Limits

I doubt I'll have time to apply to grad school for next year. Due dates for Emerson are January 5th. For some reason I thought I'd have part of the spring to take the GRE's, apply, get my references, etc. I hoenstly don't really want to do the program. I want to take classes, and I like the idea of being a student again, but I'm really just going back to get a better job. Really, I just want to start working on books. The sad thing is, at this point in my life I really ant to be an unpaid intern, but I don't have the choice. now I have to work for a living.
When I was in college, when you're 'supposed' to be an unpaid intern, I was so tired and mainly burnt out on the work I was doing, that I couldn't bear the diea of volunteering to learn mundane skills in a field I wa sonly midlly interested in. I was totally cynical, scalded on the idea of sitting around talking about books, writing about high thought and life and the world. All I wanted was to live a 'normal life', as according to
the stereotypes and concepts of the working-class people I knew, the kind of people who were made cynical by lack of opportunity, as opposed to the people I knew, and to myself, who were made cynical by a surplus of opportunity, by being told by our parents ot just find ourselves and do what we thought was important. In the past, the people we idolized (maybe idealized! I typed that by accident. Freudian slip!) formed their concept of what was important by the limitations placed upon them.

This has been a weird week. Work was canceled on Monday due to an electrical fire in an underground cable running through Backbay in downtown Boston, which caused smoke and smoldering flames to burn out through a string of manholes. Wednesday is a half day, and everyone has been planning around it being a half day. Thursday is Thanksgiving and we have "Black" Friday off, then the weekend, and then I have Monday off to move into our new apartment. Because this week can barely be said to exist, everyone seemed to be trying to cram a whole week's worth of work into a single day. To top it all off, the other old retard was working the morning shift instead of the usual old retard. He's even worse; one of them is terrified of getting in trouble, of getting caught making mistakes. The other one couldn't care less. He's copletely absolved himself of any and all responsibility to ever succeed at anything ever. One is incapable of doing the simplest thing, and the other has long since given up on bothering to care.

Pains

I’m lucky to have such smart, intense and interesting friends. This weekend my good buddy D, who seems to be in a much more positive, open-minded, less judgmental mindset than he has been in the past, came up to Boston and we hung out, hat some beers and talked on Friday night, and then after I recovered from it on Saturday morning (the dry air dehydrated me even more, and an over-long walk in the cold definitely did nothing to strengthen my immune system) I hug out with my old friend K and her husband J. I love those guys, but I worry about them.
K has an illness that she can live with, although she is often in some pain, but which is very unpredictable. She felt great for weeks, but then last weekend she had a painful coughing fit that sent her to the emergency room. J is struggling to deal with his own feelings about it, his own worry and his natural sense of…dislocation? Having no choice but to give up some of himself for his wife. It seems like people who have a loved on who is sick, frequently feel some resentment towards the sick person for saddling them with their problems. How could you not begrudge the fact that someone else’ being sick is interfering with your life? And yet, the guilt over resenting someone for being sick, which is obviously not her fault, causes a sort of anxiety feedback loop that is unhealthy. Not admitting your anger only makes it fester inside you as the overwhelming evidence of it continually stops you from being able to deny it’s existence to yourself. I think men have a particular difficulty with this, because we naturally react with a form of aggression when something difficult happens, but our culture spends so much time teaching us that we can’t take out our anger on other people, especially women, but it does nothing to teach us what to do with it, how to alleviate it, it only narrows its eyes and minimizes its importance, its relevance and reality. Society always demands that men accept their emotions, but constantly minimizes the relevance of them by belittling them.

Employee Evaluation

This afternoon I filled out my self evaluation for work. It's a bizarre situation to be in, because of the competing desires to not be arrogant, and yet knowing that if I give them any excuse to give me less than a perfect score, I won't get all of my tiny, tiny, tiny possible raise. Performance evaluations, especially if you work in a traditional corporation (it's not exactly a traditional corporate environment, but it's a lot closer than if I worked in a restaurant or a small-time retail situation like where Beanz works). It's also hard to think of goals for a job that I've been over-qualified for since before I was hired. "Don't say 'Get a better job'..."
Although it does feel good to describe myself, when I actually am proud about how hard I work, and to realize that I really am trying to make the most out of my job, trying to learn about the industry as much as I can, stuck up in the basement or between the walls or in the attic, depending on how you mangle the "foot in the door" metaphor. I'm sometimes embarrassed about how much harder I work than I should have to, but I still am happy about how much I've made the best of my situation.

Auto

My gut says Fuck the auto industry. I'm usually loathe to say Let the Market Sort it out, because positive social progress is always seen as unfamiliar and scary by average Americans, at least if we're talking about gay marriage, gender equality, civil rights, etc. But we're talking about cars, and the car industry in America, here--these are not social or political minorities that deserve to be defended by hordes of meat heads. The American car industry has always sold the idea of being American, which obviously means nothing more than Big, macho, homophobic, xenophobic, short-sighted, self-interested, my penis is not small and is very satisfying to women!
I would say that the American public is starting to shift away from being center-right to being center-left; it's starting to realize that we actually can't guzzle oil from the Middle east for infinity without even thinking about the two wars we've been waging there. The market has spoken, and it's saying that giant gas-hogs are no longer viable. Maybe when GM and whoever else figure out a way to build cars that run well, are affordable, fuel-efficient and comfortable and even attractive!, and figure out how to create a moderate amount of good jobs with benefits, as opposed to a large amount of terrible jobs with shit benefits and a tiny tiny tiny mount of super high paying bullshit sinecures...THEN maybe I'll consider voting to send my tax dollars (I work like a fucking mule. I don't know why) to bail out your fat asses.

Tradition-alism

Bill O'Reilly was on the Daily Show last night, peddling his tired schtick about being a traditionalist against the "far-left elite." I find it hilarious that so many people seem to adhere to this mythical, traditional paradise of the suburban fifties. Our country is just over two hundred years old; where do these traditions come from, and what exactly are they? When blacks and women wanted the right to vote, I'm sure the outcry was exactly the same, "It's too soon, that's too crazy, that sort of thing simply isn't done..." We cite these "traditions" without examining what they are or what they mean, or where the idea comes from. It seems to go as common sense because it's just a stereotype that we're conditioned to take the natural, sensible way the world has to be. If you balk at this kind of notion, the "traditionalist" counters by associating you with stereotypes that have nothing to do with politics, totally non-political items that carry stereotypes of elitism, effeminacy and liberalism. "Latte-sipping book reading musical theater singing gay-marrying journalist-type!" What is this type, and how can it be associated with so many things?
This argument, the "It is what it is" argument, is just a way of excusing ourselves from thinking, from confronting our predispositions.

I'm so tired of the people I work with. The people in the mailroom are the biggest bunch of illiterate, ignorant, retarded lazy bums, and the people in the offices are just a bunch of spoiled WASP scum floating from one bullshit office handjob to the next. I don't want to work on textbooks for upper middle class white prep schools, and I don't want to work in the underclass with stereotypical lazy, do nothing with their lives, blames the world for their problems sons of bitches.
I'm just tired, so tired. Tired of showing up every morning and working hard for no reason, and not having anything extra to work for. I need to take another class, or get a better job or both. My god, and I sick of the routine my days have become!

Stuff Before Bed

governor)I'm relieved. I really don't have anything more to add: I'm relieved that Obama finally won (I had my doubts, despite how clear the signs were, just like when Deval Patrick was running for, and I'm relieved that my class is finally over. I was getting so sick of those fusty, OCD old ladies and WASPy lisping little girls, and getting up early and jimmying my schedule around just to sit in a chair for three hours going over sheets with seemingly pointless exercises on them. I just hope this class actually makes me more employable.
I've been getting more inspired to write something that I'd been putting off as too obvious, or too goofy. It might be time for me to write a story or novella about Tony. I started reading Angels, Denis Johnson's first novel and it's really pleasing to read something that makes perfect sense to my natural writerly sensibilities. It's the style I got so used to in workshops.
It's definitely the Platonic form of whatever Peter Rock was trying to do; it's all about mildly deranged, deeply sad, lost people fleeing from something they're not quite sure what, drifting in and out of drug-induced stupors, and the language changes perfectly to fit what the character is feeling and going through. It's the weird harmony of the polyphonic novel. I could do something about working with Tony, going in and out of his ADD point of view, gradually unveiling the painful past and truths about himself he's almost convinced himself to stop remembering.

Voting

I've been waiting eight years for tomorrow, for the chance to finally, really, once and for all to vote George W. Bush's party out of the White House. Four years ago I told myself to get more involved politically, and in small but, I think, meaningful ways, I have. I've gotten much more informed about politics, I read a lot more political news, I try to understand the opposing viewpoints, I try to understand the perspective of people who think only about the economics of world politics, and ignore all social issues (not that I can really sympathize with this view). I try to challenge my own political ideas, and I try to engage the people I work with and their ideas, too. I feel I have a certain responsibility as an educated person, not to convince the less educated people I work with the error of their ways, but to really see where they're coming from, and to challenge their preconceptions. I feel it's my duty to broaden their horizons, but not to come across as condescending, as elitist. I think the main reason why, for example, farmers vote to spite the city (say in upstate New York, or most of the rest of Oregon
that's not Portland) is because they feel that the elite overclass tries to force it's self-righteously forward view of culture on those they look down upon as rubes. And they feel that way, largely because it's true. I've felt it necessary to understand "the common man" not from the perspective of a benefactor but as an equal. In Boston, there's a huge, visceral class divide between the "townies" and the "yuppies", and this two-way resentment and sense of superiority causes a huge amount of political divisons that don't need to, and wouldn't otherwise, exist.

Gender Stuff

We met with a friend of ours who always annoys me when she talks about her ex boyfriends or future possible boyfriends. With her, it's all about guys being disappointing, not measuring up, being too nice, not being 'manly' enough. I have a huge issue with this sort of thing, and obviously a certain degree of self-consciousness is part of it. I don't understand how a women can expect men to treat her as an equal, in a progressive way that doesn't rely on traditional gender role stereotypes, and yet think it's perfectly acceptable to talk about men in a totally regressive way. She'll talk for hours about how she only likes guys who are tall, dark and manly in front of someone who's not tall, dark or manly. If I ever even hinted that I broke up with a girl because I wasn't attracted to her, because she wasn't small, curvy and 'girly' (my wife is hardly a Barbie-type, and I appreciate many different body-types on women), it would sound soooooo offensive, patriarchal and blah dee blah blah. I can't stand hypocritical double-standards. I, as a progressive man, try to get past societally impressed stereotypes about how women are supposed to behave, look and present themselves, and I expect women to do the same.

Cuban Sandwich

I had a delicious Cuban sandwich the other day, and it occurred to me that fastfood hamburgers, specifically McDonald's, have more in common flavorwise with Cuban sandwiches than with "traditional" American hamburgers. They're thin, with crusty white bread and most of the flavor comes from a tangy, vinegary sauce and pickles. I wonder if, even though McDonald's makes its bank by selling the idea of middle-American comfort food, it knows it's biggest consumer base is actually Hispanic, black and Caribbean.