and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

It takes Peyton Manning about 4 minutes to make what I make in a year. 10 snaps of the 'ol football or so and that's all I'd need to go home happy with a full paycheck.

Somehow, though, I suspect those 10 snaps would be pretty painful.

Not a whole lot scares me in the area of pain but somehow I suspect a little NFL action for this 5'8" 160lbs. dude wouldn't do me so good.

So instead, I'll sit here and plug away, making my money the old fashioned way: by dicking around on the job.

America is the longest working country in the world. We work more hours, on average, than any other (reported) nation in the world. We take fewer vacations. But somehow I'm not sure longest necessarily correlates to hardest. I dunno, maybe it was the unions that have set up a level of expectation among workers. Maybe it's the work-hard-and-you-can-go-places culture that inspires some people to just stay-where-they-are. Maybe some people, in the end, are happy to be what they're doing and think it's just enough. I'm not sure. But if what I've seen of American work culture is any indication.. we might show up at work, but we certainly don't do much of it. Not for the amount of time we're hanging around the proverbial office.

Instead we're gossiping at the water cooler, playing dice behind the factory, selling drugs on the wharehouse floor, and jerking off in the bathroom. We're shopping on the internet and taking long lunch breaks and, *gasp*, even blogging from work.

Sometimes I feel like there is a certain understanding there. The management knows they can't stop everything so they pay you just low enough that they feel they're getting what they paid for out of you. They hire more and work with less. Then again, sometimes I feel like they're asking for it - asking for a little bit of their own medicine.. putting out shoddy products and providing crappy services. Trying to make a buck on low-quality. Cutting corners. And then when you see things like Enron fall apart, you gotta wonder who the real bad guys are.. They keep trying to tell us it's the striking factory workers but I have this inkling that maybe, just maybe, it's those suits at the top.. no wonder they have so many pockets in their Holt Renfrew's and Armani Exchange's.. all the more places to put that stolen cash.

Really, though, it's all one big nasty economic process that is, in a strange subtle way, shaping and forming the american work ethic. These things didn't come from nowhere. If I work a little harder and this place ships a few more units, I won't see an extra dime. Profit sharing is even worse when you get your $100 or $1,000 check at the end of the fiscal year - 1) you can't even use it cause it goes straight into your 401k and 2) for every $100 you get Mr. President at the top is getting $10,000 and taking a few bucks out of yours as well.

The rich get richer.

The big misunderstanding with politics sometimes is that it's really the result of economics, not the passions of forward-thinking men. Politics is the practice of expectation maximization and people - like little tiny pennies littering the planet - are the currency of these global politicians.

It's all the same game.

Another misunderstanding is that the balance of the system, the equilibrium, is static and obvious but it's not. The complexity of the system is far worse than a simple bacteria-in-a-petri-dish simulation, though the correlation is there. Resources are constantly discovered and depleted. Technology advances our knowledge and capabilities with the resources we have. People - the currency - wear out and must be replaced. With so many variables in flux it's no wonder that we haven't reached an equilibrium. In fact, we might not have even seen equilibrium yet as we passed by it in a cyclic swing.. we might be so new of a species, so new of a planet, so new of a solar system (in all its millions and millions of years old) that we haven't even gotten close to equilibrium yet..

Maybe we're just gaining momentum like a skiier heading into a valley, sharp mountain walls on either side. Maybe we're just creeping now, as if on a giant plane with a tiny dip in the middle, a local minima that we'll never reach.

Some people argue that the universe has no equilibrium - that when the universe stops expanding it will start contracting, as if in an infinite loop. That'd be a bummer for us I think but I guess I won't be around to notice if it does happen. For now, however, I think I'll stick to the simpler problems of my own personal economy, my own equilibrium. I'm smart enough to know that I'm an erratic enough creature that perhaps I don't have my own equilibrium but I do know this... I can sit here and plug away, making my money the old fashioned way: by dicking around on the job.