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!!!!