Polishing the Brass on the Titanic
Brent, my friend and one of the very cool people I work with, uses the saying in the subject of this post. He was the first one who said these words and that when said they registered in my mind. This happened a couple of months ago and I’ve been thinking about this ever since. To find a little background on the saying, I decided to do a Google to the rescue… well, not this time. I couldn’t find the origin of this saying, but I did find this great quote:
Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic; it’s all going down, man. ~Fight Club movie, screenplay by Jim Uhls, directed by David Fincher, novel by Chuck Palahniuk
I was thinking about this (the saying, not Martha Stewart) tonight on the bus ride home from Santa Cruz and I came to accept that, yup, I’m a guy that polishes the brass on the Titanic. Sure I freak out, I rant, I swear, I cuss, I act like a dirty old man… I have human flaws too numerous to mention.
Despite my flaws, the quality of life despite the overwhelming circumstances of life has started to matter much more to me than it used to.
Say a nuke is coming in from the country run by [Insert new media sensationalized despot here], and is going to explode all over me in a half hour, what am I going to do? I’m going to find my wife and nail her one more time and give her the best 3 to 14 minutes of her life.
Say global climate change really is real and every person on the planet just decides to buy a hummer. Who fucking cares, my ass gets on my bike, and with the help of my legs helps me roll my flabby belly to the office.
What does that mean in real life? It means the little stuff matters to me because the details are all that I have access to. It means somedays I don’t release a product and instead spend more than a day QAing things even though it’s not my job to do so. Somedays I massage my wife after her hard day in the office even when I’m the tired one. Or maybe I call my dad when he’s least expecting me to call and tell him yet another thing that I realized he was right about, and I was wrong about.
Ask yourself, when was the last time you heard someone get divorced over only one big mishap?
The little things matter, at least they do to me.
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