The Six Horsemen of the Apocalypse
1. Toast
2. The clothes women in my building wear to work
3. Important job prospects
4. My former Peace Child "co-stars"
5. Ideocy
6. Sleepy harmonica and Beatles' covers.
1. I'm getting the easiest one out of the way. How can people eat bread that has not been properly toasted? It's so, so, so, icky. Hot, spongey, moist bread. Not at all the same thing as delicious, browned, assertively crispy toast.
2. Looking at the rear ends of the women who work in my building -- which I do, albeit in a disinterested, habitual way -- I feel vaguely saddened. Not by their rear ends so much as the way they dress them. I feel the same, slumpingly defeated way when I look at mediocre "office-lady" clothes like the stuff at Fairweather or Lady Reitmans or Suzy Shier. I just have this sense that these women don't really care about their bodies at all, that their bodies are just some sad vehicle that transports them from home to the GO train to the office. There is a profound transmission of apathy in the visible panty lines & ill-fitting trousers. I feel far sadder about the whole thing than the women themselves probably do.
3. I am being wooed by an Important Media Outlet that wants to take me away from my job at the Ginormously Circulating Women's Magazine. It's very flattering to be wanted by IMO! Especially since I was certain my interview there was a big, fat failure, an opinion that was only confirmed by their not ever returning my phone calls. In fact, I was convinced that they thought I was a flake. I imagined myself as Annie Hall meets Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. Now suddenly they want me -- urgently. But I am so comfortable here at GCWM. I like the people I work with! Some of them speak openly of smoking pot! We make jokes about yams! Would that happen at IMO? Also here my versatility as a writer, editor, proofreader and fact-checker is exploited -- I mean, in a good way. Before I got the job I feared the office would be a hive of dowdiness, but it's fun. But IMO is offering me a part-time position that, if I choose to follow it to its full-time conclusion, will pay me three times what I got in my first job in publishing. A salary to rival my parents'! Well, maybe not quite. But a lot anyway. But still, for me, happiness really is more important than money. Even though I dream of being able to afford to fly to LA to visit long-lost friends -- which brings me to
4. I got an e-mail from my old friend Thessaly, who toured the Soviet Union with me in the musical "Peace Child" when we were teenagers. When I first met her she impressed me because she was from San Fran and went to Wavy Gravy's circus camp. Now she is living in LA, shooting for fame as a gay icon. She calls herself "The UkuLady" and plays '80s songs and original hits on her ukulele. We immediately re-bonded over how hideously thuggish the K-Fed/Spears firstborn is. She told me that she recently saw another former Peace Child, who is apparently living really close to Thess in LA, and is gaining fame as a minor indie star. It surprised me that our teenage exhibitionism actually masked genuine talent. I immediately Googled said minor indie star and one-time friend and, through reading interviews with her, have concluded that she is a little bit insane. I mean literally. This is a quote from her: "I encourage singing out loud. It is a great source of pleasure. I think it is absurd for a person to consider themselves or anyone else a bad singer. That is like calling someone a ‘bad breather.’ We don’t commonly think of sound as matter, but it is — and I think that it is our understanding of ourselves as finite that is coming to an end when we talk of apocalypse. The apocalypse is the end of limited consciousness. That is what we are experiencing right now. So do not be afraid of your own infinite nature." Insane. In one interview it says she comes from Providence, RI; in another she's described as hailing from the Midwest. But I went to stay with her and her mother for a while a year after we toured the USSR & she lived alone with her absolutely insane mother in a quite squalorous house in the exurbs of DC. I was impressed because it was like the only house I had ever been in that was as disorganized and dirty as my parents' house. Her mother was a strange combination of hard-core stage mom (my friend had a gig as a host of a kids' news show and after it aired, her mom would shut off the TV and do a post-mortem) and flaked-out oddball who told me how a friend of hers couldn't lactate after she gave birth until she had her first post-birth orgasm and also told me, as we were driving back from the beach, that she was a narcoleptic but she never told the insurance companies, but she always got sleepy when her kids fell asleep. When she told me this, my friend and her sis were sound asleep beside me. I always got the feeling that my friend was on the cusp -- she seemed to have a sense of humour about her life and her crazy mother, but at the same time her mother was everything to her. So now I can see which way she fell. Sometimes I wonder -- she is SO crazy-sounding -- if this isn't her way of masking her true weirdness, by exaggerating it so it becomes a "quirky stage persona." Does she really believe all that stuff about radiating love and filtering courage the way the trees filter carbon dioxide another quote)?
I listened to her songs on her myspace page, on which she addresses her fans as "Children of Peace" (hmmmm... an unconscious homage to our humble musical?) and talks about buying a magic wand which she feels bad about because it was made by child slaves, and it (the music) was interesting and spooky. All the more so because I knew the whole back story.
5. Why I Am an Ideot. I had to copyedit a really tedious book in which all the characters spoke in heavy dialect, so on the style sheet I created a category called "Idiosyncracies" to distinguish certain, well, idiosyncracies of speech -- only I spelled it "Ideosyncracies." That plus making a rather large number of arbitrary calls on preferred spellings of words -- I decided to keep "rock-and-roll" hyphenated throughout, for no defensible reason -- makes me think my unconscious is sabotaging my freelancing work. I told my boss at GCWM about it and she said "You must feel like an ideot." Heh heh!
6. On 91.1 FM, the jazz station, they seem to have a mandate to play at least one song featuring sleepy jazz harmonica and at least one jazz Beatles' cover every day. Who enjoys this "music"? They sound like anthems for suicide.
2. The clothes women in my building wear to work
3. Important job prospects
4. My former Peace Child "co-stars"
5. Ideocy
6. Sleepy harmonica and Beatles' covers.
1. I'm getting the easiest one out of the way. How can people eat bread that has not been properly toasted? It's so, so, so, icky. Hot, spongey, moist bread. Not at all the same thing as delicious, browned, assertively crispy toast.
2. Looking at the rear ends of the women who work in my building -- which I do, albeit in a disinterested, habitual way -- I feel vaguely saddened. Not by their rear ends so much as the way they dress them. I feel the same, slumpingly defeated way when I look at mediocre "office-lady" clothes like the stuff at Fairweather or Lady Reitmans or Suzy Shier. I just have this sense that these women don't really care about their bodies at all, that their bodies are just some sad vehicle that transports them from home to the GO train to the office. There is a profound transmission of apathy in the visible panty lines & ill-fitting trousers. I feel far sadder about the whole thing than the women themselves probably do.
3. I am being wooed by an Important Media Outlet that wants to take me away from my job at the Ginormously Circulating Women's Magazine. It's very flattering to be wanted by IMO! Especially since I was certain my interview there was a big, fat failure, an opinion that was only confirmed by their not ever returning my phone calls. In fact, I was convinced that they thought I was a flake. I imagined myself as Annie Hall meets Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. Now suddenly they want me -- urgently. But I am so comfortable here at GCWM. I like the people I work with! Some of them speak openly of smoking pot! We make jokes about yams! Would that happen at IMO? Also here my versatility as a writer, editor, proofreader and fact-checker is exploited -- I mean, in a good way. Before I got the job I feared the office would be a hive of dowdiness, but it's fun. But IMO is offering me a part-time position that, if I choose to follow it to its full-time conclusion, will pay me three times what I got in my first job in publishing. A salary to rival my parents'! Well, maybe not quite. But a lot anyway. But still, for me, happiness really is more important than money. Even though I dream of being able to afford to fly to LA to visit long-lost friends -- which brings me to
4. I got an e-mail from my old friend Thessaly, who toured the Soviet Union with me in the musical "Peace Child" when we were teenagers. When I first met her she impressed me because she was from San Fran and went to Wavy Gravy's circus camp. Now she is living in LA, shooting for fame as a gay icon. She calls herself "The UkuLady" and plays '80s songs and original hits on her ukulele. We immediately re-bonded over how hideously thuggish the K-Fed/Spears firstborn is. She told me that she recently saw another former Peace Child, who is apparently living really close to Thess in LA, and is gaining fame as a minor indie star. It surprised me that our teenage exhibitionism actually masked genuine talent. I immediately Googled said minor indie star and one-time friend and, through reading interviews with her, have concluded that she is a little bit insane. I mean literally. This is a quote from her: "I encourage singing out loud. It is a great source of pleasure. I think it is absurd for a person to consider themselves or anyone else a bad singer. That is like calling someone a ‘bad breather.’ We don’t commonly think of sound as matter, but it is — and I think that it is our understanding of ourselves as finite that is coming to an end when we talk of apocalypse. The apocalypse is the end of limited consciousness. That is what we are experiencing right now. So do not be afraid of your own infinite nature." Insane. In one interview it says she comes from Providence, RI; in another she's described as hailing from the Midwest. But I went to stay with her and her mother for a while a year after we toured the USSR & she lived alone with her absolutely insane mother in a quite squalorous house in the exurbs of DC. I was impressed because it was like the only house I had ever been in that was as disorganized and dirty as my parents' house. Her mother was a strange combination of hard-core stage mom (my friend had a gig as a host of a kids' news show and after it aired, her mom would shut off the TV and do a post-mortem) and flaked-out oddball who told me how a friend of hers couldn't lactate after she gave birth until she had her first post-birth orgasm and also told me, as we were driving back from the beach, that she was a narcoleptic but she never told the insurance companies, but she always got sleepy when her kids fell asleep. When she told me this, my friend and her sis were sound asleep beside me. I always got the feeling that my friend was on the cusp -- she seemed to have a sense of humour about her life and her crazy mother, but at the same time her mother was everything to her. So now I can see which way she fell. Sometimes I wonder -- she is SO crazy-sounding -- if this isn't her way of masking her true weirdness, by exaggerating it so it becomes a "quirky stage persona." Does she really believe all that stuff about radiating love and filtering courage the way the trees filter carbon dioxide another quote)?
I listened to her songs on her myspace page, on which she addresses her fans as "Children of Peace" (hmmmm... an unconscious homage to our humble musical?) and talks about buying a magic wand which she feels bad about because it was made by child slaves, and it (the music) was interesting and spooky. All the more so because I knew the whole back story.
5. Why I Am an Ideot. I had to copyedit a really tedious book in which all the characters spoke in heavy dialect, so on the style sheet I created a category called "Idiosyncracies" to distinguish certain, well, idiosyncracies of speech -- only I spelled it "Ideosyncracies." That plus making a rather large number of arbitrary calls on preferred spellings of words -- I decided to keep "rock-and-roll" hyphenated throughout, for no defensible reason -- makes me think my unconscious is sabotaging my freelancing work. I told my boss at GCWM about it and she said "You must feel like an ideot." Heh heh!
6. On 91.1 FM, the jazz station, they seem to have a mandate to play at least one song featuring sleepy jazz harmonica and at least one jazz Beatles' cover every day. Who enjoys this "music"? They sound like anthems for suicide.
posted by tongapup at 3:46 p.m.
2 Comments:
Hmmm, did not know this is how you feel about toast. I am a toast-lite eater... toasted just long enough for the outer to get a bit crisp, with the innards still doughy. Melts in the mouth, more like a pastry than toast. Speaking of which... can I get another pastry please?
BleeeEEEAHHRRRggghhhh.
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