Tag: work

how casually I enjoy nepotism (hello cirque make-up, hello feathers in my hair)

Work is freaking out today, hysterical in the face of our involvement with the Juno’s this weekend. (Seriously, they’re going ballistic). Passes are being handed out, rescinded, then handed out again. Same with business cards. “No, wait, take these ones instead.” Rounded corners, snazzy, to make it easier to slip into my bra? What? I had no idea my quiet little workplace could get so frantic, or so oddly surreal, as when I was instructed to make sure to “be nice to Nickelback”.

I’ve managed to claim two of the laminated on a lanyard passes to the Quintessential VIP Juno Awards Party tomorrow. (One for me and one for my roommate David as a birthday present.) A description I am amused by, if only because it says so on the pass, right above the cartoon red carpet covered in silver hollywood pavement stars. It should be fun. Work says I have to be pretty for maximum impact, but I know better. Some of the most beautiful women in the city will be there, so as far as I’m concerned, the pressure’s off. Let the diamonds sparkle. I’m not six two and I wasn’t designed in a wind tunnel, so I can show up in whatever I want! Screw you, heels. Screw you in the ear. I’m not going to make a fool of myself trying to pretty. I’m going to be interesting.

when this is done, I’m going home (thank you interscope records)

Actual lyrics from a song I’m testing today for work:

The Chorus: “But you feel so clean. Well she craves affection, so I use protection, and I know she loves me, she loves everybody.”

The First Verse: “You’re just a little girl now, you’re just a girl who misses her dad, and all the toys that she had, thought I could make you older, thought I could keep you out of harm, but now you’re caught in my arms.”

The Second Verse: “Now that we’ve made it this far, now that we’ve made a mess in the car, you ought to give it a rest.”

He then repeats the chorus about her feeling clean, but using a condom because he doesn’t want a filthy, filthy STD off the adoring yet slutty jail-bait he’s using as a Kleenex, because he knows she must have something besides love for him tucked away in that little girl skirt, no matter that the last iteration of the chorus doesn’t repeat the line, “she loves everybody” as a nod to her clubbed to death child-like innocence. End scene.

The cover of the album is a black custom condom wrapper.

it’s destiny

http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com

I like my new job. I like the potential in it, the industry, the selection of tea. I like the Rikki quote on the back of the door of the women’s washroom, my co-workers who are all neat people who smile nicely and tell funny anecdotes and complain about the weather just the right amount. I like the view, the information I need to gather, how intricate this will all be, how interesting. It’s all amazingly pleasant.

I only wish I knew more about what I’m meant to be doing. I’m used to learning quickly, to being one step ahead almost all the time, but I’m only slowly figuring out what to do at my new job. I know I’m meant to be picking up the slack as other people get on with more important tasks, but it’s like all the work available to me is below the surface, there, but invisible until it’s shown to me. I wander links and websites, learning about how our products need to circumvent routers and how to explain to people what an IP address is, while I send out prefab replies through the help, and don’t quite know what to do next. The man who was going to train me on something today is caught in the crunch of a dead-line, my friend who works here, works on a different aspect of the company.. I’m falling back on educated guesses and verifying sign-up lists that require the same attention to detail a grade-schooler could offer. I feel lost in a segue.

By the end of the week, I’ll be better. Already I know where to sign in, where to find my mail, what tasks I can attend to when I first get in. The only question is, why am I worried when no one else is?

“he’s a fool if he’s not in love with you” “most men are fools, dear” “well, yes, but…” “uh-huh”

A Corpseflower webcam. (What a great band-name.)

My cluttered white desk is a small island in the cement foyer of the Dance Centre. It tethers me to this place, this screen, this set of keys. Through the glass wall in front of me, a small map of Davie street walks past – blue jeans with cell-phones, dogs, speculative couples, their arms crossed, held, ipods wearing socks with sandals, gore-tex jackets, camouflage, gossip and hoodies against the invariable threat of rain – indifferent. The new leaves on the trees outside are an unrealistic green that goes well with the electronic music surfacing from my computer. The phone stays silent, the building almost empty, there is very little for me to do, but wait and write and read.

I went to dinner with Alastair’s family this week, or some of it. His sister has brought her husband and new-born baby over from Scotland for a week. It is both comforting and strange to finally meet them. I missed them by barely two weeks when they came to visit in California. We went to Marcello’s, then to take pictures off the roof of Alastair’s building, where my cats live. As hard as I could, I couldn’t make the sunset beautiful, so I took pictures of them instead. I had only meant to come by and check in on the cats, (I had them spayed this week), but I ended up staying until eleven:thirty at night.

Standing at the bus-stop after, I found out there had been a shooting up the street, this time at the Roma Café. Street rumour says it was Over a Girl, but had no other details, except that the bus was rerouted and not to wait. The papers, as far as I’ve found, have had nothing to say.

I really like the Roma Café. Along the front windows are painted the NHL logo, the football league logo, the NBA logo, and a blue-robed Virgin Mary all in a row. I was stood up there once by a translator I met at Bukowski’s and it gave me a chance to properly appreciate it, though I hardly ever go. The music clashes with the pure Little Italy décor like plaid with polka dots, all tawdry 80’s and 90’s pop played loud enough to shove irony off a cliff.

knots, because Jay is a sweet curmudgen

His skin is lighter than mine where the sun doesn’t touch, though we’re multi-racial enough to get us lynched in certain places, (we know he has problems at the border). I can see in the dark how the outline of my wrist – you know this story. I know this story. I will never get enough of his clever mind, his smile, or his hair, but it slipped from my mouth that the latest death.pool bet says he’ll run off with his employer next. I mistakenly used the word “cheat” before demurring that I know he is only as committed as a cat offered a dish of cream. I know the ending already, the cotton candy clouds blow away in a predictable wind. Last time I bled myself dry and then moved to another part of the country. It didn’t change anything.

Another story – The clock is heaped with minutes that need to be folded and placed into drawers. Fragments of conversation, of laughter like honey in my throat, of shared yearning after mystery. I am made of clay and I can feel in the dark how the shape of my body fits surprisingly into his (as it crumbles into dust). Everywhere are tiny, running wolves disguised as mice. On the blackboard, my name has been erased. I am a self-portrait, stars for eyes, blindfolded. His skin belongs to someone else. The sheets describe pacing, the threads worn where the line was drawn. Thou Shalt, not. The pillow tells quietly of the hollow curve of a braincase. I didn’t belong there any more than I do elsewhere, but at least it felt safe. There was water in a cup on one side of the bed.

I wonder if when I am older, I will place a cup there too, as they do, these men, these ten minute husbands who deprive me of stability. I don’t like their common habits. I want all of their mistakes to be different, they should continue to be separate creatures in as many things as possible.

My New Year hasn’t started yet. I feel, instead, that I was on the set of a film shooting a scene about New Years Eve. How else to explain where I was, who I was with? Surrey? What? I came home today soaked to the cells of my marrow from working many hours in the rain. Work began at five, where I was on gate. Somewhere around midnight, I assumed my way backstage and made myself available. After the count-down and the fireworks, my time was spent hauling about heavy bits of everything. Work was tear down, strike, a rush of blood to the lungs. The skin of my hands has been polished so raw my nerves are misfiring in interesting ways, I might have split my lip and possibly cracked a rib. Sleep was a couple of sheepish hours in a hotel room, too early in the morning to be morning yet. Then we worked again. This time in a gradual and persistent downpour. Tents had to be puzzled down, missing pieces had me to be made to fit into trucks and lamentably weighty slabs of steel needed to be dragged from one end of the complex to the other. Same with sandbags. I cannot explain how much I dislike sandbags, except to say that sometimes being female’s a bit of a bitch.

(It’s always a bit of a toss-up between letting people be nice to me and accepting the easier, indoor “nice” jobs or going out in the crappy weather and attempting to prove myself a little more to a group of strangers who all assume me to be capable anyway. Mostly I took the indoor jobs and didn’t mind when people called me “sweetie”. They can call me “sweetie” as much as they like as long as they follow orders.)

I might sound like I’m complaining, but really I love this stuff. I chose being on crew over any of the parties I was invited to. (Is it just me or was everyone really slap-dash about plans this year?) I appreciate being useful, as well as chances to constructively use basic physics. (What, you think I can heft things twice my weight without the stuff?) The best part is that apparently I’m to be paid for my hours, which is nice, as I would have been out there anyway. Just tattoo geek on my forehead in invisible ink.

when he is gone, I feel alright about nibbling on the corners of his food at 2 a.m.

Heinrich Kley
Heinrich Kley

A triff trailer mash-up that hurts in only the good ways, Toy Story 2: REQUIEM.
&nbsp &nbsp link thankfully appropriated from Andrew.

Relaxed, she stands at the bus-stop. Watches a man exit backward, pulling a small wire basket full of fake red flowers, wonders briefly what they are for. A book is folded under her left hand. Her right hand has already fumbled in her coat pocket and found her bus-pass. She’s going to be on time for work with fifteen minutes to spare. She’ll open the store early, she decides, instead of waiting.

In her mind are tiny snippets of conversation caught like film stills fighting against a projector. Nothing stays very fixed, it all moves too fast for words to bind. Outside there is blue sky, her eyes blandly track a cloud as it intersects with an airplane contrail. Seizures, that’s what her thinking can be like. Feelings overcoming her body, twisting her lips or her hands into a smile. Remembering when he kissed her, her eyes warmly close and open again. Curious if anyone else is doing the same, she scans the other faces on the bus. No one interesting today. A cluster of yoga clothing imitators, some people going to work, a couple in the back discussing a television series. Someone is reading a paperback novel but the cover looks too glossy, the book looks too thick. It’s an incarnation of the dime-store novel, the summer blockbuster hit parade. Empty calories and too much talk about weapon specifics.

Her key in the new lock turns harshly. In spite of the extra filing when she replaced the lock with the hardware store clerk, there is still something uneven. An expected alarm sounds when she opens the door, a warning keen, piercing but still quiet. Enough to tell the wrong person that they’ve made a mistake. She half trips on a newspaper someone kindly slid under the door earlier in the morning and pulls the CLOSED sign to OPEN. The useless paper and her bag are deposited on the glass topped counter while she wonders why she never seems to do any of these things in the same order. Some mornings the buttons stick on the alarm console and she has to talk to stoic sounding security people on the phone. She smiles nervously when she does it, knowing she doesn’t have the passwords and not sure if she should care.

Heinrich Kley
Heinrich Kley

A combination of coupled enzymes to construct a simple circuit in which enzymatic reactions correspond to logic operations.
&nbsp &nbsp link cruelly wrenched from the bosom of darling Warren.

My housemate, Graham, is away right now, up with his family, clustering around his grandmothers death. He says in his journal that he got to say to her the things he needed to say before she left. I’m glad for that through the commiserative sadness, though I keep a narrow sliver of being unable to relate. I know when my remaining grandmother goes, it will be barely a family affair. My mother and I will stare at the ceiling a bit, covered with the inevitable and distinctive blanket of pondering about immortality that every death brings. My brothers will ask if we’ve inherited anything and we will ask my mothers sister, Reine, who will be far more affected, the one in charge of all the necessary arrangements that accompany a death. She will tell us of something small that may come our way. Tacky jewelry from her shops, maybe, or an inappropriate coffee-table. Then it will be done. If we were the sort for annals, her passing would be the year of nothing in particular. All the known history in her head is either commonplace or inaccessible. Her drop in the sea has no flavour to leave and savor.

I like how Graham talks about his family. They seem to be a unit, a partition of people that all carry more than just a name together.

Plunderification, bitches.


it might be a pickle
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

torro-toise

Sarah has graciously offered her home this evening as an alternative to tonight’s NIN canceled Korean Movie Monday. There will be no korean movie, but it’s practically the same thing, if you squint at it a bit.

My day’s gone by with nothing addressed. I’m going to be in desperate need for some food later. I feel like going to sleep in a public park, let them erect a fence around me, and just wake me up when this all ends. I’ll be a public exhibit, free of charge, until the apocalypse has come and gone to the mountainside. When the weather is nice for ducks, I may turn to my side and let the wind destroy my possessing dreams a little, but that would be all. The grass will grow around me and tickle my hair into fantastic shapes. When it gets dark, it might get lonely, but I fail to see how that’s any worse than my current overwhelming lack of comfort, and maybe little animals might burrow in my skirts. Squirrels curling up for the heat of my body and sharing the night with me. Pets with human eyes I never see.

Did you know Queen Anne was buried in a cubic coffin?

Whipping past reflective surfaces, I make it though the day without looking at myself as much as possible. Work has two change-rooms, one next to the other, that are walled on three sides with mirrors. This makes it difficult, so when I stand in front of them, I try to focus on the colours in my hair or the angle of my shoes against the carpet. People tell me I’m pretty and I want to bite them. Pretty is useless. Pretty is not a skill. There are mirrors in the back as well, one in the hall and a large one in the bathroom. I’ve hung manniquin busts on the bathroom mirror, and so far no one has moved them, but the hall mirror makes me twitch whenever I pass and catch myself in the corner of my eye. The manniquins, however, I have fallen in love with. My hands trail over their bodies when I dress them, and I feel remembered sparks of tenderness when I smooth their artificial hair. I want to take them home with me and curl myself around the hard plastic bodies, protect them from the people who treat them as objects instead of people. I feel for them almost the same way I felt for the people who were the BodyWorlds Exhibit. A deep abiding respect with an underlying current of wanting to know their names. It’s commiseration that runs like oxygen through blood.