Don’t let the title fool you, I don’t actually love my job.

Nor have I seen Dr. Strangelove.

Nevertheless, it’s been such a long time and I wanted to write something about my job.  The reasons I haven’t written about it for so long are a mixture of respect for whatever nondisclosure terms might have been lurking in my contract, a fear of seeming disrespectful or disloyal to any potential future employers who might grace the pages of this blog, and mostly, the fact that my company’s website is so ridiculously awful and the content is so immensely stupid that it’s not even worth the space on this page to point it out.  I was also somewhat concerned that a coworker would stumble upon my site and I would be in trouble, except that a) my coworkers can’t really read English, and b) I kind of half want to get fired at this point.  So what merits this special occasion today?  Well, I just happen to be so numbed by the Olympics, the insipid circle-jerk of the media and its tumorous blogosphere, and the lack of any sensory input at my cubicle other than the near blinding glare off my furiously flickering CRT monitor, that I have no hope for any sort of mental stimulation other than to rant about my job.

Last year I did some research on the motivations driving journalists in China’s state media, and read an interesting paper on cognitive dissonance, and how journalists cope with conflicts between what they believe and what they are required to believe in order to succeed at their careers.  The paper presented a model with two spheres of discourse: public and private; and two ideologies: personal and state.  Journalists could then be classified into groups: those who expressed the state ideology in the public sphere but clung to their personal ideology in private, those who changed their personal ideology to conform with the state ideology in both spheres, and those who would sneak their personal ideology into the public sphere, etcetera etcetera.  This was a nice fancy way to understand journalists’ behavior, but did not really convey in a visceral way what exactly this “cognitive dissonance” feels like.

Now, having worked in this company for almost five months, I think I can say with confidence that now I know.

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As I began work this morning, and dove into my daily task of figuring out how to procrastinate for eight and a half hours, I started, as usual, by reading through the China articles on the New York Times website.  The first article to fall across my screen was yet another monthly reminder by Jim Yardley of why, exactly, the Chinese Communist Party is still in power, because apparently we keep forgetting.  Either that, or we’re just downright impatient.  The headline was:

China’s Communists, Resilient in Face of Change

A few hours later I found that the page had refreshed itself, inexplicably bearing a new title:

China’s Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change

The second title is actually more fitting for the article itself, which is more informative and less colored than the first title would lead you to believe.  But I wonder what the explanation is for the title change.  Did it all of a sudden occur to some editor that “Oh yes, those pesky Communists are leading the country, aren’t they?  How inconvenient.”

On a related note, tomorrow is the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and in an unoriginal show of confused irony and ambivalence, I plan on wearing my I Heart China shirt.  Either that or an American flag;  I still haven’t decided.

Dreamy riot police, where are you now? (from www.telegraph.co.uk)

There was a crazy man on the subway during my commute this morning.  He sat across the car by the door and swore uncontrollably, punctuating the end of each string of curses with a tight swipe of his arm, as though he were smacking a child upside the head.  Then he would look around, half indignant and half afraid, and self-consciously stroke his long thin hair back behind his ear with the other hand.  As if suddenly remembering that the imaginary child hadn’t quite learned his lesson, he would then burst out with another barrage of cursing, and strike the air again with his palm.

This went on for at least ten minutes before I reached my stop.  Some people got nervous and went to other cars, and some people laughed at him openly.  Eventually one lady wearing a red security volunteer armband came by from the adjacent car and peered worriedly at the man.  People looked from the man to the lady, wondering if she would do something.  All the while the man kept cursing and making striking motions, and I couldn’t help but think of the guy on the bus in Canada who stabbed, decapitated, and ate a fellow passenger, and I wondered when Beijing’s strengthened police forces would finally show themselves, jump onto the train and subdue the poor bastard.

But the police never came and the lady in the red armband did nothing, and the man was still spitting and raving as I left.  What a disappointment.  If my tax dollars are going to go into all of this extra security for the Olympics, the least I can expect is instant and highly effective beatdowns at the first signs of disorder.

This was yesterday’s picture of the day on Telegraph.co.uk, taken at Crab Island, a beach resort area near Beijing.  Who is this guy?  He is my new hero.