Can you achieve happenness through success?

The richer the society, the more difficult it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.
- Economist E.F. Schumacher, from The Geography of Bliss

Does this help or hurt a search for meaning?

Like, Dislike

Like: 
Windows.  They are the interface between indoors and outdoors, public and private.  Open windows allow the two to mingle.  Light classical music and the aroma of dinner simmering on the stove waft out; warm, filtered sunlight streams through onto hardwood floors.


Closing them creates a sense of infinite possibility.  Ceiling fans, crown moldings, window dressings and flower boxes serve as clues to explain the world - unknown people living out their unknown lives - that exist behind the panes of glass.


Doors and porches play a secondary role. I would like to explore this.  


Dislike: 
People who laugh when nothing is funny.  People who use laughing as a tic, like a period to end a sentence.  I think these people do it as a way to show that they are personable and engaging, but I find it one of the most disingenuous displays of emotion.

Day One

It's the first rainy Monday morning of 2010.  And the new year was getting off to such a great start...

I can just barely see the rain dripping down the windows in snaking rivulets if I sit up perfectly straight in my chair.  The cubicle walls are high enough to separate us from one another but low enough that everyone can spy on everyone else as they walk by.  It's corporate insecurity perfected.

I believe I'm supposed to be doing something with powerpoint at the moment but my coffee hasn't kicked in fully and I still have t-minus 5 hours before I have to place my carefully formatted, labor-of-love slides in front of the critical eyes on the 19th floor.  

My company occupies only 2.5 floors of a 27 story office building in the heart of Manhattan.  The 18th floor is my floor.  A collection of worker bees, without the comforting drone of a hive.  It's usually uncomfortably quiet down here; the only breaks for moments of human-made noise are after 5:30pm on a particularly slow day and Friday afternoons.  The 19th floor is where the more important people hide in offices with opaque glass doors, emblazoned with their name.  It's usually just as quiet up there, aided by the fact that most of the partners can sneak out to catch the Metro North to their suburban oasis earlier than the rest.  The 0.5 floor is actually a few floors above us, where the "unbillable" people sit.  It's the Bermuda Triangle of corporate life.  


This will most likely be my last post about work.  Since I hope no one I know will ever read these musings, it shouldn't matter much, but I don't want to take the chance that any momentary, self-indulgent bitterness about the pointlessness of my current situation should affect any chance I may have at a real life.


Also, since I have very little interest in what I do daily, I assume no one else will either.  Instead I hope to use this silent, irrelevant podium as a format to escape; to occassionally capture thoughts I have; to celebrate things I am inspired by; and to hopefully learn more about myself in the meantime.  You're welcome to follow along if you would like, but either way, I'll keep writing.  


Note: I am a recent adoptee to the world of blogging.  I'm sure that my understanding of how these things are formatted, updated, used/abused and operated in general will dramatically change over the course of my exploration.  Please, invisible readers, have patience.