February 2005 Archives
February 18, 2005
New Job
I have a new job at a bookstore café. They asked me to come in on Wednesday morning to fill out all the paperwork and get a tour of the store. I came in at 8AM, rang this creepy doorbell/buzzer, and was greeted at the front door by a custodian who wasn’t specifically familiar with the English language. He glared at me suspiciously.
“You work now?” he asked through a heavy accent.
“Yeah, I’m new,” I said. “I’m here to meet with Julie.”
He looked at me blankly, then motioned for me to come inside the store.
As I entered, I was taken aback somewhat by the hugeness and emptiness of the place at eight o’clock in the morning. Everything’s so still and peaceful, in spite of heavy orange extension cords strewn about and the obnoxious whir of a carpet cleaner.
“Where can I find Julie?” I asked the custodian, who gave me another blank look. After a few moments of mental digestion, he nodded and motioned toward the back of the store.
“In the back?” I asked, referring to the staff area where I had been interviewed.
“Back, back,” he repeated excitedly.
“Thanks,” I said and made my way to the back, where I laid eyes on one of the most attractive women I’ve ever personally met: Julie, the human resources manager. I’d never met her before
Posted by Stan on February 18, 2005 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
February 16, 2005
Souls Crushed: Hollywood Edition
This afternoon, Lucy started asking me all these questions about my impending trip to Los Angeles: when I’m leaving, when/if I’m coming back, where I’m staying, —
That last one tripped her up, when I responded, “In one of those extended-stay type of hotels.”
When she wondered why, I explained that I’d rather not get too comfortable with my intial trip there, because I don’t want to stay. I will stay as long as I feel I have to for my career (which, I’ll say, could be years), but I have kind of a Barton Fink mentality about the whole thing. I want to stay in the cheapest, least homey place that I possibly can for a minimum of 15 weeks, living out of my suitcase, so I can continue living the illusion that I’m only there temporarily.
I was scarred by a television writing professor I had several semesters ago. She grew up in LA, a child of the entertainment (specifically writing) world, who had seen and experienced that life all the way until she became a writer who ran away to Chicago to get away from Hollywood, at a time when people thought Chicago would become a hub for television shows (thanks to long-gone shows like Crime Story, Early Edition, and What About Joan). When that fizzled, she started teaching, because she just didn’t want to go back and be a part of it.
She always used to level with me in private, because for some reason she respected my abilities and knew how much I yearned to be a television writer. She said things like, “In show business, there are two types of people: vampires who will lie, cheat, and steal their way as far as it’ll get them, and the hapless friends and colleagues whose souls the vampires suck. Which one are you now, and which one will you be once you get into a kill-or-be-killed position?”
Weirdly, in my job experience, I’ve found this to be something of a universal. Lucy agreed, pointing out that this is the way most of the people at Lowe’s behave. I pointed out, though, that in a low-rung retail job or an office job, there isn’t the delusion of any kind of dream-factory wonderland at the end of the rainbow of soul-destruction. People are more realistic, and it really comes down to greed and ignorance.
I wouldn’t consider myself willfully ignorant, but I’m also not greedy. I like money, but I don’t go after a promotion to make more money or amass power. It’s partly because I’m mired in that mid-20s malaise, where I want as little responsibility as possible. Mostly, though, I’m wired to feel that constant twinge of Catholic guilt every time I remember doing something really rotten. I still feel guilty about stuff I distantly remember doing in preschool, whenever it pops into my head: “In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done that.” I get passed over in favor of people who are less qualified, but because I’m not tugging for the brass ring, not because I have no idea why they don’t want to promote me, those bastards.
There’s a classy song in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, about the virtue of playing it “the company way.” The reason why it’s hilarious is because it’s sung by a guy who’s still working in the mailroom after 40 or so years (but he was just recently promoted to head of the mailroom!). Despite his lack of promotions, age, and length at the company, the character still believes that being a yes-man is the only way to get ahead. He doesn’t even wonder why he’s being passed over; he just thinks it’ll come to him in time.
That, my friends, is ignorance.
Throughout this conversation with Lucy, she started to feel worse and worse about me, my feelings, my absolute terror at the thought of compromising my being to be successful in a profession I chose for some reason, and my preemptive cynicism regarding a business that I know something about but have not personally experienced. I finally concluded, “They say ignorance is bliss, but I never really believed that too much, which is probably why I’m such a mess all the time.”
Lucy responded, “I believe it sometimes.”
But I don’t. I can’t. Yes, strange things happen in my life that cannot be explained in any good way, and I sometimes am willing to look past it and feign ignornace, but it’s been a really long time since I’ve been thoroughly duped by my own ignorance. I’m too distrustful, after many years of ignorance-dupings.
Really, though, it comes down to my utter fear that I will either become the vampire, stealing others’ material for my own personal gain, or I’ll become the loser who gets stuff stolen from him. I don’t want to be either, but that seems unfeasible at this point.
Posted by Stan on February 16, 2005 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling
February 13, 2005
New Comment System
With the upgrade to MovableType 3.15 comes a new system of comments registration, which I’ve finally enabled. Essentially, you sign up (for free) to a system called TypeKey, make your account, and then you can sign in to comment on this or any other MovableType blog, automatically. I’m not sure how the signing in/signing out stuff works (i.e., how long you’ll stay signed in without having to retype your information), but it seems relatively painless, all things considered.
It’d be nice if anybody who comments regularly (I’m looking at you, wolfie) would register to this system; otherwise, “anonymous” (i.e., unregistered comments, even if you fill in the name/email/website fields) will have to be approved in order to appear on the site, and you know how lazy I am…
Thanks.
Posted by Stan on February 13, 2005 8:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
February 10, 2005
‘The Terminizor: An Erotic Thriller?’
For the last several months, my friend Laurie has been working on an adaptation for a motivational speaker named Nathaniel Henry. He preaches a philosophy that he calls N.A.T.E.: “Never anything too easy.” This is also the title of his book, which from what I understand he has self-published to sell after giving his brand of motivational speeches. It’s essentially a jumbled, nonlinear autobiography about how he gradually learned not to be a junior thug and how his life experiences shaped the philosophy he extols today. The point of his lectures, and his books, seem to be, “Look, kids, I was just like you, and I rose above it to get to where I am today.”
And apparently he’s pretty high up, because he’s willing to personally bankroll a low-budget film based on his life (and the book). Of course, he may have cut some corners by, for example, hiring poor college students who are basically working for their name on the credits and a tiny, tiny, way-below-scale stipend. Which is cool for all involved: Nate gets a competent but cheap crew, and the students get their name on a movie that would hopefully turn out better than most graduate thesis films.
Laurie’s been struggling with the adaptation, and I’ve been helping her with story ideas, so really, we’re both struggling, because we have to do exactly what Nathaniel Henry wants, but what he wants is not entirely conducive to quality screenwriting. Not that I’m surprised, because the book isn’t exactly Dan Brown, but it’s a bit annoying because Laurie will come up with an idea like, for example, “What if, instead of flashing forward and back like the book, we just spend a single year or two in his life and concentrate the events and his point of view in that time?” I thought that was the best way of distilling the pertinent information, but Henry said, “That ain’t how it happened.” Which I suppose is the age-old problem with biopics, particularly when the subjects are personally involved, but you have to take dramatic license, especially with such a low budget. It’s not going to be easy to recreate the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s on a tiny budget.
I’m getting distracted from the main point, which is that she’s struggling with it, and it’s painful every time a reasonable idea gets shot down by Mr. Nathaniel Henry, motivational speaker extraordinaire. So it was exceptionally annoying when he brought a director into the mix. This director has never done a feature (or anything else that we’re aware of), but he’s well past being a student. I think “friend of Nate’s” is the highest credit he’s ever had. This is all right, since he’s not really throwing or concepts or insisting on changes to the difficult-to-manage script.
He is, however, working on somewhat of a contingency basis: his directing N.A.T.E.: The Movie depends on whether or not his own film comes to fruition. Nate agreed to kick in some money on this director’s own project, but until he gets more financing, it’s pretty much dead in the water. Unfortunately, it’s hard for him to lure potential backers when he doesn’t exactly have a script.
Enter Laurie. The first time she and the director met, he handed her some paper and said, “I got this script I wrote. I wondered if you could punch it up a little.” She was hesitant, but Nate (who is paying her) urged her to help him complete his script. And here’s where the movie business starts to suck: so many backs scratching so many others, and it’s inevitable somebody’s going to get screwed. Usually, it’s the writer, and this case was no exception: “Here, do a free rewrite of my script or I’ll see that you never get a film credit.” Not that these guys are particularly powerful, but you never know — Nate’s story could be the next Rocky, and Laurie’s in on the ground floor. She doesn’t want to fuck that up.
So Laurie took the script, read it, was baffled, and called me. “You wanna take a look at this script?” she asked. “I read it, but doesn’t make any sense.” Good thing she called me, the smartest man alive. The next time I saw her (this was a few months ago, back when I saw her multiple times a week), she had the script in tow.
This director’s screenplay reminded me a little too much of that Simpsons episode with Alec Baldwin, Ron Howard, and Kim Basinger. Homer writes that script about an evil robot driving instructor that travels through time for some reason, and they say, “Um, Homer, most movie scripts are 120 pages. Yours is 17, and most of them are just drawings of the time machine.” This script was 16 pages, and the last five were handwritten in a chickenscratch that makes my penmanship look neat. They say brevity is the source of wit, but I’m afraid this script wasn’t supposed to be funny.
Laurie was right about it not making much sense, but I attribute this to the fact that it just seemed incomplete, or that this was kind of a “scriptment” type of thing — the hybrid of the screenplay and the treatment, where you describe some scenes briefly but will occasionally write some brief dialogue exchanges to give a feel for what’s going on. Laurie kept insisting that the director believed that this was the actual script, 100% complete, no paraphrasing, but certain statements in the action blocks kept referring to previous events that happened, which is generally a no-no anyway, but even more of a no-no when the events to which you refer never happened.
On top of that, one of the characters comes back from the dead. This was in the handwritten pages, which say at the top “after page 11,” but it seems like all the disjointed scenes written by hand exist to fill in the many, many narrative gaps in the first eleven pages, which I suppose would explain the character’s resurrection, but the director didn’t exactly explain this.
What I got out of the plot was that it’s basically another one of those frenetic, borderline incoherent drug-dealer movies, full of dirty cops and explosions and two drug dealers (male and female) both literally and figuratively screwing one another, which eventually descends into a big, pseudo-romantic “are we in love or do we need to blow each other’s heads off?” kind of ending. Because of the poor writing, it was extremely difficult to follow, so maybe I’m wrong about what the story actually is. Of course, it didn’t matter too much, because…
“This director says he got Delroy Lindo to play a part,” Laurie announced when I was done reading. “He’s committed to 15 days of shooting a supporting role.”
“Who the hell is he gonna play?” I asked. I love Delroy Lindo and all, but there are three male roles: the young, studly drug dealer; the seemingly indestructible, terminator-type bounty hunter (Mario van Peebles of Solo fame would be perfect!); and the dirty cop who ends up getting blown away in the middle of the movie before coming back to life for some reason. Now, he could play the dirty cop, except that he’s specifically intended to be a big fat white guy. Not that there are any hard or fast rules for characterization in a 16-page feature script, but it did seem like his whiteness and fatness were pretty important.
“He doesn’t have a character yet,” Laurie said, “but the director says he’s just going to ad lib everything, so it’s cool.” She laughed.
Good God. How’d she get involved in something this bad?
“Look, I don’t even know if I’m going to do this,” she said, reading my mind. “It’s a really, really bad script, and I don’t want to just write it for him because he’s not gonna give me credit and he’s not gonna pay me. I’ll do maybe 15 pages — a real 15 pages — and he can do the rest or find somebody else. I don’t like how he keeps hitting on me, anyway.”
I didn’t like how he kept hitting on her, either, though I had just found out about it.
She did end up quitting, she told me a few days ago. She didn’t feel obligated because, once this director got the Delroy Lindo ball rolling, apparently he no longer needed Nate or his movie. Ironically, shortly after quitting Nate’s film, Delroy Lindo and all the financing dropped out. I can’t really imagine why, especially if he showed him his well-planned script.
She told me she finished a draft of N.A.T.E.: The Movie, at long last, but she’s not sure how he’ll receive it. Her (logical) thought is to capture Nate’s philosophy through a series of largely fictional events, since there really is no cohesive narrative, and the few snippets of his life that are dramatically compelling (like the father who abandoned him as a child returning when he was a teenager) are mostly glossed over in the book, aside from a brief mention followed by pages of whining about being “hurt.”
So hey, good luck to Laurie. If this gets made and is even marginally successful, I can look forward to riding on her coattails.
Posted by Stan on February 10, 2005 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
February 9, 2005
The IQ Test
Lucy may be the mistress of bad choices, a part of her psychology that I’ll never fully understand, but I’ve always believed she’s smarter than me. Always, unquestionably, no matter how dumbassy she sometimes behaves. Because, I know, when she actually takes the time to think something through, she’s really damn smart. Also, she beats me at Trivial Pursuit, which is the true measure of a man; seriously, it is. Even King Lear thinks so. It’s why he went crazy. Cordelia kept beating him at Trivial Pursuit. “NO LAND FOR THEE, HARLOT!” he often screamed after she got the final pie wedge. In those days, they played for actual wedges of pie, and Lear loved his desserts. His division of the kingdom into pie-like slices for his daughters came directly from his crippling Trivial Pursuit losses.
History, my friends, is a wonderful thing.
It surprised me a few weeks ago when Lucy started insisting I was “going places,” and I’d “be something great.” She clearly doesn’t read this blog thoroughly enough, but that’s neither here nor there. The point was, I started arguing that while it’s obvious that I’ll be the greatest television writer since Kevin Williamson, it’s not too late for her. Sure, she dropped out of school and is working at Lowe’s in Iowa City. Not the life any of us imagines at the outset, but she’s 22 damn years old.
This started an argument: who is smarter, her or me? She thought I was; I insisted she was, and then she, ironically, got upset with me for being such an idiot.
“What’s your IQ?” she asked after we remembered that we both got the same ACT score. (And as we all know, standardized testing is the true measure of a man. I was just joking earlier about that whole Trivial Pursuit thing.)
“How the fuck should I know?” I asked. I vaguely remembered taking an IQ test in school and not being told how I did. I assumed from the suspicious glares from administrators that I did pretty badly, but I guess it could go either way. Perhaps they were frustrated by my intellectual capacity, or maybe they just thought I was secretly laughing at their ugly ties (I was). I also took one of those Internet IQ tests, but I couldn’t remember how I did, which meant it couldn’t be impressive.
“We’re taking one right now,” she said, and sent me a link to the same Internet IQ test I took years ago. I gotta say, I love living in this day and age because, much like in a cartoon, you can say, “We’re going to do [something] right now,” and you can magically do it, or at least get the ball rolling on it, immediately. Yay for instant gratification — it seems the ’80s did pay off for future generations.
Fifteen to 20 minutes later, our results came back. I got a 152; she got a 138 (down from 146, which she got the last time she took the test way back when). Since she was basing her entire “you’re smarter than me” argument on numbers and test results, this made it much more difficult to argue that she is, in fact, smarter than I am, despite the fact that I guessed on most of the math questions. Apparently they were educated guesses, but I didn’t know what the fuck most of them were talking about. Plus, I was trying to answer them as quickly as possible because the top of the test said something like “if you take more than 30 seconds answering a question, your score will be lower,” so it’s not like I had the time to Google the answers.
So does this mean I actually am smarter than Lucy? I guess, but why does that matter? And why does the fact that I’m 14 points smarter than her mean that she has to settle with a life in which she’s unhappy? According to the little breakdown, 133+ is Mensa-worthy, and 130+ means she’d be smart enough for law school or medical school. None of this made her feel better, because the 150+ column said I’m so smart I should only be working in the mysterious catacombs underneath the Pentagon, learning to solve a Rubik’s Cube in eight seconds or something.
Still, I don’t understand why it matters. Look at how stupid most people are, and look at how successful they can be. If anything, being smart has cursed me, because I spend 80% of my life wondering why everyone is so fucking stupid all the time GAAAAAAAAAH. Consequently, I find myself drawn to people who are as smart, or smarter, than I am, so I’m always feeling intellectually inferior. I’m stick in the middle, and it drives me crazy. CRAZY!
I tried explaining these things to Lucy. She thinks I’m just using that as an excuse for misanthropy. Maybe she’s right…
I finally distracted her with the idea that we could turn this blog into a graphic novel, a Harvey Pekar-esque romp through middle-class suburbia, featuring classic stories from this blog, from Lucy’s life, and from our hilarious adventures together. She got excited about that, but then insisted she can’t draw “cartoons.” We argued some more, but at least she stopped believing she’s an idiot.
Temporarily, anyway…
Posted by Stan on February 9, 2005 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
February 7, 2005
New Layout
Hey, since we’ve upgraded to a new version of MovableType, the layout of this blog has undergone some slight changes. Some of them I like; a lot of them I don’t. However, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, so I’ll just be doing a lot of trial and error ot fix them over the next few weeks. Do not be alarmed.
Posted by Stan on February 7, 2005 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
February 6, 2005
Whistling Dixon
Earlier this week, I was a little annoyed. Because of my prostate infection, I was forced to miss what was surely a great show, with Elizabeth Elmore opening solo for Juliana Hatfield. Because of my dad’s birthday, I missed another Reputation show in early January. Now they’re back in the area, but the closest they were playing was Iowa City on the 3rd.
I already had plans to come out and visit Lucy on the 8th to see Kathryn Musilek, the bestest folk-rocker in the Midwest, and I wanted to see The Rep, as well, so I asked Lucy how likely it was that I could stay at her boyfriend’s apartment for five days straight. Unfortunately, since she would be working for much of that time, the chances were slim; I haven’t met this new boyfriend, but I almost certainly won’t get along with him. She told me that he was okay with me staying there, but she and I agreed it probably wasn’t a great idea.
Then, fate stepped in. Kathryn announced a new date popped up: she was playing on the 3rd now; she was opening at one venue, The Rep were headlining another. Both shows started at the same time, and one venue is around the corner from another. The whole thing would work so well. Plus, Lucy had Friday off, so we could hang out before I drove back home. I was pretty pumped about the turn of events, until I realized that my car’s a piece of shit.
Ever since I returned from Seattle, it’s been troubling. I got an oil change and had the sway bar repaired as soon as I got home, but still, its performance has been a bit off. My dad says I’m not used to driving a car with a sway bar that isn’t worn out, which is fair, but I’ve had the car for going on five years, and it’s never driven this poorly.
However, being that I’m both unemployed and generally cheap, I haven’t bothered to get it fixed, or even looked at. I’ve just been driving it, and it’s been reliable enough getting me to and from Cumberland and around the area, but I was pretty worried about taking it on a long, interstate trip, particularly since there’s almost nothing but empty space between Chicago and Iowa City.
I spent most of Thursday afternoon hemming and hawing and annoying most of my friends about whether or not I should go. My decision was made for me when Elizabeth offered to comp my ticket if I made the trip. I got in my car and went to get gas before heading out to Iowa.
At the gas station, before I left, I thought, “I should check my oil. I’m gonna be driving nearly 250 miles, and I haven’t checked it in months. This could be bad.”
“Actually,” I continued to think as I looked at the sticker on the upper corner of my windshield, “I’m two months overdue for an oil change. I should go get one real quick and then go.”
I looked at the clock — I was already running a bit late, as I was intending to drive slower than usual to ensure I would make it — and thought, “Fuck it,” before hitting the road.
For 4PM on a Thursday, traffic getting out of the city was surprisingly light. I, however, was increasingly suspicious of any noises I heard, despite the fact that most of them were coming from the rough roads or other cars. When I got through Aurora, where traffic really dies as bland office complexes of the suburbs fade into the empty farm fields of central Illinois, it was much easier to assess my car’s situation. I was, as much as possible, attempting to roar up between 75 and 80 (so much for going slower…), but as I reached speeds higher than 55, my car just really didn’t want to continue accelerating. I kept pushing it, because honestly, even with my CDs to keep me company, driving through the rural Illinois is boring.
I will say, though, that as the sun went down, and the gray clouds turned pinkish-orange, the snow-covered hills and dead trees looked more beautiful than what I normally see in the midst of the disgusting Chicagoland area. I thought as I passed through DeKalb (arguably the last “big” city before the Quad Cities on the opposite end of the state) that I should have stopped, maybe given my car a rest, checked the oil, and gotten something to eat. I went back and forth in my head and decided that the car didn’t seem that bad.
As twilight faded into dusk, and civilization disappeared almost entirely, I started to notice that the hood of my car was shaking violently. I wasn’t sure if that was normal for aging cars, but I had never noticed it on mine before, and I thought it was a bad, bad thing. The engine temperature monitor, I noticed, had slowly crept from the “C” to the first hashmark — a quarter of the way to “H.” Kind of a big leap, I thought, for only driving 90 minutes. I don’t know shit about cars, though, and I never really paid attention to this on previous trips to Iowa.
My panic increased, and at the next mid-sized town with gas, food, and lodging would be my pit stop.
I ended up pulling off at Dixon, a town known primarily for being the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. I pulled off at a rather large BP/food court/service station, which fortunately was right off the Interstate, popped the hood, and examined the engine, whirling and sputtering and making a horrifying, constant clicking noise.
After gently weeping for several minutes, I noticed it was after 5:30. I whipped out my cell phone and called my dad, who should have been home by then. He actually knows shit about cars, so he could’ve at least coached me through well enough to get me back home.
He hadn’t gotten home yet, though, so I had to tell my mother what was going on. She freaked the hell out, as is her way; we both hoped my dad would get home soon. Fortunately, he did after a couple of minutes. He asked me for symptoms, asked to hear the random clicking noise, and coached me through various diagnosis steps, such as checking the power steering fluid.
Eventually, he determined it was most likely a lack of oil. That’s right, when I went to check the oil, the goddamn thing was coated right up to the line that says “ADD 1 QT.” This was after running through a bunch of different potential problems, and my dad was really frustrated because he figured, despite knowing nothing about cars, I would be smart enough to not go on a long-distance, high-speed trip without at least checking the oil level. He doesn’t know me well at all.
His advice: buy a can of oil and head home. He said, if it was the oil (he wasn’t positive, but it seemed like a sure thing at that point), I would have the pleasure of feeling like an idiot in the privacy of my own home, but if it wasn’t the oil and I kept on going to Iowa, things would get even worse. Quad Cities excepting, the further you get away from Chicago, the more difficult it is to find help.
So I dumped in a quart of oil and headed back home. The ride was still shaky, but the closer I got to home, the smoother the ride became. Eventually, it was back pretty much to normal, the way it had been driving back at the beginning of the semester — not great (my dad still swears it’s just that I’m not used to the sway bar), but no violent shaking. I definitely could have made it to Iowa.
Yesterday, just to be safe, my dad and I both took my car out on the expressway for a bit, so he could listen and feel for the problems I described. Unfortunately, they were all gone. Giving me a bunch of very Hank Hill “that boy ain’t right”-esque looks, he simply told me to go to the shop and tell them to change the oil but alert them to the clicking noise in the engine (which was still there, despite the lack of performance problems). He figured, considering the smoothness of the drive, that it was just a normal age thing, but better safe than sorry.
So that’s it. Comped tickets, seeing two of my three favorite musicians play on the same night, and spending quality time with my best friend — all gone, because I am too fucking lazy to deal with basic automotive maintenance tasks.
I’ve said it once, but it bears repeating: I suck at existence.
(What’s doubly painful: Lucy finally realized that Tuesday, the 8th, is Mardi Gras, so she refuses to let me come down and ruin her good time with my “evils of alcohol” rap, so I’d have nowhere to stay if I went down for the second Kathryn Musilek show. Sigh.)
Posted by Stan on February 6, 2005 7:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Stories of Pain and Humiliation
