Like a pig with stitched eyes | Teen Ink

Like a pig with stitched eyes

November 7, 2022
By IHateOhio BRONZE, Cupertino, California
IHateOhio BRONZE, Cupertino, California
3 articles 0 photos 1 comment

Like a pig with stitched eyes

The clicking of keyboards. Murmuring from another room permeating through frosted glass windows. Muffled footsteps on carpet. The beep of security cards being tapped against readers. The grinding and whirring and trickling of the espresso machine in the cafe. It’s all the damn same and it’s driving me crazy. Every day I go through eight hours of filling out spreadsheets and graphs and whiteboards and other bullsh*t that I don’t give two f*cks about. I was happy the first day I started this job. I didn’t have to work my ass off doing night shifts at a crappy Italian restaurant just so I could afford college classes, but now the days pass like trees on a roadtrip to Oregon and blend together like oil paint into a sh*t-colored mess. Sometimes I wonder if the sleepless nights I spent studying and waiting tables and washing dishes and crying and contemplating suicide were worth becoming an ant shoveling for a bigwig millionaire who won’t even know my name when I’m dead and cold. 

They told me to follow my dreams when I was a kid. I think that’s bullsh*t, but if it makes you happy then whatever floats your boat. I’m sure Devon from Minnesota is having a blast following his dream as a Minecraft YouTuber or whatever kids are into these days. I’m sure he’ll still be having a blast when he’s 23 and no one gives a sh*t about Minecraft anymore, and Devon will be stuck selling out to pump-and-dump crypto scams just so he can fuel his heroin addiction. I’m sure he won’t be f*cking miserable at all churning out passionless videos to scrape by cent by cent because all of his money’s being stolen by a money whoring white guy. But hey, at least that’s his dream, right? At least he’s happy with his fifteen minutes of fame. I’m not. All my employees know I hate my job and I know that they all hate me. It was never my dream to fit into the idea of whatever “success” meant when I was grown. It was never my dream to be rich or to have proud parents. All these other sheep think they triumphed over life and its struggles without seeing the carrot dangling in front of their head. They wear rose tinted glasses and write off the weight on their shoulders simply as the weights that come with life and ignore the billionaire riding them like a saddled pig to indelible wealth and lie to themselves to protect their fragile sense of success and victory which would be broken like a snowflake falling on warm hands if they were to realize how they were used like a tool. 


The author's comments:

practicing use of imagery and colloquialism to set mood and give perspective into the narrator’s thoughts and opinions on corporate america, which someone reflects my own. use of anacoluthon near the end, just to drive home the point that this guy is really pissed off to the point where his mind is running so fast there’s no time to use syntax. i also used a more realistic tone to reflect the fact that these are simply the thoughts of a man transferred onto a screen because we as people think in a simple tone. the reference to oil paint blending together is use of symbolism: oil paint is incredibly expensive and seen as high end, but in fact it has a repulsive smell and is somewhat toxic depending on manufacturer and color and such. in addition, it forms an unappealing vomit-brown color as paints and pigments do when mixed together, despite the fact that the individual components are visually appealing on their own. in short, it’s a metaphor for the opposite of the saying “greater than the sum of its parts.” the title contains symbolism in some way as well: pigs are known to be smart animals, but at the end of the day all forms of intelligence shown was motivated by food; an extremely one dimensional motivation that simply exists for survival. the stitched eyes is a nod to the part where he states they blind themselves to the fact that they are being used. the eyes are stitched because they were not born blind, they stitched their eyes in an attempt to maintain their fragile sense of success. my favorite part is the ending; it renders the more abstract tones that may have seemed as “i hate my job” which were set before into a more concrete declaration.


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