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.

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.

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.

Frying Pans, Fires, Overdramatic Metaphorical Cliches

One of my complaints about my job at the law firm was that in effect I really had two jobs, and I greatly preferred one of them; I was a sorta free agent assistant for the litigation and (especially) labor attorneys doing whatever projects came up as I was free to take them. Some of these came by assignment, sort of like a blind date, but over two years I developed working relationships with some of the attorneys, who would routinely come to me if they needed something done, and I usually tried to accommodate them. My other job was to maintain the filing for the bankruptcy group, a job which I hated intensely (no reflection on the actual people working in the bankruptcy group). There were secondary consequences to the problem, but in essence there you go.

And now I once again have, basically, two jobs; one is doing the monthly reporting to our Government Agency overlords, and one is doing the day to day work of being a compliance analyst (although we still haven't done much that's truly compliance, because of shit I might talk about obliquely some other time). I thought when I took the job that I'd really enjoy the writing and reporting aspects and that the compliance stuff would be kind of a drag. In practice, though, I've come to dread the reporting and if I don't love the compliance work it's more interesting and less...something.

For one thing, the reporting winds up being kind of isolating. I'm fond of my little compliance group, and when I'm working on the reporting I become detached from them because they have nothing to do with my reports. I interact with them much less and worry about my own shit and nag other people to give me information in a timely manner. I sort of like the communal teamwork aspect of what we do; even if we aren't literally working on the same thing, it's all interlocking pieces of a puzzle, and we can commiserate and make jokes about the weird stories we discover and say things like "Wait, who are you working? Jane Johnson? That sounds familiar. Let me...yeah, no wonder she's not returning your calls, she's on my deceased report." You know, good times, teamwork.

For another thing, the reporting's cyclical nature means that my mood, at least as it pertains to work, can be tracked on a predictable monthly swing and since my productivity is directly related to my happiness (at least in a work-focused sense), I'm most productive at the antipode of my reports' due date. Lately I start worrying about the reports even at the antipode, though; the specter of having to start collecting information and synthesizing it into bite-sized information packets so it can fit into the stupid predetermined template I was handed by the powers upon high once again tarnishes the enjoyment of not actually having to do it for two weeks.

There's also a sense of treading water, because if I skim the report for August and compare it to the one for December I don't feel like we substantively covered any new ground, made progress, improved our performance and solidified our position. The concerns feel as repetitive and cyclical as the writing process.

I just wanted to complain for a moment.

On the compliance side, I've been having to call sister Government Agencies in other cities to work out some of our issues, and let me tell you, there are some weird Interactive Voice Response systems out there; there's one that hangs up on me if I don't make my menu selection within five seconds, which is problematic because none of the selections remotely correspond to my needs. You'd think there would be like a special secret phone line that the agencies could use to talk to each other, but there isn't, and "If you're calling from another government agency, please press 8" has not yet manifested as an option. I spend a lot of time on hold and getting transferred by people who don't know who I need to talk to, but are pretty sure it's not them. (And on a pure professionalism standpoint, one of the published numbers for a particular agency in downstate Illinois, a number listed as the appropriate contact information on the website of the federal agency to which we all ultimately answer, goes to a voicemail for "Greg [Lastname]". I hung up assuming I had the wrong number, because "Greg [Lastname]" didn't bother to specify that yes, I'd reached the [Illinois city government agency]. Greg turned out to be a nice guy and I suspect that he might actually have been the boss, though we didn't clear that up.

Update Bullets

(1) My father agreed with me that it was, for us at least, unusual to attend a funeral where part of the ceremony involved watching a video of the deceased oiled up and posing onstage in a skimpy swimsuit. I suppose it's the sort of thing that might happen when the deceased happened to be a successful local figure competitor prior to her first bout with cancer, but it was still strange for me. That aside, it was the first non-Catholic (or nominally Catholic) funeral I've attended, and it was simultaneously nice but well outside my realm of experience and, sometimes, comfort.

(2) Ongoing and interlocking frustrations at work of the sort that I imagine must be insufferably dull to talk about, even by the standards of what I put up on this so-infrequent blog. I will note that working for five months in a government agency has pretty much solidified and etched in stone my nascent convictions that we live in a society where systems seem to operate independently of the individuals who compose them, and work against them. A surprising proportion of my frustration and anger is impotent and directionless because there's no one identifiable at whom to aim it; everyone would appear to agree, whether explicitly or tacitly, that most of the stuff I think is crazy shit is in fact crazy shit. I'm utterly confident that if I had a sit down with the organization's CEO, he'd agree with me. Things calcify and seem to be the way they *are* and the system grinds on. Everyone watching out for their own wheelhouse unknowingly conspires to create the machine they decry.

(3) There was a movie starring Fred Ward (and Kate Mulgrew and Wilford Brimley and Joel Grey in what I'm going to call "yellow-face", somewhere between David Carradine in Kung Fu and Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's on the offensive scale, though I suspect that might've been the point), based on a long-running series of men's pulp novels. The movie was entitled, optimistically, Remo Williams: The Adventure Beings. There were clearly supposed to be multiple sequels. There clearly were none. I don't post here as often as I'd like, but note to a fellow blogger: when your post titles indicate a multi-part series, it's only polite to provide the second installment within a month's time of the first. Just saying. :-P

(4) I just put an emoticon on my blog.

(5) I don't write about direct politics in the horse-race sense, because for the sake of my mental health I like to maintain a heavily mediated distance from the immediacy of all that, but I'd like to be the umpteenth voice noting the absurdity that Katie Fucking Couric was too tough an interview for Sarah Palin. That literally dozens of bloggers on the left can come up with answers that would be 1000% preferable for her own interests than what she can come up with is astonishing. "What newspapers do I read? The Anchorage [Whatever] and/or the Juneau [Whatever-Picayune], and I make sure to read through at least a couple of sections of the Wall Street Journal, plus, of course, whatever press clippings my staff feels it necessary to bring to my attention." Christ, namecheck USA Today. How fucking hard is this? I wouldn't want to vote for someone who claimed their worldview was influenced by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I'm not a fucking Republican, am I? - that'd be a perfectly respectable answer for someone coming from her perspective. The early buzz amongst frightened liberals was that Palin was an astonishingly good liar because she didn't flinch while telling you her piss was actually rain, but at least piss is a fucking liquid. Some of her responses are the kind of idiot panic / smug conceit you get from Homer Simpson. Where have you been all day, Governor Palin? Think of something clever, think of something clever! I was at the bar getting drunk at two in the afternoon! Brilliant! What newspapers do you read? All of them! What are your personal accomplishments? I invented the Cobb Salad!

(6) In the month of September I lost twenty pounds (thanks, Dr. Agatstin!). Unfortunately, between May and August I gained twenty pounds, so I'm still c.30 pounds overweight, same as I have been since applying for grad school back in 2006. Sometimes for giggles I measure my weight against basketball players, though, and it's nice that I no longer weigh as much as some NBA power forwards (i.e., muscular guys who are nine inches taller than me).

RIP Valerie P.

Yesterday a colleague of mine died in the hospital of complications from breast cancer which ultimately spread to her brain.

The government program which my dad's company is contracted to run part of includes a call center, and the call center is under our purview. As part of the proposal process and subsequent negotiations, Unisys was contracted to do an independent analysis of the call center, which was a big embarrassment and one of the central problems (that we were aware of) coming into the job. People were routinely on hold for thirty or forty minutes before getting their calls answered. I think my father and his business partner presumed they'd have to hire new personnel and new management staff. Unisys actually said otherwise; the staff was good and as best as they could tell the management was great, they just didn't remotely have the technical capacity or especially the manpower to meet the call volumes our clientele generates. Upgraded systems and a 50%+ increase in staffing have the call center operating smoothly and admirably.

Valerie, or as I referred to her (as I do most people around the office) "Ms. P______", was the manager of the call center, and she was good at it. I didn't get to know her well over the past few months, but she was always friendly, cheerful, and (lame and unimportant as it sounds) was always responsive and timely when I asked her for data. Now that she's gone I feel great regret that the only concrete thing I can say about her is that she was good at her job, but being good at your job is a good thing, I guess, and I can see from the reactions of those who knew her better as well as my own instinctive fondness for her that there was, of course, much more to her.

I actually went, with my compliance compadres, to visit her in the hopsital yesterday, but I kept getting kicked out of the room so that they could come in and do procedures (suctioning fluid buildup, mostly) before I could say anything to her, or rather gather the courage and thought to do it. She was supported by breathing machines, and putatively unconscious, although we were assured that she could hear us. By the time I'd worked out what I wanted to tell her I'd missed my chance, and ultimately I realized that sticking around and crowding both her family and all the other employees coming by to say hello, say farewell, offer tears and a little humor, I realized it was selfish, that what I had to say wasn't that important in the end and that I wanted to say it more for me than for her. If she could hear us, she had more than enough love around her than to miss my meager offering.

I realized that this was something I'd never seen before; my mother died suddenly and alone, and while the three of my grandparents who are gone died over extended periods of time in hopsitals, I was always away, out of state, and only ever flew in for the funerals. I've never seen anybody dying before, and I started to think about what it would've been like to be there by (especially) my grandfather's (dad's dad) side, post-stroke, as he struggled and improved before finally collapsing in resignation. I thought about that, and then I thought, as I often do, about humanity's twinned hunger to feel empathy and stunted resources with which to do it. I was sad, and then saddened again.

She died a few hours later in the afternoon, and I found out a few hours later still. She seemed to be well loved, as we'd all hope to be, but all I really know was that she was friendly and good at her job, so for me that will have to serve; it is enough. If there's anything after this, I hope it's good for her.

That's all, I guess.

Weird Presence

Working in the same office as my father (when he's in town) has created an unexpected new situation: we can run into each other in the men's room without knowing the other person was in there. At a movie theater or a restaurant or anywhere else where we happen to be in the same place, we're in that place as part of a group (often a group of two), and so we typically say things like "I need to use the men's room before we leave," or "Excuse me," and getting up from the table to walk in the relevant direction. The situation of walking into the men's room to find my father washing his hands without knowing he'd be there is actually pretty rare in my experience.

So: what I've realized that's kind of weird is that I can walk into the men's room, note that a stall is in use, select another stall, and then realize my father is in the adjacent stall. He doesn't say anything (nor do I), there's nothing overt to signal his presence. There also aren't any sort of unpleasant or squeam-inducing indicators - I don't mean that I'm sitting there thinking "hey, those are the sounds of my father's indigestion!" It's the overall aural vibe: the sound and rhythm of his breathing, the way I can hear him shift his weight slightly, a soft cough. (When he passed in front of my stall after washing his hands I could see him in the crack of my stall door, so I received confirmation.) There wasn't a particular tell or giveaway, either. I just sat down and then instantly realized: "Hey, that's my dad."

When I was a kid I could tell, with my door closed, which of my parents was walking down the hall. This didn't have anything to do with the weight of the person, since during the era in question both my father and my mother were in the vicinity of 215 pounds; I could pick them out by the rhythm of their walk and where they placed their steps in that hallway (and later on my dad's ankles started making funny noises), but that was distinguishing between a class of two; I never would've assumed that I could identify either of their walk-sounds out of fifty possibilities (ankle-noises aside). Maybe I was wrong.

I don't think this is some special acuity I've got; I just think it's cool because I've learned a slightly weird (and for me at least weirder because it involves the bathroom) thing about us: we can hear and recognize another person's presence without them making an intentional sound.

(Completely unscientific alternate theory: familial pheremones?)

A Minor Suggestion

for the mail-room personnel at my job:

One of you should, generally speaking, be in the fucking mail room, available to assist people who were told "Just go to the mailroom, they'll take care of you."

The Busy-ness

So I'm trying not to let blogging become like all my other hobbies and avocations, where I spend more time thinking about what I'd do if I had the time than I spend actually doing. But I've been exceedingly busy of late - or at the least exceedingly occupied. My company has now passed through the transitional period and has officially taken over control of its part of the contract, so there's busy-ness there. On the first day, in the call center, nobody's phones or computers worked at 8:30 in the morning, so we kind of started out way behind the eight ball. As I cheerily said later in the day, though, "the screwups today were entirely the fault of GACWTP's IT department, so we're not to blame. We didn't even have the ability to screw up!" Today was better but there's still a lot of craziness as people are finally able to figure out what works, what doesn't, what the real deal might be on certain topics, and who didn't do enough preparation (which seems to be entirely unrelated to the six weeks of transitional meetings leading up to this point).

Also, due to the transition, my dad's around, which means I'm staying out even later - out the door at 7:30 in the morning, home around 11:30 at night - because I want to spend time with him. Also, if I hang around after hours, I get two tangible benefits aside from, eventually, an hour or so of alone time with my father: a free meal and the ability to hang out with my dad, his business partner, and sometimes my immediate boss. In these sessions (aside from good dining) the metaphorical ties get loosened and I'm privy to stuff that's usually a lot more interesting and often a lot more educational than what I actually did during the work day. I couldcome home when I'm officially done with my work, but aside from wanting to spend time with my dad I do enjoy listening to and occasionally taking part in these conversations, despite the fact that I get home and wish I had more time available. (I should note that afterhours "educational" is meant in a broader sense; I'm learning [a lot] during the day about the parameters and management of the relevant program, but it's the afterhours unwinding between my dad and his partner where I learn about the specific personalities, the quirks of their business, being a supervisor/manager, and various other glimpses into human nature. Plus gossip.)

At dinner today I offered my generic observation of a particular individual that tried to contextualize a specific problem my dad and his partner had: i.e., his current behavior is part of an observed pattern that he can't, for whatever reason, publicly admit to anything less than perfect calm and control and ideal functionality. Whatever the issues with his employees or his system are behind closed doors, he can't bring them out into the open, and as a result obfuscates or just plain lies to avoid admitting that he might have a problem. I also compared it to another associate of theirs with the pithy nod that everyone has their personal flaw which needs to be managed; the other person's, discussed the previous night, is the myopic pursuit of making sure everyone knows he's very smart and incredibly knowledgable (which he is), the pursuit of which has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and led a few to wonder if he's a bigot (which he's not). My dad was immediately interested as to what I thought his flaw was, and at dinner I demurred.

Afterwards I pointed out that: (a) I still have much less exposure to him in a professional/business/managerial context than I have to his partner; (b) that I love him; (c) that I admire him and both consciously and unconcsiously he's a powerful model for me, and I'd therefore have difficulty feeling like I could pick out a "flaw" in this sense because I'd be less likely to view it as a flaw, since it's probably also a big part of my personality. I'm intensely self critical, but most of my self criticism is counterproductive and bullshit, and it avoids the truly salient aspects of my personality. A legitimate flaw is that (like many) I compensate for extreme insecurities by layering them with a confidence that borders on arrogance, but this same confidence/arrogance is going to keep me from perceiving elemental personality traits as flaws. Objectively, for example, I'm extremely confident in my intelligence, and more to the immediate point, my perceptiveness, intuition, ability to mentally cut to the core of an issue or a process, and get there faster and better than the people around me. Sometimes I'm right and sometimes I'm probably wrong and ostensibly that overconfidence could become a problem, except I'm too confident to truly doubt my own self-perceptions. I'm running in circles right now, but that's the nature of self-analysis, I suppose, especially a self-analysis as involuted and repetitive and, frankly, hateful as I've been subjecting myself to for the past ten years. Anyway, to break out of the circularity, I also pointed out that some of the things I perceive as flaws in myself are things I criticize myself for because I think, compared to the example of my father, I fall considerably short.

For example, I become extremely contemptuous of people and their behaviors extremely quickly. Not any people, and not for just any reason, but there are particular personality traits that cut right to one of the things that most bothers me about other people, and my reaction to those I (rapidly) judge as petty, small-minded, vindictive, etc., is to build up a towering edifice of disdain that borders (depending on the nature and history of the petty vindictiveness) extremely close to hatred. By comparison, my dad projects the impression that he's pretty much above it all and it's water off his back; he points out that I'm 25 and, when he was my age, he got caught up in a lot of other people's pettiness as well, and even today he can still get amped up about some small person's bullshit, but he certainly handles it a lot better than I do. I assume this is all related to my self-nominated status as the official Grudge Holder in the family. It's, between the two of us, an attested fact that at some point I basically decided that (we're skimming over a lot of deep water here) it wasn't right for my mother (and, by extension, my father) to have forgiven her mother, my grandmother, for having been a pretty horrible person, and I was therefore going to pick up the slack by disliking her for everything my mother had moved past.

[Redacted due to extreme and irrational paranoia.]

So, you know, that's probably a personality flaw.

I was hoping to write an impressionistic preview of the NBA Finals before they actually started and contaminated the integrity of my thoughts, but I've only got one more night to do it in.

Plus: The Indignities of Modern Life

(1) (This was originally going second, but it's funnier - or at least it might be funny at all - so I put it first.) So, working for/in a Government Agency, I have to pass a drug test. Now, this is not a concern, since I've led a boring and surprisingly law-abiding life and haven't actually ever partaken of a substance the government doesn't let people partake of (though I did drink before legally allowed, but, you know, fuck that noise). Let's repeat: passing the test is not a concern, and now that the test is behind me I haven't given the results a second thought.

TAKING the test was a huge concern. I have, to deploy medical terminology, mild paruresis. It is not in my case a crippling condition or anything (I don't plan my day around it and lots of people have much more severe manifestations) but I'm, e.g., incapable of using a urinal if someone else is free in the vicinity, except for instances of most severe and excruciating physical necessity overcoming my psychological blocks. Now, I've taken urine-based tests before (one in this very facility, actually), but they were of a more purely medical nature, and much lower-key in atmosphere. I presented myself and was asked whether I was ready to produce 30 ml. I had a little water, just to get myself in the mood, and said I was.

I was not.

I had washed my hands with the door open as per protocol and solemnly agreed while closing the door that I would not flush the toilet, that I would not run the water, that I would produce 30 ml. But there I stood, fully capable in the physical sense of doing the job, but incapable under that pressure of convincing myself to do it. An attendant was just outside waiting for me to finish my business, and I was on the clock. Inevitably she knocked. "I'm sorry, I couldn't do it," I said sheepishly, and then, "I'm a little shy with it."

"Mmm-hmm. You can wait around and try again. We'll wait until we close."

So I waited, and paced, and downed tiny plastic cup after tiny plastic cup of water, and I thought of rivers and waterfalls and gentle babbling brooks. I needed to use the bathroom. Not badly (not badly enough), but I definitely could fill that fucking cup. I'm ready. "I'm ready."

And this lady fixes me with what I felt was a surprisingly humorless expression and utters the immortal words: "Do you feel the urge to go?" They are delievered almost without rhythm or stress, as close to affectless as a midwestern black lady who's getting pretty annoyed can come. These words cut me. "Do you feel the urge to go?' I do not.

"I think so," I offer with a grin. She is not amused.

I fail, and am additionally informed that I voided (ahem) the test, because while I did not fail it neither did I honestly produce 30 ml of liquid. I would need to speak to my HR person and try again.

On leaving the building, of course, I immediately needed to go to the bathroom. Like, really bad.

The next day I plotted my triumphant return. I'd head over right at 5PM (the testing location was a few blocks from work), pumped so full of water that I'd have no choice but to give them what they wanted. And all day I thought of how ridiculous this was. I should've volunteered to be strip searched, and on satisfying the attendees that I had no mechanism by which to cheat, I should've been allowed to shut the door, run the faucet, and have an hour to myself in contemplation of rolling waves and gentle estuaries. (As it turns out, this happened to my dad when he did some work for a government agency in Miami, except without the closed door, gentle contemplation, and the hour to himself. The procedure there was to strip naked, then put on some sort of paper or cloth doily insufficient to a grown man's proportion, and then be directed con cup to a separate but exposed location and barked at to produce the evidence under the watchful scrutiny of bitter men who dreamed of the fortune their family abandoned in Cuba when they fled Castro.) It was ridiculous. I should've been allowed to volunteer a blood test instead. If it didn't affect my work who cared if I did drugs or not. Fuck them. I was angry, and with my anger I drank water. And drank, and drank, for hours. Round about 3PM I realized my miscalculation. It was too close to the hour of destiny to relieve myself but Jesus Christ did I have to go. I wiggled and pretended to be able to work and, improbably, kept drinking water. Finally at 4PM I succumbed to visions of Tycho Brahe and bolted from the office, rapidly hobbling my way over to the testing location. I burst through their doors and attempted to explain my situation to the attendant when my friend from the day before emerged, fixed me with a bemused look, and asked whether I need some time, or did I "feel the urge to go". Then she smiled (joyous day!) and ushered me to the room, whereby I washed my hands with the door open, promised not to flush the toilet or run the faucets, and did my proud duty as a government employee, as an American citizen.

(2) On my last day at Medium Sized Law Firm I realized that I had lost my driver's license. Also, I'd lost my old college ID, which was worthless except for pretending to be a student at the local symphony, but was a nice reminder of what I looked like roughly fifty pounds ago; the college ID sat just behind the license in the same pocket of my wallet. I had no idea, and have no idea, of where these items were lost, or when. The last time I know for certain I pulled my license was a week before I noticed it's absence, and I've gone into or called every place I can remember being in the interim asking if they'd found it. No such luck, of course. So, being somewhat paranoid, I freaked out about what would happen if I were caught out on the street without ID, and thereby started carrying my passport, which of course made me freak out about what would happen if I lost my passport. Since my driver's license was actually issued in a state where I've never spent more than three months at a time and have no intention of living in for the forseeable future, I figured I ought to get a license issued in Illinois, which means starting from scratch, which means that I will need to provide a proof of citizenship (my precious passport, which has been photocopied several times in luxurious color, preserving the accuracy of a picture which shows me roughly sixty pounds ago), proof of residence (a bill or lease), and a social security card (oops). So I had to spend an afternoon at the social security office a week ago, which if you weren't concerned about how much money you were making seems like it could be a pretty decent job. You can dress casually and conduct your job with friendly enthusiasm but at a very slow pace, which to be honest is probably about how I'd do it myself. All of this was more interesting a week ago when I didn't have a social security card, which finally arrived in the mail a few days ago. Now I just need to hit the DMV and, uhm...I'm not actually sure I'd pass a driving test. I'd certainly flunk a parking test. I'm not sure I'd pass the written test. I have no idea what they'd ask of me. I might shoot for a state ID just to get my passport out of my pocket and worry about driving (in which I have little interest) later; for now I'd just like something that attests to my name and birthday.

It all has exposed a kind of raw anxiety about not being able to prove that I am who I say I am, which shouldn't be surprising considering that I'm a mildly paranoid person who is additionaly less than 100% secure with his essential Americanness (I mean, I'm about 87% secure; this is a long topic I've written at length about elsewhere under other pseudonyms and will eventually regurgitate here, but not tonight). The import with which we invest a few small and easily misplaced pieces of paper and plastic has become unsettling to me. I discussed this with a good friend from high school, and he related that he and his girlfriend were talking about the recent Supreme Court decision re: voter fraud in Indiana, and she'd opined somewhat skeptically about what sort of person really wasn't able to cough up some government ID; my response, which jibed with his, was along the lines of, "Well, someone who doesn't have his shit together," but as recent events in my life demonstrate, it's pretty easy to not have your shit together. I'm a mildly disorganized person who's moved around a lot and I was a misplaced passport away from truly being up shit creek. This is getting a bit self indulgent, now. It's not like I was in any real trouble (I think).

The Week That Was

It had been my intent to start this blog around May 1st, in the caesura between leaving my old job and starting my new one, but lethargy, mild illness, business, and the indignities of modern society (more on that in the next post) have delayed me until this inopportune hour. There's probably going to be a flurry of posts over the next day or two as I try to squeeze out everything that, in my head, I thought I ought to blog when I get it going. I've tried blogging before, but it shouldn't be hard to turn this into my most sustained effort in the medium (at least my most sustained quasi-public effort). Anyway.

Left my old job, amicably, at the Medium Sized Law Firm (MSLF) in Chicago [I decided that playing coy with my residence was silly and unsustainable]. I may write more about this old job in the future. I have started a new job at a Government Agency Concerned With The Poor (GACWTP), also in Chicago. I did not come by this job completely honestly, which is to say that in qualifications I am capable and I deserve it (or so I think, so far), but in practice I got it through a family connection, and a much more direct one than that which yielded me the previous job. GACWTP has for many years contracted out one of its major functions to private consulting firms, and after roughly twelve or so years of one firm monopolizing this project, a company half-owned by my father competed for the most recent contract and was after a lengthy process awarded roughly 35% of the project, while the incumbents get to keep the other 65%. There's a lot at stake for My Dad's Company (MDC) (this one third of a contract is the biggest contract in the brief history [between one and two decades] of his company), for The Other Guy (they want to prove the GACWTP wrong and take the whole thing back), and for the GACWTP itself, since they feel (correctly) that they'd completely lost ownership of this important component of their mission. Into this mix I've been dropped to basically do I'm not sure what, other than be clever and observant.

It should be noted that though my dad is currently around a bunch and will be intermittently in the future, it's his business partner (50/50) who is directly monitoring this contract and even she is not the full time person in charge. This other lady is, most properly, my boss, and so far my job has been to impress on her that I'm not just trustworthy due to being In The Family, but that I'm actually capable of doing whatever she wants me to do; so far I think I've done a better job convincing her of this than myself. She was out of town last Friday and today (should be back in the office tomorrow) for an extended Mother's day trip home, and in her absence I didn't get accomplished quite everything I was supposed to, because basically my ingenuity and inquisitiveness ran up against my meek acquiescence in a new environment. There was a body of information I was supposed to gather, and while I gathered it, I could and should have done more; there is a lot of information that will be necessary to MDC that, right now, it's not entirely clear where it is. We need maps, for example, maps which break down things like zip codes and census tracts and alderman's wards, but it's not clear who has these maps or when we can get them, so I wasted too much time on Friday dicking around with what passes for a free zip code map of BMC available online. Similarly there are various sub-programs and initiatives wrapped up in this contract which are at best ill-defined in the official documents, and I don't know or didn't want to get out there and ask The Other Guy to help me out on this.

My sense of things right now, as we gear up to officially take control of our share in a couple of weeks, is that we're Getting Ready to Get Ready. I think on the actual start date we'll be ready to get ready to do the job, but too much of the focus right now is necessarily on things like hiring all the necessary people and making sure we've all got network logins and making sure we didn't extend a job offer to anyone who lied on her resume so that we need to rescind it and asking for more chairs because really we need more chairs. There's some agitated headless chicken action going on, and most of the people currently in the office are concerned with getting the human and logistical infrastructure in place for us to do our jobs. Since I don't have a defined job yet and I'm floating around like a free agent, I'm pretty much the only person I've met whose primary concern is the informational infrastructure we'll need to conduct our jobs, and I'm not the guy to just whip that into shape without some support. We'll see.