Read Online How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Katrina Onstad
Tags: Contemporary
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the morning under headphones transcribing the Ethan Hawke tape, rewinding my favourite part several times:
And the reason for your call? Absolutely
.
Sunera’s theory of reduced labour is this: when entering or exiting the office, walk quickly, even jog, if you must. Press
Ring
on your cellphone when in the elevator, then turn to your co-riders and sigh, “No time to pick up. Meeting. Relentless, isn’t it?” Come in before everyone else one day, then don’t turn up until 5:30 the next. Skip most Fridays, but run in every weekend and send out e-mails on Sunday during the ten minutes you’re in the office, the electronic equivalent of urinating in the corner.
Sunera does these things because the actual work – the assigning, the editing, the final proofing – occupies her for about four hours a week. In part, this is because Sunera is a genius with an off-the-charts IQ. Her parents still keep her law-school acceptance letters stuck to the refrigerator with magnets shaped like tropical fruits. There are others with whom Sunera works who could fulfill their job requirements in six, eight, or ten hours a week, but they show up for fifty, eyelids purple from late nights, loudly martyring themselves at the printer. (I remember a brief blip, a moment of about six weeks a few years ago, when government adssuddenly appeared on buses and billboards: WORK SMART, NOT LONG , and people in the city took note. In the mornings, the underground tunnels that run below downtown, linking office tower to mall to office tower, loomed empty until five to nine; a yodel could really fly. The subways cleared by 6:00 p.m., Pilates became popular, and children turned to their parents and said, “Where’s Nanny?” and “Who are you?”
But one day, an eager someone showed up at 8:30 a.m. and made a big noise. The boss admired the rogue sound, the tidy pile of paper that was waiting for him when he sat at his desk in the morning. The cubicle next to the eager someone caught wind, and the next morning, he let it be known that his day starts at 8:15. With hardly a breath, the subway grew pointy elbows and city skin regenerated its old grey layer and the days keep getting longer and longer.)
Sunera’s father had been an economist in Mumbai. Here, he ran a magazine stand in a downtown mall for twenty-five years, the final few of which were spent serving young MBAs copies of
Wired
and
Fast Company
, shaking his head as teenaged CEOs appeared before him in flip-flops and jeans, clutching their lattes in environmentally friendly mugs, offending his sense of capitalism. “They don’t even know who Keynes is!” he would shout to his wife, who rolled her eyes, sliding packages of gum into plastic bags.
Surrounded by balance sheets and pricing guns, Sunera chose words. It was the greatest accomplishment of her life, learning this language at ten years old. She could answer the girl outside the library who called her “Paki” with a cogent: “Actually, different country. Look it up.” She read
Middlemarch
and lost her accent, and won national awards for essays trumpeting the virtues of the Canadian mosaic. At thirteen, she flew to London to recite one to the Queen, who leaned in with her licorice breath and told her, “Lovely, my dear.”
But by university, Sunera began to feel like an Uncle Tom. She questioned her desire to “pass” as some internalized slave mentality and sought out rebellion. Under the tutelage of a radical feminist German lesbian teaching assistant with impaling studs on the back of her leather jacket, she went gay for a while. But that made her even more desirable to both men and women. Her phone never stopped ringing, and soon she was delivering speeches to snow-covered campuses, screaming, “Brown, queer, we’re still here!” The problem was that everyone agreed. They were brown, queer, here, and that was
totally okay;
in fact, it was encouraged. Envelopes of grant money addressed to Sunera kept arriving in the
And the reason for your call? Absolutely
.
Sunera’s theory of reduced labour is this: when entering or exiting the office, walk quickly, even jog, if you must. Press
Ring
on your cellphone when in the elevator, then turn to your co-riders and sigh, “No time to pick up. Meeting. Relentless, isn’t it?” Come in before everyone else one day, then don’t turn up until 5:30 the next. Skip most Fridays, but run in every weekend and send out e-mails on Sunday during the ten minutes you’re in the office, the electronic equivalent of urinating in the corner.
Sunera does these things because the actual work – the assigning, the editing, the final proofing – occupies her for about four hours a week. In part, this is because Sunera is a genius with an off-the-charts IQ. Her parents still keep her law-school acceptance letters stuck to the refrigerator with magnets shaped like tropical fruits. There are others with whom Sunera works who could fulfill their job requirements in six, eight, or ten hours a week, but they show up for fifty, eyelids purple from late nights, loudly martyring themselves at the printer. (I remember a brief blip, a moment of about six weeks a few years ago, when government adssuddenly appeared on buses and billboards: WORK SMART, NOT LONG , and people in the city took note. In the mornings, the underground tunnels that run below downtown, linking office tower to mall to office tower, loomed empty until five to nine; a yodel could really fly. The subways cleared by 6:00 p.m., Pilates became popular, and children turned to their parents and said, “Where’s Nanny?” and “Who are you?”
But one day, an eager someone showed up at 8:30 a.m. and made a big noise. The boss admired the rogue sound, the tidy pile of paper that was waiting for him when he sat at his desk in the morning. The cubicle next to the eager someone caught wind, and the next morning, he let it be known that his day starts at 8:15. With hardly a breath, the subway grew pointy elbows and city skin regenerated its old grey layer and the days keep getting longer and longer.)
Sunera’s father had been an economist in Mumbai. Here, he ran a magazine stand in a downtown mall for twenty-five years, the final few of which were spent serving young MBAs copies of
Wired
and
Fast Company
, shaking his head as teenaged CEOs appeared before him in flip-flops and jeans, clutching their lattes in environmentally friendly mugs, offending his sense of capitalism. “They don’t even know who Keynes is!” he would shout to his wife, who rolled her eyes, sliding packages of gum into plastic bags.
Surrounded by balance sheets and pricing guns, Sunera chose words. It was the greatest accomplishment of her life, learning this language at ten years old. She could answer the girl outside the library who called her “Paki” with a cogent: “Actually, different country. Look it up.” She read
Middlemarch
and lost her accent, and won national awards for essays trumpeting the virtues of the Canadian mosaic. At thirteen, she flew to London to recite one to the Queen, who leaned in with her licorice breath and told her, “Lovely, my dear.”
But by university, Sunera began to feel like an Uncle Tom. She questioned her desire to “pass” as some internalized slave mentality and sought out rebellion. Under the tutelage of a radical feminist German lesbian teaching assistant with impaling studs on the back of her leather jacket, she went gay for a while. But that made her even more desirable to both men and women. Her phone never stopped ringing, and soon she was delivering speeches to snow-covered campuses, screaming, “Brown, queer, we’re still here!” The problem was that everyone agreed. They were brown, queer, here, and that was
totally okay;
in fact, it was encouraged. Envelopes of grant money addressed to Sunera kept arriving in the
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