In Dreams

Just had a half-dream (still dreaming, drifting into a waking state) in which I received a letter that I couldn't finish reading. The part of me that was waking up tried to force my dreaming self to finish creating the letter, but one of us couldn't bring myself to finish writing it, or to finish reading it.

This Is Where It Is Going

Bad times in my head around here.

I'm tired and alone and angry. At the world and (some of) the people around me and at myself and at my life.

I feel like I'm straining to keep something from getting out.

I'm coming out of the most ridiculously compressed period of overwork I've ever experienced - 40 consecutive days in the office, working nonstop on one project, 5-6 hours a day on the weekends and 11-12 hours during the week - and by the end all that was keeping me going was my continually escalating contempt and rage for the work and the people making me do it (not the people in my company). By the end I promised myself that when the project was over, in the new year I'd commit to looking for another job because I hated the person I was becoming inside (and outside; I threw away a year of halting progress on my weight and am back to about 245 pounds). Instead I accepted a move to a different position and a fat raise (not yet in effect, sadly).

I have nothing I want in my life except a nice computer and a Fender P-Bass.

I'm smart enough and controlled enough that I'm not really afraid I'll do something stupid, but I'm living every day with the feeling that I'm approaching something precipitous.

There's Also This

Look at us; we were both so young then.



At the time I did not actually play the guitar.

And now this has happened:



At the time I do not actually play the violin. But I am glad to have it.

Adeus, Vovozinho.

About Last Weekend

One expects to go back to the state of one's raising and bury his last remaining grandparent. But one is slightly surprised to bury said grandfather while said state is getting sideswiped by a fucking hurricane. As far as I can remember, not since 1991 and Hurricane Bob, and then just now twice in a month.

Also one doesn't expect the reemergence after a roughly three-year absence of the elder maternal uncle I widely refer to as a druncle. He's still a druncle. He at one point started giving me something between his opinion and his advice on the possibility of either him or me (or, I think, my dad) cockblocking one of my other uncle's friends and picking up his escort to the post-funeral gathering. (There's like this whole other story there that I won't go into, about the guy and his escort - I'm using the term to be polite, not suggestive - but I'll leave it alone.)

The day before the service my dad, uncles, and I went into the funeral home to make some final arrangements. We went in and found no one, and almost by accident stumbled into the darkened room where my grandfather's brief wake would be held; he was already there; for reasons nobody's quite sure about (other than that it was what he wanted, I suppose, which should really count for everything if you take that stance) there was an open casket. We weren't really ready for that. (Then we found one of the directors; he repeatedly referred to himself as [First Name Middle Initial Last Name The Third].) They look different when they've gone. I guess 85 years is a good long time.

And In A Semi-Update To the Last Post

I guess I don't really know what to make of interpersonal interactions. You know, between persons. They're more mysterious, still, than I thought they were. Or I'm really bad at understanding what people say to me. One or the other.

In a related story, I bet I'm going to eat a lot of chocolate tonight. Starting in ... now.

I Was Thinking About Myself, As I Often Do

... and I've been searching for a word, what is it, it's on the tip of my tongue, I just can't seem to -

oh, there it is. Yeah. Ahem:

LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME.

Is the word I was thinking of.

For describing myself. Yeah.

Anyway, that's about the shape of it.

Doesn't Bode Well For The Long Term

In the first thirty minutes I was on Facebook I went crazy trying to figure out how to disassociate my Facebook profile from a photo tagged with my name by a woman who once sent me an email inviting me to be her Facebook friend*. I've never met this woman, she doesn't know me, and the gentleman with my name in the aforementioned photo isn't me.

So yay technology and interconnectedness, right?

*I never got this - people just put a person's name in front of a popular email service provider and assume that's the person they want to talk to? In high school someone I know sent a really long email to what he assumed was the address of his girlfriend, because it was HerName@aol.com, and received a reply saying "I'm almost certainly not the HerName you're looking for, but she sounds like a lucky girl."

Demon Rum (Vodka/Gin)

W/all due respect to the Ad Council, which does some fine work (actually, the first page of google results don't show the version of this ad campaign that appears in my neighborhood, and I didn't want to look harder than that, but it's better than this billboard), I haven't been really drunk in maybe a couple of years, despite being buzzed on a handful of occasions. Where I'm personally defining buzzed as "I can definitely feel that I've been drinking, I'm aware of its effects on me, and my tongue and emotions are...lubricated." And where I'm defining drunk as "I see two of things when I try to focus on them."

So anyway, not having been really truly drunk for maybe a couple of years, I'd forgotten that things get weird, like "after spending a few minutes across the street summoning my wilting dignity for one final push, I walked steadily through the lobby of my building, got in an elevator, struggled to get the key in the door, and then spent the remainder of the evening apparently flailing around on the bathroom floor attempting to induce sobriety before I went to sleep from 9PM-1AM. Also the whole seeing double thing, I'd forgotten about that." After being away for a while from that kind of state, it was strange to go through it all again while thinking: "what the fuck am I doing?" Also, after I finish this post I'm going to have to eat something, which will screw up what so far was a reasonably successful attempt at weekend sleep-schedule normalcy.

On the other hand, I think I was fairly successful in my lower level goals at my ex-coworker's July 4th party, these goals being something like:

(1) Be sociable and spend a few minutes talking to people I don't know.
(2) Don't get drunk, but if I get drunk, get the hell out of there before I start stumbling.
(3) Don't get weirdly competitive around [another former coworker's] husband.

Regarding #3, in addition to that former coworker being on the long list of "girls I sort of had a crush on for a period of five days to seventeen weeks that nothing ever happened with," her husband is a more or less professional comedian (and, having seen his act once, a decent one!), and very personally funny, which I think I usually handle well but am always internally afraid of overreacting to. Officially Funny people make me sort of twitchy because if I'm honest one thing I've gotten pleasantly used to in the last ten years or so is people thinking I'm pretty funny (maybe they're just being nice!) in my own peculiar way, and then I really want to make Officially Funny people laugh to prove that I am, in fact, a funny guy. Which to the extent that I might be a funny guy runs mostly counter to the nature and thrust of my funniness because I can't force it with great success, since I'm not that great at telling jokes and would probably be a bad standup comedian. Actually, I know exactly what I'd be like as a standup comedian: unfunny and rageful.

Two Things, I Think

It's been forever, yo. I still haven't written about Inland Empire and wrapped up my tripartite Lynchathon even though I saw like eight years ago now. Coming. It's hard to gather the energy for frivolously thought-and-reaction arty blogging when you're really tired and overworked, which is what I've been for a couple of weeks. I don't think it's just corporate, uhm, ethnocentrism, because I don't have a great opinion of everyone in the employ of the company I work for, but I do have a high opinion of the people I personally work with. I don't have a high opinion of the work done by a number of the people working for (directly or as contractor) our client. In one case I'm distrustful of motive, and in several I'm frustrated/exasperated by, essentially, the unreadiness of people who are supposed to be managing what is, let's be fair, an unwieldy situation, to manage that unwieldy situation. There's a learning curve for subject matter - I'm on that one with everyone else who hasn't directly worked in this field - but there's a learning curve for managerial competence and there's also a learning curve, I think, for business savvy, and I think our client, the government agency, which is heavily staffed by people who've never been near the top of an income-generating chain, is somewhat oblivious to (a) what it's like to go out and hustle for a dime, or to put it non-metaphorically, what it's like to need to make payroll when your client is several months behind in cutting you the damn check already, and (b) what people who have spent their lives being very good at hustling for a dime are willing to do to get a quarter.

But those weren't my "two things," so my post title has already made me a liar.

(1) A little navel-gazing blogging here: I went on a fairly restrictive, though not crazy-scary, diet last fall, and over the course of a few months dropped from (yeesh, I'm about to put the numbers down for real) 245 to 215. Then for a few months I did well at using the broader principles of the diet to eat intelligently while not depriving myself and sticking around that 215 plateau. I wasn't exercising regularly, and I wanted to lose more weight, so I told myself that in 2009 I'd resume dieting as I asymptotically approached my non-existent "goal weight"*. Instead, in 2009 I bounced back up to about 233 before restarting the diet in late April; I'm back to about 215 and taking a break for June to try and tread water, more or less, before making another concerted weight loss effort. (The highly restrictive diet isn't that restrictive - the more restrictive they are, the more bullshit they seem to be in the long run, I think; but worrying in an active way about what I'm going to eat for every meal becomes mentally exhausting. The broader principles of picking and choosing your spots and indulging here but not there are mentally easier for me, but my willpower was lax, hence the lapse.)

But the point is about psychology, and it's interesting to me that it's only by virtue of having lost weight that I really understand what I was doing when I was heavy. It's been clear that the foremost reason I became fat is because I became habituated to constantly snacking, in the afternoon and evening, before and after dinner, on various chocolate delivery mechanisms, and that this snacking was both a physical habit - I became completely accustomed to the notion that if I were sitting at a computer, one hand would be semi-regularly handling the cookie duties - and an emotional crutch, albeit a pretty poor one. I've had a few occasions in the past two weeks (remember above about the job stress?) where I had a kind of desperate anxiety-attack-by-food of the sort that regularly overtook me before, and what I noticed is not how shallow the emotional relief is - I've always seen that - but how horrible I feel physically, right afterwards. I actually articulated the thought out loud to some of my coworkers: "Oh my god, did I used to feel like this all the time?"

* Supposedly the "ideal" weight for someone of my height, if you go by Body Mass Index, is somewhere in the vicinity of 165 or 170, but I don't think this is a realistic goal for me. I'm not naturally huge, but I'm bigger-framed than that; I weighed 165 when I was 16, which was both when I reached my full height and when I would last be describable as "lanky". When I graduated from high school I was about 185, and while I was already pretty soft around the belly, I was only in the early stages of the normal late-adolescent "filling out" most guys experience, which happened in college, albeit masked by the fact that I was adding fat via my diet way faster than my body was adding muscle via natural testosterone surges. The short version of the above is that I've never had a moment where I was both fit and physically mature, so I don't know what my baseline should be. Adjusting for a slightly bigger frame and the fact that I'd ideally like to wind up a few smidges more muscular than the guy who actually falls into the middle of the BMI chart's "normal zone", I'm guessing I want to see what happens if I drop to about 200, +/- 5 lbs., and then start weightlifting for real. (Which is its own double-bind: weightlifting in and of itself increases muscle, which burns fat, so weightlifting is actually the most effective method for long-term fat loss. But, short-term, you don't build muscle without eating enough for your body to spend the energy necessary to burn it, which in practice means you'll probably gain some fat as well unless you're really, really disciplined.)

OK wow but enough about fatty's delusions of physical fitness shall we?

I do have other delusions.

(2) I realized today, while thinking about Nine Inch Nails and how I'm an idiot for never seeing them live and now they're, basically, done (though Reznor himself isn't, whatever that means going forward), and also thinking about guitars, that my delusional aspirations of instrumental capacity have been all wrong because I've been thinking that I want the same things from the guitar and the piano, albeit in different spheres. What I want from the piano, though I haven't played one in months and I'll have to start from scratch, more or less, when I eventually resume playing, because I did it all wrong for the first seventeen years...what I want from the piano is to be an interesting and personal improvising pianist, in the jazz idiom, which to me implies balancing a heavy dose of individuality and creativity with a broad grasp of jazz (and related styles') piano's history and various conduits and the chops to pull it all off, feeling comfortable in a variety of situations. I know I'll never be a physical virtuoso - if nothing else, I don't have the discipline, and I probably don't have the brute capacity either - but more than anything on the piano I want to be a player, in whatever sense that makes sense to me.

What I want from the guitar isn't, foremost, to be a player. I adore impressive guitarists, especially when they're musically impressive as well as physically impressive, but while I think it'd be awesome to have those abilities, that's not what I want most. I'm more moved, I think, by the electric guitar as (a) song delivery mechanism, and (b) electric noise generator. Playing songs and using effects to create interesting textures is what ultimately grabs me most about the electric guitar, and that's what I want to do with one. I both need and want a reasonable technical and idiomatic facility to make it work the way I want to - Billy Corgan said you need to practice until you can execute the fantasies in your head, and he made clear that for him that took more practice than Billy Joe Armstrong but less than Yngwie Malmsteen - but it really clicked for me today that as much as I think it'd be cool to be able to do what, e.g., professional sidemen and studio musicians do, let alone single-minded guitar virtuosi, I'd rather be a poor man's Kevin Shields or Billy Corgan or Trent Reznor than a homeless man's Carl Verheyen or Allan Holdsworth.

Whatever.

...OK...

So despite not being, as far as I can tell, physically ill (has swine flu gone stealth?), and despite knowing that depression can cause you to sleep more - so, like, I'm always depressed, but I'm not always depressed depressed, and right now I'm not depressed, just perpetually peevish - I slept a lot last night.

And by a lot I mean, I got home at 5:15, at 5:30 I lay down (clothed) on my bed and opened a book, and woke up at 7:15. At 7:30 I decided "fuck it," forewent dinner, and just went to bed. A couple of times through the night I woke up and decided to just keep sleeping. (Which by itself is notable; when I wake up, I almost always really wake up, and can't get back to sleep for an hour or two.) Which led to my finally getting out of bed at 10:00 this morning.

So, I think I just slept, including the brief periods of consciousness, for about 16 hours.

I guess I've been running myself harder than I thought.

Oh, Hi There

Been busy personally, professionally, mentally ... I've had the next two films in my final Lynchathon push in the apartment for a week and haven't watched either one. I'm basically working, coming home, going to the gym, watching basketball, staying up way too late to take advantage of my having gone to the gym, and then doing it all again and again and again.

Some brief thoughts:

Bulls-Celtics has got to be the best NBA playoff series ever in which neither team had a remote possibility of even making it to the NBA finals. It's astoundingly good and entertaining. There will be a seventh game. In the six games so far, there have been two single overtime games, one double overtime game, and one triple overtime game. There have never been so many overtime periods, or games with overtimes, in a playoff series before. I of course want the Celtics to win, and I'm not sure I can even bear to watch game 7 because of it (though of course I almost certainly will) but I almost don't care who wins the series, I just want to watch as much of it as I can. As weird as it sounds, right now these teams are both playing ridiculously good basketball considering that they're somehow overmatched against each other; the Bulls simply don't have the talent and skills (YET - get back to me in a year or two) to hang with the Celtics, but the Celtics are too injured and thin on the bench to be able to hang with the Bulls. I just watched a triple overtime game and then spent five minutes on the phone with my dad detailing my theories about whether or not a player's foot was on the three point line when he made a clutch shot. (My answer: it wasn't when he began taking the shot, but it was when he finished taking it.)

Also of some currency; there was just a training session and test for a lot of the staff working for my employers on a specific facet of what we do. The test was admittedly, by its designers, intended to be easy and passable, and the training session was geared specifically towards the knowledge necessary to pass the test. (Important clarification: I'm, for these purposes, on the QC team [three people], which had to take the test, because we have to be able to QC the work performed by the actual frontline staff [about twenty-five people, more or less].) The person running the training program told me that I had the high score. Apparently a bunch of the frontline staff did poorly on the test. Like, a bunch of them. Now:

I've gotten very good, for a variety of reasons, at reflexively deflecting apparent high achievement on my part when compared to subpar achievement from others; I'm quite facile at finding flaws in methodology and process and explaining away other people's poor performance. Partly because while I'm intellectually confident, I don't think I'm conceited; partly because I don't want people to think I'm conceited; partly because I think some of my deflections are accurate; partly because I honestly believe that a lot of what people perceive as evidence of my intelligence isn't actually evidence of my intelligence. It's evidence of my ability to notice, absorb, and retain much more information across a much broader spectrum of topics than the average person. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if curiosity and strong memory were highly correlated with other traits that I consider more authentically "intelligence," because that's a cluster of skills that complement each other well, but I think I'm smart because I can rapidly assimilate new information that's not just factual but procedural or argumentative, I can perceive different angles from which to view a problem, I'm good at disassembling arguments [better at that than creating them, which is why I hoped to become the poor man's Sidney Morgenbesser], and a bunch of other things, some of which I only notice by comparison to other people, like - in the training session for this test - how frustrated and confused a lot of people seemed to be by having a process they understood in one context presented to them in another context. The point being that people who don't know me that well think I'm intelligent because I know who John Jay was, whereas I don't understand why everyone else who took U.S. History in high school [which is to say: everyone] doesn't remember who John Jay was, since he certainly came up once or twice.

ANYWAY the point being that I can see a whole bunch of reasons why my getting the high score despite first attempting to learn the necessary information a couple of weeks before the test, while people who'd been actually doing the job for years performed poorly, isn't actually a valid indication of our relative ability to perform the task at hand in a real world situation. I've thought of lots of them. Because frankly it's sort of frightening that I should have done better on the test than someone who's had that job for thirteen years. I actually didn't want to be the high score on the test; I wanted to do very well, for a variety of reasons, but I really wanted for entirely selfless reasons to have a score that looked good but wasn't as good as the scores achieved by people who'd been performing the relevant tasks for thirteen years. It's, honestly, kind of scary to contemplate, because those are the people who are actually doing the work, and have been considered competent (well, there are issues there, but) to do the work for years, in some cases. But here we are. (By the way: I scored a 92, so it's not like I rocked the shit out of it. I've actually got a good guess as to what questions I missed and what questions the experienced employees missed; I bet I missed a few of the questions that required knowing all the many details of abstract policy - who qualifies for what deduction - that I could only partially stuff into my head because some of them are honestly so freaking arbitrary, while they missed the complex and crafty calculations stuff that I found easy because all I had to do was follow the damn direections.) Sigh.

NOOZLES OH MY FUCKING GOD NOOZLES

NOOZLES

For the last several years I intermittently have tried to remember the name of an animated show I greatly enjoyed as a child. It had something to do with koalas and Australia and children and Uluru/Ayers Rock functioning as a place of great mystical power.

Today the mystery is solved. Today I put the search string "children's animated 'ayers rock'" into Google and I was brought to happiness and joy here, which lead me again to here. (Apparently it aired back to back with another koala-themed show, because the programs were created in Japan which was had recently gone, as seems unsurprisingly likely for the Japanese, absolutely fucking nuts for koalas. It seems quite possible that I have also in part conflated elements of these two programs if they did indeed air consecutively on Nickelodeon.)

NOOZLES

It has to be this; there can only have been one children's program in the late 80s/early 90s that centered on koalas AND ALSO had the mystical properties of Uluru/Ayers Rock as a recurring plot point, right? RIGHT?

And so we come to Youtube. Here. It is important now to observe that absolutely nothing appears to be as I remembered it. The show I remember was much cooler. But it must be this.

It must be, right?

(Noozles?)

And Another Puzzle Piece Finds Its Proper Place

This post, I swear, is not a complaint.

This post, I swear, is also not a brag.

One of the things that's guaranteed to upset me (OK, this part is a complaint) about artistic portrayals of precocious children (to be fair, often of children who were much more precocious than I was) is the cliche that the child is, culturally, completely out of step with her age cohort - doesn't listen to their music, watch their tv and movies, and is completely lost when confronted with the cultural references relevant to the average N year old. Precocity doesn't entail a complete divorce from your age group and/or its interests.

One thing that I've noticed for a while, though, is that I don't seem to share a lot of the touchstones of children's books that other people have. I'm aware of classics like Goodnight, Moon and Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein and Where the Wild Things Are, but with the exception of some of Silverstein, I didn't engage with any of those books the way my peers did - reading them and having them read over and over again, with care and love. I've never actually read Goodnight, Moon, and I've read one or two Seuss books, I think both in school as part of a class thing and at my younger cousins' house when I was bored. I know I've read Where the Wild Things Are, but I'm 99% certain that I picked it up in the grade school library, read it in three minutes, and put it back on the shelf. For one thing, looking back, I probably didn't connect with the book because I probably didn't like the monsters. It's just an aesthetic sensibility; I'm not captivated by Things that look like the ones Sendak drew.

I presumed, though, that perhaps my general divorce from very young children's literature had to do with my parents (when in doubt, we know who to blame); since neither had been a young child in an English-speaking culture, they didn't have a relation to the classic English language picture books. But it's not like I remember any Spanish or Portuguese classics of kids' lit either.

So anyway, today it hit me: I have a few rogue memories dating back to when I was three years old, but the semi-complete record of my life basically starts when I was five or six (though, since I'm not one of those people who can remember disproportionate amounts of their own life, kindergarten and first grade are pretty spotty). So my very oldest memories post-date my learning to read, and by the time I start having a coherent memory record I was reading way in advance of my age range. I don't remember a period of my life when Where the Wild Things Are - or any other primarily illustrated children's book - would've been pitched at my reading level, and books like that - mostly pictures, few words - wouldn't have been interesting to me because above all else I loved to read, the actual words.

The last bit explains why I was perfectly happy, a few years later, to read bales of the "young adult" type stuff you're assigned from 3rd-6th grade even though it was ostensibly far below my reading level; it was still text, and I was a devourer of text. I also wasn't emotionally or artistically sophisticated enough to really get everything out of the best adult fiction I was reading anyway, so the truly important differences between, say, John Bellairs and John Irving weren't really evident to me. Both authors wrote stories in text, and I got that Irving's stories were more complicated (and more "adult") but they were equally comprehensible to me as stories.

(The idea that Shakespeare is difficult to understand never made any sense to me for this reason: I'd read all his plays by the time I was ten or eleven, and I understood perfectly well what was going on, I was just way too young to appreciate the art or the emotion in them. [I was way too young to appreciate the art or emotion in most things I read at that age, including, I'm sure, A Prayer for Owen Meany, about which I remember nothing.] As an adult, I can't imagine that the emotion isn't understandable to anyone with adult emotional faculties, so I'm left with people being baffled by language that I could more or less decode as a fourth grader.)

So I guess that's why I don't have fierce nostalgic love for Where the Wild Things Are, while the rest of the world either grumbles over or (more often, it seems) shouts joyously over the trailer for the Spike Jonze adaptation.

Sláinte Mhaith, As A Matter Of Fact.

Not that I think it should actually do anything to change the cultural meaning of the day, but I always enjoy pointing out that St. Patrick was actually Romano-British (from the area around Carlisle), captured as a teenager and enslaved by Irish raiders.

That said, I must as ever offer up my kudos to Irish Americans, who've done a really astounding and admirable job of overcoming the intensely bigoted attitudes against which they struggled for the better part of a hundred years in trying to make their way in this country. On the one hand, the overwhelming cultural similarity to the English (and English-descended Americans) should have made this a smooth and simple process, but on the other hand, that fact that the English (and English-descended Americans) hated the Irish more than anybody else did kind of overwhelmed the mutual love of beer for a few decades.

The Italians, of course, have done pretty well in getting accepted by the American mainstream themselves, but lots of Italian things are marked ITALIAN in a way that's more decidedly foreign - dusky, scented with olive oil - than those things marked Irish. Italians had a language barrier to overcome, sure, but on the other hand they were bringing much better food to the dinner table. I think the superior integration of the Irish into the American mainstream demonstrates the advantage of having drunken vaguely Catholic parades which are fueled by beer and images of four leaf clover, instead of drunken vaguely Catholic parades which are fueled by wine and images of the Virgin Mary, weeping.

So even though I tend to ignore the day as much as possible, I say to you: Sláinte.

Of great note: for the first time since I was maybe fourteen, nobody called me out for not wearing green. There's always somebody, and usually multiple people, who will be wherever I am during the day and who will also chastise me for not being sufficiently verdant. On absolutely no evidence, I'm going to use this data to generate a new stereotype: Black people don't give a shit about St. Patrick's Day.

And Also There Is Loneliness In This:

I was taught to how to fold sheets by my father's father, and it's an inherently collaborative method.

In college and thereafter, the first time in my life when the care and changing of my sheets was primarily my responsibility, my general method was to let the dirty sheets sit in my laundry bag until it was time for the change, at which point I'd wash the old ones, put them directly on the bed, and throw the newer ones into the pile, and so the cycle would continue. This is also why despite usually owning three pairs of sheets, I'd get into ruts with only two of them or, even more frequently, I must admit I'd simply strip the bed, wash the sheets, and then put them back on, which I eventually noticed wasn't exactly good for the lifespan of the fabric.

Thus it is that only in the last few months have I assayed the task of actually folding bed linens by myself. It is an awkward activity - especially that fucking fitted sheet - and also, I find, a lonely one. It is a small pleasure to come physically toward someone and make your corners meet.

Violence In The Workplace

That was the name of a training session which our Government Agency mandates as necessary for all employees, including contractors, and which my immediate coworkers and I finally got around to receiving on Friday. It was interesting, actually; some of the topics were thought-provoking although I'm skeptical about the educational value, although maybe that's my personal jadedness; I felt that I didn't need to "learn" the things in the session, but perhaps some of my coworkers did. Or didn't. One issue I found interesting, although somewhat tangential, was the question of what to do if you believe that a coworker is being abused at home. One of us argued that since that's not a work-related matter, it would be overstepping the boundaries of what is and isn't your business to alert your supervisor. (My initial thought was alerting the police rather than a supervisor, but for a variety of reasons that's not actually a practical idea, which I should have figured out before opening my mouth. So I learned something after all!) There were two interesting counter-examples, though, provided by long-time employees - people who worked at the Government Agency for the previous contractor and in at least one case directly for the Agency itself back in the day.

(1) A woman whose boyfriend came to the workplace, called her into the parking lot, and began beating her there.

(2) A woman whose supervisor documented every occasion when she came to work with bruises, even to the point of taking photographs (I wasn't clear on whether the woman was cooperating with the documentation in this regard or if the photos were taken surreptitiously), so that when finally the woman reported her husband to the police, her supervisor was able to provide evidence that the abuse had been going on for months.

I just thought that was interesting stuff. In my old job, among other responsibilities I read discovery documents in labor cases.* I read about one story where a woman's boyfriend came to the workplace and started a fight with a male employee whom the boyfriend suspected his girlfriend was cheating with, but I never read about a man actually coming to his s/o's job to assault her in the parking lot. I really don't know what to make of it, beyond the obvious.

* A plaintiff suing for wrongful termination needs to demonstrate the he was treated differently than those coworkers with analogous situations. For example, if a man was officially fired for coming to work drunk, but he claims he was fired because of his age, his attorney would like to be able to demonstrate that other employees who came to work drunk were disciplined but not fired. Therefore, in a wrongful termination suit, the personnel files of everyone who had the same rank (at least) as the plaintiff are generally part of the discovery, and need to be Bates labeled (by me). I also tended to read these files because they were the most overtly entertaining part of my job. I was often officially assigned to do specific readthroughs of discovery documents - flag every email with the word "sponsor," highlight every deposition passage relating to the morning commute - but was only once overtly tasked to look for something in personnel files.

Unfortunately, the training session - which had been scheduled a few weeks in advance - had some timeliness, because a few days before, the #2 supervisor at our satellite office was attacked in the ladies' room during work hours. I have heard both that she was attacked by a disgruntled client and by somebody acting on behalf of a recent firee - and also heard some details that are intended to discredit her account, which I have not directly heard. This is the sort of thing I intentionally abstain from: I don't know the details and am not interested in speculating, and am happy for the police to do their job. What isn't in doubt is that she was kept overnight in the hospital, though I don't believe her injuries are serious in the scheme of things.

I also found out today that a friend of mine's brother-in-law was murdered a few months ago, and although I never met him (I did once meet her sister) I was pretty well speechless for a while. I don't really have much to say about it, I guess. The police are still investigating but they believe it was related to his work as a district attorney.

And to close with something much lighter in tone, because it's not all violence and sadness at Medrawt HQ, I have definitive proof of the aging process doing its inevitable work upon me. My beard, when I grow it, has always sheltered the stray red hair - so did my father's before it went salt and pepper, and so did my grandfather's mustache before I was born - but recently I've noted that it contains one or two hairs of a decidedly new color. My youth is slipping away, one dull Saturday night after the next, and I've got the grey hairs to prove it.

Adventures in Telephony

(1) At work yesterday, called an equivalent Government Agency in another city, a small one, and the provided contact number was actually for the agency director, who happened to be sitting in his office with exactly the people I needed to talk to, having exactly the conversation I had wanted to have. This did not go well. I was on the phone for an hour with some extremely friendly Iowans who were really curious about lots of things I couldn't really answer because (among other reasons) I frankly hadn't really done my homework. I'd gotten complacent after a series of eventless calls where I asked my question and was promised a relevant fax in return, so that this time around I neglected to check our own management software to see what the deal was with the case in question, assuming it was as cut and dried as the others. It was not. I hemmed and hawed and sounded rather foolish, I fear. But the Iowans, being - I take it - Iowan, were extremely nice about the whole thing, and I got to drop some "this is how we do it in the big city, where our program serves 100x as many people as yours does" knowledge on them. Said knowledge being, essentially: "Honestly, we have so many clients that our resources don't really allow us to be quite so investigative or diligent."

(2) At another agency I was transferred four times in order to reach the person I needed to talk to, who let me pose my question and appeared on the verge of answering it before deciding that, hey now, she didn't actually have any way of knowing I was who I said I was, and could I prove it? This threw me off rather a lot, so I took her suggestion of faxing her something with an official coversheet, and I agreed. Unfortunately, our coversheet isn't actually terribly official, so I didn't hear back from her. My boss - and I should have thought of this myself - suggested (after much laughter) that I should email her, because maybe she wouldn't assume I'd spoofed a domain name. This was successful.

(3) Today I called what I can only assume was a very small agency, and received a recorded message that ran as follows: "Thank you for calling the [Local Government Agency]. Unfortunately, we are not able to answer your call at this time. Our hours of operation are [a window within which I was definitely calling]. Please try again later." This is unprecedented. I don't care how small they are, I'll forgive them not having a phone tree or IVR, but they don't have voicemail?

(4) This evening I was in a slightly frazzled mood, my home phone rang, I answered it, a guy with a Mexican accent informed me that he was calling from a survey company in Hollywood, and I promise I usually say something like "Sorry, I'm not interested," or "I don't have time, and a good time to call back would be, well, I'd rather you didn't," but I just hung up without saying anything. Five seconds later my phone rang again. Coincidence, right? No - same guy. Now I'm a little annoyed (well, more so), and I hang up again without notification. I'm walking away when the phone rings again, and I pick it up and say "Hello?" only to have whomever called me hang up on me. And then my phone rang again, and I picked it up without saying anything, and it instantly went to dial tone. And then in the next few minutes there were three occasions where it rang only once, and I didn't answer it. I've been told that random rings can be the result of electrical spikes in the phone grid, but I'd rather think that the telemarketer guy, for whom I do feel some level of intrinsic sympathy (he didn't draw up the business model, and everybody's got to eat) was angered at my rudeness and taking out his frustrations on me. Sorry, ese.

Yeah, Rub It In, Whatever

Hey, would you like to go to this concert?

Yeah, sure!

Would you like to go by yourself?

Don't really see a problem with that, no.

Would you like to go by yourself, on Valentine's Day?

I ... oh ... sigh. Never mind.



There's one broken and one functional Youtube link at the CSO page, but the functional one is also seven minutes long and starts with a few minutes of stage patter. So instead of Mariza, here's a taste of the true Queen of Fado; this is just scratching the surface, but it's a nice short video if a bit one-dimensional. This sort of thing was on in my house a lot growing up:

"You'd Have Remembered That!"

So said my doctor after administering a test for certain sexually transmitted diseases during my standard Actually, Your Heart Is Healthy But You Need A Physical physical. Said test involved the brief insertion of, I guess, a swab, or a Q-tip, or something, into a portion of my anatomy I've been known to stress as emphatically having an understood if invisible sign hung over it that says: "Exit Only." I thought I'd been tested for these infections when I was in college, but either I wasn't or the test they administered was different, because I'd definitely never experienced that particular sensation before. Prior to the administration she said, "I'm sure it's not that painful," and I half-shouted "How would you know?! Do you listen when guys tell you pregnancy isn't a big deal?" Dr. G-O made a reasonable point about the relative size of the foreign objects under discussion, so I hastened to make clear that I was referring to the value of the opinion, not trying to engage in misery poker - after all, how the hell would I know? (It wasn't that painful, but it was quite unpleasant. I imagine it's the sort of thing you could get used to.) I've found that in general I have a higher-than usual need, at the doctor's, to lean on the constant wisecracks, probably to deflate the awkwardness of being all but naked in front of a relative stranger. "Are you sexually active?" "Well, in principle." I'd like to be able to pull off the air of a guy who is completely businesslike and unflappable when being poked and prodded, but remember that I can't piss in a cup when people are waiting for it (and this was, in fact, an issue today!), so the prospect of getting checked for testicular cancer by a lady I've met once before in my life is a bit of a stressor, if you will.

More goes on in my life than my boring adventures in routine medical care, but frankly, being in the depths of a severe depressive period is great news for my exhaustion, apathy, and general anhedonia, but extremely bad news for my blogging.

A Wednesday

(1) Property taxes is a bitch.

(2) I voted today. Early voting is a good thing, at least until we all get like Oregon and just leisurely drop our ballots in the mail. This was the second-to-last day for early voting in Chicago, and I stood in line for about 40 minutes this morning. About a third of the way into my wait, a man approached one of the people in charge of corralling us all and making sure we filled out our forms and such, inquiring about the estimated length before he got to actually vote. Being told that ballot-casting was about 45 minutes to an hour away, the man shrugged and left. Now, possibly he was figuring that he couldn't be that late for work but could skip out early in the afternoon or something, but primarily I thought: "This, right now, is the least crowded this polling place is going to be. It will only get busier during the day, and it will be equally busy, if not more so, and Election Day proper is going to be a right mess." There's a part of me that believes we're immoral if we don't do easy commonsense things to make voting more convenient. (I don't know if we'll cover the other part of me in this post.)

(3) Incidentally, I only filled out maybe 17 sections of a probably 60 section ballot. I made the decision that I was going to vote party line in races I didn't know anything about, and abstain from voting if the race were all Democrats (because this was also a guarantee that I wouldn't know anything about the candidates). Most of the ballot actually had to do with judges, and in addition to not knowing anything about my local judges, the only judge-related vote I'm inclined to cast is one on a hypothetical referendum to end the election of judges, which is something I'm pretty eager to vote for.

(4) Mostly abstaining from chocolate and chocolate-related products for almost two months has, apparently, done nothing to change my relationship with the product. As long as I restricted myself to only ordering the occasional dessert in a restaurant, a highly controlled situation and one I'm not going to be in most of the time, I was fine, but yesterday a coworker was selling cookies on behalf of her kid's school and I thought "what's the harm in eating a little package of Famous Amos? - I don't even like them all that much!" It was like letting an alcoholic have a drink. I turned into a slavering beast and only the greatest strength of will has prevented my complete departure from the wagon. As it was I brought myself some shame with the aggressive manner in which I made sure to get all the loose chocolate chips out from the corner of the bag before throwing it away.

My dark master.