Whither Ambition?

(Original image found here.)

This is true: I am probably the least ambitious person you'll ever meet.  Sure, I put a lot of work into my radio show, not that you could tell, but I don't know that if I knew how to make it really great, if I could actually do it.  Because I have spent my life doing the bare minimum required of me to make or do something passable.  A striver for excellence I ain't.

For example: I usually wrote my college papers the night before they were due.  In fact, in the days before most people had computers, I would often ask my professors if it were all right if I turned papers in hand-written.  I remember one class - it must have been an existentialist lit class - where I wrote a paper on my bedroom floor on my stomach in pen about two hours before class.  It was for a book a really love, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, & I had a lot to say about it, but still.

You might say, well, you know you could get away with it.  But that's completely wrong - I've never had the confidence that I could in fact get things done in time.  I even told one professor I should take an incomplete instead of writing a paper, but she talked me off the ledge & let me turn that final report in a bit later.

Anyway, I could've gone to grad school, I suppose.  But I stuck with the easiest job I could find after college.  & at one period of time, I thought I might write, but it turned out I liked being ridiculous on the radio even better.  It was certainly less work - it was in fact easy, sharing music with people.  If in fact my radio shows sound as shabby as I believe they do, it's because the whole process feels easy to me.  Perhaps I should try harder.  I wonder what that would feel like.

In any event - today I unambitiously present a show about ambition.  It's on from four to six pm (4-6pm) on eighty-eight point one fm (88.1 fm) WRFL in Lexington proper.  All over the world improper it's online at wrfl.fm.  I have lots of guests today - I guess that's ambitious - & the first hour or so will be entirely filled with songs called "Ambition."

Don't worry, I didn't work that hard on it.  If you can't listen, I'll archive it tomorrow on the show's web site.

By the way, it's annoying to me that we still say "man" or "mankind" to mean the entire human race.  When I see a quote like the one above, my first thought is, "& what did Marcus Aurelius think a woman's worth was?"  (Well, chances are he didn't think of women at all.)  Would it be so bad to retroactively change quotes like that to "A person's worth..." or "A human's worth..."?  It's translated from the Latin anyway.

Here's an ambitious thought: just as I think I'll be old & die in a world in which same-sex marriage is no big deal to the vast majority of us, I hope I'll be old & die in a world where people stop saying "man" & "mankind" & instead say "human" & "humankind" or "humanity."  That way, even though every day will be over 120 degrees, & most of the great coastal cities will be underwater, I'll at least be glad that as the human race is dying out, we aren't as homophobic & sexist as we were when I was a kid.