The Underappreciated Careers

The only thing I can say right now is that April sucks. I'm stressed, pissed off, and slightly sad. Thirty-two people died in a shooting at Virginia Tech, I am once again, going through my college/university options and career choices. In the midst of all this, I succumbed to my unhealthy habit of emotional eating, which led to my realization that one of the most admirable careers in the world was being a farmer. Even with modern technology and huge ass tractors instead of oxen and plow, being a farmer still isn't easy. You have to risk losing your crops to uncontrollable elements like the weather. The biggest reason for my admiration is that farmers are the ones who grow our food. You could be Bill Gates or the King/Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, it doesn't matter. If you want your lettuce and tomatoes. If you want your bacon and eggs, you get it from the farmers. Despite all of this, my mental image of farmers has always been some guy in overalls, boots drenched in mud, pulling stuff from his field. What were my feelings towards a farming career? It seemed so... backwards and unambitious. Its like those movie cliches where the uneducated boy in plaid and overalls has a piece of straw or wheat or whatever it is hanging out of their mouth and start talking with a strange accent while sitting on top of a rusty old tractor. But I suddenly realized how important farmers were in my life. They don't exactly affect me directly but I have three meals a day (not including snacks) and the food definitely didn't appear spontaneously out of mid air. Of course, my parents paid cold hard cash for the food, but I still admire those farmers out there. I certainly can't imagine waking up at five in the morning to tend to my crops or anything like that. People go around thinking off all these professions that influence people: doctors, lawyers, politicians... Nobody ever thinks about the people who grow the food that the influential people eat to stay alive and be influential in the first place.

This led me to think about all the other underappreciated careers there are out there. What about garbage collectors? I never thought much about the neon orange/yellow vest wearing individuals who I notice pull by every now and then to pick up the garbage. (I live in an apartment so we have a garbage compactor, therefore there isn't the generic vision of the garbage man/woman pulling up to the front of my house and collecting the trash) A few summers ago, (now that I think of it, quite a few summers ago) the garbage collectors went on strike. I don't think it takes too much explaining to feel the agony of walking past an alley on a hot summer's day with the stench of weeks of garbage wafting over to you.

Oh no, I just heard on the news that the garbage collectors might be having a strike again! Just as the weather is growing warmer....

Now I'm completely off topic and should probably go back to working on my fanfic.