Grindin'

(from the Lent Blog)

It's been a more than week since anyone has posted and since I don't want this to completely die, I guess I should put down some of my thoughts.

Lent had been going fine. I am sad to say, however, that I broke down a few weeks ago. I was down in North Carolina visiting my girlfriend- we went to go visit one of her friends. His parents were in town, and since they were from Louisiana they decided to make some gumbo for all of his friends. I didn't want to seem ungrateful, so I had some. And man was it good! But the thing is, it wasn't like I forgot about what I'd given up. I made a conscious decision, and I should suffer some kind of consequence. So, I will try my best to go an extra week without beef, pork, or chicken. And if I foul up again, I'll make it an extra two weeks.

Other news? I flat out failed when it came to reading, again, no excuse for that either. I didn't expand myself culturally either, unless going out to bars to have a beer and commiserate counts as taking advantage of living in New York. The only thing I can say in my defense is that work has been extremely hectic lately. At times it's been stressful and when it hasn't been stressful it's been numbing. Not in the sense of being boring, I actually enjoy the work I do very much. No, what I mean is that I invest so much of my mind at work that I don't want to have to think about anything when I get home. It's a weird feeling, wanting to be mindless. I guess this has been my first feeling of going through "the grind."

Young men, especially those steeped in "hip-hop" lingo, love to talk about how much they grind, how hard the grind, I definitely loved to talk about it while I was in college and working. But, it's an all together different feeling now that I'm working for a living rather than going to school. Having to go to work when I had a paper due put a nervousness in my stomach that bordered on fear. It wasn't tedious by any means. But for work, though, it's sloshing through a project, which, you enjoy in the abstract, but which also consists of a bunch of tedious number crunching that ultimately gets you to your ultimate goal at some distant point in time. Sometimes it's two weeks, sometimes it's a month, sometimes your project withers up and dies because your boss wants to go in a different direction. The minuteness can be compared to the busy work you received in school, but it's ultimately much more necessary. But, since sometimes in a single day, or even a single week you don't feel that you've produced much, it feels just like you're spinning your wheels, inching forward as slowly as the ocean encroaching on an island. That's what the grind is, nothing exciting, nothing physical, there's no sweat involved. In other words, coke dealers don't grind, office workers do.