Catch-22 is going to get me fired

I am incredibly impressionable when it comes to books. We've all experienced a novel so good you can't stop thinking about it, I might describe it as being entranced. When I was reading In Cold Blood, I walked around solemn, and scared. My guard went up at night, keenly aware of any ne'er-do-wells looking to break in and murder me. When I read Project Hail Mary I found myself looking up at the stars.

Catch-22 is unlike anything I've ever read and has captured my attention in much the same way. I can no longer think straight. I spent the first 50 pages mentally scrambling for a plot, searching for a connection string to attach to, only to find none. The book will move through characters, setting, and time by the paragraph. Naturally, this has led to my mind being all sorts of jumbled.

Where Catch-22 is really influencing me is by the humor. My humor already leans dry, ironic, sarcastic. This is now turned up to 11. The book takes great pleasure in pointing out absurdities of life. It achieves this through absurd characters and, as a byproduct, absurd conversations. Every character is a caricature.

A personal favorite character description: "He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down."

You might be asking yourself by now, "what the hell does this have to do with the employment status of Mindless_Patient2034?" Certainly a fair question. I can't help but be painfully ironic now. I can't help but point out any slight absurdity of the service/customer interaction. I'll directly shed light on the dynamic and the inherent ingenuine subtleties of my needing to sell you something in order to survive via the income I earn from the transaction, although never directly. I can't stop. I'm doing it purely for selfish reasons. It is never for the benefit of the other party, rather for my own amusement. Even if I'm operating under the guise of easing tension that both of us can easily ignore. I'm coming off like an asshole. Every word is sarcastic. This has infiltrated the conversations with my coworkers. They'll say, "that customer never talks to us, I wonder why?" I'll say, "They're either introverted or the nefarious things they do at night in the woods has infiltrated their psyche to such a degree that they can't help but be nonverbal in normal interactions, maybe both." The coworker, mother of 2, did not find this as funny as I did. And nor would I expect her to. It was purely out of selfish intent. My mind can only find logic through the contrary.

10/10, can't recommend this book enough