ChanelBaby

A Moving Target

I've been doing some career soul-searching.  This is not unusual for me.  I do all kinds soul-searching -- ideal house soul-searching, ideal wardrobe soul-searching, ideal wedding-planning soul searching, ideal life plan soul-searching -- all the damn time.  It drives Bartender Dude up the wall.  When he's feeling particularly fed up with this trait of mine (generally concomitant with me begging him for things to fulfill this ever-moving target) he says I can't be happy with the now, with what is currently in front of me or what I'm currently living.  He's right of course, and there is a grain of truth, a need for the balanced view to mitigate this aspect of my personality.  But I can't help it.  Its part of what makes me, me.

So back to the career soul-searching.  Like many people out there, I have never either known what I wanted to do or enjoyed what I did.  I've pretty much always made career choices that led me up a zig-zagging corporate ladder that has provided increasing levels of stability and salary.  I don't really look back on any of this as being a waste of time -- after all, its taken me this long to even begin to get my childhood/emotional/whatever you want to call them distortions out of the way and grow into a proper, self-knowing adult.  But now I've come to a realisation, spurred on by the availability of a different job within my organisation and the blank, tired feeling of trying to stay motivated in a current job that is both difficult and boring.

This is what I've realised: I think I would be happier doing work that is intellectually engaging or, for lack of a better term, intellectually creative.  The thing about being a "business person," which is essentially what I do now -- a kind of vague catch-all for going to lots of meetings and duplicating lots of efforts -- is that while it does require many kinds of intelligence, it does not require creative intelligence.  I need to be specific here -- I don't mean that people can't be creative in the way they go about their jobs, or solve problems.  What I mean is that, for the most part, unless you are the very top of an organisation, being a "middle manager business person (THINGIE)" does not involve creating an intellectual offering.  It involves things like strategy and implementation and endless consulting and oiling the machine and soothing egos.  It involves a TON of communication and re-calibrating the way things get done and loads and loads of personality manouevering.  I tell you I find that kind of stuff emotionally draining.

The job that is open in my company that has caused this epiphany of understanding, or categorisation in my brain, is a producer for one of our web content channels (health, to be specific).  This job involves creating an intellectual offering for consumption by our members, or to speak more plainly, it involves spotting and developing (and even in some instances creating) good writing and cool online tools for our members to read and use.  Now this job, in terms of salary and responsibility, would constitute a step down for me, and I find myself in that difficult mid-career cake-and-eat-it-too dilemma.

Because if this step down represented a temporary diminishment in order to earn my chops "officially" doing something I already know I can do, in order to ascend later and re-fashion my career into a more agreeable future, then I really think I will go for it.  But if there is nowhere internally for this position to go, and if the salary drop is seriously considerable, then I don't think I will go for it, not least because I have to save all my spare ducats for this damn wedding because Oh My Holy Lord I am constantly raising the bar on what I want for that part of my life too.

So you see.  Its a good thing I have Bartender Dude to slap some sense into me from time to time, but it doesn't make these crossroad, golden-handcuff dilemmas any easier to wrestle with.

You can't fight personality, baby.

Sloth and Envy

I’d like to write more than I do.  I really would. When I read my favourite blogs I always feel so inspired to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and compose some elegant treatise on the summer joys of peppery arugula or what I love about being Anglican, or even a narrative about something funny that happened recently.  But then, inevitably, the surge of creativity welling almost to the point of action retreats back down the shore to the sea, the inner sea, where it rests in a mildly undulating passivity.

I tell you now, dear readers, the sea of the inner self is vast, it is powerful, and it is virtually dormant.  What a crime! What neglect of the soul!

The problem with me, as is so often the case with almost everything except cleaning and cooking, is that all the interesting and creative things I want to do take practice, and more importantly, trial and error. I don’t like error. I become angry and frustrated if I can’t master something immediately, the first time I try it, and then my anger veers off into boredom and I drop the whole project.  I have probably hundreds of books purchased in a mad rush of infatuation with their titles and content that sit unread on our (burgeoning and overstuffed) bookshelves.  I have a very long scarf that I’ve been knitting for almost a year from pink eyelash yarn, which stares reproachfully at me from the knitting basket on the floor.  I have $75 worth of recently purchased “art” supplies – coloured card stock, shape punchers, gold ink, stamps, thin asian paper squares – languishing in piles on the desk in our home office.  I have a very expensive mat cutter (bought in the wild-eyed hope of matting and framing all my unframed prints myself) cluttering up the walk-in closet cheek-by-jowl with Bartender Dude’s tools.

And I read these blogs, like Orangette, and Not Martha, and HelloMyNameIsHeather, and Nothing But Bonfires, and I feel so envious of their ability to lead creative lives, to get up early in the morning and being doing, baking, whipping up pincushions, and writing such beautiful prose.  I’m sure THEY don’t come home from work and eat nachos on the couch watching three hours of crap television while the house gets dustier and dustier and the unfinished scarf stays unfinished.  No I’m sure their lives are ordered and their houses are clean and they have piles of time and energy to always be doing something or making something or writing something.

And I have to remember that these lucky women do not work 9 hours a day doing Things They Don’t Care About and none of them (with the exception of Orangette) are planning a wedding, and they are probably disciplined about getting enough sleep. And I am sure if they read this post each one of them would laugh hysterically and debunk every lovely myth I’ve spun in my head about them – that their houses ARE dirty and that they have LOADS of unfinished projects lying around – but the point is, I think I need to change a few things about the way I currently conduct my life.

STARTING with Getting Enough Sleep. I’ve tried the writing every day thing – well, see, again, I haven’t so much TRIED it as done it once and abandoned it when the words wouldn’t come – but I don’t want to set myself up for failure by being too ambitious (another terrible habit of mine, scuppering my boat before I’ve even shoved off).  So we’ll see what I can do.

I am going to attempt to change little by little, and report back here on how it all goes.

Of Dreams and Horses

I just got back from a week’s holiday, and I don’t know if all that heat at the beach melted some of my synapses but last night I had the following dream:

I was at some kind of conference or event, at a big lodge in the woods, and this conference was of national importance and included heads of state.  People in tiaras and tuxes were milling about the pine-needle-carpeted floor on their way in to the lodge to do whatever it is this conference was supposed to do – probably solving the combined political crises of the Middle East and Africa before dinner and drinks.  But anyway, so I was watching this from a distance and then suddenly I was in another part of the lodge complex in the woods, talking to my (temporary) boss (I say temporary because I am currently on loan to his department).  And my temporary boss was getting ready to attend this event as well but he needed a HORSE (of course he did) to arrive upon, otherwise he would not strike the right note of gravitas.  So I turned to this unnaturally tall, lanky person next to me, who incidentally possessed magical abilities to shape-shift, and who (in my dream) was my (temporary) boss’s son and told him he’d have to turn into a horse and bear his father on his back to this reception thingy and hurry up because the delegates are all on their way into the building already.  His son strongly objected to this plan because (he said) his magical abilities had been drained recently (oh please that is SO unrealistic – once you have magical abilities you do not lose them) and to prove to me that he could not turn into a horse he stretched his body out even taller and arched over on all fours and remained there for a few minutes, glaring at me.  “See?” he said petulantly. “The magic isn’t working today! I told you I need to go get topped up.” Well, I thought to myself, I can see through HIM like a PANE OF GLASS.  So then I was furious because he would not do my bidding and I KNEW it was just because he didn’t want to help his father out. For a second I wasn’t sure how to solve the problem and then I remembered there was a little white mare in the stable around the corner (what stable? Suddenly there was a stable).  “We can send you in on the little white mare” I told my boss, and he was fine with this plan and I glowered at the unhelpful son and then the dream was over.

Yeah. I don’t. What? I don't know. SO WEIRD.

I Hate Morning People

When I am on my way to work, I do not like stoppages or cessation of movement of any kind. People who stand on the escalators when they should walk, waiting at stoplights for the left-turn lane to empty its contents across my path, just missing a train and having to wait four more minutes for another one – these are the things that send my pulse (and my feelings of fury!) through the roof even though they only constitute differences of minutes in terms of my ultimate arrival. I am notoriously late and I am always rushing to get in on time, no matter how good the intentions. I hate and despise being late but I hate and despise getting up even more.

I have come to realize that for me time balloons in the morning when I am lying in bed hitting the snooze button but collapses shortly thereafter when I step out the door to begin my commute. 

This morning I had to be in for a 9 am meeting, that I was leading, and for which people were COMING TO MY OFFICE. It was vitally important to the small part of me that still cares about saving face (Dance on the bar? Sure! Draw attention to myself at parties? I’M YOUR MAN. But show up in a harried panic to my office where a coterie of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed morning risers is waiting for me, coffee in hand, exchanging looks? No. Fucking. Way. Dude.) that I arrive in enough time to take off my coat, get some water, and turn on my computer.

So do you think that happened this morning? DO YOU?

Well if you did you would be wrong dear readers.

The dialogue in my head before stepping out the door this morning at 8:26 am went something like this (keep in mind the original plan was to leave at 8 to be in by 8:30):

7:30 am – If I don’t take a shower I can sleep for another 10 minutes. I can leave at 8:05 and it will be fine. 

7:40 am – [snooze]

7:50 am – Must. Sleep. Longer. As long as I leave by 8:15 I will be fine. I’ll get in at 8:45, and really, 15 minutes is enough time to get settled in.

8:00 am – Oh lord I really have to get up. I guess I can leave at 8:20. 8:20 will be fine. 

8:05 am – I mean 8:25. As long as I am in BEFORE 9 am. Getting in at 8:55 will work. Yeah.

Needless to say, I arrived at 8:55 am and guess what? GUESS WHAT? The bright-eyed bushy-tailed folks were EARLY (these fucking people I swear to God) and waiting at my door. WAITING AT THE DOOR! Who shows up to a meeting EARLY?

I hate morning people.

Disasterville

Our calm little flat is in an upraor of confusion.  For some unknown reason, and despite repeated assurances from me and from Bartender Dude that we don't care about this at all, our benevolent landlords have decided to push forward with ripping apart our kitchen in order to fix the hairline cracks in the tile floor.  When we first brought these infintesimal cracks to their attention at our year anniversary walk-through in October last, we made it clear that we only wanted to let them know to protect the eventual return of our security deposit, but that we didn't care two straws about getting them fixed.  The tiles weren't shifting around, or chipping at the edges, or deteriorating in any way, and we didn't want the landlords to think we were superfussy or prima donnas about every tiny flaw in our 100-year old apartment.  We made a list of the top three things we wanted fixed if they were amenable (the sticking door, the sticking windows, the busted floorboards), but the chimerical cracks in the kitchen tile that looked like the spidery tracing of wind patterns on frosted surfaces were NOT on the list.  In fact, they were second to last on the List of Stuff We Wanted You to Be Aware of But You Needn't Bother Spending Your Money On.

Nevertheless, the landlords are in a fury of improvement.  First there was the project to re-enamel the tub, after which we had to wash it out with dishwashing liquid and a soft cloth every time we used it FOR A MONTH.  Then there was the project to re-carpet the sitting room, after which we've been terrified to eat anything remotely greasy or red in there, which has greatly cut into our television viewing.  And our drinking of red wine.

Now we are living in a demolition zone, with no ability to boil water or dump empty glasses in the sink or chuck things in the dishwasher.  Behold the destruction:

The worst part of having no kitchen is having all of it piled in the adjacent office.

I can't get to anything, I can't find anything, I can't cut lemons for my tea or pull out a bowl for microwaveable soup.  Neither can I cook anything, which is difficult in itself, but I can't even slice cheese or make iced tea or locate the grater to make nachos.

In situations like this, my new poster comes in handy:

Kicking it old school, washing dishes like my grandma did:

Where are the candles, the bowl and pitcher, the symmetrical Laura Ingalls braids?  I feel like I am living in a hotel with detritus piled in one corner of the room.

Today, Bartender Dude and I drove to the grocery store and loaded up on frozen dinners and a huge jug of Arizona iced tea.  I've never been so embarrassed in the checkout line in my life.

Okay, so it's not like I stockpile KY Jelly and bleaching cream and Beano on a regular basis, but STILL.

Duking It Out

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the majority of humanities students have no idea what they want to do with their lives, most of whom end up in law school because, as I’ve often heart it put, they couldn’t think of anything better to do.  And with the exception of a JD, I am no different.  Despite years of soul-searching and self-help worksheets and online career tests, I have never known what I really want to do with my life, at least not career-wise.  I have moved from job to job over the last fifteen years of my professional life, with a short year out to take the obligatory grad school detour, and never once have I enjoyed a single one.

Things have continued to be crazy at work.  I spend most of my time terrified that someone will find out I don’t know what I’m doing, even though I probably know more than I realize.  But it is so difficult to play a game when you don’t know the rules and you have no one to show you.  So this goes beyond bored, or dissatisfied.  This is the dark ribbon of fear, the cages you make for yourself and the distortions you place on reality.  I wish there was some way to blast those phantoms out of existence.  But it takes time, and I’m working on it.

In the meantime, I have a backup plan – my new poster arrived today, the one that says “Keep Calm and Carry On.”  I’m going to have it framed and put in my office to remind me that there is No Cause for Panic.  It is a facsimile of a poster placed all over London during World War II to calm the tube-riding public.

So enough of this maudlin musing.  Is anyone else disturbed by the recent Doritos commercial that has been airing recently?  The one in which two bags of Doritos fight WWF-style in a ring in front of an army of wiggling knit toys?  I mean, what the hell is going on there?  Are bags of Doritos and knit toys supposed to have something in common?  Are knit toys supposed to have some kind of street cred?  What age group is this advert aimed at?

More importantly, what coke-lined booze-fueled junket led to some young ad jocks coming up with this crap?

Some ads are funny.  The one about car care products that intones in a sonorous voice: “Here at Blah Blah, we’ve been conducting tests to see how children make such gigantic messes in such a short time” and then shows a child being shut up in a minivan is hilarious.  The one from years ago in which the man runs into an open file drawer whilst talking to his boss about how all the information for the meeting is stored in his brain slayed me every time I watched it.  If I could have rolled on the floor I would have.

But this Doritoes commercial is WHACK.  Whack I tell you.

The Queen of Trash Film

I saw a film recently, which I thought from the previews would be the perfect chick flick to burrow down on the couch watching when Bartender Dude was at work. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a sweeping Hollywood-ised version of the story of Esther, told in the most cheesy, overblown manner possible. The script was terrible, and the actors weren’t good enough to salvage it, but they were pretty, and dressed in the most amazing clothes you can imagine (no, I am serious, I would ROB A BANK to be able to wear these kinds of clothes), and somehow madly compelling. I really wish I could blame what I’m about to tell you on the sartorial brilliance of this production, but the film took over my imagination in a truly adolescent and embarrassing way.

The thing that hooked me, the rufi that those damn Hollowoodising producers slipped into my drink, was not the underlying story of Esther (which in itself is quite a compelling story and well worth a read) but the architecture of the pulp romance novel, the proven formula that hooks many a dissatisfied member of my sex and works like crack on the broken parts of our psyches – always promising, never delivering.

And here are the basic building blocks – boy meets girl, boy chooses girl, mistaken actions, conflict and obstacles ensue, crisis builds, encounter (sometimes violent) results, truth surfaces, boy and girl passionately reunite. Only in the case of this film, it goes something like this – (handsome and leonine) king meets (stunningly attractive) peasant girl, king chooses (oh by the way she can read in several languages! And has a gift for sparring wit!) girl in BEAUTY CONTEST to be his wife and queen, like some kind of 5^th century BC version of The Bachelor, king and queen canoodle in the most remarkable clothes and settings you have ever seen in your life (DRIPPING with bling), king mistakes actions of queen and vice versa, king and queen come maddeningly close several times to working things out but never quite, crisis builds, queen confronts king by publicly entering the throne room unsummoned, at the LAST SECOND before some dude in a skirt is about to chop her down with a big sword, king saves queen and clasps her in his arms, king and queen passionately reunite.

I’ve never read any pulp romance novels, but I absolutely know there is a formula, and that it works. What upsets me is its effectiveness. Real life and real love bear almost no resemblance to this kind of cheap thrill effect, the intoxication based on blindness, the drunken escape of infatuation. I love Bartender Dude like the bones in my body, and we did go through a period when the frisson of excitement there all the time, like a shiver under the skin, but we’ve moved on from that. It’s deeper, it’s better, and it’s different.

Perhaps that is why, now, this stupid film hit me like a juggernaut, awakening the soppy teenager in me (I thought I vanquished her!), making me so confused. Maybe I miss the puppy stage. Maybe my father never made me feel beloved, set apart, a princess of the realm (actually I know for a fact that he didn’t – the queen in this story is both protected and adored, and that alone is enough to work powerfully on my wounded self). Maybe this is an indication that I need to borrow from the story the elements and symbols that will provide balance and evolutionary growth. (Oh yes I like that – paper over the embarrassing bits by pretending this is all about the evolution of your soul and not really about your truly trashy taste.)

But whatever it is, I cannot BELIEVE that I got sucker-punched into this situation by a formulaic and badly-written historic soap opera of a film. This is the stuff I look down on! Freedom from being affected by this tripe is what makes me An Intelligent, Mature Adult with Taste!

What a load of bollocks.

I’m just like everybody else, and the part of me that would secretly luuuuve to be the Queen HATES to acknowledge that.

An Actual Conversation That Just Took Place Between Me and Bartender Dude Not Five Minutes Ago

[Chanelbaby]:  Hello?  Baby?  Are you driving?

[Bartender Dude]: Uh, yeah, I'm driving home.  I'm almost there.  I just called you like five minutes ago from the restaurant.

[Chanelbaby]: Okay well I'm sorry butI'mnakedandI'mcoldandIcan'tfindmy PEEEJAAAYYYYS!!!

[Bartender Dude]: (pause)

[Bartender Dude]: Are they on the chair?

[Chanelbaby]: (whimpering pause) Nooooo....

[Bartender Dude]: (another pause)

[Bartender Dude]: Oh, you put them in the guest room.

I ask you, can the man be real?  Is this even fair?  I don't know what I did in a former life to get this lucky in love, but I MUST have thrown myself in front of a train to save orphaned, parapelegic babies, thus saving them from their crack-dealing pimp.

Everything Changes

I'm sitting in the cosy back sitting room watching The Age of Innocence (which has some of the best clothes and dinner scenes I've ever seen), and this advert comes on, triumphantly claiming "Victoria's Secret has REINVENTED THE BRA!"

"AGAIN?" I said out loud to the knitting.

This past weekend, I picked up LS and drove halfway around the world to Tysons Corner, to the largest collection of shops in the area, where there is a WEST ELM.  I get their catalogs and they have the smartest collection of things.  So I went there in search of some peacock-coloured pillows for the bedroom (I'm all in a rage for that colour) which I swear I had seen in a catalog a few months ago.  When I arrived, all the pillows were either Greek island blue or pale sea glass blue, so I asked the store clerks if they had any of the peacock-coloured ones left.  "I'm sorry, we don't," he said.  "We change our colour scheme every four to six weeks, and discount what's left to drive it out of stock."

I swear to God, I don't know what's happened to me but I think I'm suddenly older.  Suddenly shopping stresses me out, when it used to be one of my favourite activities.  It annoys the SHIT out of me that product cycles are so compressed.  The time I'm allowed to savor something aesthetically and determine if I want to purchase it has violently collapsed.  Stores don't wait for me to find the time to get to them in order to buy the things I want.  Victoria's Secret has re-re-re-invented the bra, and couldn't care less.  There are too many options to consider, I'm overwhelmed with the constant newness of products, none of which are on my radar for longer than a blip before they disappear.

I can't tell if I'm just slowing down, or if the priorities for what I care to focus on and process have shifted.  But in actual fact, and to deny to myself that this could be about me becoming tragically unhip, I think that these mass manufacturers of cheap, sleek products have realised that the craze for constant changeability can work as a powerful motivation to BUY NOW and they are using that to full advantage.

What a curmudgeon! I never thought this would happen to me, but I appear to be creeping toward MIDDLE AGE.  AHGGHGHGHG.  Someone send me some trendy music and a handbag covered in chains STAT.

Hello, Big Girl

Today I broke in my brand new superfuckingcute coat.  You will gasp, I know, but it is pink, with huge buttons, and in the SWING style that is so popular now.  I luuurrve it.  When I put my hair up in a clip and wear this coat, I look like Audrey Hepburn (except of course that I am not a twig)!!!

On my way to an appointment tonight, I had to switch buses.  As I was getting off to make the change, a series of people surged forward to get on and I had to sort of fight through them.  As I was making my way down the bus stairs, an old, rather disheveled man beamed at me and said:

"Hello, big girl."

I swear you cannot make this shit up.

I guess he could have said "Hello, pink girl," or "Hello, big pink," but I really don't think so.  I think he said "Hello, big girl."

I should have said "Hello, big hobo!  Happy LENT!"