[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is an addendum to yesterday, please continue.
Rick Rosner: Which was on following through…
Jacobsen: [Laughing] continue.
Rosner: All right. So I thought of one more huge area where I’m obsessive, which I guess falls under following through and that’s working out. I haven’t missed working out for a day, I haven’t skipped a day in 31.77 years and I’ve averaged 4.69 workouts a day over that period which, if it were one a day would be roughly a hundred and 48 years worth of daily workouts. So like, today I’m five sets into my third workout, so I have to get to at least 12 sets for this one and then I still have to do two more, which can be oppressive but I don’t allow myself to do fewer than five workouts a day lately over the past eight years. I think I’ve fallen asleep before the fifth workout three or four times in the past eight years but I think no times in the past five years. So that’s wildly obsessive to the point where my kidney numbers are often not good because the more working out you do the more muscle waste you generate and that’s how they calculate your kidney function.
It doesn’t mean that my kidneys are terrible, just means that the easy way that they calculate kidney function doesn’t work very well for me. So there you go; following through. But I fall down on a lot of stuff, the following through has to fit within my fear of obsessive compulsiveness. My dad had OCD; he’s involved keeping records, he’d never throw anything away from his CPA practice, walked around with 40 pens, a blazer would have two inside and two outside pockets and he’d put about 10 pens in each pocket. Right angles; he’d make sure everything all his papers were lined up at right angles. He had an office building and his papers would take over room after room especially as he became a sole proprietor but everything in these rooms even as the stacks overflowed onto chairs and the floor, everything would be oriented at right angles.
Now Carole is like a conscientious follow through-er, she follows through on the shit that people actually care about. She doesn’t like to let people down and she likes to do a good job. She’s worked at her current high school for a little over a year; she worked at a high school previous to that for about three years. Education is not a field that that attracts overly responsible people, maybe it does at the college level when you’re going for tenure, but a lot of people who end up teaching, ends up teaching because they’re a little bit lazy. It could be like working in a bar where you just kind of drifted into it and there you are, which means that she is the most responsible person in her office which tends to weigh on her because then everybody goes to her with everything. This is a fancy expensive liberal high school and that means the parents and the kids are pretty demanding and a lot of these demands just default to her because people learn that she’s the one who will get shit done.
She doesn’t like that aspect of the job that the job keeps expanding because she’s very competent and conscientious but she does really like doing a good job and I’m a beneficiary of that because she makes dinner most nights and really won’t let me make dinner much, maybe once a year.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] what do you make?
Rosner: The only thing I can really make, I mean I don’t do recipes but I can make an omelet, I can make scrambled eggs, I could boil pasta if need be. They used to make these ready-made meals at the grocery, like 15 bucks for a meal for two, it would give you all the ingredients and you just follow the instructions and whip it up. I could do one of those. I could follow a simple recipe but generally when I cook for myself, it’s not really cooking; it’s taking a can of chicken soup and throwing all the leftovers in the refrigerator into the can of soup.
It may be that Carole’s ultra conscientious because she feels like her parents kind of fell down on the job, not her dad as much as her mom. She feels like she didn’t get enough of what she wanted from her mom and this continues because her mom now suffers from early dementia and even if she were ever capable of not frustrating Carole, that time is gone. I think Carole has reacted by becoming a person who gives people what they want or what she thinks they would want if she were them, which is just paying attention to people and doing right by them.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 