July 2005 Archives
July 11, 2005
A Brief Example of Why I Don’t Like Any of My Friends
I’ve known Kelly since we were 12-years-old, but I didn’t really get to know her well until sophomore year of high school. We were in an awful play together, during which we spent the bulk of the time mocking everyone and everything around us while waiting to rehearse the combined total of five lines we had in the show. We’ve had ups and downs, friendship-wise, because sometimes she can be uniquely unpleasant.
Gradually, though, as she’s gone through college, she’s experienced more of the world, mellowed out a bit, and become an actual decent human being. Except when it comes to making plans.
Thursday morning, she IM-ed me to announce that she, at long last, had a break in her schedule, so she wanted to know if I wanted to have dinner with her when she got off work at 8:30. I haven’t seen her in months, so I agreed. I haven’t seen many people since I’ve come back to town, mostly because nobody I know — in the area, anyway — is a chronically unemployed fuck-up with a lot of free time; it’s hard to be worked into others’ busy schedules, and it gets tedious trying to make plans that inevitably get broken because something else comes up at the last minute.
So this was good: not only did I have plans — I had plans with somebody who sought me out first. I didn’t have to call her up and beg…
…did I?
The day stretched into evening, and eventually, I realized 8:30 had passed, so I decided to give Kelly a call and see if we were still on for the evening; it went to VoiceMail, so I muttered some profanities and thought, “She’s gonna blow me off. She’ll either just flat-out ignore me, or she’ll send me an IM to at least make a half-hearted effort. But she won’t call.”
When I checked my computer a few hours later, I had an IM waiting for me:
9:18:05 PM Kelly: hey, I saw you called…..I just got home from work and didn’t have my phone on me
Argh.
She was still online, so I told her it was no biggie and maybe some other time.
“Sure,” Kelly said. “Hey, maybe we could have lunch tomorrow. I have a dentist appointment at 11, and then I have to work at two, but if I get done fast enough, we’d have enough time.”
“All right,” I said. “That sounds cool.”
Friday morning, I ran some errands, and when I got back home shortly after 11, I got on the computer (sigh) and saw Kelly sitting online.
“What happened to the dentist?” I asked, kind of irritated.
She explained she woke up really sick, and it was so bad she decided just to cancel her appointment and would probably call in sick from work. I automatically assumed lunch was off. She started rambling and implying she has this sinus thing that seems to be going around, so I was telling her about a really effective expectorant I found. Because I’m annoying and obnoxious, I would not shut up about this stuff (Mucinex, it’s called), so she finally said, “I have the flu. I can’t take anything for that.”
Oh…kay.
I wished her well and she signed off.
Saturday afternoon, she IM-ed me once again.
“Guess who I had dinner with last night,” she said.
I considered writing, “If it was anyone other than the toilet bowl, I’m going to be very upset.” Instead, I merely asked, “Who?”
A girl from high school who I didn’t much care about then and sure as hell don’t care about now. In typical Kelly fashion, she attempted to goad me into asking all sorts of questions about what, exactly, has caused this girl to become a major fuck-up; I didn’t let her, since I couldn’t even feign interest and was kinda pissed that she blew me off because she was so sick and went out to dinner with somebody who she, theoretically, didn’t know or like as well as me.
Later in the conversation, she informed me she was seriously considering driving down to Champaign-Urbana to visit some of her old friends and have some form of wild and crazy night. Gosh, sounds fun!
My response: “Gee, you should really be careful. I wouldn’t want you to have to keep pulling off to the side of the road to vomit since you’re SO SICK WITH THE FLU.”
“I was just dehydrated,” she explained.
Okay, that is a logical explanation as to why she’d feel inexplicably shitty for a little while and then get over it. Still, Kelly has a pretty extensive history of making shit up out of thin air for no real reason. I’ll never really understand why she’d go so far as to seek me out to make plans, then blow me off for no reason and stall for the next few days until finally I give up. I give up quickly because she’s the one who instigates it. If she doesn’t want to see me, why the fuck would I waste my time continually trying to hunt her down?
And, if you’ll allow me to get even whinier and bitchier for a moment, she reached new heights of obnoxiousness when she not only repeated this exciting cycle of faux-get-togethers, but she decided it would be a really great idea to tell me about all the other plans she had made instead of going out with me. I hate to sound so bitter, but when it’s something that’s happened at least a dozen times three or four years, it gets a little tiresome.
Posted by Stan on July 11, 2005 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
July 9, 2005
Temp(er)
A few years ago, I made a mistake. Not the first, and certainly not the last, but kind of a big one. During a summer of very few assignments, all of them pretty rough and obnoxious, I decided to give up on the exciting world of office temping. Sure, the jobs were — for the most part — stress-free and high-paying (when I left, I was making $19/hour to sit on my ass and occasionally type), but I got bored. I started playing bizarre pranks that only I understood and found funny; then I started pushing things and pushing things to see how far I could go before I got fired. When nobody even fired me the day I took a five-hour lunch, I finally decided it was time to quit.
I decided to move into the exciting, fast-paced world of retail coffee sales, a disastrous move if there ever was one. Sure, it was more exciting, but I had to work way harder for less pay. Also, I had to deal with — shudder — people. Furthermore, while I’ve been toiling in the miserable retail food-service industry, I’ve missed out on all sorts of extra office experience that could perhaps be beneficial in, for example, finding a decent job upon college graduation.
I’ve been sending out my resume for weeks, rewriting it with lessening degrees of honesty, in an effort to make myself look like the cat’s ass, employment-wise. But, I decided, I need money now, so fuck it — I’ll go back to temping, gain experience, and hopefully luck out with a decent temp-to-hire position.
Step one: shove myself through the front door and get interviewed and tested.
Though my skill set lies mostly in office work and preparing coffee beverages, I did some time as an extremely masculine Unskilled Laborer. With that in mind, the first place I went was a fairly large agency that seems to get a whole lot of work in a variety of areas, both in offices and in labor-intensive jobs. I figured it’d be good to cover both bases, to expand my job opportunities. Not that I really want to go back to warehouse, factory, or construction work, but it’d pay the bills while I look for a real job, and it still pays better than retail.
The test/interview building was in Palatine, so let’s just say the de facto step two was “get lost.” Despite spending so much time in the dreaded Los Angeles, I keep forgetting the suburban philosophy of meandering roads that will just randomly stop, only to pick up again a few miles down the road. My failure to MapQuest the location is often my own undoing.
At any rate, I finally got to the facility. They Xeroxed my driver’s license and Social Security card, then shoved me into a tiny room with nine other people to fill out a lengthy application. Most of the information was contained in my resume — a document they were surprised to see, despite telling me over the phone top bring it — so I kept writing things like, “See resume,” because why bother repeating all the information?
After filling out the application, a plump, brusque woman demanded I wait for an interview. I sat down in their lobby/waiting room with three other guys. I had forgotten to bring a book, and the only periodical they had was the August 2002 issue of Wired. I decided to stare out the window at the thrilling Northwest Highway traffic. I was exhausted from having been out late the previous evening, so I nearly fell asleep. But then —
A car pulled into the parking lot, and out stepped a family. A father, a mother, an older gentleman (older brother? uncle? father?) — and two little girls. One couldn’t have been more than four, and the other was probably seven or eight.
Now, I can dig the Unemployed Family; I lived in a blue-collar town in the late ’80s, after all. Can’t afford a babysitter, family won’t take the kids, so the only option is to haul them all over town. Or, in this case, to the temp agency, while Mommy, Daddy, and Unknown Other Family Member test their skills for possible employment. So I don’t want to get all down on them for bringing their kids with them; I will, however, get all down on them because the kids would not stop being incredibly irritating.
They were yelling, squealing, beating each other with empty soda bottles, throwing flaming-hot Cheetos on the floor, insulting each other — basically, being young sisters. Maybe this wouldn’t have bothered me if they had been across the room, but they chose to sit right next to me. I was tired, I was frustrated at waiting over 40 minutes for an interview, and these kids weren’t helping.
In slight defense of the parents, it wasn’t really a discipline problem; kids will simply be kids. When the mother, a large and semi-terrifying woman, finished filling out her application, she thundered into the lobby, heard her kids screaming, and said, “Shut up!” Not in a mean way; in a “You know better than to squeal in public places.” She grabbed the soda bottles from her daughters and threw them in the garbage, then pointed down at the flaming-hots and said, “Pick up those chips.”
“Sherry hurt my arm,” one of the girls declared in a tattletale voice.
“I’m gonna hurt your butt in a minute,” the mother responded. “Pick up those chips.”
They picked up the Cheetos. Both girls remained silent for the remainder of my wait.
Finally, they called me in for an interview —
— and asked me all the questions I had answered as “See resume.” What…the fuck?
At that point, I was pretty irate, but I was trying to keep it together because I need a job. So it was cool; I just rambled on about the various tasks of jobs I had done, I explained the type of work I was looking for, and the lady seemed pretty friendly, so I assume I did a decent job of pretending to be personable.
They sent me into the testing facility. The data entry thing was a cakewalk; I got mildly tripped up by the MS Word test, because I don’t really pay much attention to the Advanced Functions (mail merge? wtf?). Same with the Excel test, which I did worse on since I haven’t even opened Excel in over a year.
My results printed out, and the plump, brusque woman really liked me all of a sudden. “You did fantastic!” she squealed, delighted. “You gonna get a job real fast!”
“Oh…kay,” I said.
She kept me even longer for “orientation,” explaining to me the various ins and outs of temping that I already knew, and then sent me back into the waiting room so my interviewer could come and talk to me.
Another 20 minutes went by before the plump, brusque woman came and said, “Here’s her card; just email her your resume so she can send it out.”
“Fine,” I muttered, then got out of there as quickly as I could.
The next day, I tested at a different agency. This one was a little more laid-back, and it was appointment-only, so I didn’t spend my whole day waiting around. In fact, I was done in less than an hour. I took a crazy typing test that bothered me to the extent that I wished I could have corrected the grammar in the copy so I wouldn’t keep getting tripped up. Even getting tripped up, I typed over 100 words per minute. This is something that both excited and revolted me. Half of me says, “Well, golly, I’m a writer — typing is my stock in trade.” The other half says, “You are a fucking nerd who spends his whole life on the Internet: this is the only reason you type fast.”
Sigh.
Still, it’s a skill, and I have other skillz that may or may not pay da billz, so now it’s time to play the waiting game…
…
The waiting game sucks — let’s play Hungry, Hungry Hippos!
Posted by Stan on July 9, 2005 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
July 4, 2005
Strange Dream
Despite trying to quell my regular nightmares with the aid of valerian root, I’ve either built up a tolerance or am so depressed and distressed that it has no effect.
Last night, for some reason, I dreamed that Lucy had a MySpace blog, which I discovered in secret. Looking back through her archives, I discovered she had somehow become friends with Meron. He didn’t know that the “Lucy” I had been writing about for all these years was the same girl he had befriended while they both attended UIC (we’ll ignore the fact that in real life, Meron goes to U of C and wasn’t even in the area at the time Lucy went to UIC).
I went with Meron to a party at Lucy’s apartment in Iowa City; since I haven’t been out to Iowa City in years, and Lucy has switched apartments twice since the shithole with which I am familiar, an apartment I once hung out at in Gurnee filled in for her new Iowa City pad. Like every shitty party I’ve gone to, the lights were low, a $4 mirrorball sadly attempted to rotate in one corner of the room, and bad emo squealed from the speakers.
At this point, my own subconscious started making fun of me. I suppose I deserve it, but come on… I was sitting on a big, plush chair, far away from everyone, plinking on my guitar. Somebody whose face was obscured in the darkness approached me and said in a husky voice, “Come on, why don’t you play something for us?”
“No, man, my guitar’s in the shop,” I said, ignoring the fact that I was holding it in my hands.
“Oh,” the husky-voiced guy said.
I started playing Brian Setzer’s recording of that song “Sleepwalk,” which I have taught myself over the past few months and actually play passably well at this point. Of course, in the dream, I played it flawlessly and received a smattering of applause for party guests who were only half-listening. At this point, Meron approached me and said, “Man, that was good. Woulda been better if you had been in tune.” Busted.
Later on at this strange party, I stood at a bar that actually existed neither at the apartment in Gurnee nor at any place I had seen it Iowa City; aside from a different background, it was almost an exact duplicate of the crappy-ass bar at my friend Samantha’s boyfriend’s apartment in crappy-ass Wicker Park.
My mental imagining of Lucy’s boyfriend, who I have never met and probably won’t meet until their wedding day, stood behind the bar. He looks, in my demented mind, like a live-action version of Bluto from the old Popeye cartoons. He had lined up a half-dozen or so whiskey glasses on the bar and poured trace amounts of it into each glass, then filled the rest of them up with tapwater. He continued this until he reached the last one, which he filled so high with whiskey that it ran over the edges and a small puddle of exciting Irish liquor formed around the overflowing glass.
“This one’s for you, buddy,” he said amiably, sliding the glass a few centimeters toward me with his index and middle finger.
“Uh, thanks,” I muttered.
The paranoid half of my brain said, “He’s doing this to torment me. I’m sure Lucy told him, probably in a disparaging tone of voice, that I don’t drink, and he’s fucking with me because he’s jealous.”
The more rational half of my brain responded, “What would he have to be jealous about? Not only do you not pose a threat, you don’t want to pose a threat, and I’m sure she’s made that abundantly clear to Bluto.”
I thought for a moment. “Oh right,” the paranoid half agreed.
“Remember,” the rational side of my brain continued, “we’re in Iowa. I’m sure him giving you an oversized novelty glass of whiskey is just a sign of solidarity. He’s probably the first boyfriend Lucy’s ever had who hasn’t been jealous of you.”
“That’s only because he knows she’s pathetic enough to marry him, but not quite pathetic enough to marry us,” the paranoid half retorted.
“Hey!” the rational side yelled. “We have our good qualities.”
“We do?” the paranoid half said.
“Drink up,” Bluto interrupted. I’m sure he noticed the way my eyes darted back and forth while my multiple personalities discussed things. The only thing each personality has in common is an inability to SHUT THE HELL UP.
“No thanks,” I responded confidently. “I don’t drink.”
Bluto gave me a hostile look.
I turned around and saw Lucy standing there.
“Hey, Stan,” she said. “Glad you could make it.”
“Yeah,” I said, and suddenly she launched into an insane barrage of crap that made my dream-self realize why I usually don’t call her on the phone much. After that, it gets really foggy; all I remember is excusing myself, getting into my car — sans Meron, who I imagine will be trapped in Iowa City for the rest of his unfortunate life — and driving back to Chicago as quickly as possible. I’m sure other stuff happened, but I don’t really remember.
And so, you see, this is why I hate dreaming. I know I’m insecure, and I know what I’m insecure and paranoid about, so I don’t need my subconscious bringing all that negative shit up to the forefront. I know it’s trying to say, “Writer, heal thyself,” and maybe it’s trying to say that while maybe I think I’m trying, I’m clearly not trying hard enough…but all I really got out of the dream is that I need to have a large castle built in the middle of nowhere where I can hide from the rest of humanity.
Werid-ass update 12/3/05: A few weeks ago, Lucy did, in fact, send me the link to her MySpace. No word yet regarding whether or not she and Meron have crossed paths.
Posted by Stan on July 4, 2005 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
July 1, 2005
The Audition
The first step I planned to take in my revised life roadmap was to find a job or career I can stand for more than nine seconds. So far, the only job I didn’t want to leave was Tully’s, and while my sister offered to have me come and stay with her in Seattle and resume work there, Seattle sucks and $7.85 an hour without benefits won’t pay the pickle-man (I do not know what this expression mean; I assume the explanation involves gigolos).
As it turns out, in another life I was a highly skilled office assistant, and in still another life I’m a really big (if not particularly bright) nerd, so the prospects don’t end with low-paying retail jobs. I’d be decently happy in a job like this if the job pressure is at a minimum; I used to while away the hours at crappy temp jobs thinking about my writing, and then I’d come home and write. Or I’d wake up early the following morning and write for several hours. I tend to write better when I’m not fully awake.
But I need some fun in my life, but I have a complicated conundrum: I’m tired of staying at home, but I invariably dislike almost all people. What the hell can I do, aside from pulling weird office pranks that only I’m aware of, to both be (sort of) social and enjoy myself?
I’ve flirted with the idea of gathering some of my loser screenwriter friends, the ones too afraid or prematurely bitter to go to LA, and having a little support group as we attempt to write, market, and hopefully sell our screenplays from afar. I’m not sure they’d go for it, but it could be fun.
Even better, my L.A. freakout happened to coincide with the departure of the bass player in a local Chicago band I kinda-sorta know. So, I thought, “I play guitar, I kinda learned bass, and I like this band — what could possibly go wrong?” I asked them if I could audition, and they took pity on me and reluctantly agreed.
Their singer/songwriter told me, “Learn these four songs, then come in and audition on Monday.” This was on Friday. It proved to me that they really had no interest in auditioning me; they wanted to do me a solid because I’ve supported the band and tinkered with their website, but they mostly wanted to get it over with so they could get on with their lives. Since I have so little faith in myself, I have a difficult time when others don’t have faith in me, either. Sometimes, I’ll say, “Fuck you, motherfuckers — I’ll show you!” but other times, particularly when I have legitimate reasons to not feel confident (like, for example, the fact that, while I regularly play guitar, I haven’t picked up a bass in about two years), I’m mentally crippled.
“I can’t do this,” I kept saying to myself, despite the fact that I learned the chord structures of all four songs in about an hour and learned most of the fills after a few more hours of practice.
I had some support. My friends, some of whom are fans of the band, thought it was really cool. My dad, who spent most of his teens and early 20s wishing he could be Ozzy Osbourne, gave me a lot of support.
Monday didn’t work out for any of us, so we rescheduled it for Tuesday. Another 24 hours to contemplate not auditioning, but also another 24 hours to get really polished.
“We practice at 16th and Western,” the singer/songwriter told me. My mind skittered toward a mental recollection of the general area. Near the decimated blocks along Roosevelt that were destroyed in riots in the ’60s and never rebuilt, in some weird warehouse district. One of the good things about LA was that, since I didn’t really know much about the area, I’d fearlessly venture pretty much anywhere. I’d usually find dead dogs and people riding in shopping carts.
In Chicago, I kinda-sorta know most areas, which usually scares me away from doing anything at any point in time ever. But now I have valerian root, which relaxes me to the point that my irrational fears slip away. (Perhaps this will lead to me chronicling a hilarious addiction to anti-anxiety medications. Stay tuned!) I didn’t even freak out when I asked for a specific street address and received the response, “There isn’t really one,” followed by a set of instructions to make sure I ended up at the correct unmarked warehouse.
So I drove out, following the instructions to the letter, and found the building. I could hear their music bleeding through the brick wall. Though I was about five minutes early for my supposed 10PM start time, but they had called me while I was driving to inform me they’d need 15-30 minutes to practice for their show on Wednesday night (the farewell show for their current bass player). I called the singer/songwriter to let them know I was there, and she said she’d run down and get me in a second (the front door was locked).
A second later, they started playing again. The hell? That’s kind of rude.
A few seconds after they finished the song, a door popped open and some random, goateed man came out. I wondered if maybe he hung out with the band or something, so I pulled my bass out of the trunk, went up and asked him if he was with the band.
“No,” he said placidly. “I just jam here.” At this point, it finally dawned on me that this warehouse was a multi-room practice building for various musicians. I’m a slow, slow fellow.
“Right,” I said, “well, I can hear them playing. I guess I’ll just wait down here.”
“Oh man, if you can hear them, go on in. Just follow the sound,” he said.
“Right,” I muttered. I walked up the stairs and down a hall, half of which was painted lime green, the other half white. Very narrow, lined with numbered wooden doors, it reminded me of the hallway of every dorm I’ve ever seen.
I found the door from which the sound of the band came, and I stood outside it for a few minutes, listening to them play, wondering whether or not I should knock. I finally decided to use the fact that they were playing songs they had asked me to learn to my advantage — I pulled out the little chord cheat-sheet I had written out and eyeballed it as they played a couple of the songs. For the songs I hadn’t learned, I just tried to get a good feel for what their bass player was doing, so that if they chose me, I’d at least have some idea of what I was doing.
They made me wait for about 40 minutes, all told, and I wished I had brought a book. Instead, I just tried to eavesdrop between songs. They didn’t know I was standing right there, so I paid close attention to the issues the singer/songwriter was having with the rest of the band, to try and figure out what she liked and so on.
At one point, she started complaining to the bass player about somebody they had auditioned the previous night. My ears perked up. “He just stood there, hitting the root notes,” she said. I was worried that I didn’t have the fills down pat, but I felt a little better that I hadn’t just planned to plunk out the top note of each chord. “We played about half of it; then we stopped him and sent him home.” I knew if they didn’t do that to me, at least things would go marginally well.
She went on about somebody else they had auditioned, a girl, and how hard-working she seemed. “Oh fuck,” I thought. “That’ll do me in for sure!”
Eventually, they went back to practicing, and finally they let their bass player pack up and popped open the door to find me standing there like an idiot.
I had been worried that the room would be a huge, cavernous practice space, and that my brain would get swallowed up in the untrustworthy sounds I heard. I’ve always been an auditory learner, so even if I were to do what I was supposed to do, staring at the drummer for dear life to make sure I was in sync, my brain would get distracted by what I was hearing and totally ignore what I was seeing, and I’d fail. But this place was tiny and echo-free — I’d be in the band before they realized I can’t play in an actual musical venue!
I set myself up in the most awkward way possible. Not only has it been a long time since I’ve played with a band — and even then, I’m using a very loose definition of the word “band” — it’s been an even longer time since I’ve even used an amplifier; I took my acoustic guitar with me to California, but I never really thought once I got back that maybe I should refresh myself on basic amp shit. I faked my way through it pretty well, but I got tripped up for a second on “line out” and “line in.”
Then came the tuner. I’m a singing dork, so I’ve made a practice of tuning by blowing an “A” in a pitch pipe, tuning my A string, and then matching the other strings to the perfect “A.” I left my pitch pipe at home, figuring somebody could just hit out an “A” for me… Instead, when it came time to tune, they told me to plug into their pedal tuner, an exciting piece of technology, commonplace in almost every rock band in existence, that I haven’t used in about seven years. I embarrassed myself first by not plugging into it properly, then by taking way too long to tune the bass strings. It felt like way too long, anyway; nobody else seemed to mind.
I ended up tuning the bottom two strings a half-step sharp, because I didn’t see the tiny, tiny light that goes on when it’s tuned sharp. Fucking electric tuners — what the hell, man?!
Finally, I got tuned properly, and we launched into a song. I, ever the professional, missed my first entrance and started thudding out the complete wrong chord structure for the first verse. I knew it was all over. I had already bombed the audition, and I’d be surprised if they went through the whole song. But they didn’t stop me, and gradually, throughout the song, I got my groove thang on, I busted out the fills, and by the end I was pretty solid.
“Holy shit,” I thought, “I might actually be able to do this.”
After I was done, the band congratulated me on not sucking. Their drummer pointed out, “He doesn’t look at the frets,” which seemed to wow them all; I didn’t really think it was anything special, being that I’ve been playing for over a decade at this point, and one of the first things I learned — which is fortunate, considering my lack of depth perception — is to find the frets by feel and look down as infrequently as possible.
We did another song, which started with a mighty bass-driven intro, and this made me very uncomfortable. A friend of mine from high school had taught me various things about bass picking and fingering techniques, but I could barely remember any of it; I was plodding away, holding my guitar pick in a guitar style and approaching the frets like Tony Iommi instead of Geezer Butler. In short, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, technique-wise, but nobody fucking cared.
We went through the entire song, which once again surprised me, and the singer-songwriter actually looked over at me and kept nodding with approval every time I matched one of the bass player’s fills.
After this song, she said to me, “That’s really awesome. We’ve seen some other people who just learned the root notes, but it seems like you really made an effort to figure out the little things he does.”
“Yeah,” I responded, my trademark wit hard at work.
We moved on to the last song — because of the time they spent practicing, they only wanted to do three songs — which I actually fucked up quite successfully. I kept hitting a “C” instead of a “G,” and it stuck out like a sore thumb; in the end, I apologized, but nobody even remotely cared, and they apologized for not taking into account that I’d actually be nervous about fucking things up. They felt like my ability to approximate the basslines concocted by their current player overshadowed the few mistakes I had made.
As we broke down the gear, we chatted about a variety of stupid crap; by that point, the root had fully kicked in and I no longer felt I had anything (audition-wise) to worry about, so I actually was legitimately witty. They knew I had a sense of humor, at least, and we discussed the practical side of touring.
The final word from the singer-songwriter was that if — if! — they found somebody who equaled my skill — equaled! they never even implied they’d find somebody better! — who had touring experience, they would go with that person over me. However, they didn’t appear to be holding their breath. She pointed out that everybody who was currently in the band — except her — hadn’t toured at all before they were in the band, so they were much more open to it than other bands would be.
Unfortunately, they haven’t finished all the auditions, and the singer-songwriter is going out of town this week, so I won’t hear back from them for awhile. But still, without getting my hopes up too high, this audition made me think maybe I can actually build a reasonably enjoyable life in a place where I’m comfortable.
If not, there’s a bottle of liquid Drano under the sink.
Posted by Stan on July 1, 2005 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
