’ve replaced outrage and anger with ignorance and apathy. I don’t know and I don’t care. My stress is borne out of the traction between how I want the world to be and how it really is, that stress converts to anger and the anger just boils and seethes. Anger is stupid, it does nothing. Anger could do things but I have to keep on living and allowing my anger to have a purpose would pretty much end the whole ‘keep on living’ part. I think the opposite of anger is humor. I’m on a road of self-repair, every time I come up against something that royally pisses me off I have to realize that it’s actually the traction and if I laugh about it, then at least I’ll have replaced stress with entertainment. I can definitely forsee myself becoming that old guy in the corner who laughs and chuckles to himself, hopefully with a mug of ale in my hands – laughing at the stupid and the wrong and the horrible. I’ll have swapped out anger-lines for laugh-lines. It’s going to be far better for me in the long-run and nobody here will even notice.