Some love the Internet because it lets you keep in touch with your far-flung friends easily and inexpensively. Others adore it because it gives you near-immediate access to a frightening amount of information. Yet others appreciate it because it gives you an opportunity to write about self-washing, self-flushing cat boxes. I'm not a cat person, but as a reader I'm happiest when someone is passionate about what they're writing. And if you visit the Amazon page for the first-generation self-washing, self-flushing cat box (yes, a second generation, with more or better something, has since come out), you will be confronted by people who are quite passionate, positively and negatively, about this particular technological innovation. The one by "N.A. Cat Lover" is particularly worth reading: "The question is not IF, but WHEN you will find yourself hunched over your cat's feces floating in a pool of fetid water, picking small plastic pellets out of the opaque, pungent water with your fingers so that you can get the device put back together."
It helps to love what you're doing, even if you're writing about cat feces. N.A. Cat Lover is certainly having fun with his or her writing. Last week my friend Doug Chandler passed on something he read recently in a Raymond Chandler (no relation, I think) biography:
"A writer who hates the actual writing is as impossible as a lawyer who hates the law or a doctor who hates medicine...The actual writing is what you live for...How can you hate the magic which makes a paragraph or a sentence or a line of dialogue or a description something in the nature of a new creation?"
Which brings us to the text on the back cover of Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen:
"This was The Life. The part they can't teach in culinary school, don't ever show on TV. The unscheduled death and disasters and heat and blistering adrenaline highs, the tunnel vision, the crashing din, smell of calluses burning, crushing pressure and pure, raw joy of it all as the entire rest of the world falls away and your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire; everything turning on the next call, the next fire order, the twenty, thirty, forty steaks in front of you and the hundreds on the way. This was what made everything else forgivable. And I knew that if I could just do this one thing, all night, every night, under the worst conditions and without fail, nothing else mattered."
Doesn't this make you want to cook, right now? I enjoyed the book a great deal, in part because it reminded me, at a time when I'm figuring out what my next job should be, how important passion is when deciding how you want to spend 40-100 hours a week. Do you care about what you're doing? Does it matter to you? You're lucky if you have a job for which you're passionate. If you're not lucky, you have to find a way to develop a passion and do more than just get through the day. And if you can't do that, maybe you can write about self-washing, self-flushing cat boxes in your free time.
For more on amateur reviews (it's where I first learned about N.A. Cat Lover), including the obligatory image of a Three Wolf Moon shirt, there's a good roundup on The Poetics of Amateur Product Reviews at Design Observer.
Sent from James' iPhone
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