Skills

I often dread the question, "what do you do?" because what the person means is "How do you make money?" I admit that this is not an entirely pointless question, particularly in this society, but it irks me that this is one of the first questions asked when meeting a new person. Now, the reason this annoys me so much is that most of the people I regularly interact with are in my age/socioeconomic group and people in my age/socioeconomic group do not make a living doing things they enjoy or choose to associate themselves with. This does not mean that I don't have friends who do not love their jobs, or are not proud of the good work they do, but I think most do not see themselves as Barista/House Painter/Child Care Provider/Online Tech Support/What-Have-You. That is what they do for money.

It would be neat if, when asked the dreaded question, people responded instead with Comic Artist/Bass Player/Quilter/Singer\Song Writer/What-Have-You. It would be even better if when people asked that question, that was the answer they were looking for.

Someone once asked me what I did to stay out of trouble. I knew exactly what they meant and was able to tell them about my fondness of cooking, and the new print I was working on, and my kung fu class. I feel this gave a more telling description of my character than heaving a sigh and saying I do home remodeling and general contracting work. It's not that I don't like my job, it's just not who I am. Unfortunately, whenever I've tried to use that phrase on others, they either assume I mean what they do for work, or think I'm implying that they are troublemakers.

What I'm getting at is, I wish the question were "What are your self selected skills?" Meaning what are the activities that you have invested your personal time into becoming better at? What are you best at? Why that activity?

Now if only someone would coin the phrase that asks that as simply as, "Whad'ya do?"