I'm an escapist. Escapism is the primary motivation of everything I do, as far as I can think. I don't think I'm the only one though, far from it. If you're trying to, at least, most people's activities could be said to be escapist in one way or another. Not above all other motivations, but certainly ever-present.
What I think most people don't do though, is realise this. In the summer, for a few weeks, I was doing a job I didn't enjoy, which involved, primarily, putting napkins and placemats into their packaging to be sold in garden centres and department stores. I suppose it was made worse with my frustration at the people I imagined would be buying the things I was packing. And so I suppose that what I was intending to do here, was shake things up for them a little bit, to intrude a little on what I wearily imagined to be their very narrow world views. (So perhaps demonstrative of how my own views narrow when I start to get fed up.)
The way I went about doing this began in a way that fitted very closely into my days at work; I wrote down quotes from the books I was reading during breaks, things I read on the internet, chosen for their challenging of the mundane, mostly, on pages torn out of the middle of the notebook I had in my bag. I tore each sentence off in a strip, then tucked them into the packets in between the cardboard and the cloth, quite enjoying how often no-one was looking at me or seeing what I did. It wasn't a work of art, it was just a small activity that made the day pass with a little more excitement. After a while, I began to get just as frustrated with myself - I felt that the literary quoting had too much of a sort of naieve high-mindedness and over-righteousness. On top of that, I couldn't help but want to make use of this unusual medium outside of what I could do in my lunch break... I did a few bits at home, and experimented with some less preachy sentences, tried to think what I really wanted to say as well as what I thought should be said. One of these ended up being a short account of a dream I once had, in which I did indeed watch someone perform taxidermy on a live horse, wondering whether or not they'd realised it was still alive. Though I never really got that far with it all before I left.
