Monday, February 28, 2005
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Yet Another Confession
Bless me Hilary Swank for I have sinned.....
It is 9 PM on the High Holy Day of Hollywood, and my heresy is showing.
I am not a practitioner of the great American religion of celebrity; although I'm entertained by the process of becoming one, I have no interest in anyone once they -are-. I watch American Idol, yet I don't think I could name more than one Kelly Clarkson song, I wouldn't recognize Ruben if I heard him on the radio, and I tend to turn the station when Fantasia's new song comes on. I was a fan of all three, while they were going through the whole process; once they got there, though, I was decidedly uninterested.
And that's just in the world of music--supposedly something I care about. Movies, to me, are less art-form and more pleasant-way-to-spend-a-couple-of-hours. I could count on the fingers of one hand the movies I actually love--and with the possible exception of Apocalypse Now, none of them is really considered "art". And so I have absolutely no interest in what the movie community considers award-worthy.
Even less than that, however, am I interested in the whole "who's your date/whose dress are you wearing" ritual that seems to whip the worshippers into such a religious ecstasy. I don't get it, I don't want to get it, I don't care that I don't get it. I find it deadly boring, probably because my grasp of fashion is such that I can't often tell the best-dressed from the worst-dressed, or either group from the in-between.
I'd like to cram something large and porous into Joan Rivers' mouth, and her little daughter Toto too. A boxing glove, maybe, although a super-sized eclair would do, if it would shut her up for a while. That VOICE, my GOD.
Also, you know what REALLY chaps my hide? All the Academoids get these whompin' big goody-bags full of tens of thousands of dollars of brand-name foo-foo crap. Apparently, all the product pimps are convinced that if a "celeb" gives their particular piece of foo-foo crap a shout-out, swarming hordes of penitents who don't yet own said foo-foo crap will knock each other over running out to the boutiques to purchase it, because a "celeb" said it was a good idea. Why didn't these same swarming penitential hordes listen to the celebs when it was actually a GOOD idea, like when they said Dubya was making a mess of things and it was time for him to go?
In fact, from what I understand, the non-winning nominees apparently get a SECOND goody-bag, even more opulent than the first. The winners, I guess, just get to win. If I was a celebrity I'd have to sit down and think about which one would interest me more. Little gold statue vs. $30,000 worth of stuff....I'd be undecided. But that just shows my undeveloped sense of proportion, I guess.
I'm not interested in the celebrities; I'm not interested in the clothes; I'm not interested in the movies themselves or which one is supposedly so much more worthy than the rest. I am bored to tears by the media coverage, both before and after. Were it not for my little stack of CDs, I would dread the ride to work tomorrow, because even the stations that I LIKE would be yammering on about Best Supporting Actress In A Drama Less Than Three Hours Long Featuring An Animal That Isn't A Caribou, or whatever. I think THAT award will be given around 1:20 AM, somewhere in with the documentaries--which, by the way, are the only movies that interest me, other than the animateds. (Incidentally: "Shark Tale" is an actual nominee? What the hell is the rest of the field like?)
Oh, and Chris Rock? Would make it worth watching, if there was a chance in hell that he would actually get to BE Chris Rock, which...not even a little bit. Justin and Janet made sure THAT wouldn't be an option.
And so I sit here, the last unchurched woman in America, watching--oddly enough--Apocalypse Now, except it's on AMC which means they've cut out all the swears. This leaves approximately thirty minutes of unbowdlerized footage, which is demoralizing in the extreme.
Oscar night. The...horror.
It is 9 PM on the High Holy Day of Hollywood, and my heresy is showing.
I am not a practitioner of the great American religion of celebrity; although I'm entertained by the process of becoming one, I have no interest in anyone once they -are-. I watch American Idol, yet I don't think I could name more than one Kelly Clarkson song, I wouldn't recognize Ruben if I heard him on the radio, and I tend to turn the station when Fantasia's new song comes on. I was a fan of all three, while they were going through the whole process; once they got there, though, I was decidedly uninterested.
And that's just in the world of music--supposedly something I care about. Movies, to me, are less art-form and more pleasant-way-to-spend-a-couple-of-hours. I could count on the fingers of one hand the movies I actually love--and with the possible exception of Apocalypse Now, none of them is really considered "art". And so I have absolutely no interest in what the movie community considers award-worthy.
Even less than that, however, am I interested in the whole "who's your date/whose dress are you wearing" ritual that seems to whip the worshippers into such a religious ecstasy. I don't get it, I don't want to get it, I don't care that I don't get it. I find it deadly boring, probably because my grasp of fashion is such that I can't often tell the best-dressed from the worst-dressed, or either group from the in-between.
I'd like to cram something large and porous into Joan Rivers' mouth, and her little daughter Toto too. A boxing glove, maybe, although a super-sized eclair would do, if it would shut her up for a while. That VOICE, my GOD.
Also, you know what REALLY chaps my hide? All the Academoids get these whompin' big goody-bags full of tens of thousands of dollars of brand-name foo-foo crap. Apparently, all the product pimps are convinced that if a "celeb" gives their particular piece of foo-foo crap a shout-out, swarming hordes of penitents who don't yet own said foo-foo crap will knock each other over running out to the boutiques to purchase it, because a "celeb" said it was a good idea. Why didn't these same swarming penitential hordes listen to the celebs when it was actually a GOOD idea, like when they said Dubya was making a mess of things and it was time for him to go?
In fact, from what I understand, the non-winning nominees apparently get a SECOND goody-bag, even more opulent than the first. The winners, I guess, just get to win. If I was a celebrity I'd have to sit down and think about which one would interest me more. Little gold statue vs. $30,000 worth of stuff....I'd be undecided. But that just shows my undeveloped sense of proportion, I guess.
I'm not interested in the celebrities; I'm not interested in the clothes; I'm not interested in the movies themselves or which one is supposedly so much more worthy than the rest. I am bored to tears by the media coverage, both before and after. Were it not for my little stack of CDs, I would dread the ride to work tomorrow, because even the stations that I LIKE would be yammering on about Best Supporting Actress In A Drama Less Than Three Hours Long Featuring An Animal That Isn't A Caribou, or whatever. I think THAT award will be given around 1:20 AM, somewhere in with the documentaries--which, by the way, are the only movies that interest me, other than the animateds. (Incidentally: "Shark Tale" is an actual nominee? What the hell is the rest of the field like?)
Oh, and Chris Rock? Would make it worth watching, if there was a chance in hell that he would actually get to BE Chris Rock, which...not even a little bit. Justin and Janet made sure THAT wouldn't be an option.
And so I sit here, the last unchurched woman in America, watching--oddly enough--Apocalypse Now, except it's on AMC which means they've cut out all the swears. This leaves approximately thirty minutes of unbowdlerized footage, which is demoralizing in the extreme.
Oscar night. The...horror.
Friday, February 25, 2005
Help Me Settle An Argument...
As I'm sure my last few posts will imply, I am a fan of Really Bad TV. I mean, we're talking all sorts of reality stuff, NASCAR, cartoons--just wonderful, awful guilty pleasures.
There's a point, though, where "wonderful" and "awful" diverge entirely--and it was at this fork in the road that I found myself last night, accompanied by Donald Trump, all of his Apprenti, and the Sony Playstation marketing department.
For all you people who actually have lives and have thus never seen "The Apprentice", here's a summary. There are two teams, one composed of college graduates, the other composed of people who never finished college. The college-grad team is called Magna; the non-grad team is called Net Worth. Each week they compete in tasks having to do with the business world.
This week's task was to develop an ad campaign for Gran Turismo 4, a soon-to-be-released game for the Sony Playstation. The marketing people told the teams that the idea was to appeal to the "young, hip, urban" 18-to-34 male demographic. The ads were to be murals, painted on large empty walls in--wait for it--Harlem, and the teams were to receive creative assistance from--again, wait for it--renowned graffiti artists.
We'll get to my issues with the concept itself.
In the meantime: The Net Worth team project manager was an African-American woman, who pretty much took over the whole operation and shut out any ideas from her team. Her big emphasis was on not offending the residents of the neighborhood by going with overblown media stereotypes, and instead emphasizing the image of a revitalized Harlem. There were problems with this concept and its execution, but I could appreciate the sentiment.
The Magna team, on the other hand, found itself in the weeds almost immediately. The project manager was a little skinny white boy from an affluent background, and all the other team members came from circumstances ranging from "moderately well-off" to "filthy rich". None of them had any experience with Harlem, other than what they'd heard about it--all stereotypes, essentially--and none of them knew a damn thing about graffiti as art. Even their artist-consultant couldn't overcome their total Wonder-Bread-ness, which was agonizing to watch.
Here's where shit got wrong.
Realizing that they were well and truly screwed, Alex, the Magna PM, decided they needed a little more expertise than they had among themselves, which was zero. And so this skinny little white guy walked up to a group of African-American teenage boys and asked their advice.
At this juncture I ran into the living room from the kitchen and yelled, loud enough to scare the cats, "Please tell me they didn't just ask some black people for advice on how to create graffiti." Which they so totally just did.
Several years ago, I used to come into my current neighborhood to score drugs with Lou, my old roomie/lover/drug buddy. Lou was a bit of a redneck, although he was a fairly enlightened redneck. But he was a danger to himself and others, because he would automatically assume that every non-white person in any given neighborhood could point out where the drugs were. He almost got Firefly and me chased out of our apartment complex when he came to visit in North Carolina--he walked up to the wrong people and asked the wrong question, and that conversation went very bad, very fast. Firefly was livid; I was more pissed that nobody beat the hell out of him for being such a dumbass.
I thought of Lou when I saw what Magna was doing.
And yes, they got some replies that ALSO made my skin crawl: "Make it with money raining from the sky," stuff like that. Of COURSE that's what they're gonna get--these are TEENAGERS. They're immersed in media culture, which is a closed loop of stereotyping and regurgitation. The Apprenti, on the other hand, are supposedly business professionals--who should, at least on some level, be able to cull the wheat from the chaff when it comes to marketing ideas. (Of course, this was the same band of idjits who brought us, only a couple of weeks ago, commercials for Dove Body Wash that could have been titled "Goopy Runner" and "Gay Cucumber Porn". So perhaps I am expecting too much from them.)
What killed me, though: first, Alex immediately (and in some cases, inaccurately) incorporated some of the slang into his vocabulary--he was yapping on about "bling-bling" and "mad props" and "g-wheels" and there was verbal shrapnel everywhere, just from the extreme and infinite wrongness of those words coming out of that pretty little N'Sync-looking mouth. And second: the mural they ended up with--complete with a large fist, wearing a gold ring with a logo, and stuffed with money. All they needed would have been a weed leaf, a scantily-clad woman, and a well-rendered AK-47, and they would have had the superfecta of Bad 'Hood Cliches.
What's even WORSE than that: their mural won. (This had less to do with the quality of Magna's work, than with the fact that Net Worth's mural was kinda craptacular and failed to relate to the game at all, other than that they both had vehicles in them.)
Filled with my normal sense of righteous liberal outrage, I went over to Television Without Pity, which has some of the most deliciously-snarky message boards anywhere. And I posted an extended version of what I said above: "Please tell me they didn't go up to African-American males and ask for graffiti advice," followed by why, exactly, I took issue with that.
I got back a lot of "I didn't see what was so wrong with that," "I thought they were smart to ask their target demographic for help," and things along those lines. There were a few who agreed with me, but not many. So I amended:
"That was a large part of my problem with this task as a whole--the assumption that graffiti is the form of media that's most likely to resonate with the target demographic.
"If you noticed the (real) focus group, it was not composed entirely of African-Americans or males. Yet the Magnoids, faced with the question of who to approach about how to improve the concept, seemed (and I'm willing to give them a LITTLE leeway and assume the possibility of editing tricks here) to target African-American males exclusively. To me, that suggests that in the collective Magna consciousness lies the impression that African-American males are the ones most likely to know about graffiti....which is also, IMHO, implicit in the very construction of the task itself.
" (The Net Worth PM's) little megalomaniacal-artist episode aside, I liked that she saw Harlem as a community. Magna's view seemed much more shallow and mercenary from the details I saw. Great for winning tasks and impressing The Donald, but in terms of character? Not so great. "
Again--lots of "I think Magna was smart to enlist the target demo rather than just keep thrashing around not knowing what they were doing," and only a few "yeah, I thought so too"s.
And so now I'm wondering--is this just another symptom of my bleeding-heart-liberal-ness? Am I being wrongheaded in my thinking here?
I'm going to ask LJ and a couple of the guys, whenever they turn up next; but I'm interested in hearing what everyone else thinks. Because to me, this whole episode was just uncomfortable and awkward and wrong.
There's a point, though, where "wonderful" and "awful" diverge entirely--and it was at this fork in the road that I found myself last night, accompanied by Donald Trump, all of his Apprenti, and the Sony Playstation marketing department.
For all you people who actually have lives and have thus never seen "The Apprentice", here's a summary. There are two teams, one composed of college graduates, the other composed of people who never finished college. The college-grad team is called Magna; the non-grad team is called Net Worth. Each week they compete in tasks having to do with the business world.
This week's task was to develop an ad campaign for Gran Turismo 4, a soon-to-be-released game for the Sony Playstation. The marketing people told the teams that the idea was to appeal to the "young, hip, urban" 18-to-34 male demographic. The ads were to be murals, painted on large empty walls in--wait for it--Harlem, and the teams were to receive creative assistance from--again, wait for it--renowned graffiti artists.
We'll get to my issues with the concept itself.
In the meantime: The Net Worth team project manager was an African-American woman, who pretty much took over the whole operation and shut out any ideas from her team. Her big emphasis was on not offending the residents of the neighborhood by going with overblown media stereotypes, and instead emphasizing the image of a revitalized Harlem. There were problems with this concept and its execution, but I could appreciate the sentiment.
The Magna team, on the other hand, found itself in the weeds almost immediately. The project manager was a little skinny white boy from an affluent background, and all the other team members came from circumstances ranging from "moderately well-off" to "filthy rich". None of them had any experience with Harlem, other than what they'd heard about it--all stereotypes, essentially--and none of them knew a damn thing about graffiti as art. Even their artist-consultant couldn't overcome their total Wonder-Bread-ness, which was agonizing to watch.
Here's where shit got wrong.
Realizing that they were well and truly screwed, Alex, the Magna PM, decided they needed a little more expertise than they had among themselves, which was zero. And so this skinny little white guy walked up to a group of African-American teenage boys and asked their advice.
At this juncture I ran into the living room from the kitchen and yelled, loud enough to scare the cats, "Please tell me they didn't just ask some black people for advice on how to create graffiti." Which they so totally just did.
Several years ago, I used to come into my current neighborhood to score drugs with Lou, my old roomie/lover/drug buddy. Lou was a bit of a redneck, although he was a fairly enlightened redneck. But he was a danger to himself and others, because he would automatically assume that every non-white person in any given neighborhood could point out where the drugs were. He almost got Firefly and me chased out of our apartment complex when he came to visit in North Carolina--he walked up to the wrong people and asked the wrong question, and that conversation went very bad, very fast. Firefly was livid; I was more pissed that nobody beat the hell out of him for being such a dumbass.
I thought of Lou when I saw what Magna was doing.
And yes, they got some replies that ALSO made my skin crawl: "Make it with money raining from the sky," stuff like that. Of COURSE that's what they're gonna get--these are TEENAGERS. They're immersed in media culture, which is a closed loop of stereotyping and regurgitation. The Apprenti, on the other hand, are supposedly business professionals--who should, at least on some level, be able to cull the wheat from the chaff when it comes to marketing ideas. (Of course, this was the same band of idjits who brought us, only a couple of weeks ago, commercials for Dove Body Wash that could have been titled "Goopy Runner" and "Gay Cucumber Porn". So perhaps I am expecting too much from them.)
What killed me, though: first, Alex immediately (and in some cases, inaccurately) incorporated some of the slang into his vocabulary--he was yapping on about "bling-bling" and "mad props" and "g-wheels" and there was verbal shrapnel everywhere, just from the extreme and infinite wrongness of those words coming out of that pretty little N'Sync-looking mouth. And second: the mural they ended up with--complete with a large fist, wearing a gold ring with a logo, and stuffed with money. All they needed would have been a weed leaf, a scantily-clad woman, and a well-rendered AK-47, and they would have had the superfecta of Bad 'Hood Cliches.
What's even WORSE than that: their mural won. (This had less to do with the quality of Magna's work, than with the fact that Net Worth's mural was kinda craptacular and failed to relate to the game at all, other than that they both had vehicles in them.)
Filled with my normal sense of righteous liberal outrage, I went over to Television Without Pity, which has some of the most deliciously-snarky message boards anywhere. And I posted an extended version of what I said above: "Please tell me they didn't go up to African-American males and ask for graffiti advice," followed by why, exactly, I took issue with that.
I got back a lot of "I didn't see what was so wrong with that," "I thought they were smart to ask their target demographic for help," and things along those lines. There were a few who agreed with me, but not many. So I amended:
"That was a large part of my problem with this task as a whole--the assumption that graffiti is the form of media that's most likely to resonate with the target demographic.
"If you noticed the (real) focus group, it was not composed entirely of African-Americans or males. Yet the Magnoids, faced with the question of who to approach about how to improve the concept, seemed (and I'm willing to give them a LITTLE leeway and assume the possibility of editing tricks here) to target African-American males exclusively. To me, that suggests that in the collective Magna consciousness lies the impression that African-American males are the ones most likely to know about graffiti....which is also, IMHO, implicit in the very construction of the task itself.
" (The Net Worth PM's) little megalomaniacal-artist episode aside, I liked that she saw Harlem as a community. Magna's view seemed much more shallow and mercenary from the details I saw. Great for winning tasks and impressing The Donald, but in terms of character? Not so great. "
Again--lots of "I think Magna was smart to enlist the target demo rather than just keep thrashing around not knowing what they were doing," and only a few "yeah, I thought so too"s.
And so now I'm wondering--is this just another symptom of my bleeding-heart-liberal-ness? Am I being wrongheaded in my thinking here?
I'm going to ask LJ and a couple of the guys, whenever they turn up next; but I'm interested in hearing what everyone else thinks. Because to me, this whole episode was just uncomfortable and awkward and wrong.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Eewww.
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Did I Mention Today Was The Daytona 500?
If anyone had to win that race that was NOT Kasey Kahne or Jimmie Johnson, I'm glad it was Jeff Gordon. I'm willing to give Tony Stewart a clean slate for this year--this incident notwithstanding--but he'll never be my favorite--and I would rather have ANYONE win it than Dale-freakin'-Junior. Every second commercial through that WHOLE race had his smug little mug all over it. Blech. Jimmie and Jeff are sorta interchangeable, really--but I like them both better than any of the other options.
(Sucks to be Harvick, though. :::Nelson-Muntz laugh::::)
February 20th is also a significant day in my life for a lot of non-NASCAR reasons.
In chronological order of occurrence, Feb. 20 is:
1.Kurt Cobain's birthday
2.Darius's birthday (the guy who introduced me to JP, among his other distinctions)
3.Eighteenth anniversary of the day I lost my virginity
4.Second anniversary with LJ (It seems a lot longer, somehow.)
Yeah, I know. You're waiting for me to take that virginity story someplace, aren't you. Ain't gonna happen. You may have noticed--I don't write about sex. At least, not when it's related to me. Just can't do it. Firefly finds it hilarious that I stop in mid-conversation and declare whatever she's just confided as "TMI". "My girlfriends here talk in WAAAAAAAY more detail than THAT," she tells me.
I'm not a prude--far from it, even though Stella claims that she can make me blush just by mentioning the existence of men. I would think this was part of the emotional toll of JP's death--except my reticence existed long before JP came into my life.
I don't talk about sex for the same reason I don't talk about spirituality, literature, or music--because I've grown tired of people using their disclosures on these topics to gain some perverse form of street credibility. I'm of the opinion that some things should be private...
...which is pretty funny, when you consider that I'm expressing that opinion on a weblog, which contains all sorts of juicy little tidbits about my life, and which is accessible to anyone who has a computer.
(Sucks to be Harvick, though. :::Nelson-Muntz laugh::::)
February 20th is also a significant day in my life for a lot of non-NASCAR reasons.
In chronological order of occurrence, Feb. 20 is:
1.Kurt Cobain's birthday
2.Darius's birthday (the guy who introduced me to JP, among his other distinctions)
3.Eighteenth anniversary of the day I lost my virginity
4.Second anniversary with LJ (It seems a lot longer, somehow.)
Yeah, I know. You're waiting for me to take that virginity story someplace, aren't you. Ain't gonna happen. You may have noticed--I don't write about sex. At least, not when it's related to me. Just can't do it. Firefly finds it hilarious that I stop in mid-conversation and declare whatever she's just confided as "TMI". "My girlfriends here talk in WAAAAAAAY more detail than THAT," she tells me.
I'm not a prude--far from it, even though Stella claims that she can make me blush just by mentioning the existence of men. I would think this was part of the emotional toll of JP's death--except my reticence existed long before JP came into my life.
I don't talk about sex for the same reason I don't talk about spirituality, literature, or music--because I've grown tired of people using their disclosures on these topics to gain some perverse form of street credibility. I'm of the opinion that some things should be private...
...which is pretty funny, when you consider that I'm expressing that opinion on a weblog, which contains all sorts of juicy little tidbits about my life, and which is accessible to anyone who has a computer.
In Which Longtime Readers Get Yet Another Glimpse of My Inner Redneck
Daytona 500!!!
WOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Friday, February 18, 2005
Why Instincts Are Good Things
Again--a redacted version of the conversation. Also annotated, because reading TWOP has shown me that bullshit should probably be annotated. :)
him: whats up?
me: Listen...I was thinking about this last night and I don't think it's such a good idea.
him: what?
me: I'm just not comfortable with what I'm doing, that's all.
him: which is..........
him: going out?
him: I am so gonna be pissed in about 10 secs
him: you've got to be kidding me
me: Meeting up with someone who has clearly expressed an interest when I'm seeing someone else. Not right.
Notice here: I'm making this MY problem, MY issue, because I have a hard time telling someone they've skeeved me out completely. I am TRYING, here, people.
him: didn't know it was like that, you make it seem like it wasn't a problem
him: so let me get this right, you don't want to go out with me because you might upset someone who doens't give you the time of day?
me: It isn't, except it is. No matter how bad things are in whatever situation I'm in, that's not a justification.
him: or hardly speaks to you?
him: great!
him: thanks
me: I'm sorry. I'm just not comfortable doing that.
him: great
him: I knew this would happen
him: you know, you tell me for days we're going to finally meet, and today this shit, pretty shitty actually
Two days, to be precise. During which we discussed at length the fact that you intended to screw me. Or rather, YOU discussed; I, on the other hand, made noncommittal noises and repeatedly changed the subject. Also, did I mention that these two days of discussion came after a year of silence, which began when YOU blew ME off the last time we planned to meet? On ZERO notice, just not returning my calls to find out where and what time? Or that there was never any explanation of why, even later, when I asked for one? So if, in fact, my change of heart is as shitty as you claim, at least I know I haven't cornered the market on shittiness.
him: if you didnt want to meet me, all you had to do was say so
me: Let's just say yesterday's conversation made your intentions WAY clearer than they had been up to that point, and that was where I started to think about it.
him: but whatever
him: oh come on, you can't take a joke? I am not like that
Oh, here we go. That whole last conversation--that was supposedly a "joke". Quite the little humorist, yeah.
him: all i wanted to do was just freakin meet you
him: my intentons were to go out and have a good time
him: but whatever
him: you seemed like someone i wanted to get to know and thought having a night out would be a good start
him: it's not about sex to me, can have that when i want, wasn't a factor
This from someone who, in yesterday's conversation, told me how many months it had been since he'd had any. And it was a fair bit longer than the duration of my little drought. That whole "I can get it anytime I want" thing? Not buyin' it.
me: If you read back, you made it sound like a lot more than that.
him: well, it wasn't and sorry if you took it that way, i am very open minded and i can conversate about anything at anytime
him: just conversation
him: but forget it
him: i cant believe this shit, i'm pretty pissed off! I am a nice person and all i wanted to do was hang out, i'm not trying to "fuck" you!
him: give me a break
Riiiiiight.
me: Again, read back. If you were a female and had that conversation, you would be fairly suspicious of the other person's motives.
him: possibly, but i just told you that was not my intentin
me: Okay--but that's all I have to go on.
him: but whatever, u just dont want to meet me and that's fine
him: just say so
him: fine, well i wont bother you anymore
Ah, yes--the injured pout. Saw this one coming. I was prepared for it, fortunately, or it might have worked--I hate hurting people's feelings but this just ain't happenin', guy.
me: I'm sorry. I can't control what you think--even though you're wrong about what I think--but I can tell you I'm sorry.
him: u know, it's pretty sad, but it's not uncommon. women deal with bullsit from guys, but are not willing to give a nice guy a chance, someone that would treat them right
him: and not ignore them for 48hrs but still have their woman on a leash
Oh yeah. Here we go with the Dynamic Duo of retorts. 1. The old nugget about "assholes get the women and nice guys get screwed." This argument would have a whole lot more oomph if it wasn't for two things: a) we haven't yet established (anywhere outside Imaginary-Land) that we're dealing with a nice guy here, in this particular situation; and b) are you implying that this is an attitude adopted solely by females? Because I can offer you MUCH evidence about lonely nice girls sitting at home while raging harpy bitches get slobbered over by gaggles of men.
Then we move on to #2: The whole "you're a woman and you're not interested in me so you must not have control of your own life" sequence. This one's my favorite; it's got echoes of CR written aaaalllll over it. Um, no--I'm not "on a leash"--I'm just not on YOUR leash. And that's the real problem here, isn't it?
him: bullshit
him: but whatever, to each is own
him: he must really have u on lockdown, but he does what he wants to??
Yup. "On lockdown". That's me. Little Miss Dick-Whipped. Because we all know, don't we: women can't think for themselves. "If they're resisting MY charms..." goes the Great Trouser-Brain, "it's only because they're under the spell of some OTHER giant schlong." "Maybe I came on a little too strong" is not a thought that ever occurs to these lovely gentlemen.
him: i hope you're not a fool
Yahoo: ________ has logged off
Well, let's see. I'm going home from work tonight and put my comfy clothes on, and I'm going to build stuff. Which--at least, to me--is a far, far better way to spend a Friday night than hanging out in a trendy-for-the-south-side bar with an insecure, backpedaling, quite-possibly-sexist nit. So--thanks for your concern, but nope--not a fool. Almost, but not quite.
Oddly enough, I appreciate LJ much more after this whole experience. Somewhere along the line, I have detached myself from the really deeply-emotional person I used to be. I remember when CR left me, just days and days where I did nothing but go to work, then go home and sob. Seriously. And I remember thinking that I had all this empty time, all of a sudden, because suddenly there was no CR to fill every waking moment with the shrapnel of his personality, and that I didn't quite know what to do with all this space now that his drama was gone.
One of my main beefs with LJ has been that he, also, has left me all this empty time. He isn't clingy; he's the anti-Clingy, as a matter of fact, and I thought I didn't like that...til now. Til I got into two days of conversations with someone who IMed me all day, and called my cell phone three times in one night for almost no reason. I felt...crowded.
Riding to work today, I was listening to "Stars", by a band called Hum. This was a song from the summer of 1995, and I could barely listen to it for a long time after, because it was so evocative of my time with JP. I've been trying to desensitize myself from those things, a little, with varying degrees of success. Today, listening to that song, I thought about what it was like being with JP. We were inseparable. We were never apart for more than a few hours, and we always missed each other madly til we could be together again.
When I was with CR, I thought I missed that kind of bond. Since I've been with LJ, I've thought I've missed that kind of inseparability. Now, though, I think I just miss JP. He was one of a kind. And in a world where what he and I had is no longer a possibility, I've decided: I like my space. I like my downtime. I like my distance, and I have no intention of marring this balance with the prospect of some clingy interloper who, I suspect, is far more sexist at bottom than LJ and all his "bitches-and-ho's" friends.
It's not what I had, and maybe it's not what I wished for, but in its own ways it's still good. How many times do I have to have that point driven home, before I stop forgetting?
him: whats up?
me: Listen...I was thinking about this last night and I don't think it's such a good idea.
him: what?
me: I'm just not comfortable with what I'm doing, that's all.
him: which is..........
him: going out?
him: I am so gonna be pissed in about 10 secs
him: you've got to be kidding me
me: Meeting up with someone who has clearly expressed an interest when I'm seeing someone else. Not right.
Notice here: I'm making this MY problem, MY issue, because I have a hard time telling someone they've skeeved me out completely. I am TRYING, here, people.
him: didn't know it was like that, you make it seem like it wasn't a problem
him: so let me get this right, you don't want to go out with me because you might upset someone who doens't give you the time of day?
me: It isn't, except it is. No matter how bad things are in whatever situation I'm in, that's not a justification.
him: or hardly speaks to you?
him: great!
him: thanks
me: I'm sorry. I'm just not comfortable doing that.
him: great
him: I knew this would happen
him: you know, you tell me for days we're going to finally meet, and today this shit, pretty shitty actually
Two days, to be precise. During which we discussed at length the fact that you intended to screw me. Or rather, YOU discussed; I, on the other hand, made noncommittal noises and repeatedly changed the subject. Also, did I mention that these two days of discussion came after a year of silence, which began when YOU blew ME off the last time we planned to meet? On ZERO notice, just not returning my calls to find out where and what time? Or that there was never any explanation of why, even later, when I asked for one? So if, in fact, my change of heart is as shitty as you claim, at least I know I haven't cornered the market on shittiness.
him: if you didnt want to meet me, all you had to do was say so
me: Let's just say yesterday's conversation made your intentions WAY clearer than they had been up to that point, and that was where I started to think about it.
him: but whatever
him: oh come on, you can't take a joke? I am not like that
Oh, here we go. That whole last conversation--that was supposedly a "joke". Quite the little humorist, yeah.
him: all i wanted to do was just freakin meet you
him: my intentons were to go out and have a good time
him: but whatever
him: you seemed like someone i wanted to get to know and thought having a night out would be a good start
him: it's not about sex to me, can have that when i want, wasn't a factor
This from someone who, in yesterday's conversation, told me how many months it had been since he'd had any. And it was a fair bit longer than the duration of my little drought. That whole "I can get it anytime I want" thing? Not buyin' it.
me: If you read back, you made it sound like a lot more than that.
him: well, it wasn't and sorry if you took it that way, i am very open minded and i can conversate about anything at anytime
him: just conversation
him: but forget it
him: i cant believe this shit, i'm pretty pissed off! I am a nice person and all i wanted to do was hang out, i'm not trying to "fuck" you!
him: give me a break
Riiiiiight.
me: Again, read back. If you were a female and had that conversation, you would be fairly suspicious of the other person's motives.
him: possibly, but i just told you that was not my intentin
me: Okay--but that's all I have to go on.
him: but whatever, u just dont want to meet me and that's fine
him: just say so
him: fine, well i wont bother you anymore
Ah, yes--the injured pout. Saw this one coming. I was prepared for it, fortunately, or it might have worked--I hate hurting people's feelings but this just ain't happenin', guy.
me: I'm sorry. I can't control what you think--even though you're wrong about what I think--but I can tell you I'm sorry.
him: u know, it's pretty sad, but it's not uncommon. women deal with bullsit from guys, but are not willing to give a nice guy a chance, someone that would treat them right
him: and not ignore them for 48hrs but still have their woman on a leash
Oh yeah. Here we go with the Dynamic Duo of retorts. 1. The old nugget about "assholes get the women and nice guys get screwed." This argument would have a whole lot more oomph if it wasn't for two things: a) we haven't yet established (anywhere outside Imaginary-Land) that we're dealing with a nice guy here, in this particular situation; and b) are you implying that this is an attitude adopted solely by females? Because I can offer you MUCH evidence about lonely nice girls sitting at home while raging harpy bitches get slobbered over by gaggles of men.
Then we move on to #2: The whole "you're a woman and you're not interested in me so you must not have control of your own life" sequence. This one's my favorite; it's got echoes of CR written aaaalllll over it. Um, no--I'm not "on a leash"--I'm just not on YOUR leash. And that's the real problem here, isn't it?
him: bullshit
him: but whatever, to each is own
him: he must really have u on lockdown, but he does what he wants to??
Yup. "On lockdown". That's me. Little Miss Dick-Whipped. Because we all know, don't we: women can't think for themselves. "If they're resisting MY charms..." goes the Great Trouser-Brain, "it's only because they're under the spell of some OTHER giant schlong." "Maybe I came on a little too strong" is not a thought that ever occurs to these lovely gentlemen.
him: i hope you're not a fool
Yahoo: ________ has logged off
Well, let's see. I'm going home from work tonight and put my comfy clothes on, and I'm going to build stuff. Which--at least, to me--is a far, far better way to spend a Friday night than hanging out in a trendy-for-the-south-side bar with an insecure, backpedaling, quite-possibly-sexist nit. So--thanks for your concern, but nope--not a fool. Almost, but not quite.
Oddly enough, I appreciate LJ much more after this whole experience. Somewhere along the line, I have detached myself from the really deeply-emotional person I used to be. I remember when CR left me, just days and days where I did nothing but go to work, then go home and sob. Seriously. And I remember thinking that I had all this empty time, all of a sudden, because suddenly there was no CR to fill every waking moment with the shrapnel of his personality, and that I didn't quite know what to do with all this space now that his drama was gone.
One of my main beefs with LJ has been that he, also, has left me all this empty time. He isn't clingy; he's the anti-Clingy, as a matter of fact, and I thought I didn't like that...til now. Til I got into two days of conversations with someone who IMed me all day, and called my cell phone three times in one night for almost no reason. I felt...crowded.
Riding to work today, I was listening to "Stars", by a band called Hum. This was a song from the summer of 1995, and I could barely listen to it for a long time after, because it was so evocative of my time with JP. I've been trying to desensitize myself from those things, a little, with varying degrees of success. Today, listening to that song, I thought about what it was like being with JP. We were inseparable. We were never apart for more than a few hours, and we always missed each other madly til we could be together again.
When I was with CR, I thought I missed that kind of bond. Since I've been with LJ, I've thought I've missed that kind of inseparability. Now, though, I think I just miss JP. He was one of a kind. And in a world where what he and I had is no longer a possibility, I've decided: I like my space. I like my downtime. I like my distance, and I have no intention of marring this balance with the prospect of some clingy interloper who, I suspect, is far more sexist at bottom than LJ and all his "bitches-and-ho's" friends.
It's not what I had, and maybe it's not what I wished for, but in its own ways it's still good. How many times do I have to have that point driven home, before I stop forgetting?
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Clueless Asshole: My Statement
Men. Men, men, men. Where to begin to instruct you on what would seem to be a very basic tenet of the Gospel of Cluefulness?
Flatly and categorically: it is NEVER. NEVER. NEVER EVER EVER a good idea, before you meet a woman, to try to get them to discuss their body type in detail.
Note above, the use of the word "try". If we volunteer the information, that's a whole 'nother story. But if we DON'T volunteer it, if you have to drag it out of us, that generally means we--like 99% of the rest of our gender--have body- image issues to some greater or lesser degree, and would really prefer not to increase our chances of rejection any further.
Exhibit A is a (slightly redacted) transcript of an IM with the guy I mentioned in a previous post--the one who I was supposed to meet a while back. In a conversation yesterday, I agreed to meet him for coffee (shut up, all of you--I know...) some time this weekend.
Originally I suggested downtown--neutral ground--but he managed to convince me to meet him at a bar closer to where he lives. (It's also about a mile from my mom's house, so it's not unfamiliar territory; he's just more comfortable there than I am, which seems to me like a minor power-grab. Not inexcusable, though--just lame.) He seems to have his agenda firmly set, whereas I have been noncommittal at best. I'm not terribly happy in my current situation--true enough--but I don't think it's unsalvageable; I have no intention of cheating with anyone. Just so we're all clear.
(It is worth mentioning, before posting Exhibit A, that I have already decided that this meeting will NOT be taking place, a decision based largely on the tone and content of this conversation.)
Exhibit A: Clueless 101
him: i'm excited, u?
me: yep! (and nervous.)
him: y?
him: do u have a wooden leg or something?
me: my natural state.
him: jeez louise
him: so yor 5'6"
him: bout i'll say 180ish
him: all booty
me: you're on the polite side of that number, but okay...
him: 8-}
him: hmmm
him: juicy fruit
him: 190ish
him: it's all good
him: no worries
him: how old is your pic?
me: A few years, actually.
him: hmmmmm
me: maybe...6? I think....
him: holy shit
him: ok talk to me here
him: you've seen me
him: my pic is up to date
him: so give me details, or give me death
him: it's only fair
me: can i just say, this is NOT helping with the nervousness?
him: i am only kidding with u
him: it's ok, let it out baby
him: so i guess its safe to assume from your responses, you've gained a few lbs since those pics?
him: so what? it's all good
him: i am not superficial
me: well, good.
him: ok i stil lwant details
him: give me a visual
me: big but not huge.
him: umm hmm
him: curvy??? straight line? help me out, no fair
him: this is fun
me: for you, maybe...
him: im only helping u warm up to me
him: open up, its ok
him: u r so funny
him: ok so big chest
him: big booty, flat, none at all,
me: spoken like a man who was never a female in a previous life.
him: haha
me: Not flat, no--not like J Lo or anything, but not flat!
me: curvy...big chest...
him: yummy
him: big and round, i'm in heeven
me: heh...
him: see, that was easy
him: you'll be fine
him: just be glad i have big hands
me: haha...
him: that is so funny, u have a 6yr old pic of u on your profile
him: holy cow
me: well first, that profile is like 4 years old anyway...and second, that's one of the few pictures of myself that I HAVE, let alone LIKE.
him: ha
him: u look good in that 1
him: so u r thicker than that 1?
me: yes.
him: hmmmm
him: cant wait
(End Exhibit A.)
Where to begin? Maybe just with a basic question:
How do these types of guys always seem to find me? And do any of you know where I might buy some These Types Of Guys Repellent??? (I know--I don't need repellent---they're already repellent enough all by themselves. :::rimshot::: Thanks--I'll be here all week. Try the veal.)
But seriously.
Guys, here's a public service message from me: File this approach under Doomed From The Start, Don't Even Think About It.
Trust me on this one.
Flatly and categorically: it is NEVER. NEVER. NEVER EVER EVER a good idea, before you meet a woman, to try to get them to discuss their body type in detail.
Note above, the use of the word "try". If we volunteer the information, that's a whole 'nother story. But if we DON'T volunteer it, if you have to drag it out of us, that generally means we--like 99% of the rest of our gender--have body- image issues to some greater or lesser degree, and would really prefer not to increase our chances of rejection any further.
Exhibit A is a (slightly redacted) transcript of an IM with the guy I mentioned in a previous post--the one who I was supposed to meet a while back. In a conversation yesterday, I agreed to meet him for coffee (shut up, all of you--I know...) some time this weekend.
Originally I suggested downtown--neutral ground--but he managed to convince me to meet him at a bar closer to where he lives. (It's also about a mile from my mom's house, so it's not unfamiliar territory; he's just more comfortable there than I am, which seems to me like a minor power-grab. Not inexcusable, though--just lame.) He seems to have his agenda firmly set, whereas I have been noncommittal at best. I'm not terribly happy in my current situation--true enough--but I don't think it's unsalvageable; I have no intention of cheating with anyone. Just so we're all clear.
(It is worth mentioning, before posting Exhibit A, that I have already decided that this meeting will NOT be taking place, a decision based largely on the tone and content of this conversation.)
Exhibit A: Clueless 101
him: i'm excited, u?
me: yep! (and nervous.)
him: y?
him: do u have a wooden leg or something?
me: my natural state.
him: jeez louise
him: so yor 5'6"
him: bout i'll say 180ish
him: all booty
me: you're on the polite side of that number, but okay...
him: 8-}
him: hmmm
him: juicy fruit
him: 190ish
him: it's all good
him: no worries
him: how old is your pic?
me: A few years, actually.
him: hmmmmm
me: maybe...6? I think....
him: holy shit
him: ok talk to me here
him: you've seen me
him: my pic is up to date
him: so give me details, or give me death
him: it's only fair
me: can i just say, this is NOT helping with the nervousness?
him: i am only kidding with u
him: it's ok, let it out baby
him: so i guess its safe to assume from your responses, you've gained a few lbs since those pics?
him: so what? it's all good
him: i am not superficial
me: well, good.
him: ok i stil lwant details
him: give me a visual
me: big but not huge.
him: umm hmm
him: curvy??? straight line? help me out, no fair
him: this is fun
me: for you, maybe...
him: im only helping u warm up to me
him: open up, its ok
him: u r so funny
him: ok so big chest
him: big booty, flat, none at all,
me: spoken like a man who was never a female in a previous life.
him: haha
me: Not flat, no--not like J Lo or anything, but not flat!
me: curvy...big chest...
him: yummy
him: big and round, i'm in heeven
me: heh...
him: see, that was easy
him: you'll be fine
him: just be glad i have big hands
me: haha...
him: that is so funny, u have a 6yr old pic of u on your profile
him: holy cow
me: well first, that profile is like 4 years old anyway...and second, that's one of the few pictures of myself that I HAVE, let alone LIKE.
him: ha
him: u look good in that 1
him: so u r thicker than that 1?
me: yes.
him: hmmmm
him: cant wait
(End Exhibit A.)
Where to begin? Maybe just with a basic question:
How do these types of guys always seem to find me? And do any of you know where I might buy some These Types Of Guys Repellent??? (I know--I don't need repellent---they're already repellent enough all by themselves. :::rimshot::: Thanks--I'll be here all week. Try the veal.)
But seriously.
Guys, here's a public service message from me: File this approach under Doomed From The Start, Don't Even Think About It.
Trust me on this one.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Link found via Blogsnob:
http://byroncrawford.typepad.com/kanyegate/
Not that I'm a Kanye fan--too critically-acclaimed, and somehow his stuff just doesn't resonate with me--but: Whaaaaaa...?
I mean, I see this guy's facts, and why that might piss him off, but still...
If Kurt Cobain taught me one thing, it was this: the pendulum will swing, and when it does...
...Those that suck will be obliterated when faced with a vital force. Kurt did it to Warrant and G'n'R and all those hair-metal boys; and if Kanye's as fake as this guy claims he is, it will happen to him too. Personally, I reserve judgement for now--but as I said, still not a fan.
Real hip-hop doesn't need a savior. In fact--REAL hip-hop will kick the ass of anyone who tries to claim that title.
http://byroncrawford.typepad.com/kanyegate/
Not that I'm a Kanye fan--too critically-acclaimed, and somehow his stuff just doesn't resonate with me--but: Whaaaaaa...?
I mean, I see this guy's facts, and why that might piss him off, but still...
If Kurt Cobain taught me one thing, it was this: the pendulum will swing, and when it does...
...Those that suck will be obliterated when faced with a vital force. Kurt did it to Warrant and G'n'R and all those hair-metal boys; and if Kanye's as fake as this guy claims he is, it will happen to him too. Personally, I reserve judgement for now--but as I said, still not a fan.
Real hip-hop doesn't need a savior. In fact--REAL hip-hop will kick the ass of anyone who tries to claim that title.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Well That Was A Nice Refreshing...Day
Yeah, I'm thinkin' I'm not happy.
Counting from midnight on Val-Day, roughly the last time we talked, I have now gone 40 hours without a single word, spoken or written, from LJ. He came in last night well after I was in bed; when I left this morning, he was still asleep. No calls, no voice mails, no text messages. Nothing. I have made attempts--text messages and notes--with no reply.
This is not, should you wonder, because he's pissed at me. He's not. This is how it ALWAYS is.
I had that fucking dream AGAIN last night. I'm starting to hate the thought of sleep.
(Although, to be fair, THAT dream was preceded by one in which I was cuddling on a couch with Clint Eastwood, which: WTF? This is what happens when you eat pot roast at 11 PM while watching "Aqua Teen Hunger Force". Which is my new favoritemost show, ever.)
And then.
I got to work this morning and I'd left my IM signed in overnight. I do that, being a flake. There was this message from a name I sorta recognized...
Back about a year ago, before I even made this blog public, there was this guy I was talking to. We were going to go for coffee...(my history with "coffee" notwithstanding)...but...okay, I don't know WHAT happened. He thinks I blew HIM off, I maintain that HE blew ME off, and....whatever. I was pissed. More at myself, for where I thought at the time I was heading with it, than even with him. It was a weird time.
Today, a year later, he IMs me. Like nothing much ever happened. Still funny, still talkative, still a fellow tech geek...all the stuff that made me interested in the first place. Still interested.
And here's me--40 hours with not a word from the guy who supposedly loves me (but has said it ONCE in not-quite-two years); dreaming of rejection about twice a week; sneaking up on Officially Fucked In The Head. They say when you get the same consensus from a number of people, you should consider whether or not it's true, and the signals I've gotten from the last few men in my life have been clear: girl, you ain't all that.
One of the more-recent Zorn mentions for this blog said:
A lot has been written lately about Web logs as political force, as new media and so on. But let's not forget the blog-as-literature idea, one that I get every time I check in with a locally written effort known as "The Story of Why."
This site is a live, serial reality novel that takes us into the head and the heart of a working-class Chicago woman whose life has been kind of a mess, in many respects, but who burns with a desire to put things right.
And I often think about that characterization, simply because I'm not 100% sure it's completely accurate.
I'm not sure I'm so much about putting my mess right; in fact, in my more self-aware moments I'm pretty sure I'm intent on doing just the opposite.
Not so much making the same mistakes over again--just finding new ones. All the mistakes there are.
'Cause what I'm doing now? Ain't workin'.
Counting from midnight on Val-Day, roughly the last time we talked, I have now gone 40 hours without a single word, spoken or written, from LJ. He came in last night well after I was in bed; when I left this morning, he was still asleep. No calls, no voice mails, no text messages. Nothing. I have made attempts--text messages and notes--with no reply.
This is not, should you wonder, because he's pissed at me. He's not. This is how it ALWAYS is.
I had that fucking dream AGAIN last night. I'm starting to hate the thought of sleep.
(Although, to be fair, THAT dream was preceded by one in which I was cuddling on a couch with Clint Eastwood, which: WTF? This is what happens when you eat pot roast at 11 PM while watching "Aqua Teen Hunger Force". Which is my new favoritemost show, ever.)
And then.
I got to work this morning and I'd left my IM signed in overnight. I do that, being a flake. There was this message from a name I sorta recognized...
Back about a year ago, before I even made this blog public, there was this guy I was talking to. We were going to go for coffee...(my history with "coffee" notwithstanding)...but...okay, I don't know WHAT happened. He thinks I blew HIM off, I maintain that HE blew ME off, and....whatever. I was pissed. More at myself, for where I thought at the time I was heading with it, than even with him. It was a weird time.
Today, a year later, he IMs me. Like nothing much ever happened. Still funny, still talkative, still a fellow tech geek...all the stuff that made me interested in the first place. Still interested.
And here's me--40 hours with not a word from the guy who supposedly loves me (but has said it ONCE in not-quite-two years); dreaming of rejection about twice a week; sneaking up on Officially Fucked In The Head. They say when you get the same consensus from a number of people, you should consider whether or not it's true, and the signals I've gotten from the last few men in my life have been clear: girl, you ain't all that.
One of the more-recent Zorn mentions for this blog said:
A lot has been written lately about Web logs as political force, as new media and so on. But let's not forget the blog-as-literature idea, one that I get every time I check in with a locally written effort known as "The Story of Why."
This site is a live, serial reality novel that takes us into the head and the heart of a working-class Chicago woman whose life has been kind of a mess, in many respects, but who burns with a desire to put things right.
And I often think about that characterization, simply because I'm not 100% sure it's completely accurate.
I'm not sure I'm so much about putting my mess right; in fact, in my more self-aware moments I'm pretty sure I'm intent on doing just the opposite.
Not so much making the same mistakes over again--just finding new ones. All the mistakes there are.
'Cause what I'm doing now? Ain't workin'.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
I Survived Valentine's Day
My man has redeemed himself, at least somewhat.
And the drought is over.
I don't think the problem is so much that he's an asshole--he really isn't, by any standard--but that he's just as emotionally crippled as I am, in many of the same ways. For whatever reason, he won't, or can't, be vulnerable.
(I read that and a red flag goes up--that's kinda the same brand of excuse I used to make for CR. Except it was more like "he can't help it". Really, though-- CR WAS an asshole--I never denied it. I always just dealt with it and accepted his excuse: "it's everyone else's fault I'm like this. Especially women. And white people." LJ isn't an asshole; he's just distant. And he doesn't blame anyone for it.)
At this moment, I am unconcerned about the etiology, or even the existence, of LJ's emotional hangups.
The important thing is, I got laid. FINALLY.
I also got a bunch of balloons and a card, all of which were waiting for me when I got home. And--even better!--he actually STAYED IN last night. Which was pretty fucking miraculous, even if all we did was watch three basketball games simultaneously. I'm beginning to like basketball, sorta, though it's certainly no NASCAR.
This doesn't solve any problems, really, but at least it makes me not need to kill anyone due to lack of sex. And that, my friends, is a start.
And the drought is over.
I don't think the problem is so much that he's an asshole--he really isn't, by any standard--but that he's just as emotionally crippled as I am, in many of the same ways. For whatever reason, he won't, or can't, be vulnerable.
(I read that and a red flag goes up--that's kinda the same brand of excuse I used to make for CR. Except it was more like "he can't help it". Really, though-- CR WAS an asshole--I never denied it. I always just dealt with it and accepted his excuse: "it's everyone else's fault I'm like this. Especially women. And white people." LJ isn't an asshole; he's just distant. And he doesn't blame anyone for it.)
At this moment, I am unconcerned about the etiology, or even the existence, of LJ's emotional hangups.
The important thing is, I got laid. FINALLY.
I also got a bunch of balloons and a card, all of which were waiting for me when I got home. And--even better!--he actually STAYED IN last night. Which was pretty fucking miraculous, even if all we did was watch three basketball games simultaneously. I'm beginning to like basketball, sorta, though it's certainly no NASCAR.
This doesn't solve any problems, really, but at least it makes me not need to kill anyone due to lack of sex. And that, my friends, is a start.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Other People's Voices
Well, the drought continues. But after the discussion LJ and I had on the phone today, I am willing to take at least a little responsibility for that.
He's right--I don't initiate anything either. That's a holdover from the CR days, when even mentioning sex was enough to bring on a tirade. I just accepted that CR didn't want me; it was a very small step to assuming that no one would. Particularly after his parting shots--about how I was "boring" and "lousy in the sack" and how he'd "rather fuck ANYBODY else." These were verdicts delivered without heat--as though he was discussing the color of the sky.
They were particularly devastating to me, the one who had always reveled in sex, who had always thought that it was something I was fairly good at. I was still carrying the memories of JP's praise in that regard...along with many, many other memories I don't think about unless I have a box of tissues at the ready. It seems very unfair of whoever runs the universe, to have given me 18 months of exactly what I wanted, early in my life, and then to expect me to live without it for the next 50 years. I try not to dwell on that unfairness--so many other people have dealt with things much, much worse--but the thought of it keeps coming back. I remember a session with my therapist, maybe two years after JP died. She was a very kind lady, and she told me she often wondered if I would ever really let myself grieve for JP. And one day she said something about how no one could take my memories of him away from me...."But I don't WANT memories," I said, in the tone of a four-year-old faced with broccoli instead of birthday cake. I think it's a fair summary of how I view my loss---I'm 35 years old, but when it comes to my loss, I regress to my four-year-old sense of fair and unfair. It's been nearly ten years, and for the most part I have learned to deal with it. I have learned to tell myself it's not about "fair", it's not about "wrong", it's not even about ME, really--it happened, and as much as I wish it didn't happen, I have to live in this world, with what I have left.
For the most part, I succeed in that. But when it comes to sex...
When I'm actually getting some regularly, I'm fine. But when it's been a while--and it's been QUITE a while, at the moment--that's when I start to remember. And I do not want to remember. I can't bear it. I do not want to remember that long summer in the third-floor apartment in Humboldt Park, sweat-soaked, bathed in light, with Nirvana on endless loop. I do not want to remember the nights in the room at his mother's house, lit only by the blue radiance of the TV. I do not want to remember our little storefront apartment, where it was an aberration if we went for two whole days without fucking. It was like that til the end. We understood each other. I don't want to remember what it felt like to be understood in that way, because I know I will never again be able to open myself up to another human being like that.
I don't say that in the tragic, God-hates-me tone you might imagine. It is not God's fault that I have closed myself away--it was CR's fault that it happened, and my own fault for letting it stay that way, out of a terror of ever being rejected like that again. I will not be able to open myself up to that possibility; I am strong, but not that strong. The only kind of love I am able to accept anymore is an arm's-length, detached kind of love; the kind of love where you know the other person will do anything you need, as long as it doesn't involve emotion. LJ and I stand by each other, and I know he'll do anything I ask; but I also know he will never be a cuddly, affectionate kind of guy. I'm fine with that; I don't think I could handle it if he was suddenly all sweet. We love each other--it's just not something that's ever discussed, or expressed often. It used to bother me, but I understand it; in fact, I've come to accept it as a good thing. I don't want any more memories like the ones I've already got--the ones I've got are already too damn much. And they always seem to surface when I haven't been touched in a while.
Don't get me wrong...LJ, when he IS paying attention, is not the problem. My journals from the first few months we were together are fairly pornographic, actually; in part because my last two men were 5'5" and 5'2", respectively, and quite...proportionate. As is LJ--who is 6'7". I shall say no more on that.
I think where things went wrong was a few months after we moved in together; when it stopped being a novelty, I guess. He doesn't think about it much, he says, and doesn't talk about it much; I think about it a lot, but I don't talk about it at all. I don't ask for anything, because CR taught me well. That's not LJ's fault, not at all. I hate that it leads to misunderstanding and mistrust. (I discovered today that we've both apparently been having the same thought: if there's nothing going on at home, it must mean that something's going on outside... I know that's not true for me; knowing that, I have to take at face value his statements that it's not true for him either.) I hate that the silence on my part isn't by choice; it's because I really CAN'T talk about it. That's not a fear I can get past. I can't even get past the fear of getting past the fear, if that makes sense.
We're two noncommunicative people--me by choice, him by nature--and I guess we shouldn't expect everything to go smoothly. It would be easier if I didn't remember how different I used to be.
He's right--I don't initiate anything either. That's a holdover from the CR days, when even mentioning sex was enough to bring on a tirade. I just accepted that CR didn't want me; it was a very small step to assuming that no one would. Particularly after his parting shots--about how I was "boring" and "lousy in the sack" and how he'd "rather fuck ANYBODY else." These were verdicts delivered without heat--as though he was discussing the color of the sky.
They were particularly devastating to me, the one who had always reveled in sex, who had always thought that it was something I was fairly good at. I was still carrying the memories of JP's praise in that regard...along with many, many other memories I don't think about unless I have a box of tissues at the ready. It seems very unfair of whoever runs the universe, to have given me 18 months of exactly what I wanted, early in my life, and then to expect me to live without it for the next 50 years. I try not to dwell on that unfairness--so many other people have dealt with things much, much worse--but the thought of it keeps coming back. I remember a session with my therapist, maybe two years after JP died. She was a very kind lady, and she told me she often wondered if I would ever really let myself grieve for JP. And one day she said something about how no one could take my memories of him away from me...."But I don't WANT memories," I said, in the tone of a four-year-old faced with broccoli instead of birthday cake. I think it's a fair summary of how I view my loss---I'm 35 years old, but when it comes to my loss, I regress to my four-year-old sense of fair and unfair. It's been nearly ten years, and for the most part I have learned to deal with it. I have learned to tell myself it's not about "fair", it's not about "wrong", it's not even about ME, really--it happened, and as much as I wish it didn't happen, I have to live in this world, with what I have left.
For the most part, I succeed in that. But when it comes to sex...
When I'm actually getting some regularly, I'm fine. But when it's been a while--and it's been QUITE a while, at the moment--that's when I start to remember. And I do not want to remember. I can't bear it. I do not want to remember that long summer in the third-floor apartment in Humboldt Park, sweat-soaked, bathed in light, with Nirvana on endless loop. I do not want to remember the nights in the room at his mother's house, lit only by the blue radiance of the TV. I do not want to remember our little storefront apartment, where it was an aberration if we went for two whole days without fucking. It was like that til the end. We understood each other. I don't want to remember what it felt like to be understood in that way, because I know I will never again be able to open myself up to another human being like that.
I don't say that in the tragic, God-hates-me tone you might imagine. It is not God's fault that I have closed myself away--it was CR's fault that it happened, and my own fault for letting it stay that way, out of a terror of ever being rejected like that again. I will not be able to open myself up to that possibility; I am strong, but not that strong. The only kind of love I am able to accept anymore is an arm's-length, detached kind of love; the kind of love where you know the other person will do anything you need, as long as it doesn't involve emotion. LJ and I stand by each other, and I know he'll do anything I ask; but I also know he will never be a cuddly, affectionate kind of guy. I'm fine with that; I don't think I could handle it if he was suddenly all sweet. We love each other--it's just not something that's ever discussed, or expressed often. It used to bother me, but I understand it; in fact, I've come to accept it as a good thing. I don't want any more memories like the ones I've already got--the ones I've got are already too damn much. And they always seem to surface when I haven't been touched in a while.
Don't get me wrong...LJ, when he IS paying attention, is not the problem. My journals from the first few months we were together are fairly pornographic, actually; in part because my last two men were 5'5" and 5'2", respectively, and quite...proportionate. As is LJ--who is 6'7". I shall say no more on that.
I think where things went wrong was a few months after we moved in together; when it stopped being a novelty, I guess. He doesn't think about it much, he says, and doesn't talk about it much; I think about it a lot, but I don't talk about it at all. I don't ask for anything, because CR taught me well. That's not LJ's fault, not at all. I hate that it leads to misunderstanding and mistrust. (I discovered today that we've both apparently been having the same thought: if there's nothing going on at home, it must mean that something's going on outside... I know that's not true for me; knowing that, I have to take at face value his statements that it's not true for him either.) I hate that the silence on my part isn't by choice; it's because I really CAN'T talk about it. That's not a fear I can get past. I can't even get past the fear of getting past the fear, if that makes sense.
We're two noncommunicative people--me by choice, him by nature--and I guess we shouldn't expect everything to go smoothly. It would be easier if I didn't remember how different I used to be.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Up-And-Coming Serial Killer Alert
This was an actual query that brought someone to this site last night.
"they laughed look at his pathetic little dick tiny white men have smaller penises"
Dear g-d: I would really prefer NOT to meet this individual in a dark alley. Thanks--Gladys
"they laughed look at his pathetic little dick tiny white men have smaller penises"
Dear g-d: I would really prefer NOT to meet this individual in a dark alley. Thanks--Gladys
Monday, February 7, 2005
Another Realization
I was standing in the shower tonight when something occurred to me.
(Most of my best thoughts come in the shower. If I could be kept in captivity in a tiled enclosure, naked, under running water, I would probably be Aristotle.)
I bitch a lot about my mother, I know. But here's the thing...
My mother was probably a lot like me, when she was my age. I know she was unmarried; that was another six years in her future. In fact, she hadn't even met my father yet.
She worked; she travelled; she was a state archery champion and second in the nation at one point. She went bow-hunting with a bunch of men, which scandalized her family. Her siblings used to wonder if maybe she was a lesbian. I wonder sometimes if that had something to do with why she got married.
I wonder why she made a lot of the decisions she made, actually. I think somewhere around my age, she started to listen to all the people telling her that what she was doing wasn't what she should have been doing. Why aren't you married? Why don't you settle down? Who's going to take care of you in your old age? Never mind that what she was doing was actually making her HAPPY; everyone around her knew better than she did.
And she was always vulnerable to other people's opinions; the middle child, with a bully for an older sister, always questioning her every decision. She'd married late--but she'd married. Her youngest sister, the darling of the family, had married a very wealthy man--which didn't diminish her darling-ness any. That left my mom, the last unmarried girl in the family. Sneaking up on forty with no husband and no kids...
My mother let them make her decisions for her. She was scared of their opinion and scared of the picture they painted of her future; and because of that fear, she gave up on who she was. If she was a stranger, I'd say she sold out; since she's my mother, I'll be a little more merciful. The net result was the same.
I have spent most of my life trying not to be my mother. I have spent most of my life trying to be different not so much in beliefs--that came naturally--but in consciousness of the things that drive me. My mother--and she has admitted this--made some very big decisions in her life without a second thought. For the most part, I can identify my reasons for the choices I've made--if you can count "because I wanted to" as a reason, that is. (Sometimes that's been a very good reason.) I promised myself at the age of 21 that I was never going to be afraid of my mistakes; that I wasn't going to have regrets. For the most part I've succeeded.
But tonight I realized: It's entirely possible that I could fall into the same trap--letting other people's fears--or even my own fears--dictate my choices.
I don't think I'm willing to let that happen.
(Most of my best thoughts come in the shower. If I could be kept in captivity in a tiled enclosure, naked, under running water, I would probably be Aristotle.)
I bitch a lot about my mother, I know. But here's the thing...
My mother was probably a lot like me, when she was my age. I know she was unmarried; that was another six years in her future. In fact, she hadn't even met my father yet.
She worked; she travelled; she was a state archery champion and second in the nation at one point. She went bow-hunting with a bunch of men, which scandalized her family. Her siblings used to wonder if maybe she was a lesbian. I wonder sometimes if that had something to do with why she got married.
I wonder why she made a lot of the decisions she made, actually. I think somewhere around my age, she started to listen to all the people telling her that what she was doing wasn't what she should have been doing. Why aren't you married? Why don't you settle down? Who's going to take care of you in your old age? Never mind that what she was doing was actually making her HAPPY; everyone around her knew better than she did.
And she was always vulnerable to other people's opinions; the middle child, with a bully for an older sister, always questioning her every decision. She'd married late--but she'd married. Her youngest sister, the darling of the family, had married a very wealthy man--which didn't diminish her darling-ness any. That left my mom, the last unmarried girl in the family. Sneaking up on forty with no husband and no kids...
My mother let them make her decisions for her. She was scared of their opinion and scared of the picture they painted of her future; and because of that fear, she gave up on who she was. If she was a stranger, I'd say she sold out; since she's my mother, I'll be a little more merciful. The net result was the same.
I have spent most of my life trying not to be my mother. I have spent most of my life trying to be different not so much in beliefs--that came naturally--but in consciousness of the things that drive me. My mother--and she has admitted this--made some very big decisions in her life without a second thought. For the most part, I can identify my reasons for the choices I've made--if you can count "because I wanted to" as a reason, that is. (Sometimes that's been a very good reason.) I promised myself at the age of 21 that I was never going to be afraid of my mistakes; that I wasn't going to have regrets. For the most part I've succeeded.
But tonight I realized: It's entirely possible that I could fall into the same trap--letting other people's fears--or even my own fears--dictate my choices.
I don't think I'm willing to let that happen.
Sunday, February 6, 2005
Dreams That Suck
I woke up at about 9 this morning, rolled over, and pulled up the covers.
I'd had it, you see. LJ, still "sick", slept in the spare room again last night. I put "sick" in quotes because it seems to be a relative term; too sick to sleep with me, but not too sick to have every single one of his friends over to watch the fight. Not too sick to go out with them afterward and stay out til 4:00 AM, or--before that--to notice that I had an attitude when I came upstairs (I'd been deliberately respecting their space, and doing some work in the basement) to discover that in the midst of "guy time", someone's girlfriend was sitting in the middle of things, drinking and smoking and generally being treated like she belonged there. Which I never have.
So yeah. I was not facing the morning very well. I went back to sleep.
I wish, now, that I'd just gotten up.
I had this dream, you see. In this dream, I found out that JP was still alive; that he'd been hiding out for nine-plus years--where or why was never satisfactorily explained, even in the dream. And he came back home, and agreed to see me. Even in the dream, I remember how excited I was when I knew I was going to see him again; how glad I was that he was alive, that my soulmate was back.
And then, when I saw him, he treated me like I was a million miles away, someplace he didn't even remember anymore, much less want to return to. He told me he didn't want me anymore.
I woke up because one of the cats had tripped the house alarm; woke up to klaxon shrieking and the realization: I can't win, either way. Even in my dreams I get left behind.
LJ and I fought it out later; as always, he made it my fault, my insecurity, rather than how he treats me. He's not 100% wrong--as he said, "I wish you'd just bitch about LITTLE shit, like not taking out the garbage or something--you know, something I can fix." But he's not 100% right, either--I know that too.
This is one of those days where it's hard to see the sense of spending another 40 years on this earth.
I'd had it, you see. LJ, still "sick", slept in the spare room again last night. I put "sick" in quotes because it seems to be a relative term; too sick to sleep with me, but not too sick to have every single one of his friends over to watch the fight. Not too sick to go out with them afterward and stay out til 4:00 AM, or--before that--to notice that I had an attitude when I came upstairs (I'd been deliberately respecting their space, and doing some work in the basement) to discover that in the midst of "guy time", someone's girlfriend was sitting in the middle of things, drinking and smoking and generally being treated like she belonged there. Which I never have.
So yeah. I was not facing the morning very well. I went back to sleep.
I wish, now, that I'd just gotten up.
I had this dream, you see. In this dream, I found out that JP was still alive; that he'd been hiding out for nine-plus years--where or why was never satisfactorily explained, even in the dream. And he came back home, and agreed to see me. Even in the dream, I remember how excited I was when I knew I was going to see him again; how glad I was that he was alive, that my soulmate was back.
And then, when I saw him, he treated me like I was a million miles away, someplace he didn't even remember anymore, much less want to return to. He told me he didn't want me anymore.
I woke up because one of the cats had tripped the house alarm; woke up to klaxon shrieking and the realization: I can't win, either way. Even in my dreams I get left behind.
LJ and I fought it out later; as always, he made it my fault, my insecurity, rather than how he treats me. He's not 100% wrong--as he said, "I wish you'd just bitch about LITTLE shit, like not taking out the garbage or something--you know, something I can fix." But he's not 100% right, either--I know that too.
This is one of those days where it's hard to see the sense of spending another 40 years on this earth.
Saturday, February 5, 2005
Revisionist History, a la Mom
I spent the afternoon with Mom today, as a prelude to her going out of town for a month to stay with my Auntie Sue. Sue is from my dad's side of the family, and consequently does not suck; unfortunately, she lives far enough away that I don't get to see her nearly often enough.
So I went out to Mom's, and we had lunch, and hung out for a while (which was weird, simply because usually when I go to Mom's she has some kind of work that needs to be done--drag the Christmas tree downstairs, move this heavy object, re-program the VCR--but today there was nothing to do) and then she drove me home.
I knew it was gonna be a goofy ride; everytime Mom gets ready to go on a trip, she gets a little bit morbid, and starts asking questions about what I'm going to do after she's dead. This was only unsettling the first couple of times, really; after that, you get used to it. She had asked me about what I planned to do with her house once she's gone, and I managed to come out sounding fairly noncommittal because I know the true answer wasn't the one she was looking for. She wants me to move out of my house and into hers when she's gone; that option has already been filed under No Chance In Hell. I love the house but I despise the neighborhood; it was responsible for many of my insecurities and it hasn't gotten any better since I left. It's the kind of place where people have those decorative geese on their front steps, the ones with little country dresses on them, and my neighbors are the kind of people who make sure that their geese are wearing the appropriate seasonal outfits at all times. (I remember once, not long after JP died, when I was still living at home, Firefly had come to visit and we plotted to run around the neighborhood in the middle of the night on a goose-stripping rampage, leaving a trail of nekkid geese in our wake. We never did it but it was a pleasant idea all the same.)
So Mom was already on her life-flashing-before-her trip even before we got in the car, which was why I was not at all surprised when she came out with this gem:
"If you hadn't majored in education, what would you have done?"
I thought about it for a minute. Finally I said "You know, asking me that NOW, when I already know what I know, I don't think I can give you a really valid answer. I mean, if I could go back in time and know everything I know now about myself...Put it this way: I'd have been a twelfth-year senior. I'd have taken every elective, every art class, graphic design, music, all kinds of stuff. As it was, I did the stripped-down version of college..."
"I never meant to make you feel like you had to do that," she said.
"No," I told her, "it wasn't you at all, it was ME. I wanted to get out as fast as possible. If I'd had my way, it wouldn't even have taken the full three-and-a-half years; I would have been out sooner if I could have gotten all my classes, but there were some courses you just couldn't get into if you weren't a senior."
"But what would you have done?" she asked.
"I don't know, really," I said. "But I'll tell you this: it probably would have been even WORSE, from your view."
"You would have been a hippie," she laughed.
"Pretty much, yeah."
This was the point at which things got revisionist.
"I always thought you should have been a writer," she said a little later in the conversation. "You really should. Why don't you set aside an hour every night and try to write?"
Aside from the almost irresistible urge to call bullshit on that--I know I've blogged about the influence of my family in my NOT becoming a writer--I was also entertained slightly by the mention of spending time writing. After all...what's this blog, if not my "hour every night" for writing?
"Yeah," I said. "I probably should. People tell me I'm pretty good..."
"I always said that," she said. "I mean, you could have gone into journalism or newscasting..."
"Yeah, I could have," I said--and it took an effort of will not to say it as snidely as I wanted to.
Back when I was a college freshman, the college radio station put out a flyer that said they were looking for newscasters and DJs. On a whim, I went in and auditioned, and a couple of days later I got a call that I'd been accepted for training as a newscaster. (I was so flabbergasted that I accused the person on the other end of the line of being a fake, calling me at the behest of one of my friends. But it was actually true.)
So I went in twice a week, and learned how they did things, and took pointers on writing brief, concise news stories for radio, and how to deliver them. They started everyone out on their low-frequency little training station, and then moved them up to the "real" station when they'd learned well enough.
I was at the point of being moved up to the real station when my mom gave me an ultimatum. She wasn't going to pay my phone bills, and she wasn't going to always be sending me money, and I needed to get myself a paying job.
Well, I had a boyfriend in Chicago who I couldn't go a day without talking to; and I had the typical financial requirements of a college freshman who'd known no life other than being completely pampered. You know--clothes, pizzas, nights out with friends--that sort of thing. But the radio station didn't pay anything, really, and I had a fairly heavy class load besides; there was no way I could keep my grades up AND work at the radio station AND get a job that paid as much as I needed to make.
So the radio station fell by the wayside, and I got a job at a grocery store.
Here's the thing that pisses me off, though: My mother has, since I was a very small child, complained about "not having enough money". This was the perennial excuse for why I couldn't do something, or why I couldn't have something; yet there was somehow always enough money for the things she thought I was SUPPOSED to want. There was always enough money for the things she wanted for herself. And that's fine--but she makes it a point to remind me that she could spend her money any way she chose, because she EARNED that money. Which she totally did not. She married my dad, who already owned his house free and clear, and for the first thirteen years of their marriage she never worked a day outside the house. And when he died, four years after that, he left her with the house, with all the savings, with no debts at all. So her idea of "not enough money" is very different from 99.999% of the rest of the human race; and her idea of "earned" is also very different.
I'm not saying she was obligated to pay for anything for me. But I also know that the things she DID pay for, she paid for out of a sense of obligation. Does that make sense?
The other thing that pisses me off:
There was a whole group of us who started at the radio station together. Of the people who started with me, one is now the producer of one of the most popular radio shows in Chicago, and the other is a reporter on WGN News. Every time I hear of them, I think That could have been me. If it hadn't been for the constant pressure to always be making money, that could have been me. That's a hard pill to swallow, you know?
I mentioned that to Mom today--about the two who are now semi-famous--and she said "Really? I didn't know that. Why did you ever give up the radio station, anyway?" she asked.
"Money," I said. And let it drop.
My mother loves me; I know that. I know she did the best she could, and tried to make the best decisions as far as what was good for me, and what would make me happy.
I just wish, maybe, that she would have asked me my opinion on the subject.
So I went out to Mom's, and we had lunch, and hung out for a while (which was weird, simply because usually when I go to Mom's she has some kind of work that needs to be done--drag the Christmas tree downstairs, move this heavy object, re-program the VCR--but today there was nothing to do) and then she drove me home.
I knew it was gonna be a goofy ride; everytime Mom gets ready to go on a trip, she gets a little bit morbid, and starts asking questions about what I'm going to do after she's dead. This was only unsettling the first couple of times, really; after that, you get used to it. She had asked me about what I planned to do with her house once she's gone, and I managed to come out sounding fairly noncommittal because I know the true answer wasn't the one she was looking for. She wants me to move out of my house and into hers when she's gone; that option has already been filed under No Chance In Hell. I love the house but I despise the neighborhood; it was responsible for many of my insecurities and it hasn't gotten any better since I left. It's the kind of place where people have those decorative geese on their front steps, the ones with little country dresses on them, and my neighbors are the kind of people who make sure that their geese are wearing the appropriate seasonal outfits at all times. (I remember once, not long after JP died, when I was still living at home, Firefly had come to visit and we plotted to run around the neighborhood in the middle of the night on a goose-stripping rampage, leaving a trail of nekkid geese in our wake. We never did it but it was a pleasant idea all the same.)
So Mom was already on her life-flashing-before-her trip even before we got in the car, which was why I was not at all surprised when she came out with this gem:
"If you hadn't majored in education, what would you have done?"
I thought about it for a minute. Finally I said "You know, asking me that NOW, when I already know what I know, I don't think I can give you a really valid answer. I mean, if I could go back in time and know everything I know now about myself...Put it this way: I'd have been a twelfth-year senior. I'd have taken every elective, every art class, graphic design, music, all kinds of stuff. As it was, I did the stripped-down version of college..."
"I never meant to make you feel like you had to do that," she said.
"No," I told her, "it wasn't you at all, it was ME. I wanted to get out as fast as possible. If I'd had my way, it wouldn't even have taken the full three-and-a-half years; I would have been out sooner if I could have gotten all my classes, but there were some courses you just couldn't get into if you weren't a senior."
"But what would you have done?" she asked.
"I don't know, really," I said. "But I'll tell you this: it probably would have been even WORSE, from your view."
"You would have been a hippie," she laughed.
"Pretty much, yeah."
This was the point at which things got revisionist.
"I always thought you should have been a writer," she said a little later in the conversation. "You really should. Why don't you set aside an hour every night and try to write?"
Aside from the almost irresistible urge to call bullshit on that--I know I've blogged about the influence of my family in my NOT becoming a writer--I was also entertained slightly by the mention of spending time writing. After all...what's this blog, if not my "hour every night" for writing?
"Yeah," I said. "I probably should. People tell me I'm pretty good..."
"I always said that," she said. "I mean, you could have gone into journalism or newscasting..."
"Yeah, I could have," I said--and it took an effort of will not to say it as snidely as I wanted to.
Back when I was a college freshman, the college radio station put out a flyer that said they were looking for newscasters and DJs. On a whim, I went in and auditioned, and a couple of days later I got a call that I'd been accepted for training as a newscaster. (I was so flabbergasted that I accused the person on the other end of the line of being a fake, calling me at the behest of one of my friends. But it was actually true.)
So I went in twice a week, and learned how they did things, and took pointers on writing brief, concise news stories for radio, and how to deliver them. They started everyone out on their low-frequency little training station, and then moved them up to the "real" station when they'd learned well enough.
I was at the point of being moved up to the real station when my mom gave me an ultimatum. She wasn't going to pay my phone bills, and she wasn't going to always be sending me money, and I needed to get myself a paying job.
Well, I had a boyfriend in Chicago who I couldn't go a day without talking to; and I had the typical financial requirements of a college freshman who'd known no life other than being completely pampered. You know--clothes, pizzas, nights out with friends--that sort of thing. But the radio station didn't pay anything, really, and I had a fairly heavy class load besides; there was no way I could keep my grades up AND work at the radio station AND get a job that paid as much as I needed to make.
So the radio station fell by the wayside, and I got a job at a grocery store.
Here's the thing that pisses me off, though: My mother has, since I was a very small child, complained about "not having enough money". This was the perennial excuse for why I couldn't do something, or why I couldn't have something; yet there was somehow always enough money for the things she thought I was SUPPOSED to want. There was always enough money for the things she wanted for herself. And that's fine--but she makes it a point to remind me that she could spend her money any way she chose, because she EARNED that money. Which she totally did not. She married my dad, who already owned his house free and clear, and for the first thirteen years of their marriage she never worked a day outside the house. And when he died, four years after that, he left her with the house, with all the savings, with no debts at all. So her idea of "not enough money" is very different from 99.999% of the rest of the human race; and her idea of "earned" is also very different.
I'm not saying she was obligated to pay for anything for me. But I also know that the things she DID pay for, she paid for out of a sense of obligation. Does that make sense?
The other thing that pisses me off:
There was a whole group of us who started at the radio station together. Of the people who started with me, one is now the producer of one of the most popular radio shows in Chicago, and the other is a reporter on WGN News. Every time I hear of them, I think That could have been me. If it hadn't been for the constant pressure to always be making money, that could have been me. That's a hard pill to swallow, you know?
I mentioned that to Mom today--about the two who are now semi-famous--and she said "Really? I didn't know that. Why did you ever give up the radio station, anyway?" she asked.
"Money," I said. And let it drop.
My mother loves me; I know that. I know she did the best she could, and tried to make the best decisions as far as what was good for me, and what would make me happy.
I just wish, maybe, that she would have asked me my opinion on the subject.
A Fine White Dust
The arrival of my tax check, as always, heralded the beginning of the Home Improvement Season here at The Catastrophe.
Agenda Item #1: The kitchen needs a ceiling.
"Gladys," I hear you saying. "Why doesn't your kitchen have a ceiling?" This is why. Note the date. That is correct. I was without a ceiling for a few days shy of a year.
That all changed this past week, however, as Morris returned, bringing with him a new assistant and many, many sheets of drywall. They did most of the installation on Tuesday; on Wednesday, they spread the compound.
And on Thursday--god help us all--they started sanding.
If you have never sanded drywall, or had drywall sanded in your home, the following experiment should prove illustrative:
1. Procure for yourself a large, powerful fan, of the sort normally found in jet-engines or wind-tunnels. Also, a fifty-pound bag of Pillsbury's Best all-purpose flour.
2. Position the fan in a central area of your home. Open all doors to adjacent rooms.
3. Open the bag of flour. Spread a three-inch-thick layer on the floor directly in front of the fan.
4. Turn on the fan.
5. Repeat as needed.
This entire house--from top to bottom, east to west, stem to stern--looks exactly like it was the epicenter of an explosion involving three years' worth of the gross domestic product of Colombia. There is not a single inch of surface that is not completely grayed-out. Even the cats look more elderly than usual.
The worst part: Morris is not done sanding yet. There is no point to removing the dust, because it will return on Monday. So in the meantime, I will be living in a simulacrum of the Arm & Hammer factory after a bad industrial accident.
Also, I will be dusting, vacuuming, and washing until the Rapture comes. (I am also accepting bets as to whether I will have gotten laid by that point. Current odds: 13-1 against.)
Agenda Item #1: The kitchen needs a ceiling.
"Gladys," I hear you saying. "Why doesn't your kitchen have a ceiling?" This is why. Note the date. That is correct. I was without a ceiling for a few days shy of a year.
That all changed this past week, however, as Morris returned, bringing with him a new assistant and many, many sheets of drywall. They did most of the installation on Tuesday; on Wednesday, they spread the compound.
And on Thursday--god help us all--they started sanding.
If you have never sanded drywall, or had drywall sanded in your home, the following experiment should prove illustrative:
1. Procure for yourself a large, powerful fan, of the sort normally found in jet-engines or wind-tunnels. Also, a fifty-pound bag of Pillsbury's Best all-purpose flour.
2. Position the fan in a central area of your home. Open all doors to adjacent rooms.
3. Open the bag of flour. Spread a three-inch-thick layer on the floor directly in front of the fan.
4. Turn on the fan.
5. Repeat as needed.
This entire house--from top to bottom, east to west, stem to stern--looks exactly like it was the epicenter of an explosion involving three years' worth of the gross domestic product of Colombia. There is not a single inch of surface that is not completely grayed-out. Even the cats look more elderly than usual.
The worst part: Morris is not done sanding yet. There is no point to removing the dust, because it will return on Monday. So in the meantime, I will be living in a simulacrum of the Arm & Hammer factory after a bad industrial accident.
Also, I will be dusting, vacuuming, and washing until the Rapture comes. (I am also accepting bets as to whether I will have gotten laid by that point. Current odds: 13-1 against.)
Nookie Drought and Death Flu: Report from the Front Lines
I have now reached Day 72.
Soon, someone will die. We won't even talk about the dreams I'm having, or the wear and tear on my battery-powered friend. The condition of my psyche and/or my vibrator just isn't a conversation I'm capable of having at this point.
But--as I said--soon someone will die.
However, I may suspend the count for a day or two--LJ has the Death Flu, the same variant I had back around the beginning of December. And it's hard to be angry at a man who looks THAT pathetic. I know how that flu feels. It ain't pretty.
Soon, someone will die. We won't even talk about the dreams I'm having, or the wear and tear on my battery-powered friend. The condition of my psyche and/or my vibrator just isn't a conversation I'm capable of having at this point.
But--as I said--soon someone will die.
However, I may suspend the count for a day or two--LJ has the Death Flu, the same variant I had back around the beginning of December. And it's hard to be angry at a man who looks THAT pathetic. I know how that flu feels. It ain't pretty.
Friday, February 4, 2005
And It Was Good.
Music is one of the very few things in this world that makes me absolutely certain of the existence of God.
Sitting here in Place Where I Work with two computers running FileMaker on all cylinders, I leaned back in my chair and listened to my iTunes on shuffle for a few minutes, and ran across a Jeff Buckley song. And I got to thinking: you know, humans have come such a long way. From the original music--banging on rocks and stretched-out animal skins and blowing into reeds--to the layers of guitar and effects on a song like "Forget Her"...Yeah. That's a long walk.
I always wanted to be a rock star, but in my family, that was like saying I wanted to be a writer--only worse. Writers were at least respectable, or could be--rock stars, no way. Drug addicts, the lot of them, and deviants of the worst imaginable sort. I took guitar for a couple of years when I was about 9, with a middle-aged classically-trained type who managed to suck all the fun out of it--well, him and my mother, with her constant admonitions to practice. There was no rock-n-roll taught here, no power chords, nothing even remotely fun; it all seemed kinda random, really. (I have to resist the temptation to believe that I would have understood it better if there had been theory taught along with the simple little traditional songs; my theoretical side really didn't develop til I was an adult, so it would be revisionist at best to believe it would have made any difference when I was 9.)
I gave up music when I was 11, figuring I had no talent; it's unfortunate to go through life loving so much something you know you can't do yourself. I didn't even have the comfort of having a good voice; for the most part, I sound like hell. (When we sing Happy Birthday here at work, I just move my lips. No one's picked up on it yet.)
Briefly, while I was with JP, I gave myself permission to indulge in music even if I did suck, and played bass, which we'd picked up at a pawn shop. I even sang a little when JP and I were together; heroin has the wonderful effect of relaxing all muscles, including the vocal cords, so my voice took on an interesting whiskey-and-cigarettes tone that made me sound worldly and less horrible.
When he died I gave up singing, but in a doomed effort to carry on his dream, I bought myself a guitar (as his most cherished possession, JP's guitar had gone to his brother) and tried to learn what I could. Which was not much, mostly because I was trying to drown myself in work and vodka to numb the pain. After moving back from North Carolina, my guitar was pawned for fix-money while Lou and I were together...along with the amp and JP's four-track recorder. I just gave up then, and never got them back.
CR, a few months before he left for good, talked me into buying him a professional keyboard/synth--the ones with all the sounds, the ones that need a stand all their own because they're so huge. I loved that thing, and used it more than he did, but of course it was HIS, and he took it with him when he left. What was his was his; what was mine was also his, and I had to hide the distortion pedals that I'd kept from JP's things, to keep CR from taking those too. He had the nerve to use that against me in one of our last conversations--that I'd had the nerve not to let him have something, to keep it for myself, just because it had belonged to JP. By that time, trying to avoid anything that could trigger CR into doling out one of his patented Everything You Love Is Shit Including Me emotional abuse spiels, I'd gone so far inside myself that I never even listened to my music anymore; it was just Something Else That Was Gone. I hated CR for taking that away too.
A few weeks before he left, Layne Staley from Alice in Chains was found, dead and decomposed in his apartment in a litter of used needles, crack pipes and spray-cans. It hit me pretty hard, really; Layne was part of my JP memories, one of our renegade heroes, the exception that proved the rule that All Junkies Die Young. They said he was practically skeletal when they found him, at least two weeks after anyone could remember seeing or hearing from him. The night after it was reported, I remember being holed up in the bedroom, where CR hadn't slept for weeks, and watching JBTV on cable. JBTV was another part of my JP memories, and watching it now wasn't easy, but it was comforting. They played this Sonic Youth song that I'd never heard before--"The Diamond Sea"--and something in me woke up, a little. I'd sworn off journal-writing a couple of months earlier, after the wedding from hell, but that night I changed my mind. Layne is dead, I wrote. But I am not.
It took a few years, but I took my music back--and lately I've been thinking about getting myself a guitar. Or maybe a new Macintosh, with GarageBand (because god knows I've been getting just TOO much done around the house lately ANYWAY, and need a new computer-based way to fuck around and waste time. That program could do more to erase my productivity than the Internet ever did. The damn thing is like crack for music geeks.)
I know I'm too old to be a rock star now, but that doesn't mean I can't still make noise.
Sitting here in Place Where I Work with two computers running FileMaker on all cylinders, I leaned back in my chair and listened to my iTunes on shuffle for a few minutes, and ran across a Jeff Buckley song. And I got to thinking: you know, humans have come such a long way. From the original music--banging on rocks and stretched-out animal skins and blowing into reeds--to the layers of guitar and effects on a song like "Forget Her"...Yeah. That's a long walk.
I always wanted to be a rock star, but in my family, that was like saying I wanted to be a writer--only worse. Writers were at least respectable, or could be--rock stars, no way. Drug addicts, the lot of them, and deviants of the worst imaginable sort. I took guitar for a couple of years when I was about 9, with a middle-aged classically-trained type who managed to suck all the fun out of it--well, him and my mother, with her constant admonitions to practice. There was no rock-n-roll taught here, no power chords, nothing even remotely fun; it all seemed kinda random, really. (I have to resist the temptation to believe that I would have understood it better if there had been theory taught along with the simple little traditional songs; my theoretical side really didn't develop til I was an adult, so it would be revisionist at best to believe it would have made any difference when I was 9.)
I gave up music when I was 11, figuring I had no talent; it's unfortunate to go through life loving so much something you know you can't do yourself. I didn't even have the comfort of having a good voice; for the most part, I sound like hell. (When we sing Happy Birthday here at work, I just move my lips. No one's picked up on it yet.)
Briefly, while I was with JP, I gave myself permission to indulge in music even if I did suck, and played bass, which we'd picked up at a pawn shop. I even sang a little when JP and I were together; heroin has the wonderful effect of relaxing all muscles, including the vocal cords, so my voice took on an interesting whiskey-and-cigarettes tone that made me sound worldly and less horrible.
When he died I gave up singing, but in a doomed effort to carry on his dream, I bought myself a guitar (as his most cherished possession, JP's guitar had gone to his brother) and tried to learn what I could. Which was not much, mostly because I was trying to drown myself in work and vodka to numb the pain. After moving back from North Carolina, my guitar was pawned for fix-money while Lou and I were together...along with the amp and JP's four-track recorder. I just gave up then, and never got them back.
CR, a few months before he left for good, talked me into buying him a professional keyboard/synth--the ones with all the sounds, the ones that need a stand all their own because they're so huge. I loved that thing, and used it more than he did, but of course it was HIS, and he took it with him when he left. What was his was his; what was mine was also his, and I had to hide the distortion pedals that I'd kept from JP's things, to keep CR from taking those too. He had the nerve to use that against me in one of our last conversations--that I'd had the nerve not to let him have something, to keep it for myself, just because it had belonged to JP. By that time, trying to avoid anything that could trigger CR into doling out one of his patented Everything You Love Is Shit Including Me emotional abuse spiels, I'd gone so far inside myself that I never even listened to my music anymore; it was just Something Else That Was Gone. I hated CR for taking that away too.
A few weeks before he left, Layne Staley from Alice in Chains was found, dead and decomposed in his apartment in a litter of used needles, crack pipes and spray-cans. It hit me pretty hard, really; Layne was part of my JP memories, one of our renegade heroes, the exception that proved the rule that All Junkies Die Young. They said he was practically skeletal when they found him, at least two weeks after anyone could remember seeing or hearing from him. The night after it was reported, I remember being holed up in the bedroom, where CR hadn't slept for weeks, and watching JBTV on cable. JBTV was another part of my JP memories, and watching it now wasn't easy, but it was comforting. They played this Sonic Youth song that I'd never heard before--"The Diamond Sea"--and something in me woke up, a little. I'd sworn off journal-writing a couple of months earlier, after the wedding from hell, but that night I changed my mind. Layne is dead, I wrote. But I am not.
It took a few years, but I took my music back--and lately I've been thinking about getting myself a guitar. Or maybe a new Macintosh, with GarageBand (because god knows I've been getting just TOO much done around the house lately ANYWAY, and need a new computer-based way to fuck around and waste time. That program could do more to erase my productivity than the Internet ever did. The damn thing is like crack for music geeks.)
I know I'm too old to be a rock star now, but that doesn't mean I can't still make noise.
Tuesday, February 1, 2005
Ten Thousand Reasons My Job Simply Must Blow Me Raw
You'll forgive me, won't you? As coined in a pair of previous comments, I am about to engage in a Ranty Panty Pissy Pity Party [tm Pisser and Ka].
It is the end of the day here at Place Where I Work. I have spent roughly half the day dealing with office politics, immature ho-bag bosses, and the fallout from Other People's Problems (related to office politics, mainly.)
My best friend here at work just found out today that she is losing her job at the end of May; her program is being phased out because Beverly, our boss, pissed off some of the higher-ups in charge of making funding decisions. So Stella will be leaving. Two other people may or may not be losing their jobs as well; one of them may be dragged into a different program. The only one who won't suffer due to this is Beverly.
Another friend of mine here, Delora, announced yesterday that next Friday will be her last day. She's transferring to a different office because she can't stand it here anymore.
The net effect of this will be that I'm gonna get left in an office populated almost solely by uptight white people, with whom I cannot deal. And I will also lose my lunch buddies.
For a couple of weeks now, I have been researching a problem Beverly was having with her e-mail. She wanted to be able to read it at home and then be able to have it marked as "old mail" when she downloads it onto her work machine. So I made it a research project--contacted three different people in the IT division, including one of the directors, and asked "What would be the pros and cons of making this change that would solve that problem?" They all said, essentially: all pros, no cons. So this morning I spent a good chunk of time explaining the change to her and making the needed adjustments to her mailer.
Around lunchtime she tells me "I don't know where all my mail is going." So I go and check it out, and find that the change has created a new inbox, one that's stored on the server instead of her individual machine. Meanwhile, she's gone to lunch, so I write her a note explaining that now, when she's done with her mail, she just needs to move it to one of the mailboxes stored on her machine. Knowing she'll give me a bunch of shit if she doesn't understand what I'm saying, I go back to my desk and create a graphic, annotated representation of what's happening and why she needs to do this. It takes about a half hour.
I come back from lunch and she says to me: "I don't have time to look at any of this. Why is it like this?"
Typical Beverly--she never has time to learn anything, just time to tell me why I have to do something impossible to make her life infinitesimally easier.
So, after attempting to explain it verbally, I go back to my desk and go back to work on a project. Before I start working, I put on my headphones.
I have been wearing my headphones to work for almost the whole four-plus years I've been here. I work better with music, plus it drowns out the distractions from the hallway outside my door. I have a very hard time concentrating sometimes, and the music helps. I'm quiet about it; in fact, I'm far less-obtrusive with my headphone-listening than the guy across the hall, a total asshelmet who SINGS along with his headphones--LOUDLY, in bad-American-Idol-audition style. Everyone who works with me has seen me wearing my headphones before. When they come in, I take the headphones off and listen to what they have to say, then I put them back on when they leave. No big, right?
Wrong.
Beverly comes into my office about 3:40 and I am in the middle of writing something down. I SEE her walk in but I want to finish what I'm writing before I forget it. She, however, blames my lack of responsiveness on the headphones. (Apparently she had yelled for me from down the hall, which is her normal habit; somehow her yelling is considered perfectly appropriate.)
"Are you listening to MUSIC?" she asks, two seconds later after I've finished my writing and taken the headphones off.
"Um.....yes," I say.
"Not a good idea," she informs me. (I'm sure what I'm listening to is an even LESS-good idea, I think but do not say.)
"Okaaay..........."
As I'm passing her office on the way to the printer a few minutes later, she calls me back. "Has Amy seen you wearing headphones?" she asks.
"Yeah--like a million times," I say. "She's never said anything."
"Well, I don't like it when ________ wears them. I don't think ANYONE should be wearing them. It sends the wrong message, like you're trying to block out the rest of the people." (Which I am, and for damn good reason,, I think but do not say.) "Plus, where do I draw the line about who can wear them?" she asks. "Because, you know, there are some people who really CAN'T wear them." (There are some people who can't walk, either--should we outlaw feet? I think but do not say.)
"Okay, I understand," I say. While swallowing my tongue.
"I'll think about it, and I'll talk to Amy about it, and I'll let you know." (Yep--that's just what's needed. A meeting,I think but do not say.)
"Sure," I say, and go back to my desk. To do some work. Without my headphones. Because god knows my concentration is greatly improved by the non-stop yap-yap-mouth of Asshelmet across the hall, about whom I can summon up only the barest scintilla of empathy over the fact that he is one of the possible job-losers in the Stella situation. Because he NEVER FUCKING SHUTS UP. Not once, not ever.
But okay. Fine. No headphones. Duly noted. Back to work I go. For about thirteen seconds, before Beverly pops her head back into the door to say: "Gladys?"
"Yes?"
"You can wear them until I talk to Amy about it."
"Okay. Thanks." ....ferrrrrrr NUTHIN', I think-but-do-not-say in my best Roxie Hart imitation.)
"And I can't deal with this e-mail thing. You mean I have to move things to a different MAILBOX?" she asks, in the same tone in which one would say "You mean I have to eat this whole fourteen tons of dogshit with a TEASPOON?"
"Right," I tell her.
"Well that's not going to work. That's not convenient. I want all the mail to go to the same box. I can't be moving all this stuff. How do I even do that?"
"You already had all those little sub-boxes on your mail ..."
"I never use them," she says. "Why does it do this now?"
"It's because we changed the protocols to solve your OTHER problem, the one where the mail wasn't getting marked as read. So it's kind of a balance between two inconveniences," I tell her. "You can either move the mail when you're done with it, or you can have it marked unread when you download it. It's a question of which is less-inconvenient."
"Well, I can't deal with that," she said. "I don't have time for all this."
"I'm not sure what to tell you," I tell her. ( DIE DIE DIE, die a million burning syphillitic deaths, I think but do not say. ) "When I get home, please be ready 2 explain 2 me why I can't tell these bitches 2 fuck off, because I don't remember why that's a bad idea," I text-message to LJ. No response. As if he wasn't already on my shit-list, since we're now on Day 68 and I've instituted a new policy, which I'm letting him figure out all on his own: No Nookie, No Cook-ee, or Let Them Eat McCrapburgers.)
I have been spewing resumes like a college boy spewing recycled beer in a frathouse bathroom at 3 AM on a Sunday. And most of THEM are probably going into the toilet as well, methinks. But we shall see.
I have SO got to pull the rip-cord on this job.
It is the end of the day here at Place Where I Work. I have spent roughly half the day dealing with office politics, immature ho-bag bosses, and the fallout from Other People's Problems (related to office politics, mainly.)
My best friend here at work just found out today that she is losing her job at the end of May; her program is being phased out because Beverly, our boss, pissed off some of the higher-ups in charge of making funding decisions. So Stella will be leaving. Two other people may or may not be losing their jobs as well; one of them may be dragged into a different program. The only one who won't suffer due to this is Beverly.
Another friend of mine here, Delora, announced yesterday that next Friday will be her last day. She's transferring to a different office because she can't stand it here anymore.
The net effect of this will be that I'm gonna get left in an office populated almost solely by uptight white people, with whom I cannot deal. And I will also lose my lunch buddies.
For a couple of weeks now, I have been researching a problem Beverly was having with her e-mail. She wanted to be able to read it at home and then be able to have it marked as "old mail" when she downloads it onto her work machine. So I made it a research project--contacted three different people in the IT division, including one of the directors, and asked "What would be the pros and cons of making this change that would solve that problem?" They all said, essentially: all pros, no cons. So this morning I spent a good chunk of time explaining the change to her and making the needed adjustments to her mailer.
Around lunchtime she tells me "I don't know where all my mail is going." So I go and check it out, and find that the change has created a new inbox, one that's stored on the server instead of her individual machine. Meanwhile, she's gone to lunch, so I write her a note explaining that now, when she's done with her mail, she just needs to move it to one of the mailboxes stored on her machine. Knowing she'll give me a bunch of shit if she doesn't understand what I'm saying, I go back to my desk and create a graphic, annotated representation of what's happening and why she needs to do this. It takes about a half hour.
I come back from lunch and she says to me: "I don't have time to look at any of this. Why is it like this?"
Typical Beverly--she never has time to learn anything, just time to tell me why I have to do something impossible to make her life infinitesimally easier.
So, after attempting to explain it verbally, I go back to my desk and go back to work on a project. Before I start working, I put on my headphones.
I have been wearing my headphones to work for almost the whole four-plus years I've been here. I work better with music, plus it drowns out the distractions from the hallway outside my door. I have a very hard time concentrating sometimes, and the music helps. I'm quiet about it; in fact, I'm far less-obtrusive with my headphone-listening than the guy across the hall, a total asshelmet who SINGS along with his headphones--LOUDLY, in bad-American-Idol-audition style. Everyone who works with me has seen me wearing my headphones before. When they come in, I take the headphones off and listen to what they have to say, then I put them back on when they leave. No big, right?
Wrong.
Beverly comes into my office about 3:40 and I am in the middle of writing something down. I SEE her walk in but I want to finish what I'm writing before I forget it. She, however, blames my lack of responsiveness on the headphones. (Apparently she had yelled for me from down the hall, which is her normal habit; somehow her yelling is considered perfectly appropriate.)
"Are you listening to MUSIC?" she asks, two seconds later after I've finished my writing and taken the headphones off.
"Um.....yes," I say.
"Not a good idea," she informs me. (I'm sure what I'm listening to is an even LESS-good idea, I think but do not say.)
"Okaaay..........."
As I'm passing her office on the way to the printer a few minutes later, she calls me back. "Has Amy seen you wearing headphones?" she asks.
"Yeah--like a million times," I say. "She's never said anything."
"Well, I don't like it when ________ wears them. I don't think ANYONE should be wearing them. It sends the wrong message, like you're trying to block out the rest of the people." (Which I am, and for damn good reason,, I think but do not say.) "Plus, where do I draw the line about who can wear them?" she asks. "Because, you know, there are some people who really CAN'T wear them." (There are some people who can't walk, either--should we outlaw feet? I think but do not say.)
"Okay, I understand," I say. While swallowing my tongue.
"I'll think about it, and I'll talk to Amy about it, and I'll let you know." (Yep--that's just what's needed. A meeting,I think but do not say.)
"Sure," I say, and go back to my desk. To do some work. Without my headphones. Because god knows my concentration is greatly improved by the non-stop yap-yap-mouth of Asshelmet across the hall, about whom I can summon up only the barest scintilla of empathy over the fact that he is one of the possible job-losers in the Stella situation. Because he NEVER FUCKING SHUTS UP. Not once, not ever.
But okay. Fine. No headphones. Duly noted. Back to work I go. For about thirteen seconds, before Beverly pops her head back into the door to say: "Gladys?"
"Yes?"
"You can wear them until I talk to Amy about it."
"Okay. Thanks." ....ferrrrrrr NUTHIN', I think-but-do-not-say in my best Roxie Hart imitation.)
"And I can't deal with this e-mail thing. You mean I have to move things to a different MAILBOX?" she asks, in the same tone in which one would say "You mean I have to eat this whole fourteen tons of dogshit with a TEASPOON?"
"Right," I tell her.
"Well that's not going to work. That's not convenient. I want all the mail to go to the same box. I can't be moving all this stuff. How do I even do that?"
"You already had all those little sub-boxes on your mail ..."
"I never use them," she says. "Why does it do this now?"
"It's because we changed the protocols to solve your OTHER problem, the one where the mail wasn't getting marked as read. So it's kind of a balance between two inconveniences," I tell her. "You can either move the mail when you're done with it, or you can have it marked unread when you download it. It's a question of which is less-inconvenient."
"Well, I can't deal with that," she said. "I don't have time for all this."
"I'm not sure what to tell you," I tell her. ( DIE DIE DIE, die a million burning syphillitic deaths, I think but do not say. ) "When I get home, please be ready 2 explain 2 me why I can't tell these bitches 2 fuck off, because I don't remember why that's a bad idea," I text-message to LJ. No response. As if he wasn't already on my shit-list, since we're now on Day 68 and I've instituted a new policy, which I'm letting him figure out all on his own: No Nookie, No Cook-ee, or Let Them Eat McCrapburgers.)
I have been spewing resumes like a college boy spewing recycled beer in a frathouse bathroom at 3 AM on a Sunday. And most of THEM are probably going into the toilet as well, methinks. But we shall see.
I have SO got to pull the rip-cord on this job.
Advice From One Who Knows
Never eat half a fresh pineapple in one sitting.
Or you'll be doing a lot more sitting than you expected.
This has been a public service announcement.
Or you'll be doing a lot more sitting than you expected.
This has been a public service announcement.
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