Post THE FIFTY-FIRST, In Which I Speak of Hardly Working

   I really don't know the meaning of hard work. Work, to me, is work. Take lifting. Either you can lift something, or you'd rip your arms out attempting it. At the end of it, the box (or whatever) is either lifted or not lifted. Either you can cut it or you can't, if you're actually trying. There is a difference between taking your time on a project and just phoning it in (or even, to extend the metaphor, scribbling down the vague gist of it on a Post-it and faxing it over,) but I really don't know what else you can do about it other than that. They say to pour blood, sweat, and tears into the things you are doing. But is caring about your job the same as hard work?

   Actors, for instance, sometimes speak of difficult acting, of having difficulties envisioning their roles. I really don't see how hard acting can get exactly. Do they mean that you have to make more decisions on what your character would do and whether or not that would conflict with the overall direction of the film/play/whatever? That's not harder work, it's just more of it.

   I come from the school of all you can do is all you can do, but all those others could be of the same school and I wouldn't know it. How could I really know if mine isn't even the only school? It's my school, so of course I can't see outside of it, at least not enough to know if the people who speak of working harder are part of it (albeit with some communications issues on what constitutes hard work,) or if they're of a different school altogether that actually believes there's a difference in grades of work.

   Some things do just take longer, but that's more dedication than exertion. If it's all at the same time, then it would be "hard" because it that takes a lot of skill to do. What matters here is if you already have the skill required to do it. I just don't understand it.

   But then again, I've never understood people who've never understood people who've never understood people who don't put a lot of stock in good looks because it's something you can't control- the people who say, if you're ugly that's because you were born ugly, and if you're handsome that's because you're born handsome, so, why put stock in good looks? That, to me, is like saying if you're smart it's because you were born smart. Obviously true to some extent, but if you're ugly it's nothing that can't be fixed with a good haircut and the right amount of makeup (not too much, of course- an incredibly high percentage of ugly people are that way because they wear too much makeup.) And if you're dumb, you can make it through dedication and hard wor-- er...

  Well, "hard work" here meaning not so much that the work is hard but that you actually do the points listed above. Like, actually trying. Which is pretty much all it is, really. Hard work is just trying. So I guess the answer to the question posed in the first paragraph is, "yes, caring about your job is the same as hard work." Apparently.