I watched “The Soloist” one night. And as I stated in my Facebook page, it was a “wickedly impressive” movie. I was hooked up. From its opening theme (where reporter Steve Lopez played by Robert Downey JR. starts his day), it was already engaging. Then there was the bicycle accident, and his encounter with the schizophrenic musical prodigy Nathaniel Ayers (played by Jamie Fox).
Before you get bored, this is not a movie review. Just hang on tight.
And why do I love this? For one, Iron Man and Ray Charles are in this movie. You don’t usually see these guys in one frame. But also, it gives me a glimpse of a world I once looked forward to.
Steve Lopez works for Los Angeles Times. His specialty is to write stories with human elements weaved on them, ranging from transient cellists to societies of Atheist who “non-worships and non-gathers”. And Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musician living on the shade of a Ludwig Van Beethoven statue and playing a violin with only two strings and still sounds like someone with PhD is playing it, is his latest topic. Lopez would travel on his car, asks random questions and record his senseless scribbles of speech on his recorder along the way. Then a day later he would produce an article packed with sagacity and meaning on the left side of LA Time’s front page. Nice job. For me it’s a nice job.
It is my dream. WAS my dream. To be a journalist. To be someone who writes about someone who cares about something but so innate and hidden they couldn’t tell the world about it. To be someone who walks into the office where papers stacks like the Empire State Building, articles pile perpetually, where deadlines fly like the speed of light, where phone calls were made to people you don’t know and probably would never know in your entire life so you can extract information from, where people talks about the current geo-political climate or the latest bullshits in their office two to three cubicles apart, where gritty principles and noble beliefs are free and put on the paper while sipping black, sugarless coffee from a ceramic mug. This is the office I dreamed of. Where chaotic organization is the rule and magnified conversation with your officemates (two to three cubicles apart) is the lifeblood. A place where democracy is inexistent, so that the external world can enjoy it.
But this is not my office.
My office is a carpeted, 200 square-meter wide, walk-in freezer cold, call centre production room called “The Floor”, which I share with the rest of the other 70 employees, more or less. The Floor is clean, organized, dotted by computer stations in cubicles placed side by side, one after another. It is clean, no towering paper works, organized, no loud chats, only the small, private buzzes of its employee conversing in thick and sleek American accents. Though coffee mugs in all sizes are all around the office. I'll walk in there on ungodly hours, sit on my station, and face my flat screen monitor, which will be my window to a world 8,000 miles away. There, my life begins.
Continuation on When Impermanence is God.
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