Temp Hides Fun, Fulfilling Life From Rest Of Office

BOSTON—Ty Braxton, 23, continues to hide his fun and fulfilling life from the full-time employees of Hale & Dorr, the Boston law firm for which he has temped since July.

“At a job like this, where you’re surrounded by angry, perpetually stressed-out lawyers who are working 80 hours a week, it’s important to hide the fact that you’re enjoying a normal, balanced, happy life,” Braxton said Monday. “People get really pissed when they hear stuff like that.”

Braxton, who earns roughly one-fourth of what the firm’s lowest-seniority full-time employees make, said he has no desire to make his coworkers feel bad about their “boring, shitty lives.”

“If somebody complains about how bad it sucks to work overtime five days straight, I just nod and agree,” said Braxton, who spends his weeknights at parties, at concerts, and playing basketball in the park. “No point in rubbing in the fact that no matter how busy things are, I leave at exactly 5 p.m. every single day. If anyone asks me to stay later, I just say my agency doesn’t let me do overtime.”

After graduating from Wesleyan University in May 2000 with a degree in Russian literature, Braxton worked a series of part-time jobs in and around Boston. In December 2001, he signed on with QualiTemps, the city’s largest supplier of temporary office labor, which currently pays him $8.44 per hour.

“I have so much going on in my life right now,” Braxton said. “I’m helping a friend start up a little Cajun food stand, I’ve gotten way into this Russian poet Mayakovsky, I’ve been hanging out with this really cool girl I met when my band, Sophie Drillteam, did a show with hers. Honestly, I just don’t have the time or energy to put into some job.”

In spite of his happiness, Braxton said he makes sure always to project an air of dissatisfaction, in both facial expression and posture, while in the office.

“If I had a great time staying out until 4 in the morning the night before, I make sure to wipe away all traces of a smile before I walk in these doors,” Braxton said. “If anyone found out I’m not living a hellish existence like they are, I’d be asking for trouble.”

Braxton is also careful about engaging his coworkers in conversation.

“I stopped talking about movies, because no one here ever goes to them,” Braxton said. “Every time I mention a movie to someone, I have to sit there and listen to them go through the process of figuring out the last movie they saw. The other day, Andrew Walser, this intellectual-property attorney who’s trying to make partner, told me that his last movie was Gladiator. I was like, ’Oh, man, that’s depressing.’”

In his long-term temp assignment as conference coordinator at Hale & Dorr, Braxton schedules employee use of the firm’s five common meeting rooms and is responsible for keeping the rooms stocked with cold refreshments and snacks. His other primary duty is to procure audio-visual equipment for meetings when requested, a situation that arises “only, like, one or two times a month.”

“People e-mail me about needing rooms, and I have to e-mail them back with room assignments,” Braxton said. “I also have to post the schedule on the meeting-room doors and order paper cups and things. All in all, though, it’s pretty easy. Everybody’s usually way too busy to give me any work to do, anyway.”

During his three to four hours of “down time” each work day, Braxton reads, surfs the web, and e-mails friends. He also works on long-term personal projects. Over the past six weeks, Braxton has translated 41 pages of Alexander Pushkin’s unfinished novel Dubrovsky for a new English version he dreams of one day publishing.

Braxton has never mentioned his translation project to coworkers, nor has he mentioned any of his other pursuits.

“I don’t want to rub in how much I get to do the things I want to do,” Braxton said. “I feel sorry for them. They go home after a hard day, and they’re so fried they just spend the night sitting in front of the TV. You know how these people spend their weekends? Resting. They rest.”

Another advantage Braxton enjoys over the full-timers is a significantly more relaxed dress code.

“They’re always on the way to the dry cleaners or the barber or shopping for another expensive suit,” said Braxton, who estimates that his average coworker spends five hours a week maintaining his or her personal appearance. “As long as I wear deodorant, keep my tie reasonably clean, and wash my one pair of Dockers over the weekend, no one really gives a shit what I look like.”

In his efforts to hide his happy, fulfilling life from his coworkers, Braxton has even resorted to lying.

“Just yesterday, somebody asked me about my last temp job,” Braxton said. “It ended in May, but I told them it ended in June. See, after it ended, I took about a month off and just kind of dicked around, traveling around Europe until my money ran out. I knew not to mention that to people who won’t be able to do anything like that until they’re 65.”

Though Braxton said he sympathizes with his coworkers, he added that the decision to pursue a prestigious, high-paying career path was entirely their own.

“They wanted to go for the brass ring and really live the good life,” Braxton said. “What they don’t seem to get is that the key to living the good life is to avoid that brass ring like the fucking plague.”

Bauhaus - 13 years later

Red Sky at Night

 

Byron Bay

 

Sydney

 

How gold became a memecoin

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Common Law P/L go

Song of Solomon

1 O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.

2 I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother's house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.

3 His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me.

4 I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please.

5 Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I raised thee up under the apple tree: there thy mother brought thee forth: there she brought thee forth that bare thee.

6 Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

7 Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

8 We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?

9 If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar.

10 I am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favour.

11 Solomon had a vineyard at Baalhamon; he let out the vineyard unto keepers; every one for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver.

12 My vineyard, which is mine, is before me: thou, O Solomon, must have a thousand, and those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred.

13 Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the companions hearken to thy voice: cause me to hear it.

14 Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices.

7 Years

 

10 years

 

20 years

I think about this tweet alot

 

2 windows

Disney

100 days

 

Mastodon

@SESSpackman@mastodon.social

Hill of Dead Pets

 https://stilgherrian.com/essay/revealed-where-is-the-hill-of-dead-pets/

10 years

I can’t remember now what I was thinking when I started this blog 10 years ago today. I mean, I do remember the specific exact reason why I started, posting that first post about inviting Dashan to our wedding. But I don’t think there was any more thought to it than recording the exchange.

However the blog quickly took on the characteristic that has sustained it for this last decade. What I like to think of as my ‘external memory palace’ – a place where I can keep a record of all the minutiae and internet detritus that comes across my screen on a daily basis, or other quirky footnotes from something I have read (usually in the LRB) that I want to preserve. For a long time I was frustrated that I would be able to half recall something I had seen some years before, but it was lost to time, never to be recovered.

In that sense, the blog has served fairly well as a resource to call back to when that half remembered thought emerges. Two inflection points in the blog that have made it is what it is. The first was in January 2014. Up to that point, I had been posting every weekday, but leaving out weekends and holidays. I was keeping close track of my metrics (I have tried to keep the views on the blog as low as possible, making sure it was hidden from search engines and not sharing the url. But I still noticed there was one view of the blog everyday. Now I do not know if that was an artifact of my own views, a random view from a bot (most probably) or a real person. But the thought there was one person checking the blog everyday inspired me to make a post every day. That is something that I have some small pride to have maintained for over seven years now, with 2 exceptions – the days my two daughters were born when I had other things on my mind.

The second major structural change to the blog arose because of the number of entries (now over 3,000). This brought its own problems that even though I knew I had made an entry, I could not find it again. This reached an impasse when I was trying to find the music video for Janelle Monáe - Q.U.E.E.N. (25 May 2013). That led to one of the major overhauls of the blog in around 2016, where I laboriously went back through the thousands of posts and manually added a tag to each one.

Otherwise the daily update has proceeded without much difficulty. The vast majority of entries are done every day on the day – usually in the morning. There are times when there will be a spate of things that I come across that I want to add, so there may be 4 or 5 days planned out in advance. Other days I will be absolutely lost and have no idea what to post – so I will wait and generally later in the day something will come up that I want to add.

Looking back over the years, there are definitely trends of interests that have risen and fallen. I haven’t done a crossword in years! Same with flash fiction. I was also much more prepared to go to lengths to embed weird music players in the past that I don’t do now. Chess has been picking up in popularity more recently, as has a new series of entries about the 100 Mountains of Japan. There are also a number of constants such as Art and Poetry that have remained the mainstays over the years.

My favourite posts are the ones where I get to bring together a number of different sources on a single topic – where I have also gone back and added to over the years as I discovery more information about it. The translation of Du Fu is one of these. The same with the one on Brecht and Benjamin playing chess together.

As to how often the blog actually serves it purpose and lets me search back for something half remembered – the answer is not that often! Although on the occasions when I have had something bugging me and gone back through the blog and found what I was thinking about – it has been very satisfying to be able to find it. But it is not infallible, there have been times I was surprised the thing I was looking for was never recorded – which at least gave me a new entry for the next day.

Personally, when this blog started I was on the cusp of getting married, still living in the small apartment in Ultimo. Now, 10 years later, we have moved twice – to each time to bigger houses to accommodate a growing family. There have been births and deaths in the family, the pandemic, innumerable work dramas and stresses. But the constancy and existence of this record is and remains a great source of comfort that I have been able to work on a project for a sustained period of time.

As to what things will look like 10 years hence, hopefully that will be the subject of the next entry.

Spring Snow