Monday, May 28, 2007

This world is big and wild and half insane
I'd like to reiterate: No matter the mood I'm in, a listen to the Kinks song "Animal Farm" always makes things okay. It's the Song of Happiness. The one thing I could imagine destroying my dogged spunk forever (if I may be so brazen as to claim I possess dogged spunk) would be for something truly bad to happen while "Animal Farm" was playing.
But, no. Only good things happen with Ray Davies.

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Sunday, May 27, 2007


Nuestro propio animal.

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Tuesday, May 22, 2007

What I hear
...on any given public radio story:
"So, they've decided to hit those bad employers where it hurts.
[Pause for dramatic effect.]
In the wallet."

What I'd like to hear
"So, they've decided to hit those bad employers where it hurts.
[Pause.]
In the testicles. Hard."

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Monday, May 21, 2007

The Camping.
I am: home. Under a ceiling fan. Sitting beside a loudly purring cat. Alone, alone, mercifully and finally alone. Sunburnt and happy. Did I mention the ceiling fan?

Back from the mentoring conference and subsequent jaunt from the beach on which I live, to another, more remote beach for a camping weekend with old and new friends, where I:
  • was gifted with and wore all weekend long, the world’s ugliest, $5 bejeweled flip-flops.
  • laughed harder and in merrier company than I had in a long, long time.
  • climbed giant sand dunes.
  • kept reenacting portions of The English Patient on said sand-dunes, till my one friend said, “Hm. This is just an English Patient kinda day for you, huh?” after which I stopped.
  • got passive-aggressively scolded by a lady in one of those beach convenience stores for bringing in an ice-cream cone from another beach-convenience store down the road.
    “Oh,” she said. “I guess I can just stop selling my ice cream, here.” Followed by big smile. Weird.
  • ate the best campfire grilled fish, ever
  • read a novel in two sittings. (The Bird Artist by Howard Norman. I didn’t like it at first but then suddenly was halfway through it and then completely. And it’s still reverberating around my head. Let me know if you’ve read it. I want to talk with someone about this book.)
  • saw more stars than I’d remembered there were. No. Really.
  • made new friends/kept old.

    This summer-vacation-from-school thing, I’m beginning to not hate.

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  • Tuesday, May 15, 2007

    In Which the Fish goes Inland for a Swim
    There are periods in your life that feel more stagnated than others, and then there are periods in which so much is changing so rapidly that you don’t even have time to think about how to classify what’s going on.

    I met a woman at dinner tonight who reminded me of this. I introduced myself and she said,
    “Oh, we’ve met.”
    When?
    Five years ago, it turns out, back when I was a student at this same conference I’m mentoring at this week. This woman was a mentor at the time, and she remembered me. Flabbergasted I was, at this. I swear, I don’t even remember me, back then. So much has changed.

    The conference is taking place in the town where I went to college. The funny thing is that I spent the days preceding this week just dreading it.
    “I don’t work in media any more!” I thought. “How can I possibly mentor some young kid on how to do it??” So many of these completely illogical thoughts. (It’s been what, nine months since I was last “in media”?)

    Once I arrived, I realized that these fears came as a result of a dip in courage that I’ve experienced only lately. During my months in Beachtown, I have felt, in large part, rather stagnated in many areas of life in which I want to grow. It’s true that I’ve been faced with the potentially self-esteem-annihilating challenge of being in a new geographic location, doing a completely new thing every day, surrounded by completely new people. But then you also have to take into account that (at the risk of offending those of you who are one of these, err, people), there’s the fact that most of these new people are younger, and lack the same brand of maturity/drive and self-confidence that characterized folks whom I surrounded myself with back in ‘Lanta. I’m not counting my very best friends in Beachtown. So chill, ya’ll.
    However, the general climate in any creative writing program is gonna be more laissez-faire than that in an urban journalistic environment. Put that program on the freaking beach and boom: You have the possibility for extreme stagnation for goofuses like me, who rely an awful lot on my immediate environment to supply get-up-and-go. So the energy is lacking and you’ve neglected to find a way to refuel it and you start to lag, to be less than the Kicker-of-Ass you know you are. Then you start to blame yourself for your own lagging, and the next thing you know, you’re thinking all sorts of illogical things. Things like, “What if I don’t remember how to use that piece of equipment I used every day for four years?”

    Cut to tonight. A night out, after a great day of mentoring and, well, general kicking of ass. To a healthily beer-enhanced dinner out with a few of the coordinators of this program, and a fiery discussion about the future of communication and news and media, what it should be and what our respective roles should be. Tra. And la. We got there around 6:30 and started right in on this talk and at some point shortly thereafter, I looked up from the table for a gulp of air and glanced at the clock. It was past nine. And I wondered: Where the hell had I been hiding myself all these months?

    I haven’t jumped to the conclusion that I’ve made the wrong decision in leaving Small Publication for grad school. I just need to find a way to remind myself of the wider world that I love while I’m immersed in academia and the strange social milieu of Beachtown. To remind myself, that while I love the time I have available now, and the things I am learning; the wider world I prefer is still there and it’s still mine. I don’t have to completely unplug from one, to benefit from the other.

    By the time I got back to my hotel, I was in this weird, rare state of complete ecstasy with every conceivable aspect of my surroundings. There were these lovely, intelligent, snappy people I’d just eaten with. And then there was the fact that I was driving through my college town, which is also my favorite place forever and ever amen in the land.

    How I love it here. I drove back to the hotel from dinner with the windows open, turning down each street by instinct, amazed how well I still knew the way. Here’s the tree-lined street I used to bike to campus on a-million-and-a-half years ago, I thought, and look, there’s a pack of old hippies on bikes, now. Here’s that street right through the center of campus and look how nothing’s changed! I drive right by some girl crossing that street carrying a backpack and the thought floors me: she’s having her college experience right now. The thought is both heartening and lonely-making: I don’t own this place. It never was mine. Still I drive through it; I catch the air in my hand as I surf it out the window. I let it go again.

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    Tuesday, May 08, 2007


    And the Girls All Trying to Look Pretty
    I’m one of those people who calls you right when you sit down to dinner.
    That’s how my dad always used to term people who did what I’m now doing to make money over the summer: “Those people who call right as you’re sitting down to dinner.” He used to like to, as he put it, “mess with” them on the phone, to tell them that the lady of the house? Oh. Why, she just died, tragically, a month ago. Etcetera.

    I had my first person tell me his wife has just died on my very first shift, last Thursday. Only I don’t think he was pulling one over on me. He just said it really quickly and quietly: “She’s deceased, now.” And I said “Oh! I’m sorry.” And we both hung up at the same time.

    I’m working at this phone bank at the medical center a county away, which half the time when I’m driving up, puts that Billy Joel song in my head, “He works at Mister Cacciatore’s down on Sullivan Street/Across from the Medical Center,” which is also a song about working pointless jobs just to make money, so it always feels apropos, which makes it stick in my head even longer. Because, you know. I’m trading in my Chevy for a Cadallac-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack.

    I got another song stuck in my head last Thursday. We had just gotten through my first time leaving a voice message with someone.
    “Thanks; have a good day,” I said and hit the “Release” button, and my trainer looked at me and said, “And that’s how we do it.” Right then, I totally heard “Taking Care of Business” kicking in, in the background of the Movie of Our Every-day Joe Drudgery that was being filmed right at that moment.
    I hate that song. Well, no. When I was six, I thought it was the greatest. I just hate that now it’s a stand-in for any montage of “Is it Friday, yet?” culture. Not that this has destroyed its inherent anythingness. Just. Well. It’s just one of those songs.

    We call people about medical studies at the center. Last Friday, I got a lady on the phone who right away was familiar with all the medical terminology I used. She ended my sentences for me, interrupting.

    “Yes, yes. ‘—any liability.’ I know, I know! I’m a medical doctor. I deal with this stuff all day long. Listen. What I want to know is why you people are using Retinol in this study. Retinol’s a psychotropic. Why are you using a psychotropic drug in a study about acne??”
    Uh, well, I didn’t actually think it’s a psychotropic, I muttered. But it was. She knew it was. Further, she wanted to know what we had against people with diabetes that we were testing a drug that had adverse effects on them and who was Betty and why was she calling day and night?
    It took me a good three more minutes to get her off the phone. Round and round we went. She was making me angry even though I knew she was crazy and that this conversation had not one thing to do with me. Also a fact: This was the single most fascinating conversation I’ve had in my time so far at this job.


    Any new job is the same as any new person you’re dating. Whether or not it’s even remotely something you’d want to pursue for the long term, it’s kind of compelling at the start, simply in its novelty. When that starts to wear is when you realize what you’re stuck with.


    Today, across the way from me, another operator asked a man if he had a history of tumors. He didn’t understand her.
    “Tumors!” she shouted. “Like, cancerous tumors!” Then she giggled.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s just one of those words that starts to sound funny if you say it too much.”


    The coffee at the center is bad. Everyone warns you of this. It’s like talking about whether or not it is indeed Friday yet. But it’s not watery-bad. It’s burnt-bad, which far surpasses the weird lemony-tinged stuff you pay two dollars for at the main coffeeshop back in Beachtown. I really kind of like it.


    I drink too much coffee at the center, because sitting still for five hours is absolutely the most tiring thing.


    No matter how well you leave impersonal phone messages, you’ll sound like a dork when you get to the “thanks”-part at the end. How can you give a meaningful, hearty “thanks” to someone who hasn’t just done something for which you feel genuine gratitude? Who, moreover, is not a human at all, but a machine belonging to a person you’ve never met in your life? In the weird tinny reverb world of the answering machine message, it’s easy to sound perfectly confident as you say, “I’m calling in regards to a hospital study blah-dee-blah-dee-blah,” but once you get to that ending, that “thanks” will never sound more than perfectly lame.


    Today, other operators who got to the center first took all the good headsets. There are headsets that fit perfectly and make you feel kind of like some sort of kitchy, snappy operator from America Past. When your headset feels good, you feel good. The one I was stuck with today was too loose and kept slipping, the mic ending up too low, or more often, too high: in danger of sticking me in the eye or slipping right into my mouth. I didn’t feel remotely kitchy or cool. Instead, I felt like that scene at the dance in Sixteen Candles, where Joan Cusack is trying to drink from the water fountain around her headgear. All day long, this was me.


    Today, when I had two hours to go in my endless shift, some man I’ve never met came in for the start of his shift. I don’t get a good look at him when he sat at the cube next to mine.
    But then he starts talking on the phone, and I admire his voice. Over the next minute and a half, I decide it’s not just an attractive voice; it’s perhaps The attractive voice. Out of sheer boredom, I spend the next five minutes concocting a small romantic intrigue for me and The Voice. We will go out this very evening. We will have smashing conversation which ends with our both admitting we’re very attracted…to the way the other sounds while speaking. And then— Then I overhear him chatting to another of the operators. Turns out he came straight here today from his other job…at another call center. He works two jobs. Both of them are at call centers. Both.


    Every day I bring this book of Susan Orlean essays I’m reading, or reading in theory. As in: there’s a bookmarker in it, so I must be reading it, huh? Really, what I’m leafing through when we’re in those spells of waiting for potential study patients to call us back, is In Touch. Also Star. These magazines are all over the tables at the center and I can’t figure out why they appeal to me. I read them and I’m filled with muttering annoyance at the notion that I should even begin to care about the fashion influence Posh Spice holds over Katie Holmes and my god, have you seen this woman’s cheekbones? She is simply terrifying. A good way to startle the hell out of me would be to have me looking at these pictures of her in Star, and then to tap me on the shoulder and I’d turn around and for you to be her. Seriously, I might have a stroke.

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    Tuesday, May 01, 2007


    Eat Mo Shad.
    The Dangercat demands it.