June 2006 Archives
June 30, 2006
Degas’s Hecklers in Shitter
So my mother has this job now, and she has a co-worker who she says loves to hear himself talk about himself. He was late to work today, and the explanation as to why disturbed her:
He recently moved to our little slice of suburbia (although he’s a west-of-53’er, which is why it comes to no surprise that he’s a self-obsessed yuppie) and, last weekend, took his kids to a pool park we have called Rainbow Falls. It was recently rebuilt, which I guess is a detail that isn’t germane to the story, but I feel compelled to share it. I guess it accounts for the lack of any kind of detail or knowledge in the rest of the story; it’s been at least a decade since I went to the old Rainbow Falls, but I’ve never been to (and probably will never go to) the new one.
At any rate, at some point during this little trip to Rainbow Falls, he needed to take a shit. So he goes into the can, he’s by himself, he’s doing his business, and — three junior-high-aged kids rush into the bathroom. They’re making all kinds of noise, screaming, heckling, beating on his stall door. All this culminates in what I’d consider an ultimate act of humiliation: they crawled under the stall walls and doors and basically watched the man finish his shit, all the while heckling him in a Beavis & Butt-Head manner.
Why did something that happened last weekend make him late to work today? Was he trapped in the stall all week with these three depraved boys? No; after the incident, the guy immediately tracked down somebody who works there and had her file a report. But that wasn’t enough to quell his outrage and disgust; he tracked down some “big-wigs” at the Park District to not only explain the situation in more detail, but to politely tell them how to handle it. His scheduled conference call with them was this morning, which made him late to work.
He felt they should post high-school-aged attendants in all the bathrooms. He also apparently felt they should act like bouncers, and that any kids under 16 should be forced to use the “family bathroom.”*
My thought on this? Well, after the initial disbelief regarding certain aspects of the story (the most gaping hole was how he got out of the stall; they’re tiny, so I can barely imagine that many people crammed into it — another flaw of the story — and with these borderline-sociopathic attempts at intimidation, I really don’t see them just lettin gthe dude walk away without a fight), I kind of chuckled at the idea of high school students trying to ward off gangs of bizarre, creepy kids only a few years younger than themselves. Sure, they’ll stand watch, but at Park District wages, you’re gonna have a lot of kids unwilling to get involved in such bizarre situations. They might run and try to get security**, a cop, or some other kind of adult authority figure, but it’s not really a great preventative measure.
My mother, who worked at the Park District for many years, didn’t quite have the heart to tell him that they probably burst out in uncontrollable laughter as soon as he hung up the phone. She also felt like he should be pursuing this with the police rather than telling the Park District how they could prevent further incidents (especially when his idea was fairly half-assed). Kelly, one of my best friends from high school, is a part-time manager at Rainbow Falls, has told me enough disturbing stories that, combined with this incident and with the pedophilia issues, maybe having an actual security guard — not a high school student but possibly, a dude with a gun or a huge, bouncer-like fellow — wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world. They apparently have some kind of security surveillance that was installed after the pederast stuff, but that doesn’t really prevent so much as it helps them catch suspects.
The whole thing seems unfeasible to me, however. How many more people would be creeped out by some armed man or gentle giant just standing there, probably in sunglasses, watching everything that happens? I’m sure it’d prevent a lot of unseemly incidents, but wouldn’t it be perceived as just one big unseemly instance itself?
With the overall disbelief still fresh in my mind, wondering why somebody would not just share the story in general but want to share it with everyone in the office on an individual basis, I turned to Kelly for answers. I wanted to know, before I put too much thought into this, if it had even happened. I know about Park District gossip, and I know Kelly herself as an almost pathological need to spread gossip to every corner of the universe. If something this odd had happened, she would know either from the rumor-mill or just from the bosses over her head telling her and other managers to do something about it.
Conveniently, right as my mom was finishing telling me the story, Kelly IM’ed me, from — even more conveniently — the scene of the crime, Rainbow Falls. I told her the entire story, and after “lol”-ing at a few key moments, she said, “Never happened. There’s no way.” Of course, she also said things like, “Around here, that would actually be a normal thing. It doesn’t even put a dent into the crazy-ass shit I’ve seen over the past 10 years.” This prompted a flood of little nuggets from stories I had, until that moment, blocked from my mind.
So from that point, I realized the story was total bullshit, which led me to the even more disconcerting question of why? Why would this guy make up a story like this, with such elaborate detail, just to explain getting to work late? What happened to “I had a flat tire”?
Did it start with a little granule of truth — maybe some obnoxious junior high kids actually were harassing him, but in a much milder way — and he just rolled with it? Because he has to be the hero of all his stories?
I don’t know. Stuff like this confounds me. Sometimes, when I have no interesting stories to write on this blog, I’m tempted to just make shit up, but that just seems so lame and half-assed. Instead, I go for weeks — possibly months — without a post.
*One of the many things I know almost nothing about, I’m told they installed a “family bathroom” in addition to the men’s and women’s rooms to circumvent reported incidents of pedophilia. Understandable.
**I don’t even know if they have security guards. It would stand to reason, what with the pedophilia, but I don’t remember them having security when I went there many years ago.
Posted by Stan on June 30, 2006 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
June 13, 2006
Mother Lode!
“This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.” — from a review of Spinal Tap’s Intravenus de Milo
If you’ve talked to me at all over the last few weeks, you’ll know I’m in the process of either selling or destroying the majority of my worldly possessions. Why? Don’t need ‘em, don’t want ‘em, sick of looking at ‘em. So there they go, out the door or through the window, until I’m left only with objects of vital importance, such as my copy of A Confederacy of Dunces and the Bruce Springsteen Born to Run 30th anniversary box set.
But some things I just can’t let go. Sure, I don’t need it; I don’t even want it, but I feel like I have to keep it. It’s not often that I get nostalgiac, but I am a big fan of record-keeping. I’m also a big believer that I could, probably will, and possibly should, die at any moment. So I’d like to keep a nice, vaguely chronological record of my existence. It’s sort of the same reason why I keep this blog going, even though I don’t update much anymore and I’ve also deleted, tweaked, and edited things so that, really, it in no way resembles my actual life. Kind of disappointing as far as journals go, but deal with it, assholes.
In addition to this stupid blog, today I found a bunch of old notebooks, papers, and writings that I just can’t give up. Yes, they’re truly awful — but one, in particular, takes the cake. It was a spiralbound notebook that I carried with me through most of 1995, a collections of terrible drawings and the world’s worst poetry.
Here are the front and back covers, loaded with doodles, references to TOTALLY RAWKIN’ BANDS, and games of Tic-Tac-Toe that were undoubtedly played during Spanish class:
I’ve also taken the liberty of scanning a drawing of one of my most popular (among me and my sad, sad group of drugged-out metalhead friends) characters, a pathetic bordertown drunk called Pepé Tequila:
Pepé Tequila lasted from the start of junior high through most of high school, when I worked continuously on a cartoon series (a cross between Beavis & Butt-Head and Touch of Evil, if you can fathom that) involving a disparate cast of characters living on either side of the border in this tiny, crime-ridden cesspool.
And here is a drawing not done by me. It was done by my best friend at the time, who was a much better artist (you’ll note, for example, that the drawing doesn’t totally suck):
That’s right, we were in a band. It went through many changes. We started, in seventh grade, as the Big Peckers. We soon graduated to the Sweaty Peckers, followed by the Hemophagics, Umbra Void, Tainted Meat, and Habeas Corpus (which we firmly believed had something to do with dead bodies), before we settled for awhile on Purple Iodine, our longest-running name. But here’s the thing: we didn’t make any music. At all. We made up fake song titles and drew fake album art and t-shirt designs. Mostly it was a long series of attempts at making each other laugh, hence starting out as the Big Peckers and having every song and album cover have something to do with genitalia. I have tons of these concept drawings, but I won’t waste my time scanning them unless there is a strong demand.
Around the time of Umbra Void, we started playing actual songs (mostly poorly rendered covers), and by the time we became Purple Iodine we were actually taking this whole band thing seriously. We were about as good as Wyld Stallyns, but there was a noticeable shift from the pointless bawdiness of “You Can Touch It for a Quarter” and the “Underground Beings.” For example, unliked “You Can Touch It for a Quarter,” which is just a song title, “Underground Beings” had actual lyrics (which are not in my handwriting, though I recall having some input). It goes a little something like this:
Face downWow! That’s pretty intense, man. Sadly, though, Purple Iodine broke up shortly after eighth grade began, and I formed a new band with a few people mentioned here, here, and here, which as I point out was only taken seriously by me and Steve. I started writing lyrics and actual music, with Steve’s input (even though he didn’t even have an instrument until Christmas of 1995, and even then he didn’t know how to play it), for our new band, which I seem to remember being called Draft first, then Curmudgeon, but apparently at one time we settled on the name “Ashtray.” I have a few more fake album mock-ups and a horribly written bio under that name. So here we go, guys, it’s the poetry explosion!
into the water.
Point of No Return.
Unbearable Tension
Suffucating [sic]…
Respirating…
Suffering…
Here come the underground beings!
Ravaging..
Suffering..
Underground Beings!
(Drums)
Back to the Underground!
(Guitar & Drums)
Back to the Underground!
(Back-up singers) Look at the thing, I just found!
Dated 12/1/95:
“Cyclone Fence”Well, that was weird. Especially the Life with Louie reference. Imagine most of the verse being the melody of the first two lines of Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” repeated over and over again. I think that’s pretty much how I wrote it. Now it’s time for the second set of lyrics, entitled “Alienated Youth Clique,” also dated 12/1/95 (as you’ll see, I was busy that day). Years later, I took the riff of this song, which pretty much repeated over and over and over and over again ad nauseam, and rewrote it as “College Girls,” (this time with a chorus) the third song on disc two of The Hedge.
Rudimentary square
Lost itspubicshiny hair.
Didn’t use conditioner.
Friday’s spatial disorienter.*
Sitting in the garden.
Daughter has a hard-on.
“A” of retribution.
Give a revolution.
Living in the cyclone fence,
Never minding burning pence.*
Living in the cyclone fence,
Kissin [sic] cousins have good sex.
Rudimentary square
Lost its armpoit hair.
Spiral-bound notebook.
Didn’t admit what they took.
Twenty-five after.
Hide fromrising [sic] laughter.
Eat corn with chop suey.Saturday’s “Life with Louie.”**
Endocrine is gooey.
Living in the cyclone fence
Big dumb jocks don’t make no sense.
Living in the cyclone fenceWimpyPansy boys havegoodsome friends.
“Alienated Youth Clique”Honestly? No idea what any of this is supposed to be about. My explanation for the rampant food references: it must have been fourth period, right before lunch. I was hungry, man, and math sucks. Next song, dated 12/2/95. All I remember about the music was that it was very flanger-intensive.
Publicist hangover
Yuppies drive Land Rovers
Double chili cheesedog
Kill the slacker ball-hog.
Chocolate danish w/pickles on the side.
Tic-tac man’s at school w/no one to confide.
Living of nucleonic acetate*
Far too much to palpetate [sic]
Living in the ’90s jetlag
Microwave tower gig bag
Monterey jack on rye
House a massive pig sty.
Revolution int he air
Retribution: AIDS scare.
Crush them with some limestone
Prom queen’s made of skin and bone.
Amplitude modulation
Saves renaissance from a nation.*
Misguided clique on the bedroom floor.
Cousins knocking athe [sic]door.
“Science Fiction”Not sure what it has to do with science fiction, although admittedly a shit-stained orthodontist anywhere near a bed littered with bleeding hearts is not exactly un-sciency. Neither is a doctor without a schlong, unless it’s a female doctor. Also, sisters made of boron are not exactly common.
Fade jeans
Attitude
Looking mean
Brain is stewed
Dodge Reliant’s
Bastard child
Attorney clientPicanteSpicy mild
Brother is an oxymoron.
Sister is a chunk of boron.*
Doctor doesn’t have a schlong.
Pediatry [sic; I assume I meant “podiatry,” but maybe I meant “pediatrics”] school is really long.
Custom shirt
Designer
Maen alert
Protractor.
Death rearsits [sic] ugly head
Shit-stained orthodontist
Beating hearts are on the bedI thinkI need a psychiatrist
12/3/95:
“Chocolate’s Uniform Righteousness”*Well, it kinda starts out as more overtly sci-fi than “Science Fiction,” but I’ll never understand what the title of this song means. Or the lyrics. Seriously? Insects invade us just to annihilate bad television? Don’t they have better things to do?
Gargantuan species of insect
Rise above to intercept
The drab militia planes
Containing leaders so vain.
Six feet of prudent agriculture.
Hepped up on goofballs.
Pelted with mothballs.
Looming over to dominate
A burning nation’s requisite.*YouthfulViril [sic] insects on the hunt
To burn the shows with Alan Funt.
Pie-inspired aneurysm
Long and fruitful rheumatism.
Exstensive [sic] feature’s matte painting.
Short-lived sit-com’s Fox-inspired dwelling.
Dirt-encrusted funkified dive.KreNeed canned meals just to survive.
Also 12/3/95:
“Nucleus Blues”Short, sweet, but not to any point that I can see. There’s a really weird free-association vibe to this that seems to me like more of a comment on my horrible, horrible brain than my horrible, horrible writing.
Down east
There’s a beast
I killed it
With a drill-bit.
Anal repression
No taxation without representation.
Elephant man.
Sewer slam.***
Bye-bye birdie
Don’t lay a turdie.
Dated 12/4/95:
“Table Mesa”What? No, I’m not kidding: what?! I think this is notable for being probably the first attempt I’ve made to rhyme consistently. I think this drastically affected the lyrics (seriously, replacing “rain” with “roaches” to keep the rhyme scheme? What is that?).
Fall Equinox approaches
Drastically affectingrainroaches
Summer cheese melting
Golf balls pelting.
What do you want?
You look so gaunt.
Whip out your chocolate schlong
Hit the strawberry gong.
Bye, bye, hobo.
Tomorrow eat los huevos.
Also 12/4/95:
“Lacadasically [sic] Slurred”You know what that is there, the last two lines of the last stanza, where, after three couplets, I just totally drop the rhyme? That’s art. Art, man. “Love Switch” level.
Egotistic notions
Spare no emotions.
Psychopathic liars.
Swim in deep friers.
Sister lost her contact lens
Liver too deep; it got the bends.
I like it When [sic] it’s green,
Not when it’s blue.
Diving into vital energy
Notsnquite caring who’s my enemy.
Dramatically lucid recall
Alluding to precision catch-all.
Once again dated 12/4/95:
“Hello, Goodbye, Illinois”Was this…finished? I don’t know. What’s weird is, I actually like the “starlit face” image. I must have stolen it from something significantly better than me.
Walking down the interstate
Approaching a massive gate
Inside of which are plastic explosives
Nonmetal devices, anti-corrosives.
Many numerical intergers [sic]
Cannot count the pain in her
Starlit face as it brings down the hous [sic]Even the mouse.
Dated 12/7/95:
“The Congo”Yeah, so there actually is an explanation for this. There was some guy who looked vaguely simian that my friend Mark started referring to as “the Congo.” Then, as I recall, Art came up with the basic “Congo” chant, and Jeff came up with the “African jungle” bit. In retrospect, it’s really pretty horrible and offensive. Man, I miss junior high.
Congo, Congo, Con-go.
Congo, congo, con-go. (contin. b.g.)
(English accent): Deep in the African jungle, the Congo, the fiercest being ever to be created on Earth, stalks his prey
Congo, congo, con-go.
Congo, congo, con-go.
Dated 12/15/95:
“Sinatra Is a Buddhist”So, um, I don’t really get 90% of this (surprise, surprise), but I notice it’s starting to tackle actual recurring issues in my life: the horrible acne that plagued me through junior high and some of high school, loneliness, fear of death and pain, “daddy” issues, et cetera.
Secretive pain kills the weepers
Why is no one watching the brain-dead leapers.
Big zit on the middle of my forehead
By the time I get home I’ll be dead.
In this constipated world of sin
Even my dad can be thin.
Hold me back from the muzzle of restraint
Forgo your strength for the mandetory [sic] faint
Dead with a Pepsi in his handLack ofWithout love, there is no promise [sic] land.
Studious pain, envious wisdom.
Castritated magistrate cannot come.
Death is a four-letter word
And it creeps upon the lonely ones.
Lonely like me…
Excedrated buttfucker sitting on a weiner [sic; as we all know, thanks to Martin Prince, the preferred spelling is “w-I-E-n-e-r”]I know about thirty guys wh are quite a bit keener
Bored Cuban, Puerto Rican Jew
God is Satan, where the hell are you?
Living on an island with a seasick fisherman
Hey, asshole, get the fuck off the can!
Dated 12/22/95:
“La La Land (Boston, 1689)”Huh. Was I going through some weird minimalist phase in my “poetry”? Answer: no. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words, so I apparently decided to express myself with a comic-book-style drawing rather than song lyrics:
During the
So there you have it: one of my early, hilariously misguided attempts to get political by brashly taking on such outdated civil rights issues as Injun affairs. The hell?
Sadly, the poetry/lyrics come to an end with this last one, dated 1/21/96:
“Poofy-Haired Competition”I’ll argue this was my first attempt at satire. And what an attempt it was! You might be wondering — what was my obsession with mocking low-quality guitars? It was spurred by my obsession with high-grade guitars. From another page, here is a description of my dream guitar:
(Verse) Got my Kramer guitar,
Pink hair, and lookin bizarre.
Got my Guns N’ Roses lunchbox,
Whitesnake dolls that really talk.
’80s metalison the move;
Competitions in the groove.
(Chorus)Livin on the edge of life
Crossroads ahead cut like a knife
Livin in the crow’s nest with Erik and “Spunky”
Lovin and losindeepin L.A. is funky
(Pansy-ass Bridge)But still
I think of you.
Living in the capitalist’s [sic] capital,
I still know that I love you (Robert Plant falsetto)
(Verse) Got my Gremlin guitar,
Bottled hair, gonna be a star.
Got my official Poison clocks,
Kip Winger’s old, dirty socks.
Barhopping by night, playing pool by dad
I suck somuch [sic] I can’t get laid.
(Chorus) Livin on the edge of life
Crossroads ahead cut like a knife,
Livin in the crow’s nest with Erik and “Spunky”
Lovin and losin in L.A. is funky.
(Guitar Solo)
(Repeat chorus) Livin on the edge of life
Crossroads ahead cut like a knife.
Livin on the edge of life.
“Epigibder & L-iphone Lampshade Deluxe SG”I have to say, there was a time where I both knew and cared what all of that meant. That time is long past; I know some of it, because I do still play guitar and occasionally take interest in new models, but the Ralphie Parker-like glee and attention to detail is a little disturbing. The only thing this guitar is missing is a compass on the stock and this thing which tells time.
Specs & Features
Scale Length: 25.5” (647.7mm)
Fingerboard: Rosewood
Neck Radius: 12” (304.8mm)
Width @ Nut: 1.63” (41.3mm)
Bridge: Floyd Rose Licensed Locking or G&L Vibrato
Nut Material: Graphite
Tuning Keys: Sperzel Locking Keys
Pickups:Pickup Selector: 5-way
- 1 Humbucking
- 1 DualBlade
- 1 Gold 1957 Gibson Humbucking
Controls: Volume & P.T.B. Controls
Finish:The first thing I want most in the world is a custom-made guitar for [sic] a good guitar company. It would take all the components from my two favorite guitars, the Gibson SG and the G&L Legacy Special. It would have a vintage 1957 Gibson humbucking pickup, a custom G&L DualBlade single-coil pickup, and a Fender humbucker. It would have a Floyd Rose floating bridge or a G&L fixed bridge, which ever [sic] the buyer wants. It would have Gbson knob controls, G&L switches, a combo SG-Strat black pickguard, and a Gibson togle switch.
- Clear Forest Green
- Blueburst
A final note:
There are more songs. In the back of this notebook, I found a tracklist of songs that don’t appear here. I recall writing them, I recall the titles, but I haven’t found the notebooks that contain their precious, awful lyrics (yet!). Unlike the fake albums we used to manufacture, these songs did exist. There are even, on this tracklist, parantheses with wide gaps so I could write in the length of the song once we recorded our demo-tape using a four-track reel-to-reel I bought for $5 at a church sale (it didn’t work, and we never recorded a thing in any form). The list:
There’s another list (which may have been a setlist for a concert that never remotely happened) featuring most of the same songs, but adding “Alienated Youth Clique,” a cover of “In Bloom” by Nirvana, and two songs I don’t remember at all, “Abrupt Eruption” and “Fred Mertz.” If I find any of these, I will make them public as soon as possible.
- Petrified Leafblower
- Hello, Goodbye, Illinois
- Cyclone Fence
- Arizona
- Elgin Suntan
- Orange El Rey Pick
- George Likes His Chicken Spicy
- Pumpkinhead
- Science Fiction
- Chocolate’s Uniform Righteousness
- Peppermint Guy
- Japanimation
- Congo [Hidden Track]
I hope you enjoyed this stumble down memory lane as much as I did.
Don’t say I never gave you nothing.
Edit: I just realized, I had never expected to find this notebook (and was disappointed about that) because I thought I had loaned it in high school to an ex-girlfriend who was working with me on a comedy sketch about bad poetry. She never gave it back, for whatever reason, and I never really cared until after we broke up, so basically I never got it back. But now I’ve realized that was probably the notebook that has those other songs. I’m still digging through my shit, and I may stumble across it, but I don’t hold out much hope.
*I don’t know what this means, either.
**I just wish I was making this up.
***I don’t know what this means either, but it sure sounds like a euphemism for anal sex.
Posted by Stan on June 13, 2006 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Stories of Pain and Humiliation
June 12, 2006
Guitar Strings Are Dangerous
So I’m restringing my guitar today, and I could feel I poked myself with the B string. Not a huge deal, really, just a little poke. So I’m twisting the tuning machine with one hand, and I’m holding the string to the nut, and I realize the tuning machine is suddenly really, really greasy. So I look down, and I see my thumb and forefinger are covered in blood, and it’s getting all over the neck of the guitar.
“Oh fuck!” I say in my calmest panicky voice and rush to the bathroom to wash the blood off, hopefully clean and disinfect the cut, and maybe even put a Band-Aid on it. But once I cleaned it up, I realized it was just that tiny, tiny poke from the stupid string. I dunno, I’ve done that a million times, and I don’t recall profuse bleeding. Is it possible I burst a capillary or hit an artery or something? Anybody who knows more about anatomy than me (my knowledge extends to knowing all of the body parts featured in the game Operation (so I know it’s not butterflies in my stomach or my funny bone), let me know what I may have done so I don’t do it again.
Posted by Stan on June 12, 2006 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Stories of Pain and Humiliation
June 6, 2006
“I Have to Stand in a Certain Spot in My Kitchen or It Cuts Out…”
So I’ve got this piece of shit of a cell phone that I bought a few years ago to replace my previous piece of shit of a cell phone. The old phone, after about two months, stopped holding a charge. The battery was fucked or something. It’d last me maybe six hours, so I’d have to keep it off almost all the time because I like to think I only carry my cell phone for vital emergency purposes. But I kept missing important phone calls. This is back when I used to get important phone calls.
So I got a new phone and had an awkward and semi-hilarious run-in with a guy I hadn’t really spoken to since junior high, but that’s another story. This new phone worked pretty well for awhile. It had better reception indoors, the capability of playing MP3s as ringtones (allowing me to realize my dream of having Europe’s “The Final Countdown” as a ringtone), good volume, and it was a flip-phone which meant I wasn’t scratching up the screen all the time by shoving it into a pocket full of keys, loose change, pens, etc.
It had one weird problem, though: once in a great while, I’d pick it up to check my missed calls and find, instead of “2 missed calls” or “1 new message” or whatever, there’d just be a timestamp. An old, old timestamp. Like, say, I’d get out of class at 5:30, and I’d check my phone for the first time since entering class at 1:30, and it’d say, “2:47.” It was frozen. I’d flip open the phone, but the screen wouldn’t illuminate. It couldn’t be turned off; I could only pop the battery out and then back in. Seemed like an easy enough solution to a fairly pointless problem that, really, wouldn’t happen any more than once every two or three months.
But it’s started getting more frequent, which has led me to this semi-pointless rant. Because, honestly, aside from potential jobs calling, I’ve had no use for my phone over the past several months. I usually don’t even have it with me, or if I do I have it off, or if I leave it on it’s sitting in my car or on my desk, and I’m shocked, baffled, and on occasion horrified when “The Final Countdown” blares. I have an instinctive reaction like, “I hate you, you damn phone, for being tethered to me and not allowing me to be free of communication with everybody I know.” Because, the fact of the matter is, I dislike most of the people I know. Fortunately, very few of them ever call me.
I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense to resent the cell phone even though I do, indeed, usually keep it at least somewhere near me. Somewhere that I’ll hear its desperate blooping that I’ve missed a call within a short while, so if it is a job — and let’s face it, at this point I’d have a better chance of being called by the Queen of England than getting a job callback — I can get back to them in fewer than six weeks. Because, yes, I do feel I need it for incoming important calls and outgoing emergency calls; I just resent the incoming calls that aren’t important. Not to split hairs or anything…
So Saturday, while I was nowhere to be found, I got a call from Lucy. She asked me to call her back; I didn’t. She called me yesterday and left me a message chiding me for not returning her call, but she was in a suspiciously gleeful mood because of some stupid promotion at Lowe’s that she’s all excited about. She told me she’d find out for sure if she got the promotion tomorrow, meaning today, and hopefully I’d actually answer when she called. I called her back and left a sarcastic message about how, for a change, I might actually keep my phone with me so that I can pick up when she calls…
Around seven this evening, when I realized she hadn’t called, I — for the first time today — looked down at my phone: “2:17 p.m.,” it read. And of course, when I popped the battery out and back in and turned the phone back on, I had a message waiting. Motherfucker.
Posted by Stan on June 6, 2006 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
June 5, 2006
The Load of Shit
Over Memorial Day weekend, my sister called. Usually I avoid her calls like the Plague, but in this case I actually had to talk to her so we could set up file-sharing and she could download some pictures of her house that she thought she had lost. This led, not surprisingly, to an hour-long conversation about my hilarious efforts to find a decent job (or any job, at this point) in an art-related field in which I’m competent. Since she also failed to find employment doing anything resembling what she wanted to do, it’s one of the few areas where she commiserates with me instead of condescending to me.
She gave me all these pointers about her perceived problems with my cover letter and resume (which she hasn’t even looked at — she just happened to take a class in how to make a “bitchin’” resume) and then the conversation gradually turned toward a bombshell she had never before revealed:
“So yeah, a few weeks after you left L.A., I got an e-mail from Cameron asking what happened to you because you kind of fell off the face of the planet,” she said. “He said he’d e-mailed you a couple of times but didn’t hear back, so he was wondering what happened. I told him that you ran out of money and had to go back to Chicago, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s a shame, because he said if you’d stayed another week, they’d have hired you on full-time.’”
At first I was livid. Cam happens to be engaged to my school’s L.A. internship coordinator, arguably the least helpful person on the planet. I was angry first at her for again proving her uselessness by not telling me something like that, then at myself because I kinda blew her off when I got back to Chicago. I was jaded and bitter, but she did call me once; I picked up, thinking it was someone else, but got her off the phone really fast. The last thing she said to me was, “Don’t blow this off.”
In that instant of lividity, I was thinking, did she tell me not to blow this off because when I had called back, she was going to tell me an employment offer had been extended? But as the shock and anger wore off, I gradually began to realize that what my sister had told me made no sense whatsoever, and I explained to her why:
- As an initial side-note, I pointed out that Cam hadn’t e-mailed me at all after I had left. Not once. And, even after getting ahold of my sister and hearing back from her, I still didn’t hear from him myself.
- I had given notice at both of my internships. Not a whole lot, and I ended up skipping out earlier than I had told them, which probably didn’t go over well, but they were aware that I was leaving, and they were aware of one reason why. If either of them had intended to put me on full-time, they had ample time to speak up. They didn’t.
- Of the two internships, Cam’s fiancée only knew of one. Ironically, at the one she didn’t know about I was treated with respect, felt somewhat like I fit in, and was made to feel like I was competent in what I was doing. At the one she was aware of, I didn’t fit in at all. The people there would ignore me if they could, they gave me worse than menial tasks (I know, I know — that’s part of being a lowly intern, but at least at the other internship they didn’t make me feel like I was doing all the piddly crap they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole), and just generally treated me like an outsider. Since this was the only one the internship coordinator knew about, I find it really surprising that of the two, this was the one that intended to offer me a paid position.
- Before I even gave notice, I took a half-day off from the internship where I didn’t belong so I could go to Santa Monica for an open interview at a café. When I came back thinking the interview went well, the women at the production company were excited that I’d be getting a paying job somewhere and also recommended various other places where I might be able to make more money (none of which were hiring). Doesn’t really sound like the kind of place that planned to hire me…
- One of my friends worked the exact same internship at the exact same place — she was Monday-Wednesday-Friday; I was Tuesday-Thursday — and she actually got along well with the people there. Yet, she interned there for a whole summer and then, in the end, was cut loose, with the typical promises about how they would have loved to hire her but just couldn’t afford it. I suspected that was how things would end from the moment I interviewed, when the women who interviewed me kept talking about how great the previous interns were, and I was just thinking, “So why did you let them go?” Answer: they didn’t plan to hire anybody; like most places, they just wanted the free labor.
I had always had the feeling that Cam’s fiancée would say or do anything to keep her job or make herself look good, so long as it didn’t involve actually doing her job well. This just seemed to me like proof of that, with the truth hidden even from even her fiancé. It’s not the most unreasonable thing in the world. If I had people breathing down my neck from all sides, saying, “What’s up with this kid who just bailed?” I’d probably make up a similar lie. But I also wouldn’t dangle the lie in front of the other person (or his sister). It’s just more of the school’s empty promises, which had stranded me out there in the first place.
Why wouldn’t I dangle it? Because here’s how I reacted: I said, “It’s a bunch of bullshit and here’s why,” but…it nagged at me. I was in a foul mood for the rest of the weekend, and I let it kind of gnaw at me all week, going back in forth in my head, with a 99.9% certainty that everything Tracey had heard from Cam was a total load of bullshit, but I just couldn’t let that 0.1% go. What if they had wanted to hire me? What if they had intended to offer me a job on the very day I stopped showing up, after giving my two weeks notice one week before? Maybe I was just that much better than my friend who never got hired at all. They had just hired a director of development, whom I actually clicked with, who liked my coverage — maybe she would have needed an assistant. Maybe I had fucked myself out of a nice (to start with) career opportunity for some really, really stupid reasons.
When Friday rolled around, I could no longer tolerate all this horrible, horrible thinking I had been doing. I had to take some kind of action. Should I call up the production company and ask about it? No, no, that’d never work. Maybe I should just call and try to make amends, apologize for walking out on them so abruptly. Not trying to pry any information out of them, but perhaps the information be divulged. “Sorry I ditched you.” “Oh, the only person you fucked was yourself — I was just about to offer you a job.” “Oh, how silly of me. Let us now laugh.”
I stared at their business card, which I had discovered while cleaning out a bunch of old shit, contemplating whether or not I had the guts to actually call them and — gasp! — apologize.
Not today, I thought, and instead sent an e-mail to my friend, the other half of what we jokingly called “Team Intern,” the tactic we had used to get hired together — we knew each other in advance, so we could talk to each other and coordinate the way we ran the office, to make sure everything ran smoothly. If there was something she found out on Friday would happen on Tuesday, she could call me up and let me know. Team Intern, yes, that’s the ticket.
She responded to me a few hours later, quelling my fears and neuroses by reminding me of various other factors that would have prevented us both from being hired full-time. This just wasn’t the place for that. They were a relatively small operation, they obviously wanted to keep the overhead low, so by having two interns in rotation working for three months and then replaced, they had all the additional help they really needed, and for free! In exchange, the very purpose of an internship: payment in experience and maybe — just maybe! — a shiny new reference.
My irritating conscious mind allayed, I was able to continue sending out a resume that, I assume, human resources people print out and hang up on the bulletin board in the break room for everyone to first laugh at, then sigh with the relief one gets in knowing they don’t have somebody like me working for or with them.
Let the good times roll.
Posted by Stan on June 5, 2006 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
