What do you do???

As we are in the holiday season, it seems I get invited to at least one holiday gathering every year where I only know one or two people. Given that I can wallflower at home, I try to talk with people I don't know and, through this, I have found an almost automatic question is "what do you do?" Although this question is perfectly normal and meant as a conversation starter, it does make me think about our view towards work and how we can ask what someone does, but asking something like how much money they make is walking into the mine field of invasive. It also reminds me of the line in the movie "Party Monster," the film about alpha NYC club kid Michael Alig, when the main character is asked "what do you do?" he answers "we don't do, we just are."
If we are looking for a way to get to know someone, asking their vocation is usually a pretty good way of doing that although maybe not for the right reasons. We make assumptions about a person based on their job: we assume a doctor is rolling in dough, a teacher is the reincarnation of our fifth grade taskmaster, and a social worker has a kind disposition. Also, we tend to associate certain people with their vocations and assume all people who fill those jobs are like that. Since Jesus was a carpenter, the profession of carpentry sometimes earns an extremely dignified place among career paths. First, current Biblical scholarship is led to believe Jesus was a carpenter because he made things out of wood and wasn't framing houses or installing cabinets (Sorry if I've destroyed your vision of Jesus as the Bob Villa of Biblical times). Second, one need only read the Bible to know that Jesus' ministry and sacrifice (i.e. what he's known and loved for) was mutually exclusive with his job as a carpenter. If I were a more daring person, I'd ask if Jesus was a tele-marketer or worked for a collection agency would those professions not earn the ire that they do now?
This is not to criticize any particular vocation or a person's choice of employment be it money, fulfillment, or schedule. However, we put so much emphasis on what a person does for a living and we tend to forget that there are other aspects to them. A friend of mine who went through a bout of unemployment, found a job, and then lost it due to downsizing. He received some grief from people he knew because he couldn't "keep" his job. This was like saying his worth as a human being seemed to be based on how well he crunched numbers and did spreadsheets and the fact that he is a cool guy was thrown to the wayside.
My Mom retired about 5 years ago or so from a long career as a high school math teacher (she currently moonlights and mine and my sister's moral compass)and, although most of her former students have only positive things to say about her, there were of course the occasional students who's feelings toward her were not, shall we say "fluffy bunny." Still, there are many teachers in the world and few would do some of the things that she did. She volunteered to help a student who would be out of school for months due to a serious injury with his mathematics because the teacher/tutor the school got for him was untrained in teaching high-school math. She wrote thank you notes to everyone (leads, chorus, band etc) in each of the school plays letting them know how much she liked the performance. If anyone she knows is going through a hard time, she is usually there to help out in any way she can. To me, that says alot about who she is even though it is independent of her ability to explain the quadratic equation.
I don't expect that people won't ask me "what do you do?" at parties. Getting back to someone saying, "we just are" I think that how I would like to be seen. I don't save lives as part of my job or make loads of money, but I think I would rather be judged based on how I do my job than what exactly that job is. I try to do my job honestly, with realism, and in gratitude for my boss' good treatment of his employees. This, I think, is reflective of the person I try to be and a value that defines me much better than my job.