The Right to Mourn (what's not right to mourn)

Every weekday I flip through Metro NY for my dose of the news on my way to the real reason I pick it up: the soduko and crossword page. This page also tends to have room, just across from the horoscope, for an op-ed piece. One of the columnists writes for the Daily Show and I read his pretty regularly, but the rest I can do without. Today, columnist Clark DeLeon echoed the cries of the rest of the media that's obsessed with Michael Jackson's death by telling us that who we should really be mourning is Farrah Fawcett. This reminds me of when the media covered the news of Princess Diana's death 24/7 for about 2 weeks, all the while telling us we were bad people because we should have been clamouring to mourn Mother Theresa, who died at the same time.

Media hypocrisy aside, what really bothers me about this is that there is some assumed right and wrong about mourning someone or something. When I was in high school, my grandmother and my dog died in the same week. My grandmother was in her eighties and I saw her 2-4 times a year. My dog slept next to my bed every single night. You can guess which one broke my heart.

I don't believe that there's a bottom line of personal tragedy which can be reached by adding up the sum of our experiences: Let's see, add two points for regular contact, subtract one for bad qualities, add 3 for tragic and sudden reason for demise...
...it doesn't work that way.

Although my will to live was not crushed by either Farrah or Michael's passing, if I had to mourn one of them, it would be Michael Jackson (and that's a pretty big stretch). After all, as a child of the eighties and not the seventies, I haven't had much to do with Farrah. Michael, on the other hand, has been in my musical vocabulary since I was old enough to listen to the radio. I still blast "The Way You Make Me Feel" when I need a pick-me-up and if the radio stations would ever stop playing "Thriller" these days I might be able to go back to enjoying it once a year on Halloween as most members of my generation do.

So if you want to mourn the death of Billy Mays as loudly as he used to sell OxiClean, go right ahead. I won't tell you you're wrong.

It's (not) my job

Probably the most frustrating phrase you can hear when you're looking for a little help is "it's not my job." Suddenly, the boundaries of someone's job description become so absolute that the person in question cannot act against it to lift a finger to help you. If you're lucky, this phrase gets the add-on of "Sorry," as in "Sorry, it's not my job" which means that the person would help you if they could, but oh shucks, the world is too clearly defined into categories of "my job" and "not my job" and the universe will be thrown out of whack if they test that. Sorry.

"No, it's alright, I don't need you to hold the door while I carry this heavy box through it, I'd hate to overturn the natural order by making you do something that's not your job. Thanks for saying 'sorry,' though, it really makes me feel like you're not at all an ass and are in fact a terribly well-intentioned person bound beyond your own strength but an all-too-confining job description."

The only phrase more frustrating than "it's not my job" when you're an underling with 30 bosses is the exact opposite. Suddenly, you can't even staple a piece of paper without someone asking why you didn't get their permission first, since overseeing stapling is their job and how dare you step on their toes to make that decision. The most frustrating aspect of this problem is that this is the moment when job descriptions suddenly become so elastic that the person in question (and your 29 other bosses) can stretch their job as far as they like to argue any excuse to oversee whatever it is they want. Never mind that two other people already claimed that it's their job to oversee proper staple consumption and office equipment usage, what matters is that the person in front of you suddenly also has a line item in their job description about correct angles of staples on the page that now means they should have been in on the staple decision from the beginning and next time you should know better.

It sounds confusing, I'm sure, to navigate your way through this rather mutable environment, but I have figured out a quick guide for said underling to know where you stand:

--If you don't want to do it, it's your job

--If you want to do it, it's not your job.

I'd wish you luck, but it's not my job. (Sorry)