Long Overdue Update

I don't think anyone reads this blog, and don't expect anyone to. It's hidden in plain sight, which for all intents and purposes on the internet, is hidden.
Since my last post, I took a trip to Turkey to stay with my inlaws. It was an unbelievable time. When I returned, I was offered a job as a marketing assistant at the educational publisher where I worked in the mailroom. When I went back for my last two weeks in the mailroom, I discovered that the problem employee who was making me frustrated and embarassed to be associated with him, had been fired while I was out. And they say passivity will get you nowhere. Clearly, it was passivity that has been my secret weapon all along!
My new job is now not so new. It's a placeholder job, but it's good experience, it's the lynchpin of my resume, making it look like a planned if bizarre career, rather than a pinball's course from one nonsensically buzzing box to the next. I like my two managers. Their manager, who is ultimately mine...well, I don't have that many issues with him...
Since then, I've started volunteering at an afterschool writing workshop for highschool kids, run out of the non-profit where I've been taking adult workshops. I love it. I want to be a teacher. Teaching is something meaningful, somehting important, something I get excited about, something that matters to me. Guiding creative young people, helping them think their way through writing issues...this is really what I do.
I'm trying to get into a teacher ed program called the Boston Teacher Residency. It's a highly selective, essentially no-cost M.Ed program. Once you complete the 13 month training and co-teaching year, you are obligated to teach in the city public schools for three years. Each year forgives one third of your tuition. This also means that you get three years of experience teaching, as well as a Master's.
If I can go in five years from an embarassingly overqualified mailclerk having trouble getting excited enough to finish a story, to a young urban high school English teacher with a Masters of Education, dual licenses in English and ESL or Special Ed (another facet of the program!) and a union salary reflective of that experience and qualifications...I'll be proud of myself, satisfied that I'm improving the quality of life in the city I love, and making a damn decent living.

Living the Dream

Half-watching an episode of LA Ink, when the veteran tattoo artist says of a guy who works at a BMX magazine "Any grown man who's still doing what he was doing when he was twelve is gotta be...living the dream." And those ellipses captures everything that's pathetic and inspiring and fascinating and utterly boring about the tattoo/rock/etc. world.

War

I feel like I'm at war with my own company. Really, I'm only at war with my HR department, which seems to exist to keep me in my place, to prevent me from advancing in the company, to top me from taking advantage of any of the benefits that come with my full time position. It's purpose seems to be to maintain the status quo, to stop people from reaching above their place, to raise the incompetent up to the middle and to drag the exceptional down to that same middle. to create a false middle ground and adjust the weak and the strong so that they are both confined by it. I hate, detest and revile the company I work for. I will immortalize the epic of beaurocracy and unfairness that it has put me through. 

Clunk, rattle, CLANG.

My radiators sound like the beings in the cellar are launching a full-frontal assault on us surface dwellers.

Gay Marriage

http://www.slate.com/id/2212893/

I read a fascinating article in Slate about gay marriage. The gist of the issue was state governments vs. the federals government. The general, stereotypical Conservative response is that the federal government should stay out of state governments' business, BUT in this case, that same argument would favor gay marriage. I know several "traditional-common-sense-values" conservatives who are utterly Small-Government until people start doin' gay shit, when they want the government to step in and stop people from exercising offensive freedoms. As the article says, if you really support state autonomy, then you have to implicitly support gay marriage rights, since two of our states allow gay marriage. Although, I suppose you could say that even if the state allows something, the federal government doesn't have to listen. Except, then the federal government would be squelching state's right.
I still think that if we leave the states alone, in twenty years zero smart, creative, progressive, forward-thinking people will live in the tundra states, and then, HUGE surprise! industries in those states will flounder by relying on antique, unsustainable business practices. The coastal states will try some new-fangled ideas that seem weird and scary for a couple years and eventually come to seem perfectly logical, inevitable and reasonable.

Lazy Idiots

Some of the people I work with are so stupid it hurts me. Several times I've heard people say, "How can America have a deficit? Why don't we just print more money?" And this is not just people in the mailroom, this is actual editors saying things this retarded, things that I was taught were stupid when I was fucking eight.
My manager today said that he told his kids in high school, and he hated to say it, to learn Spanish. I gave a sort of horrified/dumbstruck look. He said, "I mean, I feel, if you come to this country, you should learn English." I said, "Well, I think everyone should know at least two languages." He didn't seem to really have anything to say to this.
How many jobs are non-English-speaking immigrants stealing from "hard-working regular American Joes" like my manager who barely peels his fat ass off the computer seat twice a day? If all the immigrants who work seventy hours a week washing dishes and mopping floors learned English, they would suddenly get the easy jobs that dumb, lazy generic fat white people have been hogging for two hundred years. There are a lot of jobs, like mail room supervisor, sanitation company manager, etc., that any moron can do, but always winds up going to some braindead older white guy where no one expects anything from him and he delivers even less.
What is so horrible about white people learning to speak a second language? How does you learning Spanish obviate the need for Mexicans to learn English? I used to work with a lazy, dumb-as-shit fucking retard Puerto Rican guy and this dumbshit spoke three languages (conversationally, at least) fluently. There's a big difference between thinking that people should learn the language of the country they immigrate to, and wondering why you should learn a language other than English. It's like saying, "Hey, I'm a fat lazy white guy and I have no ambition other than to sit around in some condo drinking Bud light, why should I dream of anything greater? How dare you suggest such a thing?!"

Words of Encouragement

My boss said the nicest thing to me this afternoon. I saw that A and R were at loggerheads yet again, whihc is always the SNAFU over there. R thinks he eneds to whip A into shape and A thinks R is out to get him. In reality, A has a mildly retarded-seeming (I'm being dead serious) inability to get attention other than by acting "weird" and "random", by being annoying on purpose. he's that thirteen year old who hasn't figured out how to get positive responses from anyone, so he goes with people snapping at him to stop being so weird, because at least they notice him! This is what socially retarded tweens do. Seriously, the dude is 38, and his twin brother (!!!!!) is a pediatrician (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).
Anyway, I asked M how the drama-level was today. She said, seriously, I shouldn't say this because it's probably unprofessional, but I wish everyone here was just like you. If I could have seven you's, I'd be so much happier. You don't bring any drama, you just do your job and act like a normal person, and you don't feed into all this other people's bullshit. Then she went on to how professional I was, and even in my evaluation, I told Claire, if I could give this kid Excellents across the board, I would, and she agreed with me. Then she asked me if I was looking for other jobs in Pearson, or outside, and I explained all the bullshit about how few jobs are being posted and so on. Anyway, she said that she or Claire would give me excellent references. I think either one of them could write a great reference for an Med degree somewhere. They see that half of what I do is get people to behave like adults, help people organize their work, think through problems logically. All I do is teach grown men who are basically giant babies how to act like semi-normal human beings!
At any rate, even though I'm getting so frustrated with the company skipping over me, it was really nice to get those words of encouragement.

Editing

My wife is the best editor I've encountered in damn long time. She reads closely, she reads analytically, but she's also a thoughtful, sensitive editor who considers my emotions as the person who wrote the thing. She looks for not just how to structurally improve the piece, but for what is really going on in the metaphorical sublayers of the piece. She's very constructive, but also brutally honest. she gets right down to the heart of what you're trying to say, and lets me know what I've put down that's fighting what I think I'm trying to say. She doesn't care if you want to insist that the story already says what you think it should have already said. I'm lucky to have an editor who not only cares about me, but about what I want to write.

The Wrestler

We saw the Wrestler last night and it was pretty fantastic. Much like wrestling itself, every scene felt Important, like it Symbolized Something, but not anything in particular. Wrestling to me has always been about not so much good vs evil, but familiar vs. unfamiliar (Futurama: "I'm not from here! Look at my crazy passport!") This means that sometimes the good guy could be a big Mexican who drives a low-rider up to the ring and whose slogan was "Lie, cheat and steal!" (RIP Eddie Geurrero), and the villain is a smug rich white guy.
Everything, particularly the ending, felt appropriately ambiguous and unresolved. Randy fails at everything except wrestling because of his tragic flaw, which is itself not particularly tragic. It's not that he cares too much, or fears success--he's just, as his daughter admits in a brutal scene, a fuck-up. He just can't quite hack it in the "real world." He can't get used to his real name, Robin, so he insists on his assumed name.
Cassidy/Pam is his perfect mirror image. She's an aging stripper who hates being called by her real name. They have essentially the same job: they flaunt their athletic bodies on-stage so that the audience can fantasize about being or possessing them, but what they do seems to have much more to do with debasing the body, with shame and being pointed at rather than pride and being ideal/idol-ized. I did have trouble believing anyone, especially guys in this podunk town, would be disappointed at ogling Marisa Tomei, but other than their difference in beauty, I found it totally believable that she would find herself drawn to Randy. They have similar jobs they each have trouble leaving, each have a child they worry about suporting, they each prefer the bombastic, party-time fun of the 80's to the gloomy introspection of the 90's. And Randy is the only person who treats Cassidy and Pam the same way. He flirts with both of them unambiguously, with as much chivalry as he understands ("I guarantee she's hotter than any skank piece of pussy you'd wind up marrying," he jeers at a young guy who finds her too old). He barely sees the difference between her work persona and her everyday one.
Randy is a kind of poshlust-Christ, a camp martyr. He flaunts his wounds for the audience to gawk at; the camera, and a strategically placed mirror his "I'm the boss, I'm the boss I'm the boss," the scene reflect his muscular chest, emblazoned with the painful and vulerable looking bypass incision that I kept waiting to burst open into the flaming, chained sacred heart. And yet what does he sacrifice? Who does he redeem, and how? It makes perfect sense that Cassidy compares him to a Christ she knows not from the Bible but from the Passion of the Christ (this reminded me of the epigraph to Kill Bill that attributes "Revenge is a dish best served cold," to the Klingons). He's something larger than life, someone whose suffering redeems us, but their understanding and interest in how this works and what it means, goes no further than that.

Hungry Mother

Dude! Hungry Mother...Dude! We had a wonderful if a bit expensive dinner tonight at a restaurant we'd been trying to go to for some time: Hungry Mother in Kendall Square. We had a ltitle amuse bouche of beef tongue with a tangy marinade on a sort of crusty toast piece, then I had a peanut soup (!!!) while Beanz had a lovely "nude" mushroom appetizer. My soup was rich and creamy, smokey with little crunchy bits of bacon(?) and peanuts. It had a little sliver of lime on the side (the bowl had a lovely spoon rest on the side, where the lime wedge sat). It could have used a little salt and more lime (acid). Beanz pointe dout that it would have really ruled if they'd just put a little sea salt and more lime pieces in the spoon rest. I still liked it, but it could have been GREAT. Her mushrooms were so lovely, prepared simply so that you couldn't not appreciate the shrooms themselves.
For entrées we had a roast chicken (no one, as she pointed out, makes a straight up roast chicken in a gourmet context) and I had a braised pork shoulder with a creeeaaaaammmyyy grits-cake. Both entrées were lovely, if not quite stunnign comapred ot the very unique and quirky apps. For dessert we had a little lemony crusty tart with somewhat sour buttermilk
ice cream and an earl grey caramel sauce. Didn't get much earl grey, but the sour cream like
ice cream, soft and cold on a warm crusty biscuity cake and the sweat sauce, was delightful. I had a ncie tart pink grapefruit sorbet with a grapefruit supreme. It was tart and fucking gorgeous.
Dude! Awesome!!!!

Workshop

Ahh, I had a really good workshop tonight! We work-shopped my story and one other guy's-we were the first people to do be WSed, so we kind of got to set the tone for the class, which was exciting. I was surprised at how easy it was to sit silently while people talked about my shit. It was actually kind of more comfortable not saying anything, not having any say in the direction of the conversation. It's all about them, the class, figuring out what you said, and guess what you were trying to do.
The tone of the class was really productive. People were very constructive, very focused on what worked, what gets in the way, and what's the best way to say that, to improve it. There was only one person who gave the useless workshop comment: "I don't know. Maybe I can't express it. Maybe it was over my head or I just didn't get it. But I just didn't relate to the characters. I didn't like them. I didn't get what was going on, I didn't care about them." Well, hey, that was helpful! I'll just go back and edit it to make it more awesome. Why didn't I think of that?
Honestly, I wished that they would workshop me for a longer period of time, because they didn't really get around to going into the metaphors, and why I chose certain images to be central. They liked the things that I thought were working, and they had problems with the things I knew were problematic. My teacher got them, at least somewhat. Beanz really gave me the most incisive criticism; she got what I was trying to do and what I needed to change to make what worked work better.
I'm looking forward to doing two other people's shits next week!

Editors

Beanz read my story that I submitted to my workshop last week, and it made me feel a million times better about waiting to hear what they have to say. Now I can anticipate
what they will complain about, what they might like, and how I'll respond to them. The best thing about workshopping a story is that sometimes you need other people to tell you what you were trying to say, and then you have to go back and rework what you actually said, so that the final product comes close to matching what you intended to say, and and what other people remind you you were actually coming close to saying.
Beanz is a wonderful editor. She isolates what my story is saying, what parts work and don't work towards that end, and what I should do to begin improving it. She tells me what I need to hear and am worried about hearing. She's unsentimental, but invested in improving my work. It's not that she's merciless, but she doesn't soften her blows for me (even though this story is obviously inspired by our relationship)

Shirley Jackson

I'm reading a fantastic book right now, called We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, of "The Lottery" fame. It's a classic tale of eerie dread with a possibly unreliable narrator, who veers from having a winsome, uncanny sense of imagination to seeming possibly murderous and psychotic. The plot focuses on a prim and proper family in a small isolated village who live in an almost empty mansion. They're hated by the locals, at least as far as the incredibly alienated narrator is concerned. The family is reduced to the ghostly Mary Katherine or Merricat, who claims to be eighteen but often feels much younger, her older sister Constance, whom she idolizes and adores, and their infirm and senile uncle Julian. Everyone else in their family is dead, and they are cut off from the rest of their extended family. The only people they ever see are a few rich friends, of Suitable Society, who occasionally come to visit and have gruesomely formal, icy and bloodless "social" visits. It come sout that the entire family was poisoned, and Constance, the older sister was tried but found innocent, and the townspeople still suspect them.
Mary Katherine becomes more and more unhinged, more unearthly seeming as the story continues. She plays little fairytale games that border on neurotic and/or paranoid delusions. But, whereas a horror hack like Stephen King would simply make Mary Katherine a raving loon with Creepy Little Girl in Horror Story behaviors, the tics that Merricat displays are perfectly suited to the kind of world she's been consigned to. She is terrified of change, of Constance "growing up" and leaving her to pursue an adult life, getting married and so on. So Merricat tells herself that she can use three "magic" words to protect her world from changing. She chooses three words and, as long as no one says them out loud, she will be safe. She speaks the first word into a glass of water and drinks the water, whispers the enxt to her dessert and eats the dessert, and so forth. She picks words that her uncle would not be likely to say. When it becomes obvious that change is actually coming, she speaks the words outloud, breaking the spell (to protect herself from the realization that the words don't really hold any special properties?) What a creepy conceit, and what a perfect metaphor for the icy Stepford like locale Jackson is describing: the Blackwoods' lives are reduced to nothing but socializing, little luncheons where people chitchat but don;t really communicate. They convince themselves that by not talking about it, their problems will go away. That by throwing little parties and eating cakes, they can restore their lost social status and make their existences bearable again. They do nothing except talk and eat, and yet they see the utility, the emptiness of this existence.

Work Frustration

My department, or maybe it's my company or the entire corporate world seems to neither reward hardwork nor punish failure. It drags all employees into the middle, it demands mediocrity and that's exactly what it gets. I got my performance evaluation this year. I rated myself as outstanding (five out of five) and wrote long, serious evaluations of all the hard work I do. My comments from my supervisers were extremely positive, in fact they were devoid of negatiivity. As far as their written evaluation is concerned, I have no room for improvement. But they rated me at 3 or 4 for every single category. The logic behind this, I've been told, is that they can't give you a perfect score, you won't try harder in the future. Exactly the opposite, I think, is the case. They have just told me that, no matter how hard I work, I will only do slightly better than the guy who is barely holding onto his job. I'm starting to feel the same kind of resentful, cynical malaise that happens to so many talented, ambitious young people here: that to try harder than the bare minimum is a waste of energy. Claire gave me very positive feedback face to face. She told me that I shouldn't give up applying out to the company, that I'm a great asset and she doesn't want to lsoe me, BUT "it would be a sin if someone with your talent and hardwork didn't advance in the company." She told me I don't belong working in the mailroom, that I'm, essentially, too good for that. BUT she didn't give me a decent raise, she didn't give me a promotion, a better title. She's willing to say anything to help me, but she won't do anything that would make a real difference in my life. She ahs to follow protocol, she can't promote me ahead of the barely sane, borderline retarded guys who've been struggling for twenty years at tasks I've mastered and have been teaching and reteaching to them for the past year. She's hedged in by rules that she herself created and could rewrite. Maybe I'm describing myself, or everyone.
I need a real job.

Industrial...

I've been working in an industry that is founded on mediocrity and nepotism. My industry
has billions of less important, middle manager type jobs who have relatively minimal responsibilities, just to make sure that people are sending he right thinga to the right places at the right times, and so on and so forth.
For every job, they have two basic choices: do we hire a young person with minimal experience, a weird looking resume, and an impressive pedigree, who will work really hard out f fear of being fired, make unusual choices, and work for a small amount of money because s/he is desperate for a job, has no family to support, and has a family who might help him or her if worst comes to worst; OR a middle-aged person who has lots of experience being a non-important middle manager, someone who has no hope of rising to a higher position, someone who has no ideas, who has been hanging on by playing to the middle for a long time, someone who feels entitled to a steady stream of small raises by being consistently mediocre. I hate my industry! Why am I wasting my time here? I don't want to work in a cube, circling typos, trying to sell text books to rich suburban kids. I want to teach kids! Give me a teaching job, universe!

Ms America

How do people get excited about Miss America? It's the most one-dimensional celebration of generic beauty that never matures, develops or evolves in any way. It's not even regressive, it's static, utterly boring. It's too boring to even write about!...

Israel Protest

Tonight walking out of work I heard an amplified voice, speaking in all capitols coming from the center of a dense black coated crowd in the middle of Copley Square. My initial instinct, callow as I am, is always to avoid anyone who seems to be protesting or fundraising some good cause or another. The notion is always overwhelming, to wrap my mind around a cause I probably know nearly nothing about and come down in favor or against it all in the span of a moment. I should have already made up my mind, and it should be unswayable.
I wandered closer and tried to see where exactly the rally or speech was coming from. As I stepped closer I clearly heard a woman's voice speaking out against Hamas and in support of Israel. Unambiguous, unwavering, pure support of Israel against the inhuman, anti-semitic, genocidal Hamas that uses human shields and kills Israeli children without hesitation. She spoke from a small platform either on the steps of Trinity Church or just off to the side, and was surrounded by men and women in red caps waving Israeli flags. The crowd was surrounded by glinting chain link fences. Police in black uniforms trimmed with reflective neon green stood around, inspecting the crowd, standing between the tiny group of pro-Palestine counter-protesters and the even smaller (apparent) group of Jews who oppose Israel's allegedly unbalanced counter-attacks on Palestine.
I tried to get closer to the center to find out who this woman speaking was, where she came form and how she could so decisively support Israel 100%. A tall, broad limbed policeman glance down at the silver cylinder in my hand when I pressed the button on the top down with a click. I took a sip of green tea, bracing hot within the frigid metal exterior of the thermos, and he looked away. Annoyed for only a second at his suspicion, I realized that my thermos looked too much like a bomb to be a bomb: a metal tube with a bright yellow mechanism in the top with a pressable button.
Just a few days ago I witnessed a group of stomping protesters decrying Israel's unbalanced attacks, labeling them murderers. It's so bizarre to me that the way we talk about Israel and Palestine is SO unilateral, so black and white. You're either an elite liberal anti-Semite who blames Israel for everything, or a Bible-thumping hillbilly who hates Arabs and supports Israel to suck up to The Holy Land in case of the, you know, Revelation. I don't understand how I could come to any definitive, satisfying, non-wishy-washy conclusion: Hamas has committed itself to the destruction of the Jewish state and sends daily barrages of rockets against Israel; Israel insists on annexing land away from the Palestinians, because the Torah says they are supposed to have it, launches a massive strike that indiscriminately kills Palestinian soldiers and civilians. Neither side if innocent. I don't understand how you could side utterly with one side or the other, and yet I also don't understand how you could label someone a bigot for siding more with one than the other. I thought the two-party system was divisive and destructive...

Grub Street

I had my first class at Grub Street tonight, and I really enjoyed it. It's funny, workshops are so similar to one another, and yet so totally individual. Virtually every workshop I've ever taken has had the same format, and yet the vibe, the relationship between the teacher and the students, and the students with each other (or maybe I should say in this class, the participants and the leader, since we're all on closer to even footing) is so personal, so unique. I must admit, I'm impressed ot the point of being a little intimidated by some of the other writers. They just seem like naturals, like people who know the whole format of how to do a workshop, and how to assemble a story, or at least an exercise that feels like a story, on the spot, without much coaching or prompting.
I'm remembering how exciting and terrifying it is to pass out a story I've written, something that I think is a good representation of what I can do, the perspective I bring to the literary world, to a room full of near strangers and the sit silently while you listen to what there people think of it, other people who are your peers or perhaps competitors.
The workshops I took at Reed, or at least with Hillis, and this wasn't really his fault, were combative to the point of being ridiculous. There weren't two competing sides or teams, but
there were definitely people who were out to savage my stuff with their critiques, and people who were out to savage the critiquers not because they liked me, but because they hated them.
I really don't think this experience will anywhere near so charged, but I still wonder what they'll say.
I want to impress them, but on the other hand, I want to hear what they have to say, I want to get honest criticism that will help me improve. It's the old balance between going out on a limb, and excelling at what you do well, between taking a risk for the experience of really testing the limits of what you do, and in taking a risk for the sake of taking a risk, for fear of being labeled safe.
I've seen too many reality competition shows! Every time I watch Top Chef (or, to a lesser extent, Project Runway), I picture a writer's version of it, where the shitty writers get eliminated first.

Books

I finished two novels today--I didn't realize that I only had seven pages left in each one, and had obviously been half-consciously putting off finishing them.
What Maisie Knew was so dense, so complex and subtle. It really is an amazingly precise novel, where every line is written so as to require close, close reading to see all the depth it encloses. Everything that goes on, all the social/sexual power-trading that goes on between the adults, and what Maisie understands perfectly and what she misses, (and what she holds back), as well as what the adults do not realize she knows and see that she doesn't, is all encoded in the precise, subtle use of language. Each sentence demands a great deal of close attention, and yet the whole novel is generally fun, light, exciting and pleasurable.
The other one I finished was Gentlemen of the Road. This book couldn't be more opposed; it's utterly light, fun, throwaway, devoid of subtlety. The history that provides the background where the extremely broad story takes place, is carefully crafted (much as in Yiddish Policemen's Union), but the story itself doesn't require any attention. It's pure pulp, swasbuckling adventure. The characterization is exactly the same as in Kavalier and Clay and Yiddish (and somewhat Summerland), except with far less depth: you've got the sensitive, dour, smart yet adventurous hero, with his touch, cynical, realistic sidekick (it's a little Lethal Weapon, I must say) and his unsentimental, get things done would-be girlfriend, just trying to get by with their zany money-making scheme that unwittingly to them becomes an end of the world epic adventure.

Workshop

My writing workshop starts tomorrow night. I'm nervous, because I haven't taken a workshop since sophomore year in college. I'm nervous about impressing my workshop members and teacher, and I'm worried about caring what they think of me. I know I'm a good writer--why should I care if they approve? I can pull a solid workshop story out of my ass. And yet, I haven't done that in a long time. I'm confident that I could fucking rock this workshop (it's just a nonprofit that advertises on the subway--it's not like writing at Reed, where people expect you to be rewriting Finnegan's Wake, or else you're "not really living up to expectations). I'm not sure how open to be, how recpeptive, how vulnerable to let myself be.

Great Day

God we had a wonderful day today. All week and msot of yesterday I was stressed out, feeling riritated, like every day had a splitner stuck under it, irritating my skin--I couldn't dig it out without grinding it in deeper, grating the flesh around it. What would have been mild annoyances became what felt like real pain, a real detriment. The phone rang every few minutes, forcing em to change gears. I can't stand changing gears back and forth, having my concentration derailed. I need to build up steam, to keep plowing forward, gathering momentum.
Today we just relaxed around the hosue all day, and spent time onyl with each other. I love my wife so much, and I wish we could lead more parallel lives. We go to bed at different times, work on different days, run on different schedules. Being apart is ncie when we're both leaving for work at the same time, but the way it is, we both have a day alone where we can never quite do what we want to do in our separate lives, and we also don't have quite enough time to really spend together on our one overlap day.

Scarface

I finally saw Scarface tonight. I could never watch the whole movie before, because in high school I'd seen the climactic assault-rifle, grenade launcher, bloodpak menage-a-trois scene several times, and it's kind of hard to walk into a movie with an open mind after watching such an unbelievably over the top ending action sequence. My god, it made A Better Tomorrow Two
seem subtle. I lied it a lot, but it was definitely more Casino than Goodfellas. It was so 80's, I couldn't believe it, to the sythy disco score to the polyester shirts to the montage near the end. I'll never think of a chainsaw as an unnecessary addition.
My favorite was the sunglasses-wearing assassin at the end who sneaks in, all silent and android-like and delivers the final shot (via shotgun, no less!) to Tony. He's like the taciturn samurai who steals the rifle and then takes a nap from Seven Samurai, or Snake-Eyes from GI Joe, or the overseer in mirored shades from Cool Hand Luke. He's Boba Fett! He has nothingt o do with the movie, he's just a bad ass who appears in the middle of the movie, does something incredibly bad-ass and then the movie's over!

Meehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

All week long I've been helping other people make up their minds, helping people make decisions that they should be able to make on their own, and listening to them drone on about details about their day, what they were thinking, how they made their decisions--forcing stories that don't interest me in the slightest. The second I start thinking about something that interests me, something that's important to me, the phone rings, or I get another email, or my wife or my mother or my father or my boss asks to think about something else. I keep being distracted by one thing after another, when all I want to do is worry about the one ro two things that have any relevance.
I want, I need, a better job, either in a school, publishing ro possibly a non-profit of some kind or another, Iw ant to take my writing workshop and be able to devote some serious thought to it, and I want to start applying for Masters in education. I'm either going to go to school part time while working (maybe as an editorial assistant), or go into this program where you student teach as a job as well as take ed classes on the non-teaching days.
Every second I have to sit still and have a quiet moment, where I can think about writing, plan my education, I get an email from my mother suggesting a different program, or Beanz asks me to make a different plan, to think about and worry about our vacation (which won't be coming up for almost five months!), Tony starts droning on about the completely and totally ordinary day he's had, Russ or Armen or someone else at work starts freaking about over something completely stupid and juvenile. My job is dragging me down into a world of ignorance, laziness and simple-mindedness, and my home life is sometimes like the horrible radio, a constant distracting white noise of repetitive, annoying mundane logistical details, purely ordinary little details I don't want to think about, a decision I would normally just make without agonizing it over.
The main difference btween em and Beanz is that she takes every decision like they're equally important: she agonizes ove rit for weeks (years, sometimes), reads up on it, and talks about it constantly, and then in the end she winds up makign a snap ecision and worrying if it was right. Because sometimes you can only make a snap decision. No matter how much you plan, you're going to overlook one key detail that totally hanges the range of choices you can even consider.
I on the other hand, refuse to worry about minor decisions. They simply slide to the back of my mind, where I consider them offhand, then I think about it seriously for a very short time, before just making the decision so I don't have to worry about it anymore. She's incredibly indesive because she's afraid to make the wrong decision, but she has to make the decisions in the end, so she always needs my help to help her consider the options (playing Devil's advocate is what it feels like to me). I simply don't make decisions, until I have to, and then I make them swiftly, decisively and with minor but wll-planned considerations. Other than that, I play eveyrthing by ear. She can't play anything by ear, ever.

Eating

Tibetan food is exactly what you wanted to have for dinner, but didn't realize it until the first bite touched your lips. My wife and Iw ere talking tonight about food that is superficially pleasing and food that is fundamentally satisfying. Fake sugar, and super refined fatty and sugary foods, mass-produced McDoritos shit (CMTV tries to mass-market this brand of bland jingoistic Americanism to a country that defies that characterirzation yet embraces the same stereotype--selling the idea of white trash to white trash that wants to be Gangsta) tastes great up until you're about halfway done, when your brain starts to realize that your taste buds have been swindled. And yet the notion of complete (whole) foods has been co-opted, commodified, and mass-marketed to rich yuppies to assuage their sense of paranoia and reinforce their sense of superiority to the masses they condescend to patronize.

Buttcracks

There are two kinds of people whose butt cracks are always sticking out: plumbers, of course, and homeless guys.

Pay Me, Bitch!

Today was that day when I had to tell people how to do their jobs for them all day long, over and over again. No one could do anything without asking me if they were doing the right thing. I would love to be in charge of anyone, to have a small amount of responsibility, to be in a position to make decisions. But I'm not. I am a Mail Clerk I. Why are the Group Leader and the Supervisor asking me how something should be done? Pay me, bitch! This has been my frustration throughout my entire professional life: I can't get a real job, but I wind up in these horrible low-class jobs where people ask me what am I doing there? (Why don't you ask the people who refuse to hire me?), and I wind up shouldering all the responsibility with absolutely none of the credit or...remuneration, shall we say?

Drawing Animals

I can't draw animals--I always proportion them as if they were humans sitting in animal-like poses. There's something about the way the head hangs over the rest of the body, the way the limbs bend and gester, implying humans emotions rather than the blankness, the unreadablity that animals do.

Teaching

I talked to our friend Tracy tonight about programs for getting a masters in education, and getting "floor experience, direct eperience teaching chidlren and learning realitic, practical skills as a teacher.
I told hr that my one fear about Harvard's program which is all about teaching inner city kids is that I would run into the same program ANova did with Teach for America, that the whole dynamic would be about this kid from Harvard coming dwon from an Ivy tower to teach poor disadvantaged little people the errors in their ways. But Tracy tod me that at Charlestown high school almost everyone had come from Harard or some other Ivy league school and that principals really appreciate, in genral at least, teachers who go the extra distance ot get a really "serious" education. I totally appreicate that fact, because I would like to take a vry serious, very academic, techncial approach to teaching, and yet I wnt to really be getting practical skills, not just understanding the "pure" approach to the theory of education.

Sick Language

I had more problems with this article. Maybe it is alarmist to call obesity an epidemic, but can we at least agree it;s a problem? Have you been on a city subway filed with teenage girls lately? Many of the fourteen eyar old girls I see are either obese, sitting across ("in" really isn't the right preposition) three seats while texting, drinking soda and eating chips, or beanpole anorexic and smoking cigarettes, hoping to be noticed by a guy seven years older then her.
Even if it's loosey-goosey to reapproriate the terminology from epidemiology (ooh, big words, he must be a scientist!) to describe a eprsonal failing, does that necesarrily obviate the role of personal responsibility, giving it up to the Huge Government Spendocats (because lord knows Dick Cheney wasn't bi government or big spending) If something is an epidemic, we try to be more careful about what we do with our bodies, we help the people afflicted, we teach them how to help themselves, and we try to stop them from being discriminated against by people who blame them for getting themselves into this mess. Maybe it is their fault, but that doesn't mean we don't help him. Maybe obesity isn't a disease per se, but why is it so absurd to talk about it in those terms?

Fat and Sloppy

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/952dsuys.asp

These liberal pansies, using "statistics" from "respected colleges" such as "Yale" to back up their arguments!
How incredibly unscientific it is to ridicule flaky, unscientific liberals for using stats that "seem too exact." Think I'm misusing a figure? By all means, ask me too back it up, by all means, provide a counter stat, by all means, point out the error in my logic, by all means, interpret the figure another way. But don't point at it and say, "Yeah right."
I started out sympathetic to this article, because I sometimes think all this whining about fat-discrimination is ridiculous. I've noticed that people do their whining about how being obese really isn't their fault on Livejournal, Secondlife and World of Warcraft chatrooms while eating Fritos (please note that I'm blogging, am extremely thin, and used to use LJ, so powder me a big hypocrite). And yet, he totally loses me after a paragraph or two, by collapsing the distinction between the standard eye-rolls: "liberals are too quick to remove personal responsibility" and "liberals want to solve everything with taxes." His closing argument runs, "These liberals will get you coming and going: they want to protect you from being discriminated against for being fat, and they want to pass a tax on the food that makes you fat! First, they you to be treated fairly, and then they want to encourage you to eat more healthily! How dare they!" He goes on to make the go-to argument for Bill O'Reilly types, the slipper- slope. What's to stop some lazy fattie in the future from claiming that the tax on fatty food (it's just a tax on one food, soda which tends to be distributed by titanic companies and made entirely out of nutritionless corn) constitutes prejudice against the fat? Well, has anyone made that claim? Are you hoping someone will? I say, go ahead, let someone claim that. And I'll tell them that taxing soda does not punish you for being fat, it punishes you for drinking soda. You might not be able to help being fat, but you can help yourself from drinking soda.

Psuedo-Rebellion

Are you a twenty-year-old girl, anorexic, covered in tattoos (usually "nautical stars"), totally into the same twenty indie rock bands that all hipsters are obsessed with (or the same six black metal bands that the big smelly guys you want to date [to scandalize your dad], and pose naked on the internet with your pubes shaved off while hanging out smoking and drinking PBR before dropping out halfway into an English degree from a non-credited private hippie college in a major city? Will you just trust me that you are not a Republican? I understand that you only ever hang out with flaky people who totally hate George Bush and totally aren't sure why, and super left-wing college professors who totally tell you to be offended by stuff that you think is totally boring and like whatever, man. Can you do me a favor a move to a place other than Williamsburg, LA, San Francisco, or Seattle? Will you please just do me a favor and take a quick roadtrip through not-so rural New Hampshire and trust me that a lot of the country is full of gun-toting hillbillies who think you are a dirty fag-loving slut because you have the audacity to miss Church more than once in your life? Do you believe me that the Daily Show does not represent the general political leanings of the average American? It might be 'trendy' to be liberal, angry about the direction the country went in the last eight years, vote for Obama and drink soy milk, but it is much much more cliche and pointless to try to be contradictory to a perceived majority due to your lack of perspective.