Hempstead, N.Y., December, 1, 1994—I see a lot more go by on a conveyor belt each weekend than I do in real life. Inserting the six or so sections into the New York Times Sunday edition on a seemingly neverending belt, I catch glimpses of lives and hopes, dreams and destinations I've never reached and probably never will, passing by me ad infinitum in the form of recycled paper traveling on the back of mechanical beast of burden. Almost every Saturday night or Sunday morning, I stand in front of that machine and watch my finished handiwork, a stuffed newspaper, rumble down the belt into the dark, gaping maw of a waiting delivery truck with an unknown destination.
Lately it seems I've been feeling as if my future is as uncertain as that of the completed newspapers I spend each weekend with. I've been wondering where my life is taking me (or where I am taking it), and after a good deal of pondering the matter, I'm certain that I don't have a clue where I'm going to wind up. I may become a journalist, an author, a professor, a lifetime student, a statistic, a victim, or, like my Saturday night companions, just another career worker on the belt, watching the newspapers, and our unrealized dreams, roll endlessly by.
What I have realized, however, is how unprepared my college career has left me for whatever field I may choose. As a junior English major at a liberal arts school, I am completely unprepared for anything I'm going to face this summer, much less after graduation. Sure, maybe I've learned to write a little bit better, and maybe now I can even do a little basic calculus and count to ten in German, but how will any of that really help me outside Hofstra? It won't get me a job, it won't get me published, and it won't even help me work better on the belt. My education might allow me access to graduate school, but in essence that is simply a prolonging of the inevitable—a fear of entering the real world.
In that respect, the beltworkers have the advantage over me—they've been living in the real world while I've been avoiding it, hiding away in my scholarly pursuits. As a condescending college intellectual at a hard-labor job, I used to think myself above the blue collar automatons, who would labor five or six nights a week for a paycheck. I believed myself better than such a repugnant lot; I was a pampered student who only worked one day a week and never really had to live in the real world. I thought I was better than they because I knew obscure facts about The Great Gatsby and because I used good grammar when I spoke. I held myself aloof.
But then, with almost glacier-like speed, I began to mature. I got to talking with the career laborers. I found out why they operate on the timeclock of a vampire 52 weeks a year. They don't care about their job, the workers that last at the job, anyway. They don't really worry when there is a long night or an easy one. I learned that the lifers echo the cry "all in a night's work" because their lives mean a hell of a lot more to them than just a paycheck every week.
Predictably, for some, their lives mean families; their lives mean putting their children through college so they won't have to live in the real world, so their spoiled kids can have it better than they did.
When workers told me stories like this, I couldn't help but snicker from inside my sanctuary of academia. After all, The American Dream, for Generation Xers, has become a bit of a cliché—worn out and unrealistic, something we seemingly can never approach. As a member of such a select clique, then, I could respect but not relate to this line of reasoning.
But others' reasons for laboring on the belt were startling and inspiring: photography, scuba diving, racing, to name just a few. Diverse as the workers themselves were, their hobbies and interests were passionate expressions of their person, reflections of what they thought themselves to be.
They worked to support efforts which represented who they were. They didn't unfold and lay out 15,000 copies of a newspaper each night just to pay the rent; they worked to fund their interests and further their evolution toward an undetermined end.
In that sense, they are honorary collegians, these men who have barely graduated high school. They work because it allows them to fulfill their pleasure, which in turn lets them live out their mundane lives in contentment.
Like college students, whom I always thought worked to get good grades to get good jobs to lead good lives, the beltworkers don't know where the hell they're going either. I realized, then, that we really aren't so different, they and I. We are both clueless.
Unfortunately for me, it seems I cannot live my life in bland happiness; I reflect upon my existence too continually to let myself become enrapt in the bliss of the everyday. I worry too much, so it seems my education is leading me nowhere. I'm too afraid to enter the real world (which the beltworkers showed me is just a big sham anyway), and I can't quite pay off my Visa bill.
I guess this weekend I will return to the conveyor belt, put my Times together throughout another long dark night of the soul, and collect last week's paycheck, just as I do almost every week.
But I finally can admit that whether I attend college or work the belt, whether I avoid life or face it, my future won't change, and I won't have any real control over it—I'll just be more, or less, well-read.
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