"Blue Edge" by Marja
The Purpoii Driven Life
Purpoii: (pər pī) n. Multiple goals that hopelessly conflict with one another.
One of the things Jeff Tannen feels compelled to do is invent words. He claims it is one of his purpoii. He is of the mind that most people, whether they are aware of it or not, believe they have a sole purpose in life; it’s what keeps their cogs and wheels in motion, allows them to focus on the external without having to worry about inner attrition. However, Mr. Tannen seems to think he has purpoii, which is not to say that he is driven by a few complementary purposes. Actually, this fictitious word, purpoii (pronounced per-pie), is plural for multiple purposes. The word itself is a permutation of a mathematical exponent and an illogical idiom. (Other rhetorical combinations include infinijillion and oodleology.) Devising words like purpoii provides Mr. Tannen with a reason for existence, not to mention a (somewhat false) sense of proprietorship.
Mr. Tannen’s self-proclaimed ownership extends beyond his stockpile of fabricated terminology. Writing is another one of his purpoii (which, in turn, allows him a venue for his customized vocabularium). After all, what could offer more purpose than the authority one establishes upon publication? And, as a married man who fills a bottom-feeding position as a part-time community college instructor, it’s safe to assume that he has little to no influence outside the textual world. Therefore, although it is one of his many purpoii, writing is among the most significant. This is interesting, since his writing leaves one wanting, does it not? To begin with, why would someone who professes to take the act of composition seriously write about themselves in the third person? Does Mr. Tannen have a purpose for that?
Usually he has a reason (or excuse, some would say) for everything, yet it is not quite clear why he has chosen to write from this particular point of view. What is unmisunderstandable is the fact that this man believes himself to be special in ways he is not. Is he really arrogant enough to think that he’s the only person on earth who is simultaneously motivated by such factors as obligation, acceptance, and self-righteousness? Is it possible that his rampant egotism has blinded him to the point that he thinks no one else multi-tasks their purposes or struggles with incompatible ambitions? The short answer is: Yes. The long answer: Perhaps he has considered the fact that human beings are driven by multiple purposes, but believes that he, more than anyone else, is painfully aware of each purpose behind every one of his actions, which causes endless conflict in his perplexable existence.
Mr. Tannen, in light of the long answer above, maintains a personal belief that is somewhat paradoxical: If an action does not cause conflict, it’s probably not worth doing. For those who do not dwell on all that is existential, let us examine an experience that illustrates both Mr. Tannen’s seemingly philosophical aphorism, and an assessment of his self-righteous profundity.
Here’s the setting: A warehouse whose state as well as stature resembles an abandoned hangar. Every so often, in the sweltering summer heat, a light breeze enters through the roll-up doors, causing the cobwebs overhead to undulate like living membrane, pockets of dust to shift and settle, like blusters of regolith under the breath of a solar wind. Lining the rusted metal walls are large cardboard boxes containing hundreds of pre-made bridal bouquets. These artificial roses, tulips, hydrangea, and lilies remain in their cardboard crypts until the inventory manager, who sees sunlight only through the broken axial fans in the warehouse roofing, refills the stock bins in the air-conditioned workshop, which is connected to the warehouse. This inventory manager feels like the flowers he stocks every morning—somewhere between dead and never having been alive—since his job has long since drained all the joy from his work week.
Obviously, the employee in question is Mr. Tannen. Nearing the end of his graduate degree, he opted for what he assumed would be a more rewarding job than teaching composition at the university. Actually, several deep-seated factors played into his provisional choice of employment. For one thing, Mr. Tannen was once a randomistically dedicated advocate for small business. Prior to working in the warehouse, he had been employed by numerous family-owned establishments and was able to maintain a staunch loyalty, even under the duress of blatant dismanagement and bounciful paychecks. Contributing to the success of small businesses was something Mr. Tannen was willing to sacrifice his personal happiness for. Of course, having thought of himself as a writer, he accepted the warehouse job not only so he could more accurately depict the work of an underpaid laborer in his prose, but also because it guaranteed misery.
Perhaps one of the reasons Mr. Tannen ever took up the pen in the first place was to fulfill his lifelong campaign for martyrdom. Throughout his childhood he observed the ways his father sacrificed his own personal happiness for social stability—by accepting overtime at the office and declining vacation, by attending church services for his children’s benefit, by offering his wife all of the assets in the divorce settlement. Mr. Tannen always admired the brave new world of stability his father strived to create and, wanting to secure a thankless badge of nobility for himself (as well as his father’s approval), he set out to make himself miserable—another appealing aspect of the warehouse job.
Having admired his father’s perseverance in times of conflict, Mr. Tannen spent a majority of his childhood trying to make his father proud. Although he displayed natural talent in all things artistic, he knew his father valued labor and sacrifice above all else. He sought to repress the impulses that drove him to depict an autumn sky in watercolor and charcoal and shied away from song and dance as superfluous indulgences that distracted from productivity and practical matters. As a child, Mr. Tannen emulated his father to the point that, when attending weekend retreats with his father at the office, he would sit behind a desk and pretend to be miserably fulfilled, content with living like a human mole in a cubicle, typing and collating himself toward acknowledgement.
Although his father’s nod and writing fodder seemed to be justifiable reasons for accepting the warehouse position, there was another aspect of stability that needed to be satisfied. He may not have been legally wed at the time, but Mr. Tannen was in a serious, devoted relationship, which brought with it a whole gaggle of new purpoii in the form of respobligations. Mr. Tannen’s personal credo on the subject: Along with commitment comes regiment. No longer could he afford to piddly-fart around (as his father would say) between part-time jobs; he needed a full-time position that, if nothing else, made him appear responsible in the eyes of his partner and, even more importantly, in the eyes of her father. The warehouse job, Mr. Tannen would argue (sometimes simply to convince himself), may have been a small business, but it offered stability through growth, a rigid work schedule, and competitive (slightly above the federal minimum) hourly wages.
These are only a few of the impetii that motivated Mr. Tannen to initially accept the position. Grudgingly, he remained at the warehouse job for over a year, despite the frequency of grumbling on his and the parts of the other employees, as illustrated in the following scene:
“Have you heard the new rule?”
“The one about leaving the radio on the Christian pop station?”
“No, the one about books on tape.”
“What about them?”
“We can’t listen to them anymore.”
“Even when the bosses aren’t in the workshop?”
“Yup.”
“Why not?”
“Because of Harry Potter.”
“What about him?”
“Haven’t you heard? He’s evil.”
“You’re kidding me. What now?”
“Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya . . .”
For as long as Mr. Tannen was employed at the silk wedding flower business, there had been a crusade to overthrow the bosses’ radio dictatorship. It was a daily feud that began as early as 6:00 a.m. when Mr. Tannen arrived to stock the workshop. Upon entering the building, the first thing he made sure to do was change the station on the satellite radio to alternative rock, or big band, or Euro pop—any type of music that was less dependent on the piano and acoustic guitar, less repetitive in tone and lyrics, and more in tune with his and his fellow co-workers secular lifestyles. However, upon entering the workplace themselves, the bosses (a husband and wife duo) would assume command of the remote control and condemn the employees to entire eight-hour shifts of born-again propaganda.
That’s not to say the bosses never had the best interest of the employees in mind. Toward the end of Mr. Tannen’s term at the silk flower business, they instituted an incentive program called Jelly Bellies or Bust. The purpose of the program was to promote teamwork among the staff while offering a substantial monthly payoff to one lucky individual. Each employee received a certain number of Jelly Bellies for tasks they accomplished throughout the day. One of the ways an employee could earn extra Bellies was by catching a mistake one of the other workers had made. At the end of the month one jelly bean was drawn from the jar (each color representing an employee) and the lucky winner took home a five-hundred dollar prepaid credit card[1].
Another morale-boosting tactic the bosses religiously practiced was presenting gifts to their employees on special occasions. For Mr. Tannen’s twenty-seventh birthday he received a copy of The Purpose Driven Life, a best-selling Christian self-help book designed to guide the rudderless heathen to the single-minded path of the straight and narrow. Upon taking home this spiritual investment, Mr. Tannen attempted to glean knowledge from the lessons and biblical proverbs, but found them to be impractical as they did not account for purpoii. Mr. Tannen felt he had no choice but to post his birthday gift on Ebay, since the wisdom contained therein was not applicable to his life[2].
Although he initially sought misery, stability, approval, and whatever else his purpoii required him to seek, Mr. Tannen eventually quit his job at the warehouse to go back to teaching. After all, with the exception of stability and approval, teaching composition at the college level does satisfy the above requirements, does it not? In addition to those requisites, however, it also allowed him to address yet another purpose that up to that point he had been powerless to pursue—integrity. Between lying to customers over the phone at his bosses’ behest, and playing the scapegoat when orders weren’t correctly shipped, Mr. Tannen was forced to relinquish any pride he had in his work ethic. At some point during his employment he realized that although the products he helped sell, stock, produce, and ship occasionally satisfied soon-to-be brides, he was acting on behalf of a machine (granted, it was a family-run machine) and felt he was contributing nothing toward the good of the people.
Mr. Tannen believes that, on some level, most people try to make the world a better place for everyone. Of course, the definition of better (and the definition of everyone, for that matter) varies from person to person. There are countless ways in which people contribute to the progress of humankind every day; whether it be cramming their pocket change into the plastic bins at grocery store checkout stands, refusing to vote because none of the candidates have expressed interest in the voter’s demographic, planting a tree, saving a species, writing an essay—most people make an effort to give something back to their communities, their country, the world. Because Mr. Tannen feels that education is one of the most lacking, yet fundamental aspects of society today, his main contribution to the world has become teaching.
One’s reaction to this particular purpose might be: How heroically integritous! How graciously noble! However, I assure you that Mr. Tannen does not hold a position at the community college simply because it’s his fervent desire that every student succeed in the world of academics. As much as Mr. Tannen would like to be able to attribute one particularly gallant purpose to each decision he makes, I think we’ve already established that he is riddled with motivationary factors when it comes to committing to any one cause. Therefore, an examination of the purpoii that prevented him from continuing his supposed unrewarding work as an inventory manager and incited him to return to the classroom is in order.
Aside from the fact that Mr. Tannen is not qualified to do anything but write or teach composition (one profession providing a small income, while the other boasts even less), he has felt compelled, since he was a boy himself, to have children. Unfortunately, according to his skewed understanding (inherited from none other than his father), the prerequisite for having a child is owning a home. To purchase a house, one must earn a substantial income. In order to establish a stable career, one must work from the bottom up, which is exactly where Mr. Tannen sees himself now—on the very bottom rung of the employment ladder. Hence, his adjunct position at the community college. More often than not, he goes into the classroom thinking more about names for his firstborn (which are currently Phoenix if it’s a girl, Zander if it’s a boy) than about the essays he assigns and, at the same time, dreads having to read.
On any given day Mr. Tannen will tell you that his primary purpose in life is to be a father (which is to say that on any given day he may proclaim something else entirely). The ironic thing about this purpose is Mr. Tannen really has no idea what fatherhood entails. In fact, when pressed, he is unable to come up with a single valid reason for wanting to bear offspring. Having assessed the motives for his actions thus far, it appears that everything he does lacks maturity—that is, it seems that instead of being driven by this or that purpose, as he asserts, all of his actions are based on selfishness. The wisdom I could share with little Phoenix, he often muses. Other times he wonders, All of my friends have little Zanders of their own—why can’t I? As if bringing a child into the world to validate one’s intelligence or wanting what everyone else has (like a toddler in a toy store) justifies the need to procreate. In either case, Mr. Tannen whole-heartedly claims that one of the reasons he trudges through the trenches of developmental English is for the sake of his unborn children.
Teaching then becomes just another of his obligabilities—a means to an end. So many of his actions, aside from his unadulterated selfishness, seem to fall in this very same category, to the point where he ends up choosing to do only the things that satisfy the most purpoii.
Here’s one way to think about Mr. Tannen’s daily operations: He’s a robot with a constantly changing prime directive. One day he is driven by the need to write, employing witty expressions and disjointed anecdotes as a way of achieving a feeling of self-importance, and the next day he vows never to take up the pen again in his pursuit of all things scholarly. It’s as if the purpoii are like the multi-colored Jelly Bellies inside the workshop jar and only one of them may be drawn and adhered to for the moment.
This constant reprogramming then, which compels Mr. Tannen to generate superfluous words, compose incoherent rants in the third person, seek his father’s approval, maintain a sense of stability through the act of self-sacrifice, and achieve all of the model goals outlined in the board game of Life, seems to cause him more than just grief—in a way, he feels it compromises his identity. After all, how is one expected to know who they are if they cannot condense their lifelong ambitions into a simplified thesis statement? Life should be straight and narrow, as described in The Purpose Driven Life, should it not? It’s our built-in ability to simplify and generalize that allows us to make sense of our lives, thus enabling us to put our fingers on single purposes for our existii.
Perhaps Mr. Tannen should quit trying to juggle and jigsaw his priorities into place and focus his efforts on a single purpose. Maybe then he could shed some of this pathological hamster wheeling (and self-absorption) and concentrate his attention on the bigger picture. Why place so much emphasis on purpoii anyway? Must one be able to see both the jar and the jelly beans to live a fulfilled life?
It shouldn’t matter that the colors and flavors of the Jelly Bellies conflict with each other. One must learn to eat them one at a time. After all, a purpoii-filled life doesn’t have to be so different from a purpose-filled one—it’s just a matter of how many Jelly Bellies one feels the need to cram in his mouth all at once.
[1] This system ended up not only causing disharmony among the employees, since they became more interested in their personal Jelly Belly count instead of helping each other fill the orders, it also transformed the somewhat soothing work environment, complete with techno versions of How Great Thou Art, into a cutthroat competition.
[2] Even though bidding began at ninety-nine cents with no reserve, it seems there weren't any buyers who thought the book may be applicable to their lives either.
Copyright © 2008 by Jeff Tannen
