so i think i'm short circuiting

Monday night. About 8:30 pm. 4th floor of the Mills Building in San Francisco’s Financial District——a historic 22-storey building that has greed-mongers like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch as its tenants——and the legal translation firm I tool away for. My boss, Nicholas——a quirky, ridiculously intelligent 30-year old man who grew up in the Czech Republic and Germany has asked me over to his desk to help him with a Spanish translation document he is working on. He is wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, staring at one of the two large flat-screen monitors standing on his desk. He asks me to read the original legal document, which is in Spanish, in order to determine if the English translation makes sense. He hands me the printout. There is a passage that doesn’t sound right to him, one that doesn’t read sensibly. So I read it. The lawyer who wrote the passage in question is trying to state that his client has the right to introduce some evidence or testimony——that if this ability was taken away it would “castrate” and “hinder” their ability. Awkward wording, but that is what was written. It is one of those overly-wordy-typical-lawyerly run-on sentences that is difficult to understand in its original language, let alone translate. But there was Nicholas, a brilliant humble young man who studied theatre, getting flustered about the translation after I told him that it seems technically correct.

But that doesn’t make sense, he says. It just doesn’t make sense how the translator worded it.

It’s all bullshit to me so I was all too eager to go back to the ridiculous, pointless, soulless work that I was working on at my work station. But there we were, debating the phrasing of a translation, devoting our piercing attention, our life——the fleeting, finite amount of breaths and heartbeats within us——to this pointless minutiae. Part of me wanted to crack, bend over and put my hands on my thighs and laugh and laugh and laugh. This is our life, Nicholas, I wanted to say. This is what we’re doing with it. Pathetic. Just fucking, pathetic. Can't you see?

And I care for him. He was excited about my trip to New Mexico for my artist residency, didn’t hesitate to give me six weeks off to go and chase my dream.

This is what we’re doing with our lives, Nicholas. How can we get out of this?

Part of me wanted to walk out, say peace out, but of course I sat back at my desk and went back to work.