Intern
We have an intern at Small Publication for a couple months from Japan. She’s a few years younger than me and her real interest interest is actually to work in television someday. But even though I wonder if she’s learning anything productive from us – other than she doesn’t want to do what we do - she’s amazingly nice and ridiculously accommodating.

She’s come out with me a couple times on stories I’ve gone to cover, and she’s always doing things like trying to carry my gear-bag for me – or I mention I want some coffee and she tries to go get some for me, and I’m just like, “No-neee-no, no!” And then we go out for coffee together.

So anyway, I’m trying to organize taking her out out dancing with some of my friends because she wants to go dancing in a big, bad way. I don’t want to go to Buckhead. I unwant to go to Buckhead.

I’m thinking, instead, of maybe M.J.Q., this club in Midtown that from street-level, looks like a small garage, but when you go in, you go down some steps and it’s actually, well, a club. That's my choice of location more for nostalgia than actual current affection, though.

My friend Sheila and I used to go to MJQ a lot a few years ago when it was always free and never, ever too crowded and you’d go in there and by 2:00, you’d be dancing with this crazy conglomeration of club-kid-sorts, waitresses-from-greasy-spoon-down-the-road-just-off-their-shifts-sorts, hipster-sorts, middle-aged office guys, streetpeople and hippies. Now it’s gotten to be rather the hip place and it costs ten bucks and I haven’t been in over a year.

But I think we could have some fun.

But it’s not because she’s nice; it’s because she’s guilt-ridden.
When I was a teenager, we had an exchange student named Cecelia. She was from Honduras, and I was seventeen. Let me clarify: I was very seventeen. Self-conscious, baggy t-shirted, always-writing “Nobody understands me; I should diiiie!” poetry in a spiral notebook –seventeen. A tad self-obsessed and a tad low on the self-esteem.

Cecelia was a sweetheart. Nineteen years old when she came, but very naïve about a lot of things, in the way of girls who grow up in wealthy Honduran plantations. She laughed at my dad’s corny jokes. We’d all go out for ice-cream at Baskin Robbins. She got married a year after going back home, and now has a mess of kids. God, I’d love to go see her.

I was friends with her at home, but when she sat with me on the school-bus, I smiled politely and then looked out the window. And yes, I had my walkman on. And pretended I didn’t hear the kids at the back of the bus making fund of her, in the way of asshole white kids who grow up in wealthy Midwestern suburbs.

She hated the Pittsburgh winter and slept underneath a mountain of blankets. She spent hours and hours on the phone with friends back home; she cried a lot at night.

And I still feel totally guilty for not going to her, then. For not telling the boys on the bus to go screw themselves. For being such a typically disappointing teenager: a shitty friend.

Which is probably a part of the feelings I have when I see our Japanese intern waiting at her bus-stop in ninety-degree heat. I give her a ride home because I like her and because it’s the decent thing to do. Because I don’t want her to think all Americans are assholes like our political leaders. Because I don’t want her to regret choosing Atlanta as her destination for this internship. Because I like to have some company sometimes, myself, outside of work.

Having written this out, I guess it appears very self-aggrandizing: “Ooh, how nice she is to the poor, poor Japanese girl, and all because she feels sooo guilty for being a snotty teenager. Jesus. What an asshole.”
But whose motives are not at least partially selfish, in one way or another, for almost everything we do? Even wanting company is self-serving.

I like our intern a lot. And if I were her, I imagine it would take some very good times not to regret choosing Atlanta.

Say it, Frenchie.
Mostly at my sister’s behest, I’ve added the Comment feature, so ya’ll can click and respond to any little thing.

She and I have decided to communicate only through the media - even though we live in the same town. So the next story I do for Small Publication, I will insert some secret reference about the time I was four and dying eggs and she kept coming into the kitchen, saying, “Oh, Alice, the Easter Bunny’s hopping by right now!!” And I’d run to the door. Again.
“Oh! You just missed him.”

And by “journalist”, I mean "sham".
I am tired when I drive home in the afternoons – but I reward myself by listening to pop music. The furthest music possible from current events. I even get this little illicit rush from it. This is how I know I’m not a real journalist, sadly. I’ve met real journalists, and they’re always on the job – that being, taking in newsnewsnews 24-fucking-7.

I’ve met newspeople from local t.v. and radio stations I never listen to or watch. Talk radio. They know their local politics inside-out. They’re up all night, watching C-SPAN. They get up early to scan the Internet news. Not because they have to for their jobs, but because it's what they live for. They were Born seeking the Deep Burning Flame of NewsTruth.

And while they climb ever higher on their mountains of discovery and soundbytes, I race by in my car, listening to The Shins. And I am driving to somewhere far, far away.

So I’m not a real journalist; this I know. I’m a writer and a listener of interesting cultural and political Stuff.

I know what’s going on in the world. (And “Hey,” you can hear her say. “I listen to N.P.R., maaan. I read the New York Times.”)

There is some Truth I’m looking for that sings to me a catchier poetry than the Council President’s reported dastardly doings with city funds. When I’m doing the kind of writing I like to do about the nonfiction subjects that interest me, I feel good and right. I just need to get to the point where I’m feeling that way as much as possible.

Girl, You Know it’s True
And on those pop songs I love so – excluding the above, I’ve noticed this proliferation of the ubiquitous girl known as “Girl.” The Shins, the White Stripes and Pavement are three bands that frequent my little car, and all three are all about Ms. Girl, always telling her she’s so damn foolish in this way and that, or so naïve, or living in the past or otherwise deluded. That’s always the case with Girl in these songs I love.

Yeah, you see, and “Boy” just doesn’t cut it as an equivalent to me. Although Liz Phair could’ve gotten away with it in her glory days I think, and probably did in some song I can’t think of at this brain-addled moment. Hmmm. That Girl, though; I wish she’d get her shit together, already.

Cursed to Walk the Earth Like Cain
I have not been sleeping. I’ve started full-time at Small Publication, and my hours now start at 6:00 a.m. So I’ve been trying to go to bed at 10:00 or 10:30 in order to get up at 5:00, but even though I am definitely truly tired by that hour one week into this work-schedule, my brain, she won’t listen. And will not let me fall asleep.

Last night, I started off in bed at 10:30. Found myself still awake at midnight, so I joined Hunter in the living room to read. He loaned me some Borges: a wonderfully dreamy short-story about the universe really being a hexagonal library with an uncountable (though not infinite) number of floors. I got drowsy two-thirds of the way through the story and went to bed with Hunter. Felt myself drifting… almost… but no. Returned to the couch with an afghan around 1:45 or so before finally retreating once again to the bedroom sometime later, avoiding all eye-contact with time-keeping devices. Also, I admit, grumbling nastily.

When you can’t sleep, everyone else is smug in their slumber and deserves the full brunt of your ire. And everyone else is surely experiencing the most peaceful sleep ever. All shall awaken refreshed and in tune with nature, but not you. You will Never sleep, Never rest, Never have peace.

Instead, your days shall consist of a dull stupor in which your brain will only travel just so far with a thought before it becomes utterly baffling. Thus, much takes on an air of the profound.

Your nights you will spend accompanied by the sudden vivacious chatter of your brain, which suddenly wants nothing but to regale you with loops of pop songs as well as little reminders of things you have to do tomorrow, things you screwed up at today, news that your pillowcase is made from the scratchiest material known to man and that it must be a hundred degrees in this bedroom and that the kitchen sink is dripping in just such a pattern. Look at your significant other sleeping. Remember when it charmed you to watch him sleep? The rat; he’s clearly mocking you. And: You have to get up in four hours, three hours, three and a half.

Last night I got two hours of sleep. I have not napped today either, in hope of falling into bed in utter exhaustion in a couple hours or so. But I seem to be catching my second wind, now. Yepperdoodle.