2001-08-19 - 1:28 p.m.

Well, another birthday come and gone. I am now 22 years old, and once again the stunning recognition is made that I have no more birthdays to look forward to. Not that I won't have birthdays, but I won't look forward to them anymore. After all, what can they do for me now? I have all the benefits of being a citizen, I can vote, drink, smoke, fuck, and generally make a legal nuisance of myself wherever and whenever I want. Ain't a damn thing I get from any future birthdays, except for social security at 65. That's a damn long way away, and as far as I'm concerned it can take its sweet time getting here.

So, thoughts of aging and imminent and inexorable mortality aside, I've starterd thinking about systems. Those of you who have been to NC know all about them: that they hedge your thoughts, restrict your scope, without letting you know about it. Frightening thought. I've been thinking about the current system of doing things at my restaurant, and while I understand that the system is ridiculous and short-sighted (things like too many tables in too small a space, a computer system that constantly breaks down, 2 terminals for 6 waiters, and the need to go BEHIND the bar to fill up the water pitchers can really get you down) I've been pretty much accepting it as the status quo, not really thinking about it in terms of what I can improve, or what not. I just set my mind to figuring out how not to fuck things up. The sad thing about that is that it means I internalize the inadequacies of the system, if things go wrong it must be my fault, as opposed to the fact that the restaurant is essentially being run by crack-monkeys. It's good to remember that in a social system as regulated and interdependant as a restaurant, things will go wrong that are not your doing, and there's nothing to be done about that. But maybe the system can be changed a bit, make the problems less frequent.

So, having bored you all top tears with the trials and tribulations of waiterdom, I'll just get on with it, and make the larger point. Systems are EVERYWHERE. They limit our capacity to think of things by their very existence, focus our minds in specific ways, dictate much of, if not what we do, then how we do it. Not that this is bad: without systems, there would be no action. You have to decide what you're going to think of if you're gonna do it, and systems have the added bonus of being mentally efficient: if you have an endlessly repeatable script for greeting and serving customers, you don't have to think about what you're going to say, which allows you to keep your thoughts on the fifteen thousand other things you need to do. This applies to other jobs as well (the assembly line is based on that concept).

Problem comes in when the system supplants the logic it was created to serve: we use computers to keep track of the drinks we need to serve; we need to serve a drink, but the computer doesn't record it; no record, no drink. The system in this case becomes its own morality: customer has no drink because they shouldn't get one without the computer's assent. This is more than just semantics: I can write down the drink order on my pad, record the price, serve it, and add it on to the bill later, but this is unacceptable to management because it deviates from the system. The system becomes the ultimate arbiter. Scary, no?

Funny thing is, systems, and their abuses, are not limited to bureaucracy. The pop up in art too. Especially in writing and acting. In writing, it's pretty obvious when it happens. Take a successful columnist like Leonard Pitts Jr. He writes really fricking well, no question. But, if you read a lot of his columns, you get a feel for his style. And you start to see an essential similarity in his work: he write his columns based on a system, how to structure an argument, how to manipulate the reader's emotions, how to end up leaving the reader changed and energized. The system works inceedibly well, probably because it is the same system that good writer's use, and have used, since the beginning. Same species, same laws.

It pops up in acting too, but the results are FAR less encouraging. The system 'good' actors use today is a little less recognizable, and has nothing to do with Stanislavski or anything. It has more to do with the outright manipulation of the audience: my character is supposed to be an asshole, so I need to get overly angry at what the other character just said. Things like that. And really 'good' actors find their own systems which make them immensely popular, and which they follow with all the fervor of a martyr. A good example of this is Jack Nicholson, or Meryl Streep. People love them, flock to their movies, and ALWAYS say how great their performances are. But there's something so fucking SIMILAR about what they do. It's not that they're not talented, it's that they have a formula, and it works, and so they continue to follow it devotedly.

In a very real sense, success makes them systemic slaves. The question is, how do you become successful, but not follow that system unquestioningly? Is there another system, or do we have to collapse into chaos? I'm gonna think about that for a while...

�

�

previous - next

[ Previous 5 Sites | Skip Previous | Previous | Next ]

This RingSurf New College Diaryring Net Ring
owned by Pretentious White-boy Musings.

[ Skip Next | Next 5 Sites | Random Site | List Sites ]