Hire Love

Boss, who on Monday amicably promised to pay me through the end of August, called to say I needn’t bother coming in to work anymore. Then he left for a beach house on the Carolina shore.

Luckily, I found this clip of Oprah discussing The Secret on Larry King:

So, if you think about a book hard enough, you can star in the screen adaptation?

The Secret celebrates The Laws of Attraction, which, despite sounding like a dating handbook written by former debutantes, is actually a new age belief system rooted in quantum physics. The idea is that our thoughts carry energy, and this energy determines our experience. Which is just a fancy PHD way of justifying childhood games of paranoia—”Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” If I believe my mother’s back will really break, will it?

Oprah cried and prayed and got cast in The Color Purple. I don’t want to be in a movie (although I did just submit pictures via Craigslist to do a Sportswear photo shoot) but I would like to get paid to write. If I cry and pray and sing an old evangelical hymn will I get a call to blog for Entertainment Weekly?

Oh I know I’m emitting some low-level negative energy, enough to trigger the security alarm at H&M. But I’m tired. Tired of submitting my resume and cover letter (not even a generic one!) and never hearing back, tired of responding to Editorial Assistant ads full of gross misspellings (Come work in a fst paced environnment). Instead of Oprah inspiring me to focus my thoughts into a light beam of positivism, a smooth jet of hope, I want to jump up and down on her fine Harpo furniture. In muddy Crocs.

Yes, I secured a job in September as a personal assistant, but it isn’t enough to pay the bills. And I don’t have health insurance. There are other laws besides the Laws of Attraction— for example, The Law of Gravity; what am I to do if an air conditioner falls on my head?

Megan and I are getting together this weekend to construct wish boards. I’m sure Oprah would cream all over this idea. Basically, we’ll sit around and drink beer and make collages out of back issues of Jane in an attempt to better visualize and hence actualize our futures. It’s pretty simple what I want: a book in two years, a job teaching or writing, freedom from debt. I don’t need Tivo or a timeshare. Just simple things, really: fresh cut flowers on the kitchen table. I’d like a kitchen table.

If you see me in the next few weeks, and my forehead looks botoxed, it’s because I’m straining under the effort of positive thinking. Can you hire me? I can probably only type 30 words a minute—one-handed, mind you—but they are the right words.

You Wine Some, You Lose Some

I feel like I’ve invited all of these people to a party in my apartment—people from as far away as Rheinland-Pflaz and Worcester—and then, under pretense of replenishing a cheese plate, snuck out through the back door. I’m not sure what all of you have been doing with Trybecca while I stopped posting. I expect some of you re-read older entries; others, gone in search of a more esteemable hostess, one who doesn’t put olive pits back in the bowl, or top off unfinished merlot with shiraz.

Which is what I feel like I’m about to do. For the past few months, I’ve been sipping on a dry unbalanced blend with a tart finish, distributed by a shady and cheap vineyard known as “Summer Camp Start-Up.” I didn’t like the taste and I didn’t want to keep drinking, but it’s no easy task, standing up, walking away. Because you’ve already had a lot.

Since turning 30, I’ve been on a blurry trajectory, not realizing I couldn’t see clearly because I was f’ed up on Boss wine. Or whine, really. At some point, you internalize your co-workers, you become the place where you spend 40 hours a week. I caught myself storing a vintage of anger. I was aging it, turning it over in the dark.

Then, last Tuesday, the first tornado in over 100 years touched down in Brooklyn. I still wonder if my emotional state brought it on, somehow lassoed the sky—I was on my roof that night, crying to The Bearded Whorl (whose name is Dan—I’ve decided he gets his real name), allowing myself a thorough outpouring. That night, wind wracked the city, the streets flooded. Curled up in his arms, I dreamed (in color) my heart was an ark I was offering up as waterproof refuge to…raccoons. I suppose that speaks both to strength and weakness—to survive, but to survive sealed off. To rescue masked creatures.

I waded to work the next morning only to discover that my desk, which happened to be directly under a number of minute and asbestos filled holes (like how you puncture a jar lid so a lightning bug can breathe?), not to mention a potted plant, was underwater. Computer destroyed, documents buried beneath a thin layer of soil, I decided I couldn’t stay.

(Yes, that was my Sufjan Stevens CD.)

The Job Gods had delivered the wet threat I couldn’t. It became painfully obvious that I was not just tidying up and salvaging camp surveys, but boxing up my belongings. I dried off the office Polaroid, borrowed it over the weekend, and took happy photos of me and Dan. I let the camera teach me to live in the moment.

Dan moved back this morning to the Midwest, to a wrap around porch and an unpolluted air. I miss him. Do, and will. But I’m excited about the Fall. Besides submitting poems, I’ve been reading James Merrill, drinking white wine mid-afternoon, and working through the particulars of my new employment. I’ll be personally assisting a well-known poet. And as long as she doesn’t pull over to pee in a ditch with me in the car, she has to be better than Boss:

Then again, I’m an odd duck for snapping that picture.

Welcome to the 8th month of Trybecca. My new job officially uncorks the first week of September. Until then, I’m still in the summer camp business. Nothing to do but stare at the dregs of my current glass, try and predict the future. What do you see?

Rough Patch

Boss is quitting smoking. God help me. He left his patch at home and had to go back for it. Last year, when my ex-boyfriend tried to quit, I rolled over onto one of his patches and unknowingly wore it to work. This was when I was a travel agent. For eight hours I kept shouting airport codes.

One of my readers, Dave (of course it would be a a Dave! ) wrote this:

Love your blog, and the advice poem bit.

Here’s my situation: I received a job offer. It’s for more money than my current job, and I could walk to work (unheard of in LA, mind you). On the other hand, it’s not *that* much more money, and I’d probably have to work longer hours. If there is one thing I truly love about my current job, it’s the hours (half-day-from-home Fridays particularly). I left my last job, which paid a lot more but had much longer hours, because I don’t want to be an absentee workaholic father to my (now two year old) son.

What should I do? Something in a series of couplets would be especially nice.

Best,
Dave – RattlingtheKettle.com

Last time I had a poem written for me, it was by a homeless guy in Washington Square Park; I think his name was Paul The Homeless Poet. Must have been over 10 years ago. It was a little rhyming job about fever blisters. Well worth the $2. This is really taking me back…

Hmmm. Did Paul rhyme “blister” and “sister”? Also, was he homeless because he got a poetry degree? I don’t write a lot of rhyming couplets, but here’s your Lunch Poem. (Today I ate beets and goat cheese.)

The Offer

We seek advice when we know
already. Ignore the crow

of a higher paying job
in favor of Sponge Bob.

Trust your gut. You can’t refute
the most difficult commute

lies between father and son
who never talk. Once undone

it’s done. Let your son outweigh
a morning walk through LA

to the office. What’s a year
of less money? Keep him near.

Camped Out

This past weekend I went to camp. I hadn’t been to camp since the summer before sixth grade. I was eleven. I remember Benny Mardones’ “Into the Night” getting a lot of radio play in the Seafarer cabins:

“She’s just sixteen years old
Leave her alone, they say
Separated by fools
Who don’t know what love is yet”

Not exactly the song you want older male Sunfish instructors humming as they teach preteen girls to tie the aft end of the halyard to the upper boom, is it?

I rode to camp with Boss, Ashley, and Epee Le Peu. Epee Le Peu is the man (a former fencer) I am currently seeing and employing. This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Maybe. But just yesterday, Boss threw a NYC condom on my desk as a joke—so I’m thinking that as long as everyone here is blurring the lines of professionalism no one is culpable. If our office ethics were a painting, that painting might look like this:

I picked this muzzy internet art in particular because it bears some resemblance to my hair in high wind:

Boss car was broken into a few weeks back, and, as you can tell from this photo (thank you Epee), has yet to be fixed. Unless you count as “fixed” fashioning a window out of a box. Aside from giving me the plumage of an angry bird, the incoming air made it virtually impossible to sing along to Prince and Journey in anything like real time. While the rest of the car was screaming “With Open Arms!” I was still like “I come to You!”

I’ll write more about camp in Friday’s post. For now, please content yourselves with bookends. Boss left earlier than the rest of us, so on the way home, we stopped in Shartlesville. Shartlesville is known for its sheepskin store and miniature village, which proclaims to be the World’s Greatest (specifying indoor—it might rank low among outdoor miniature villages).

We wouldn’t know. It was closed—miniature hours?— so we hit up DQ instead. I had a banana cream blizzard and won the remaining 1995 oinking pig keychain flashlight from a crane game knock-off.

Ashley acclimated to her new DQ white trash environs:

This photo is a white trash 10. Precariously balanced AC unit? Check. Cigarette in hand? Check. Bad posture? Check. Glimpse of field? Check. Bearclaw stuck to white cinder block wall? Check.

Oh, and my blog is back. For real. Please subscribe (if you haven’t already) and forward to friends and coworkers.

An Eye For An Eye, a Tooth For a…?

I want to assure my readers that I am fully committed to the blogging process and that soon, very soon, I will be back on a regular basis. Sometimes, good things have to go away for awhile in order to return even better. At least that’s what my dad told my mom. Just kidding. But seriously, absence makes the heart grow fonder, yada yada. If sexy hadn’t left, JT wouldn’t have been able to bring it back.

I’ve found an apartment in Dumbo only a few blocks from my office and I’m moving in next week. In the interim, I’m going on a bluegrass booze cruise and driving to Pennsylvania with my boss. It’s a five hour road trip. I’ll need Dramamine for both.

Boss and I haven’t been seeing eye to eye for weeks. He’s a micro-manager. Whenever I hear the word “micro-manager” I picture munchkins. They were creepy and autocratic, always directing by hanging on Dorothy’s sleeve. Try this lollipop! Parade this way! Email that PDF file!

This afternoon, while I was hunkered down attempting to save our summer camp in Ohio (out of a grand total of twelve enrolled students, one made guttural noises until age seven, and two turned out to be scammers from Nigeria), Boss paid a visit to my desk. He tugged at his lower lip like a hooked trout to show me the space where his tooth used to be. Then he produced a presecription pill bottle and shook it in rhythm to 60’s Soul Classics to get my attention. “Guess what? My tooth is in here!” This emphatic show-and-tell left me repulsed and curious. Why would you keep a years-old tooth in the office? And if you were proud of this tooth, wouldn’t you fashion a necklace and wear it to, say, Jimmy Buffet concerts? And what were these pills? Tugboat Todd from nextdoor had an insightful comment: “God, I hope he never gets a vasectomy.”

I want a job I can really sink my adult chops into and here I am teething on a whiskey rag. That rag must be dipped in Powers.

Fun at the Office

This afternoon, I received another Boss Post-It on my keyboard.

Which made me realize it’s time to do this. Early and often.

Josh created this blog for our office to put up daily videos. The best part is the submission component. Is there something in your office that drives you crazy? How about passive agressive Post-Its? Can you film Boss in secret?

I Can Has a Company! LOL!

Boss is allergic to cats. His red eyes are the reason HR Kitty never happened back in January. Or did it?

I work in a loft in Dumbo. My building could have sold James Herriot on the city. On my floor alone, there are at least five cats. And an English Bulldog that plays soccer by the elevator. And something that moves really fast through the hall, like the smoke monster in Lost. I haven’t gotten close enough to tell what it is yet.

Today, Boss discovered he had left his keys at Home Depot. When he rushed out knocking stuff over, one of the black cats from the silk screeners snuck in through our open door.

Cats are smart. They know who’s allergic and who’s not. This particular cat made a bee-line for the CFO station, aka sneeze central, aka Boss desk. My co-workers and I availed ourselves of the opportunity to snap some photos.

This is Boss chair, and this is the cat in it. Notice the CFO hat crumpled up in the corner. First the cat pawed the hat. I’m beginning to sound like Dr. Seuss.

After doing significant dander damage to the chair, it decided to check out Google calendar. I would much rather cat had done some callbacks, but whatever.

Ooh…I’m giving I Can has Cheezburger, the most popular WordPress blog, a run for its money:

I Can Has a Company!

(After lunch, Boss asked if the pollen was getting to us, too.)

Switching gears a bit, from dander to Dan, here is yesterday’s “Little Annie” in its original English and intended meaning. Who was Annie? A CPR dummy at summer camp. Great work, Dan.

LITTLE ANNIE

Caroling in the fiberglass your mouth

fails, a new aborted slit for me to save.

I have imbued your sneakers with life and you

have no legs, Annie, what’s happened

to our capacity for love? It ripples slack

against your torso, a t-shirt dreamed up

for someone more complete.

Don’t unseal these little humiliations;

bleach left in water reduces itself

to rotten water in time. Why can’t I

remember your eyes? Like night terrors

some things refuse us, the sturdy ones.

Annie I put the mask on you. Annie

the hot and wet of me would sheen along

your face until the lightning bugs return;

tilt back your plastic chin and breathe.

boss moonstone potion crazy resign

I’m having a really hard time at work. Today, while I strained my eyes entering in yet more Excel data, Boss browsed Craigslist for a boat. He scrolled with one hand. He had to, because the other hand was holding a drumstick and beating out the bass line to Superstitious on XM radio.

There’s some festering antagonism between me and Boss. I need to address the problem but it turns out I have a touch of the passive-aggressives (hence the blog). We’re constantly one-uping each other with snarky attitude. Maybe I should say one-oping, since we’re quibbling over operations.

Since I’ve lived in New York, I’ve grown more self-assertive. About some things. Self-assertion only works against the rational. I’m afraid I can’t muster enough energy for the Boss talk, and even if I could, it would be like an Evolutionist showing a Creationist her fossil collection.

Instead, I sit cross-legged at my desk and google angry search terms. Like:

boss hair fire spell pay raise

which, unfortunately, only got me to a bunch of role-playing sites and a Harry Potter trivia page.

I really liked this one:

boss ADD trick leave work early

which led me to Productivity501. The article was earnest but ultimately unhelpful. I doubt I can shorten my commute by convincing Boss to let me work from home. I would have a greater chance of convincing him to buy the boat and let me work from shore.

No no, the meaty keywords are always Wicken:

chant boss amulet change

Bingo. Now this is what I’m talking about. Look at the cute clipart! Cross-eyed Merlin casting a pentagram.

Buy 10, get 15 free.

This Week’s Top 5 Bad Ideas

5) Hosting the 2012 Olympics on a high risk former Blitz bomb site. (BBC)

4) Declining an invitation to Her Majesty’s dinner party because you’re “too busy.” (Daily Mail)

3) Protesting Paris Hilton’s upcoming incarceration. (Live Journal)

2) Talking in the limo. (ABC)

1) Opening the 9th story office window overlooking the East River, suggesting an air horn to frighten the boaters below. Searching online for one. (Boss)

Color Wheel of Fortune

Yesterday morning, Boss showed up to work with his Bob the Builder tool box and his CFO hat. The CFO hat is an orange baseball cap. He named it CFO hat. To wear at his CFO Station, more commonly referred to as “desk.”

This could only mean one thing. No, this could mean a lot of things, but he began by changing our door lock. Boss sent me and Ashley to the hardware store to get keys made. You don’t have to ask us twice to run errands, especially when they involve minimal effort and a Starbucks around the corner.

At the hardware store I discovered the Benjamin Moore Color rack. At age 29, I’ve never painted a bedroom or touched up a table or stenciled my kitchen in an art deco border. I’m not the HGTV target audience. If I could cook with paint, or if US Weekly had a special section entitled “They Paint Just like Us!,” then I might be interested. (Did you know that Dr Quinn Medicine Woman is a painter?)

There are moments that make you reckon milestones. I’m female and almost 30—shouldn’t I have refurbished an antique chair by now? Why do I have nothing to paint? There were hundreds of colors, all named. Named. I want that job. The Benjamin Moore color namer probably never has to run Boss Errands. She’s too busy coming up with these in the paint think-tank:

barrel brown
soft chinchilla
leap of faith
peace and happiness
sweatshirt gray
woodmont cream
dream whip

These last two sound like Tasti-Delight flavors. And Precious Moments colors like Leap of Faith are awfully subjective. For example, if your best friend phones you up to ask how The Project is going (that’s how home improvement types refer to their improvements) and you say “Great! We’re painting the study Peace and Happiness!” you’ll both stall. It’s like Who’s on First.

Friend: “Hey? How’s The Project?”
You: “Great! We’re painting the study Peace and Happiness!”
Friend: “Cool. Thanks for the well wishes. What color’s the study?”
You: “Peace and Happiness.”
Friend: “Yeah, cool. I’m doing OK. What color did you say?”
You: “Peace and Happiness!!”
Friend: “Do I sound that depressed?”

Wait a minute… paint namers might be poets. Because if I called up a poet friend, and he said he was “redoing his bedroom in Cupid’s Dart,” I’d get it. I just would. I wouldn’t need to see the wall—just the writing on the swath. I’d know he was in love and having lots of sex.

Oh God. I would paint my entire apartment Da Vinci’s Canvas or Soft Chinchilla because it sounds right.

I took about 30 Benjamin Moore color strips with me. Tonight at dinner, I did a Paint Reading for my friend Russ. A Paint Reading is like a Tarot reading but with swaths instead of cards. I fanned them out and Russ picked #2133, which said Sidewalk Gray.

We were actually eating at Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A.