To keep it real with you, I'm pretty much at that age where it's silly to spend much time talking about what women want*, mostly because the very question implies that all women are some sort of homogeneous collective waiting for you to do the secret sex dance which, if performed correctly by rote, will permit you to frolic winsomely in vag valley. Regardless of the cultural / political implications of the question, it's also something you're supposed to be pretty much over by sometime in your late twenties.
To put this in context, I saw Whitesnake back in Vegas about three months ago and as I listened to timeless cock-rock classics like "Is This Love" and "Give me all your Love," I found it incredibly awkward to hear a man nearing sixty mewl on and on about love and sleepless nights. It's not unlike the uncomfortable feeling one gets watching the Norma Shearer / Leslie Howard version of "Romeo and Juliet" and understanding that at 34 and 43 respectively, they're just too old for this shit. Congratulations if you got that last reference - we're cribbing from the same Film Studies book.
Nevertheless, this question keeps popping up like some sort of perennial whack-a-mole, and the blunt foam hammer chained to the game console that's more often than not used to answer reads "girls only like complete assholes," which brings us to the point of this post: do "girls" really like "assholes?"** Ladder theorists***, neck-bearded misanthropes, and weeping emos from John Hughes movies say yes, but pretty much every woman I've ever known in my entire life says no, which brings us to the point of this post.
A friend of mine back in high school said that girls want a guy who is "at least somewhat domineering," which is not quite the right usage of that word, but we can run with it. Girls want a guy who acts like a guy, and not a simpering, snivelling man-child. The point at which most ladder theorists miss the mark is to mistake aggressiveness for hostility, jocularity for vulgarity, and independence for ignorance. In other words, when a guy is a little handsy and jokey with his girl, makes up a rude-sounding nickname for her that he uses in public, and occasionally blows her off to drink beer and watch Family Guy ****with his buddies, well, these things are expected. Not necessarily desired, mind you, but expected.
What is neither expected nor desired is the butt-sniffing, the hourly calls, the sparkly-eyed awe-struck saccharinity of hanging on her every word and treating her like a golden goddess that a NBLT***** would give her. She's a person, damn it, and it's no more appropriate to idolize her than it is to denigrate her. This is what I like to call the White Elephant treatment - the subject's object d'amour is so precious, so rare, so sacred, that she must be kept apart, and cared for in isolation.******
What this means is that girls don't in fact like assholes, they like guys who display a certain degree of guy-liness, and who treat them like actual people. They also don't like guys who simper and fawn, and throw themselves prostrate to beg for sex. Do some girls like a guy who is more dominant, more aggressive, more controlling? Yes they do. Do some girls like a guy who steps back and lets the woman take control? Yes they do. Do women like a guy who refers to women generally as a collective slab of lubricated meat into which he can thrust his disused man-pole? I'm just going to guess that's a no, but then I was never in Poison.
So NBLTs, remember: the guy with the girl your lusting after isn't an asshole. You're jealous because he's banging her like a screen door in the wind, and you're sitting on the sidelines writing Battlestar Galactica furry slash fiction and getting a beat-off blister. Move on, gird thy loins, and man up. Likewise, acting like an asshole won't help you, because you're actually going to act like an asshole, most likely because you don't spend enough time socializing, and instead squander your day blogging about shit that everyone already knows.
*Notice that this does not in any way stop me from proceeding.
**For the remainder of this post, we're going to go ahead and speak in broad generalities about men and women. If you appreciate the distinction, and the quotes preceding the above asterisk, you probably don't need to bother with the rest of this post as you've long surpassed any lesson in the arbitrary nature of gender dynamics that this blog might give you.
***Yes, I know I'm pretty much scrounging up the internet from 1999, but I can't think of a better catch-all for the troubled sub-class to which I refer, and thus I call them ladder theorists.
****Self-referential linking! This blog works on a lot of levels!
*****Neck-Bearded Ladder Theorist
******Good on you for catching that subject-object implication. You're a real smarty!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Famous Vampire Slattern
I wasn't even sure if I would make this update because it is cold-and-flu season here in Michigan. I don't think I've got the swine flu or anything, but two days ago I felt like someone let the air out of my tires and poured sugar in my gas tank. I slept for ten hours, and didn't have a whole hell of a lot more zip yesterday. Today I only feel like my blood is made out of taffy, and everything I touch turns to hurt, but it's an improvement.
This weekend is Halloween, which is one of the busiest days of the year in restaurant work. Naturally, as I feel like crap and I'm going to have to bust my ass from Thursday to Sunday, I'm very excited. I'm even more excited to do this in costume, as has been requested. I have no idea what I'm going to do, and with only three days left, it looks like I'm doing something pretty unspectacular and / or slapped together at the last minute, but I do know what I'm not doing: wearing one of the three worst Halloween costumes in existence.
These aren't necessarily anything you can buy in a store. Rather, these are costume concepts that for one reason or another suck of their own accord.
Crappy Costume 1:
Dead Celebrity
Examples:
Micheal Jackson, Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze
Why it Sucks:
When Billy Mays died, I was actually saddened. I thought Pitchmen was a great show for its brief running time, and I found his catchy, bombastic style totally charming. When he died, the first thing I thought of was that "zombie Billy Mays" would be a great Halloween costume. Some people really liked the idea of staggering around all mottled and decayed with a bottle of Kaboom, others thought it was lame, but I began making plans to buy a blue shirt and to grow a beard. Then, while grocery shopping, I heard someone the next aisle over explain the same idea to a friend. Then a month later, the same thing happened. That's when I realized that although there was only one Billy Mays, there would be about ten bajillion Billy Mays zombies.
Celebrities are celebrities for a reason - lots and lots of people like them. If you're going to go as any sort of zombie celebrity, go as a b-list zombie celebrity, somebody popular enough to be marginally famous, but who died in enough poverty or obscurity that people feel bad for laughing at your cleverness, or more to the point, go as someone who was famous for doing good works and who touched human consciousness in a significant way as opposed to being a baby raping pedophile whose death overshadowed all others.
Suggested Alternatives:
Zombie Ricardo Montalban, Zombie John Updyke, Zombie Paul Harvey
Crappy Costume 2:
Sexy Anything
Examples:
Sexy Nurse, Slutty Firefighter, Astronaut Whore
Why it Sucks:
A costume that's actually worse when it's done well, the sexy professional costume is your way of anouncing to the world that your stepfather was "a little handsy," and that you are desperate for approval and attention. If you didn't catch the memo, ladies, getting attention from boys is really really easy: Step one, walk into a room where boys are. There is no step two.
There's something in this culture that's really all about embracing slut-dom, and I of all people should think it's just great, but I don't. A little class and mystery go a long, long way, and the sexy costume is not so much like an erotic flirtation as it is like the family dog humping your leg while you try to watch the football game.
These rules apply for guys too - nobody wants to see your shaved chest, chachi, and truthfully you're probably not pulling off that shirtless soot-streaked fireman costume as well as you think you are. Generally speaking, boys, we're about half as good looking as we think we are, and if no one is explicitly asking you to take your shirt off, you should probably leave it on.
If you must do a sexy costume, do something weird and subtle. Alternately, where a sexy costume in a very unsexy way so as to become repulsive or frightening.
Suggested Alternatives:
Sexy city comptroller, slutty hay bailer, crucified jesus in a thong
Crappy Costume 3:
Vampire
Examples:
Louis, Edward, Dracula
Why it Sucks:
There is nothing I can type here that adequately expresses how bad an idea it is to dress as a vampire this halloween. I could have gone with an obvious "suck" joke, discussed in even greater detail how badly vampires are played out, but for the sake of my dignity and yours, we'll just go on to the suggested alternatives.
Suggested Alternatives:
Sexy dead celebrity
Hey, costumes are hard. There's a lot of pressure, and frequently your resources are limited. Make the best of it. It's okay if, like, three people "get" your costume - you'll all have a good time drinking beer and making jokes until 2:00 when everyone just gets tired of their costumes and gets naked, at which point you'll be glad that you just wore a black T-shirt that reads "this is my costume."
This weekend is Halloween, which is one of the busiest days of the year in restaurant work. Naturally, as I feel like crap and I'm going to have to bust my ass from Thursday to Sunday, I'm very excited. I'm even more excited to do this in costume, as has been requested. I have no idea what I'm going to do, and with only three days left, it looks like I'm doing something pretty unspectacular and / or slapped together at the last minute, but I do know what I'm not doing: wearing one of the three worst Halloween costumes in existence.
These aren't necessarily anything you can buy in a store. Rather, these are costume concepts that for one reason or another suck of their own accord.
Crappy Costume 1:
Dead Celebrity
Examples:
Micheal Jackson, Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze
Why it Sucks:
When Billy Mays died, I was actually saddened. I thought Pitchmen was a great show for its brief running time, and I found his catchy, bombastic style totally charming. When he died, the first thing I thought of was that "zombie Billy Mays" would be a great Halloween costume. Some people really liked the idea of staggering around all mottled and decayed with a bottle of Kaboom, others thought it was lame, but I began making plans to buy a blue shirt and to grow a beard. Then, while grocery shopping, I heard someone the next aisle over explain the same idea to a friend. Then a month later, the same thing happened. That's when I realized that although there was only one Billy Mays, there would be about ten bajillion Billy Mays zombies.
Celebrities are celebrities for a reason - lots and lots of people like them. If you're going to go as any sort of zombie celebrity, go as a b-list zombie celebrity, somebody popular enough to be marginally famous, but who died in enough poverty or obscurity that people feel bad for laughing at your cleverness, or more to the point, go as someone who was famous for doing good works and who touched human consciousness in a significant way as opposed to being a baby raping pedophile whose death overshadowed all others.
Suggested Alternatives:
Zombie Ricardo Montalban, Zombie John Updyke, Zombie Paul Harvey
Crappy Costume 2:
Sexy Anything
Examples:
Sexy Nurse, Slutty Firefighter, Astronaut Whore
Why it Sucks:
A costume that's actually worse when it's done well, the sexy professional costume is your way of anouncing to the world that your stepfather was "a little handsy," and that you are desperate for approval and attention. If you didn't catch the memo, ladies, getting attention from boys is really really easy: Step one, walk into a room where boys are. There is no step two.
There's something in this culture that's really all about embracing slut-dom, and I of all people should think it's just great, but I don't. A little class and mystery go a long, long way, and the sexy costume is not so much like an erotic flirtation as it is like the family dog humping your leg while you try to watch the football game.
These rules apply for guys too - nobody wants to see your shaved chest, chachi, and truthfully you're probably not pulling off that shirtless soot-streaked fireman costume as well as you think you are. Generally speaking, boys, we're about half as good looking as we think we are, and if no one is explicitly asking you to take your shirt off, you should probably leave it on.
If you must do a sexy costume, do something weird and subtle. Alternately, where a sexy costume in a very unsexy way so as to become repulsive or frightening.
Suggested Alternatives:
Sexy city comptroller, slutty hay bailer, crucified jesus in a thong
Crappy Costume 3:
Vampire
Examples:
Louis, Edward, Dracula
Why it Sucks:
There is nothing I can type here that adequately expresses how bad an idea it is to dress as a vampire this halloween. I could have gone with an obvious "suck" joke, discussed in even greater detail how badly vampires are played out, but for the sake of my dignity and yours, we'll just go on to the suggested alternatives.
Suggested Alternatives:
Sexy dead celebrity
Hey, costumes are hard. There's a lot of pressure, and frequently your resources are limited. Make the best of it. It's okay if, like, three people "get" your costume - you'll all have a good time drinking beer and making jokes until 2:00 when everyone just gets tired of their costumes and gets naked, at which point you'll be glad that you just wore a black T-shirt that reads "this is my costume."
Monday, October 26, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give it, Volume 3: Your First Short Story, a Fictive Tour-De-Force
Ever since you were a little girl, you’ve had this one great idea for a story. Check it out: there’s this guy – he’s a poet, and he’s kind of an outcast, but he has like two or three friends who really understand him and who are themselves kind of weird, like he’s got this one friend who’s super into comic books, and the other knows everything about, like, 1980’s ska bands or something. It’s not important, but okay, there’s also this girl that hangs out with them and she’s kind of annoying, but she’s also really cool and like she can fix cars or something. She’s kind of cute, and she has a thing for the poet guy, but he's not that into her and she gets pawned off onto one of the supporting characters, so she gets rejected for not being good enough for the poet guy, but like it isn’t a dick move because she still gets someone or whatever.
At any rate, there’s this one girl that the guy really likes but she doesn’t even know that he exists, or that secretly he’s really cool and they have a lot in common, like both of them totally think that Catcher in the Rye is actually stupid and no big deal, and they both think that team sports are basically for fascists, and the girl is like a violinist or something, then one day they go to a party together and she happens to have her violin, and then he starts saying his poetry as she’s playing, and everyone in school sees how cool they are. Also they are vampires who can fly and then they pork.
You worked on this story for most of your adolescent life, and then continued between drafts into your twenties. You’ve shown it to your mom and she thinks it’s good, and she’s super proud of you, but you’ve been sitting on your final draft for the last six years because someone, somewhere, told you that your stories are precious babies who need to be nurtured, fed, clothed, suckled, and jacked off so that they could come into the world as some sort of Courier New Messiah, totally blowing everyone’s mind and shocking their dulled consciousness into a new paradigm of enlightened thought.
Which, of course, is utter horse shit. I’m not sure where this idea came from (romantic period, I’m looking in your direction) but it’s utter crap that should be stuffed into a brown paper lunch bag, and set alight on your neighbor’s porch, because THAT would make a much better story than the rotten egg you’ve been sitting on and trying to hatch.
Writers have a lot in common with snakes – generally, we sneak through life watching, waiting, striking quickly, not having eyelids, swallowing our food whole and taking weeks to digest it, but also regularly shedding our skins. Writers are receivers, ultimate objects (as opposed to subjects), receiving new stimuli, responding, receiving again, and undergoing a constant process of reinvention. Ultimately malleable and classically liberal, what we are is not what we were.
Sure, you’re saying, how is that any different than anyone else? Everyone else constantly reinvents themselves and also the only constant…is change!!!111oneone
If we are to carry the snake metaphor forward (metaphorward? I just accidentally created the best literary journal title EVAR), then the difference between the constantly reinvigorated writer and the constantly reinvigorated…er…not-writer…is that the writer tacks up his old skins for everyone to see, apparently by evolving thumbs and then devising some sort of industry by which tacks are created.
Okay, this metaphor is just not working.
The point of this post being that writers absorb, release, display, advance. We constantly write new work, abandon the old, and hopefully we don't mistake our identity for our work. What we did back then is not who we are now, but we hope that what we did is worthy of consideration, of study, of appreciation. We hope that someone looks at our work and relates to it, absorbs it, is stimulated by it, but when we’re doing our job right, we don’t mistake the work for ourselves.
Which is exactly what you’re doing by carrying that crusty old story around with you. Imagine if a snake didn’t shed its skin with the seasons: the skin would be filthy, ridden with parasites, flaking from neglect, and utterly repulsive. It would be a disgusting parody of its former self embedded with the filth of years, so perverted from its original form that it would be unrecognizable even to its wearer if the wearer were able to distance himself from it, which of course he can’t because he has trapped himself within it, and is unable to break away because he has never done so before, and he does not know how.
So to make it simple: when you have an idea, get working on it immediately. If you can’t make something of it at first, put your notes in a drawer and come back to it in six months. Still nothing? Forget about it. It was a passing fancy. Got that story written? Proofread, edit, and send it out. Forget your delusions of world-shattering grandeur: if you get it published it will probably be in a journal with a circulation under 1000, and only half of those will read it, but it’s a start, and you can go on to bigger and better things.
At any rate, there’s this one girl that the guy really likes but she doesn’t even know that he exists, or that secretly he’s really cool and they have a lot in common, like both of them totally think that Catcher in the Rye is actually stupid and no big deal, and they both think that team sports are basically for fascists, and the girl is like a violinist or something, then one day they go to a party together and she happens to have her violin, and then he starts saying his poetry as she’s playing, and everyone in school sees how cool they are. Also they are vampires who can fly and then they pork.
You worked on this story for most of your adolescent life, and then continued between drafts into your twenties. You’ve shown it to your mom and she thinks it’s good, and she’s super proud of you, but you’ve been sitting on your final draft for the last six years because someone, somewhere, told you that your stories are precious babies who need to be nurtured, fed, clothed, suckled, and jacked off so that they could come into the world as some sort of Courier New Messiah, totally blowing everyone’s mind and shocking their dulled consciousness into a new paradigm of enlightened thought.
Which, of course, is utter horse shit. I’m not sure where this idea came from (romantic period, I’m looking in your direction) but it’s utter crap that should be stuffed into a brown paper lunch bag, and set alight on your neighbor’s porch, because THAT would make a much better story than the rotten egg you’ve been sitting on and trying to hatch.
Writers have a lot in common with snakes – generally, we sneak through life watching, waiting, striking quickly, not having eyelids, swallowing our food whole and taking weeks to digest it, but also regularly shedding our skins. Writers are receivers, ultimate objects (as opposed to subjects), receiving new stimuli, responding, receiving again, and undergoing a constant process of reinvention. Ultimately malleable and classically liberal, what we are is not what we were.
Sure, you’re saying, how is that any different than anyone else? Everyone else constantly reinvents themselves and also the only constant…is change!!!111oneone
If we are to carry the snake metaphor forward (metaphorward? I just accidentally created the best literary journal title EVAR), then the difference between the constantly reinvigorated writer and the constantly reinvigorated…er…not-writer…is that the writer tacks up his old skins for everyone to see, apparently by evolving thumbs and then devising some sort of industry by which tacks are created.
Okay, this metaphor is just not working.
The point of this post being that writers absorb, release, display, advance. We constantly write new work, abandon the old, and hopefully we don't mistake our identity for our work. What we did back then is not who we are now, but we hope that what we did is worthy of consideration, of study, of appreciation. We hope that someone looks at our work and relates to it, absorbs it, is stimulated by it, but when we’re doing our job right, we don’t mistake the work for ourselves.
Which is exactly what you’re doing by carrying that crusty old story around with you. Imagine if a snake didn’t shed its skin with the seasons: the skin would be filthy, ridden with parasites, flaking from neglect, and utterly repulsive. It would be a disgusting parody of its former self embedded with the filth of years, so perverted from its original form that it would be unrecognizable even to its wearer if the wearer were able to distance himself from it, which of course he can’t because he has trapped himself within it, and is unable to break away because he has never done so before, and he does not know how.
So to make it simple: when you have an idea, get working on it immediately. If you can’t make something of it at first, put your notes in a drawer and come back to it in six months. Still nothing? Forget about it. It was a passing fancy. Got that story written? Proofread, edit, and send it out. Forget your delusions of world-shattering grandeur: if you get it published it will probably be in a journal with a circulation under 1000, and only half of those will read it, but it’s a start, and you can go on to bigger and better things.
Friday, October 23, 2009
On Poverty
Those of you returning to SSS will notice a distinct lack of obnoxious advertisements on the right hand side of your screen. First-timers here will notice that there are no clumsy offers to make your wang bigger or meet new vampire singles drifting between this current entry and the archives.
I say good for me – the nice folks at AdSense were just making sure that I didn’t compromise my artistic integrity by falling into that cushy suburban malaise I so dread. Suffering is the root of all art, and as I no longer have ad dollars buying me petty distractions like food, I will suffer aplenty.
Which brings us to the point of this post.
I don’t know who among my readership has really suffered the perils of honest to goodness poverty, but it’s a bitch. Less so for me now than when I was a kid – I’m educated, I have a support network, and in theory my advanced degree might get me some manner of gainful employment. In short, I have perspective.
Perspective allows me to say things like “Ha ha ha, Mastercard, go ahead and garnish the wages I don’t have, ha ha ha amirite?!” and not only mean it, but say exactly that to any other creditor who calls me looking for their money. Fuck you, usurious credit card bitches – you can’t garnish wages I don’t have, and filing bankruptcy is just my way of crapping in your hat and then laughing in your face when you put on your poop hat. Nobody can break my knees, and since I don’t own any property, what’s the worst that could happen?
Of course, in between my spats with my creditors, I still have to deal with the day-to-day problems of not having two red cents to my name. What follows is my advice to my fellow poverty stricken fellows, be they writers, students, or just shiftless layabouts.
1) Eat, and Eat Well – poor people migrate to ramen and mac-and-cheese because it’s something like 79 cents a box, completely ignoring the fact that for about five dollars, they could get TEN TIMES as much whole grain pasts, garlic, oil, parmesan, and diced tomatoes. In other words, for half the cost long term, they could eat twice as well twice as often, and NOT get scurvy. Poor people also love the dollar menu at Burger King, again ignoring that with just a little time and effort, they could eat meat that doesn’t contain feces and people and any combination thereof, in greater quantity at lower cost. There’s that whole perspective thing.
2) Exercise Often – Your own body will provide you hours of entertainment, and not just the kind that the church sends you to hell for. Since you’ve put down the Popeyes 2.99 chicken special in favor of two good roasters and a bag of gold medal flour, you might start to get a little soft in the middle. Luckily, even as the anti-entitlement hate machine moves forward to crush anyone making less than CHA-CHING per year, we still have enough parks for you to waddle your fat ass around. Stave off the diabetes – walk around the track, kick some pigeons - fun for all!
3) Fit that Kit – Another thing poor people love is either A) clothes that they can’t afford, but that look totally ridiculous, or B) clothes they can afford that look totally ridiculous. I never miss an opportunity to pimp Russell Smith’s Style as it will make your life about ten bajillion times better just by reading it, but you don’t even need to follow all his excellent advice on buying cap-toed oxford shoes instead of the hideous sneakers that some rap guy told you to buy, or a nice sport coat instead of a full on Canadian tuxedo, but you can at the very least get your second-hand clothes tailored. Find a place that says “alterations” and go in. There will be either a Middle Eastern / Italian man or an Asian woman (there are no exceptions) and you will give them from 5 to 20 dollars per item of clothing, and when they are done, your ten dollar department store jeans will look like they cost 100 dollars and were custom fit to you, because they were.
The hard part about making the most of poor circumstances is getting started. After all, your normal food budget for the day is probably about ten dollars, and I’m suggesting that you spend, like 100 bucks on food all at once. Well, this is how math works: Take one hundred dollars to the store, and with one of those dollars buy some pens and some paper. Now, as you go about your daily life, put a hash mark on that paper. Once you get to ten hash marks, see if you need to buy food again. Oh, you don’t? The cost was exactly the same, and you had more variety in your diet and you don’t have the gout? EPIC WIN!
The same thing goes for your clothes – embrace style, not fashion, and see if you can’t make your hundred-dollar tailored outfit last twice as long as your hood-fabulous fifty dollar made-in-a-sweatshop, XXXL baggy Nike ensemble. Exercise, and notice how you feel better and think more clearly. Miraculous!
This does mean that you’ll probably have to give up on that 50” LCD flat screen TV you’ve got on lay-away at Kmart, and the same goes for the X-Box 360 at Rent-a-Center. You might want to go ahead and cancel your cable TV while you’re at it, and consider putting in a land line and answering machine instead of toting around a brand new iPhone with internet, TV, and unlimited texting.
These are hard sacrifices to make, and I know it’s a lot easier to work on your excuses than to, you know, work, but I have faith in the ability of all individuals, even poor destitute mouth breathers like you.
I say good for me – the nice folks at AdSense were just making sure that I didn’t compromise my artistic integrity by falling into that cushy suburban malaise I so dread. Suffering is the root of all art, and as I no longer have ad dollars buying me petty distractions like food, I will suffer aplenty.
Which brings us to the point of this post.
I don’t know who among my readership has really suffered the perils of honest to goodness poverty, but it’s a bitch. Less so for me now than when I was a kid – I’m educated, I have a support network, and in theory my advanced degree might get me some manner of gainful employment. In short, I have perspective.
Perspective allows me to say things like “Ha ha ha, Mastercard, go ahead and garnish the wages I don’t have, ha ha ha amirite?!” and not only mean it, but say exactly that to any other creditor who calls me looking for their money. Fuck you, usurious credit card bitches – you can’t garnish wages I don’t have, and filing bankruptcy is just my way of crapping in your hat and then laughing in your face when you put on your poop hat. Nobody can break my knees, and since I don’t own any property, what’s the worst that could happen?
Of course, in between my spats with my creditors, I still have to deal with the day-to-day problems of not having two red cents to my name. What follows is my advice to my fellow poverty stricken fellows, be they writers, students, or just shiftless layabouts.
1) Eat, and Eat Well – poor people migrate to ramen and mac-and-cheese because it’s something like 79 cents a box, completely ignoring the fact that for about five dollars, they could get TEN TIMES as much whole grain pasts, garlic, oil, parmesan, and diced tomatoes. In other words, for half the cost long term, they could eat twice as well twice as often, and NOT get scurvy. Poor people also love the dollar menu at Burger King, again ignoring that with just a little time and effort, they could eat meat that doesn’t contain feces and people and any combination thereof, in greater quantity at lower cost. There’s that whole perspective thing.
2) Exercise Often – Your own body will provide you hours of entertainment, and not just the kind that the church sends you to hell for. Since you’ve put down the Popeyes 2.99 chicken special in favor of two good roasters and a bag of gold medal flour, you might start to get a little soft in the middle. Luckily, even as the anti-entitlement hate machine moves forward to crush anyone making less than CHA-CHING per year, we still have enough parks for you to waddle your fat ass around. Stave off the diabetes – walk around the track, kick some pigeons - fun for all!
3) Fit that Kit – Another thing poor people love is either A) clothes that they can’t afford, but that look totally ridiculous, or B) clothes they can afford that look totally ridiculous. I never miss an opportunity to pimp Russell Smith’s Style as it will make your life about ten bajillion times better just by reading it, but you don’t even need to follow all his excellent advice on buying cap-toed oxford shoes instead of the hideous sneakers that some rap guy told you to buy, or a nice sport coat instead of a full on Canadian tuxedo, but you can at the very least get your second-hand clothes tailored. Find a place that says “alterations” and go in. There will be either a Middle Eastern / Italian man or an Asian woman (there are no exceptions) and you will give them from 5 to 20 dollars per item of clothing, and when they are done, your ten dollar department store jeans will look like they cost 100 dollars and were custom fit to you, because they were.
The hard part about making the most of poor circumstances is getting started. After all, your normal food budget for the day is probably about ten dollars, and I’m suggesting that you spend, like 100 bucks on food all at once. Well, this is how math works: Take one hundred dollars to the store, and with one of those dollars buy some pens and some paper. Now, as you go about your daily life, put a hash mark on that paper. Once you get to ten hash marks, see if you need to buy food again. Oh, you don’t? The cost was exactly the same, and you had more variety in your diet and you don’t have the gout? EPIC WIN!
The same thing goes for your clothes – embrace style, not fashion, and see if you can’t make your hundred-dollar tailored outfit last twice as long as your hood-fabulous fifty dollar made-in-a-sweatshop, XXXL baggy Nike ensemble. Exercise, and notice how you feel better and think more clearly. Miraculous!
This does mean that you’ll probably have to give up on that 50” LCD flat screen TV you’ve got on lay-away at Kmart, and the same goes for the X-Box 360 at Rent-a-Center. You might want to go ahead and cancel your cable TV while you’re at it, and consider putting in a land line and answering machine instead of toting around a brand new iPhone with internet, TV, and unlimited texting.
These are hard sacrifices to make, and I know it’s a lot easier to work on your excuses than to, you know, work, but I have faith in the ability of all individuals, even poor destitute mouth breathers like you.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
How Hard is Your Job?
When you get take-out, you may wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. You probably don’t, but you may. This is especially true if for any reason your order is wrong.
People, I understand – you have a busy life full of busy things. Your boss is a jerk, your kids are screaming for pizza, your wife is a frigid hell-beast, and your car is probably overdue for an oil change. Your one joy in life is a few delicious slices of greasy pizza just the way you like it: Detroit style, thick crust, extra cheese, crispy corners, hot and fresh, loaded with pepperoni, sausage, peppers – absolutely perfect.
So it makes perfect sense to me when you go completely ape-shit, knocking over tables, calling everyone in the store a “complete fucking retard,” and threatening to call the health inspector because someone accidentally got half a god-damned mushroom on one slice of your precious fucking pizza.
I want to tell you a little bit about me. Hi. You’re reading my blog. I make light of being highly educated and working in a kitchen, but on a normal day I’m okay with the work I have – it’s very Maoist of me. Sometimes, frequently even, I like the work. The problem is that after something like sixteen years in restaurant work, I’ve come to understand that most of my coworkers don’t.
There are basically three types of restaurant with which you, the diner, need concern yourself:
1) The Family Joint – often taking the form of a single corner café, the family joint is run by (you guessed it!) a family, literally started by a mom and pop who just barely secured a bank loan to buy a little place with an oven, a stove, and seating for thirty. They’ve worked that place for forty years, and someday they will leave it to their children. The children, having grown up washing dishes, waiting on their parents friends, and cooking nine different kinds of Salisbury steak special, will throw mom and pop in a home and sell the old shithole to a slimy developer who in turn will knock the place down and build a corporate sports bar which goes under in a year, leaving the neighborhood blighted and depressed for years to come.
2) The Serious Kitchen – this place does serious business, and the cooks are serious people. They’re formally educated by a real culinary school, and they have their own knives that they roll up in a neat little carry-case that never leaves their sight. When your meal is prepared in a serious kitchen, it’s going to be done right something like 99% of the time. If you happen to dine within that unlucky 1%, then 99% of that time, the kitchen staff will do everything in their power to fix the problem, and the remaining 1^% of 1% of the time will burst forth from the kitchen and stab you to death before sucking the blood from your suppurating neck hole because serious kitchen people are coked up like a motherfucker 100% of the time, coked up to the breaking point, coked up so that they haven’t slept in about thirty six hours because they are here to COOK SOME FUCKING FOOD YEEAAAAHHHHH!
3) The Stoner Kitchen – mostly, this is where you’re eating. It’s staffed by teenagers who typically work one, maybe two days a week just so that they can say they have a job because mom and dad would cut them off otherwise. The goal for these lackadaisical little shits is to get high out back and sort of float their way from one end of the shift to the other, slipping in and out of consciousness just long enough to acknowledge a request to mop the floor, and to then spend the next two hours mopping the same four square feet of floor space while droning on about the merits of Phish’s early work in a recursive loop broken only when the need arises to raid the make line for a double bacon extra cheese potato chip pizza with creamy ranch dressing sauce and extra crust.
So after your long hard day in tight shoes or whatever the fuck your problem is, you’re taking out your frustrations on the employees of one of these three establishments. This is a very good idea, because there is nothing more logical than venting the petty travails of your boring life onto a bunch of people who hate their jobs, don’t care about you, and who work with very, very sharp knives.
We’ve all got to be considerate – if you’re reading this as a restaurant worker, remember that you might be making your ten thousandth fish-and-macaroni plate of the day, but it’s your customer’s first. They’re paying your wages, hopefully leaving you tips, and they’re placing awfully high hopes on that little bit of meat and starch that you’re fixing up for them. You have the power to absolutely make someone’s day just by paying a little bit of attention, and giving it a little bit of love.
If you’re reading this as a customer, shut the fuck up and eat your fucking food before I remember that I’ve got seventy thousand dollars in student loan debt, I make about a dollar over minimum wage, and that prison is three hots and a cot guaranteed.
People, I understand – you have a busy life full of busy things. Your boss is a jerk, your kids are screaming for pizza, your wife is a frigid hell-beast, and your car is probably overdue for an oil change. Your one joy in life is a few delicious slices of greasy pizza just the way you like it: Detroit style, thick crust, extra cheese, crispy corners, hot and fresh, loaded with pepperoni, sausage, peppers – absolutely perfect.
So it makes perfect sense to me when you go completely ape-shit, knocking over tables, calling everyone in the store a “complete fucking retard,” and threatening to call the health inspector because someone accidentally got half a god-damned mushroom on one slice of your precious fucking pizza.
I want to tell you a little bit about me. Hi. You’re reading my blog. I make light of being highly educated and working in a kitchen, but on a normal day I’m okay with the work I have – it’s very Maoist of me. Sometimes, frequently even, I like the work. The problem is that after something like sixteen years in restaurant work, I’ve come to understand that most of my coworkers don’t.
There are basically three types of restaurant with which you, the diner, need concern yourself:
1) The Family Joint – often taking the form of a single corner café, the family joint is run by (you guessed it!) a family, literally started by a mom and pop who just barely secured a bank loan to buy a little place with an oven, a stove, and seating for thirty. They’ve worked that place for forty years, and someday they will leave it to their children. The children, having grown up washing dishes, waiting on their parents friends, and cooking nine different kinds of Salisbury steak special, will throw mom and pop in a home and sell the old shithole to a slimy developer who in turn will knock the place down and build a corporate sports bar which goes under in a year, leaving the neighborhood blighted and depressed for years to come.
2) The Serious Kitchen – this place does serious business, and the cooks are serious people. They’re formally educated by a real culinary school, and they have their own knives that they roll up in a neat little carry-case that never leaves their sight. When your meal is prepared in a serious kitchen, it’s going to be done right something like 99% of the time. If you happen to dine within that unlucky 1%, then 99% of that time, the kitchen staff will do everything in their power to fix the problem, and the remaining 1^% of 1% of the time will burst forth from the kitchen and stab you to death before sucking the blood from your suppurating neck hole because serious kitchen people are coked up like a motherfucker 100% of the time, coked up to the breaking point, coked up so that they haven’t slept in about thirty six hours because they are here to COOK SOME FUCKING FOOD YEEAAAAHHHHH!
3) The Stoner Kitchen – mostly, this is where you’re eating. It’s staffed by teenagers who typically work one, maybe two days a week just so that they can say they have a job because mom and dad would cut them off otherwise. The goal for these lackadaisical little shits is to get high out back and sort of float their way from one end of the shift to the other, slipping in and out of consciousness just long enough to acknowledge a request to mop the floor, and to then spend the next two hours mopping the same four square feet of floor space while droning on about the merits of Phish’s early work in a recursive loop broken only when the need arises to raid the make line for a double bacon extra cheese potato chip pizza with creamy ranch dressing sauce and extra crust.
So after your long hard day in tight shoes or whatever the fuck your problem is, you’re taking out your frustrations on the employees of one of these three establishments. This is a very good idea, because there is nothing more logical than venting the petty travails of your boring life onto a bunch of people who hate their jobs, don’t care about you, and who work with very, very sharp knives.
We’ve all got to be considerate – if you’re reading this as a restaurant worker, remember that you might be making your ten thousandth fish-and-macaroni plate of the day, but it’s your customer’s first. They’re paying your wages, hopefully leaving you tips, and they’re placing awfully high hopes on that little bit of meat and starch that you’re fixing up for them. You have the power to absolutely make someone’s day just by paying a little bit of attention, and giving it a little bit of love.
If you’re reading this as a customer, shut the fuck up and eat your fucking food before I remember that I’ve got seventy thousand dollars in student loan debt, I make about a dollar over minimum wage, and that prison is three hots and a cot guaranteed.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 2 – Your Mom, the Ultimate Literary Authority
Once, in an undergrad workshop, a young lady responded to some particularly harsh and pointed criticism by saying that she had had her mother read over the piece, that her mother normally read at least a herculean ten novels per week and thus knew her word craft, and that her beloved momma had enjoyed the story. ERGO by a simple syllogism, we were to be persuaded that this particular short story was in fact literary gold.
There were a few problems with this story (the one she told to explain the one we read, which also had problems, naturally). For one, who reads ten novels a week? It’s possible, and it’s certainly what I’d rather be doing with my time than what I do now, but such a vigorous reading schedule wholly precludes any sort of professional or personal life outside of reading. For another, lots of people like lots of things, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any good, and likewise if you’re work appeals to that person, it could just mean that it’s more of the same old crap that this person likes. It didn’t take but a moment to figure out that the novels this dear girl’s mother consumed so voraciously were the most dreadful of the pulp bodice rippers, Fabio-bedecked pink-covered word-trash fit only for lining the cage of a hated parakeet, which brings us to the point:
A loving life-giver, a supportive healer, a caring nurturer; your mother is a lot of things, but she is not a literary critic.
(Having said this, someone out there has a mother who is, in fact, a literary critic / publisher / creative writing professor, etc, and right now they’re pushing their glasses up and saying “Umm, excuse me? But like, you don’t know me, and you don’t know what I’ve been through, and who are you to…” and I will say to them: BAAAWWWW, because no matter how talented your mom is, no matter how many Pushcart prizes she’s won, and despite the number of classy black-and-white photos wherein she stares forlornly off into the horizon or intensely into the camera, she is the last person qualified to give you a read.)
Understand that when I say “mom” here, she is also interchangeable with “best friend,” “girlfriend,” “guy at kinkos who puts up with your incoherent babbling because he’s running your copy job,” and “other douchebag writing on his laptop next to you at Starbucks.” Those people nearest you are the last people you should ask for serious criticism.
Your friends are your friends for a reason: they’re supportive, they’re fun to be around, and when you go through that big breakup with the one you thought was the one, they’re there to change you out of those frumpy work clothes, get you up off the couch and away from that pint of Haagen Dazs, and make you dance, DANCE! So understandably they’re going to apply this same you go girl! attitude to anything you show them. They’re going to love how real your characters are, and they’re going to tell you that they didn’t know what was going to happen right up until the end, and then they will compare your work to a list of writers that they might have heard of, and you will be just dizzy with warm, fuzzy affirmation.
Which, of course, is a huge disservice to you because your current draft sucks crap through a straw, and someone needs to tell you. That’s not even me being mean – unless you have some insane ability to objectively remove yourself from your work (you don’t) and a keen critical eye to boot (you haven’t), then you probably need external criticism of some sort, and of all the people in the world, you are asking those least critical of you.
A workshop can help whip you into shape so long as you can take all criticism with a grain of salt. Your fellow workshop attendees are not publisher-quality proofreaders, and you might remember that they are not there to read, they are there to be read. The odds are that you’re in the same boat, in which case you all deserve the hell out of each other. If you’ve got some super-attentive hard-working suck up in your class, you might get one good read per submission, but that’s a mighty big if.
You can find a mentor, of course, but that pretty much involves latching on to the university teat, which in turn involves a lot of workshopping and a lot of sucking up, not to mention a lot of cash. Still, it’s a good investment if you’re able to get the attention of an older and more accomplished author who is willing to bring you up as an apprentice.
But there’s one sure-fire way to improve your writing that doesn’t involve sitting around in a circle with a bunch of self-centered assholes OR a bajillion dollars in crippling student loan bills: read. Read every day. Try to read ten novels a week – you’ll fall terribly short, but in shooting for that goal you will be doing more good for your writing than a thousand writer’s retreats. A mentor might coach your style and give you advice, but with just a few trips to the library, you can have thousands of mentors pouring years and years of experience right into your eager ears and filling up the vacuous expanse there between.
The most common rebuke I hear to this bit of advice is: “but I think if I read too much then it’s going to take over my voice,” to which reply; snowflake, precious, princess, baby cupcake sweetheart, we’ve already established that you suck. My old professor Dave Hickey cut right to the heart of the matter: if you read Tender is the Night and suddenly start writing like Scott Fitzgerald, then you have done yourself one hell of a favor. Go forth, read, write, and stop bugging your momma – she’s on her second novel of the day.
There were a few problems with this story (the one she told to explain the one we read, which also had problems, naturally). For one, who reads ten novels a week? It’s possible, and it’s certainly what I’d rather be doing with my time than what I do now, but such a vigorous reading schedule wholly precludes any sort of professional or personal life outside of reading. For another, lots of people like lots of things, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any good, and likewise if you’re work appeals to that person, it could just mean that it’s more of the same old crap that this person likes. It didn’t take but a moment to figure out that the novels this dear girl’s mother consumed so voraciously were the most dreadful of the pulp bodice rippers, Fabio-bedecked pink-covered word-trash fit only for lining the cage of a hated parakeet, which brings us to the point:
A loving life-giver, a supportive healer, a caring nurturer; your mother is a lot of things, but she is not a literary critic.
(Having said this, someone out there has a mother who is, in fact, a literary critic / publisher / creative writing professor, etc, and right now they’re pushing their glasses up and saying “Umm, excuse me? But like, you don’t know me, and you don’t know what I’ve been through, and who are you to…” and I will say to them: BAAAWWWW, because no matter how talented your mom is, no matter how many Pushcart prizes she’s won, and despite the number of classy black-and-white photos wherein she stares forlornly off into the horizon or intensely into the camera, she is the last person qualified to give you a read.)
Understand that when I say “mom” here, she is also interchangeable with “best friend,” “girlfriend,” “guy at kinkos who puts up with your incoherent babbling because he’s running your copy job,” and “other douchebag writing on his laptop next to you at Starbucks.” Those people nearest you are the last people you should ask for serious criticism.
Your friends are your friends for a reason: they’re supportive, they’re fun to be around, and when you go through that big breakup with the one you thought was the one, they’re there to change you out of those frumpy work clothes, get you up off the couch and away from that pint of Haagen Dazs, and make you dance, DANCE! So understandably they’re going to apply this same you go girl! attitude to anything you show them. They’re going to love how real your characters are, and they’re going to tell you that they didn’t know what was going to happen right up until the end, and then they will compare your work to a list of writers that they might have heard of, and you will be just dizzy with warm, fuzzy affirmation.
Which, of course, is a huge disservice to you because your current draft sucks crap through a straw, and someone needs to tell you. That’s not even me being mean – unless you have some insane ability to objectively remove yourself from your work (you don’t) and a keen critical eye to boot (you haven’t), then you probably need external criticism of some sort, and of all the people in the world, you are asking those least critical of you.
A workshop can help whip you into shape so long as you can take all criticism with a grain of salt. Your fellow workshop attendees are not publisher-quality proofreaders, and you might remember that they are not there to read, they are there to be read. The odds are that you’re in the same boat, in which case you all deserve the hell out of each other. If you’ve got some super-attentive hard-working suck up in your class, you might get one good read per submission, but that’s a mighty big if.
You can find a mentor, of course, but that pretty much involves latching on to the university teat, which in turn involves a lot of workshopping and a lot of sucking up, not to mention a lot of cash. Still, it’s a good investment if you’re able to get the attention of an older and more accomplished author who is willing to bring you up as an apprentice.
But there’s one sure-fire way to improve your writing that doesn’t involve sitting around in a circle with a bunch of self-centered assholes OR a bajillion dollars in crippling student loan bills: read. Read every day. Try to read ten novels a week – you’ll fall terribly short, but in shooting for that goal you will be doing more good for your writing than a thousand writer’s retreats. A mentor might coach your style and give you advice, but with just a few trips to the library, you can have thousands of mentors pouring years and years of experience right into your eager ears and filling up the vacuous expanse there between.
The most common rebuke I hear to this bit of advice is: “but I think if I read too much then it’s going to take over my voice,” to which reply; snowflake, precious, princess, baby cupcake sweetheart, we’ve already established that you suck. My old professor Dave Hickey cut right to the heart of the matter: if you read Tender is the Night and suddenly start writing like Scott Fitzgerald, then you have done yourself one hell of a favor. Go forth, read, write, and stop bugging your momma – she’s on her second novel of the day.
Friday, October 16, 2009
What the Cock is with all this Vampire Shit?
When I got back to Detroit from Vegas, it really marked the first time I’d pulled my head out of the insular morass that is the academy and breathed deep the candy-scented wind of pop culture. No longer could I count on those around me to discuss the particulars of Proust or the details of Derrida – instead, I had to take the pulse of the day-to-day Joe Punchclock world and see what we had to talk about, and evidently the only thing to talk about is vampires.
At first I thought that was pretty awesome, since I know a fair amount about Vampires. I wrote a paper on Dracula back in my undergrad days, and of course I know that those dreaded nightwalkers have two slam attacks, +6 to armor class, and replace their normal hit dice with D12’s. Of course it turns out that I like the gay ass crap lame stupid vampires from lame crap stupid books and stupid mythology crap gay lame stupid. What everyone likes now are vampires TO THE EXTREME!
Man, watch True Blood and you’ll see that Vampires don’t care about your pussy-ass cross or your stupid garlic – only sunlight can kill a vampire, but who cares? Vampires are made to PAR-TAY! Sleep all day and party all night bitches! WOOOOOO!
And that old guy sleeping in a coffin crap? Please, get real – it’s the new millenium! Vampires are young and sexy. They have all the same problems as teenagers have, only they handle them in sexy and deep ways that adults just don’t understand. Just watch The Vampire Diaries to see how sexy it is to be a vampire.
Of course, who cares if the vampires are sexy and awesome if they can’t connect with us mortals, right? If we’ve learned anything from the Twilight series, it’s that nobody will ever understand you like a vampire. Also, they shimmer! Also, you smell good!
There’s pros and cons to all this vampophillia which, of course, is hardly new – This is a trend we’ve been on since at least the early 1990’s, and there are precursors of this phenomena as far back as the 1970’s. There’s no good reason for anything to stop now except that we’re at a point of over-saturation. When the media-buying public turns on vampires, and turn they will, it’s going to relegate the entire genre to some sort of hammer-pants, Power Rangers, NKOTB-class throwback which none but its most die-hard adherents will deny.
So what are the pros of this latest phase of vampire re-invention? Vampires have for all intents and purposes been a stand-in for “other,” like most movie monsters. Usually we discuss this otherness in Freudian terms – Vampirism as symbolic of perverse sexual desire, Werewolves as rejection of social more, and Mummies as a deep-seated fear of exploring and seeking out the sexual and social lives of our forebears, but it’s more useful in the post-modern, post-colonial, and to an extent post-Freudian paradigm to consider the earliest source material (for brevity’s sake, we’ll just stick with Vampires).
Okay, super-lit-fag part is over: Dracula represented unchecked sexuality, sure, but that was (to paraphrase) just the symptom, and not the cause. Dracula, as a Transylvanian, was a Romanian, which made him a weird liminal figure for the British. On the one hand, he spoke Romanian, a romance language, and held many customs of the European aristocracy. On the other hand, he was a Balkan with one foot in the “mysterious orient” – his crossing over the channel is very much symbolic of the intrusion of foreign cultures into jolly old England, an incursion of unwelcome socio-cultural heterogeneity.
So this is what’s kind of good about this vampire glut – if you read the bloodsuckers as symbols of “other,” it seems to indicate that the empowered culture is more open to miscegenation, more willing to cohabitate, learn from, and live with other cultures, and maybe even to cede power and identity peacefully as the traditional protestant anglo-saxon patriarchy fades into twilight. Maybe, just maybe, these foreigners aren’t so bad since it turns out they’ve lived next to us all along.
The downside of all this is that these heavy-handed tales are becoming less and less subtle, more pedantic, and less original with every passing day. Okay, we get it, they’re just like us. Or are they? Despite the nodding of the old guard in these shows and movies, there’s still that element of difference, of danger, of weirdness, that makes the mention of vampirism exotic. In short, it smacks of the traditional perception of the white girl running off with the black guy in order to piss off daddy. It smacks of everybody having a black friend, or a gay friend, or what have you, and saying that they’re just so cool, basically like everyone else, and not at all like you thought.
And so often it is the “strange” or “perverse” vampire who crosses over to be with the “daywalkers,” the other kind, be it to attempt to form an actual meaningful relationship (True Blood), to include the other in a separate-but-equal binary (Vampire Academy), to re-establish the identity of other into a mainstream context (Vampire Diaries), or to plea for understanding, even pity (Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles). More often than not, it’s a weirdo sell-out vampire (Bill Compton, Lissa Dragomir, Stefan Salvatore, Louis Du Point Du Lac, respectively) who crosses over.
Thus the more the vampire gets “reinvented,” the more he is un-invented. His backstory differs from series to series, and even his proclivity or necessity for blood is heightened or lessened depending on just how exotic he needs to be. The more he is integrated as a trope of the mainstream, the more we notice his differences. If the vampire were black, we’d talk about how articulate he was. If the vampire were Asian, we’d praise him for not being so uptight, and so on.
In any case, this entry got way more blah blah and less ha ha than usual, but I consider it a public service for all vampire fans: stop reading and stop watching now. It’s not going to get better, only much, much worse. Like any art cycle, the current vampire thing is going to go into a parodic mode (or in this case, back in), but first it has to become completely bloated and derivative. Don’t follow fat Elvis to the toilet – go re-read Dracula, and stop watching these insipid fanged melodramas, because if you stop buying, they will go away.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
These are the People who Cook your Food
When you first take a restaurant job, you’ll likely be flabbergasted at the sheer volume of things you need to remember – what goes where, the recipe for this and that, how to take orders, and so on. None of it is particularly hard (in fact, 99% of restaurant work is so easy that a trained chimp could do it so long as they had the right hair net), but it’s a small and petty world of particulars. Different managers will have different preferences, and while normally this is a small matter of nuance, god forbid you catch the wrong boss on the day that he or she decides that putting the Italian sausage on before the ham is a fireable offense. Naturally, this is only a concern if you actually want the job. If you don’t, please feel free to skip the rest of this post and go back to dipping your scrotum in the secret sauce.
For those who do take at least some interest in their work, even if it’s only out of fiscal necessity, I advise you to relax because all that stuff that comes rushing at you the first week, from the tedious and repetitive make instructions to the smelly messy clean up, is just details. The most important thing to remember about restaurant work is that you are going to be bored. Bored bored bored. B-O-R-E-Fucking-D BORED.
Sure, during the Super Bowl you will run around like a headless chicken, filling orders and kowtowing to customers, but most weeknights you’ll stand around scratching your ass and trying to work up the interest to bother washing your hands before handling raw meat with your E. Coli tainted fingers. Friday and Saturday you’ll have a nice dinner rush which will, for your first month or so, put you into a pants-pissing, tear-streaming, I-can-hear-that-scream-it’s-coming-from-me panic, but that only accounts for about four to six hours of your work week.
Most of your time will be spent bullshitting, which brings us roundabout to the point of this post: Something about restaurant work brings out the lowest common conversational denominator. It might be a visceral reaction to being around so much raw meat, or it might be a rebellion against the constant reminders to wash your hands, keep products out of the 40-140 “danger zone,” or the gallows sensibility of making just barely over minimum wage at a job that could at any moment take your fingers, but whatever the case, kitchen workers without exception develop exceedingly foul mouths and dirty minds. Not only do restaurant workers dwell in a cesspool of grotesque mental depravity, but we feel the need to drag absolutely everyone in the kitchen down to that level.
For some reason, the rules of courtesy, propriety, subtlety, and decency are completely backwards in a restaurant. It’s kind of like the scene from Super Troopers wherein the character Farva ignores the cleverness of his squad's games (eg, meow) and proceeds to walk up to the window of a speeding motorist and call him a chicken fucker. It’s unsubtle, inappropriate, and unpleasant. It’s restaurant work.
Should you find yourself working in a restaurant, you’ll find everyone to be incredibly nice and courteous for your first week. They’ll show you how to cook, forgive your little mistakes, and generally be there to help whenever you need them. This is because they think you’re a moron and they expect you to quit or be fired by the end of the week.
In a restaurant, courtesy is the cruelest form of disrespect.
You’ll know you’ve been accepted when they give you a nickname: prison bitch, fresh meat, baby hole, and depot (that’s where a train pulls in) are all popular. You’ll know you’ve been accepted when one of your seniors comes up behind you, wraps his arms around your waist, and tells you that there’s a she-wolf in his closet, and that you need to unzip his pants to set it free. You’ll know you’re one of the crew the first time you tell the young wide-eyed high-school kid washing dishes that you intend to (and I quote): “crap in his mouth hole,” but only if your mothers can watch.
Interestingly enough, gay guys in a kitchen don’t go in for any of this shit. They are usually comparative figures of stoic quietude and social normalcy, and in a sense restaurant work becomes a sort of Saturnalia wherein everyone sheds their normal personae and picks up the mantel of what they’re not supposed to be. The girls act butch, bossy and in command, the guys chase each other around snapping towels like sissies.
This is how we pass the time in a restaurant, but remember: the reversals only happen behind the kitchen walls. If this behavior all sounds strange or subversive, remember that everything is backwards – when you hear two three-hundred-pound bakers talk about dusting each other in flour and aiming for one another’s respective wet spots, it’s their way of dealing with the extensive regulations and best practices required to make safe food. Just imagine a crew of cooks all discussing their enthusiasm over the new serve-safe standards, and jumping up and down with excitement over quality control assurance testing. I don’t know what guys like this do for fun on the line, but I guarantee we’ve all swallowed some of it.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It Volume 1: Workshops; Soooooo productive.
I think once upon a time it was a useful exercise for writers with comparable styles and politics to sit around in a circle and cry about the first time daddy touched their no-no places, and to explore why that made them write primal scream poetry. That’s still sort-of-kind-of the case, but mostly not. Like any classroom setting, the instructor knows that 70% of attendees are just phoning it in for an English credit, 10% will drop out, 10% will be bearable (just), and the top talented 10% will shine and grow provided they can discipline themselves to the point where they contribute meaningfully. Mostly, writing workshops are either big whiny pussy parties, epic fail conferences, or collaborations between the unwitting and the unwilling, so let’s examine those three configurations.
1) Big Whiny Pussy Party – In this kind of workshop, the self-loathing reaches critical mass, and the whole thing implodes into a morose, sniveling blob of incest poetry and prose of rape and abuse. Forget about the top talented 10% of kids who bring in actual tight work – they will be dragged down into a swirling vortex of miserable one-upmanship, abandoning their mature and polished pieces for a collection of weeping self-pity. This goes on until someone kills themselves from depression, or more likely, someone finally reveals that they had a perfectly happy childhood, and that per the tenets of a writing workshop, the whole thing was made up. Everyone feels silly, and proceeds to turn in unsettling "alternative" fiction about talking cats before getting a C+ for the semester.
2) Epic Fail Conferences – In a workshop, someone, somewhere, is going to do it wrong. That’s fine. Every workshopper should expect that you’re going to get a story about a guy who is just a guy and who doesn’t do anything and then everyone likes him, the end. Or a story about a girl whose life is not good, then she goes to therapy, and her life is good, the particulars of which are usually described in an epilogue that is longer than the actual story (I call this a “girl gonna get her head right.”) Forget about the top talented 10% - they will recognized early on that NO ONE in that class has any criticism worth hearing, and that anything they contribute will be as pearls before swine, warded off with the usual shield of “But that’s what actually happened!” (fiction workshop) or “But that’s what should have happened!’ (Non-fiction workshop). This continues until someone kills themselves from frustration, or until the talented kids stop attending, preferring to go drink beer and screw each other during class time, and submitting work to the professor during office hours, barely earning a C+ for the semester.
3) Collaborations between the Unwitting and the Unwilling – Some writers are talented beyond their years - all writers think they are. A collaboration between the unwitting and the unwilling occurs when one or two prima donnas (the unwitting) hijack the workshop either by over-submitting, over-criticizing, or making some manner of scene every time the class meets. This may involve a tearful breakdown, a stomp-out, horse-laughing at students they consider inferior, or just telling loud obnoxious stories that get stuck in your head like that fucking Brittney Spears song (Womanizer, womanizer baby you’re a womanizer…). Bear in mind that the top talented 10% are not necessarily the unwitting – anyone can make a scene. The unwilling, meanwhile, which may very well include the top talented 10%, usually stop showing up or manage to sleep during class. Forget about the top talented 10% - everyone else will when the class drama queen totals his or her car (don’t worry, the car will be fine by next week) right before class and then pretends to have a concussion. This continues until I get an A in the class and then go on to start a blog.
There have been some great criticisms of workshops going around in the last few months, of which I think the best is this hot mess from June of 2009. On the other hand, I can’t in good faith recommend that anyone read Art School Confidential and drop the idea of an arts education altogether because there are too many good things to be gained – mostly banging your fellow students and having free drinks at your professor’s house all while being granted an irrevocable license to act like a total drunken asshole because hey, you’re an artist.
Workshops can be a super mega awesome way to get involved in your communities art scene, gain invaluable contacts, and hear criticism from like-minded individuals. That’s the kind of shit that Hemingway, Stein et al were doing in Paris
Friday, October 9, 2009
The Surface of the Earth is the Shore of the Cosmic Ocean
It's a slow internet day at 11:00 AM, but those sectors of the blog-o-nets that are up and active seem to be making much ado over president Barack Obama's Nobel peace prize win. Let me say first: congratulations mister president, and second: I don't really give a flying fuck.
The thing that's been stuck in my craw for a couple days is the pedestrian furor over NASA's LCROSS experiment, the context of which being that we would launch two fucking giant centaur rockets at the moon and then proceed to get a massive erection because we just launched two fucking giant centaur rockets at the moon.
I've been seeing three responses:
Response 1 - Horse Laughing: For those unfamiliar with a horse-laugh, it's the derisive snort one gives immediately before saying something like "Yeah, THAT'S a good use of tax dollars," or "Yeah, SURE a plane hit the pentagon." There's usually not a follow-up argument, just a cranky cynicism that 79 million dollars got sunk into a fluffy pile of moon dust rather than, I don't know, giving it to people who horse-laugh at NASA missions.
Response 2 - Unfounded Terror: No joking, an acquaintance of mine literally feared that the moon would crack in two and leave its orbit, either crashing into the earth or flying away into the sun, causing a global cataclysm. I know that when you see a nuclear explosion on television it pretty much dominates the screen, and that nuclear bombs can wipe out whole cities and stuff, but remember: even though it's really small compared to the earth, the moon is really really really fucking big! If New York City were transported to the moon and put on the side facing earth, and all the lights on were left all the time you wouldn' t even see it! Nothing is going to happen if we shoot missiles at the moon - it's a giant rock-solid ball of empty.
Response 3 - Batshit Lunacy: Thanks to the egalitarian premise of examiner.com, one of my beloved fellow Detroiters makes the claim that our launch of kinetic rockets into dear and sacred Luna, sky-mother, mistress of tides, is a violation of some UN charter or something - look, I didn't bother to read past the part where he starts referencing papers with unlikely titles from agencies that don't have web pages and professors who decline to be named, and I didn't' pay much attention to the part that came before that because I don't speak the sophisticated language of people from tinfoilhatistan, but I am going to say that if there anyone is living on the moon, my god - they don't need AIR to BREATHE! KILL THEM NOW BEFORE THEY KILL US! NYEEEARRRGGGHHHHH!
Contrary to what people seem to think, NASA is made up of scientists. Even those swaggering cowboy test pilots that people love to romanticize can do math problems in their head that you couldn't do with a Cray supercomputer. Watch NTV and you'll see what I'm talking about: in a follow-up press conference, the operators involved rather clearly pointed out that finding drinking water and a nice place to live was not neccessarily the goal of this experiment. This is something the media, and indeed the world at large, seem to get wrong with disturbing frequency. Science is not results driven - that's product development. Science is, science does, but to start an experiment with a predetermined outcome is to taint the data.
So they found odd metals, lots of dust, and not a lot of water - what does it mean? Who knows? What does mean mean? Step back, let the research happen!
There was a time when this culture embraced science for science' sake. Now it seems to be vilified as blasphemous by the religious, and wasteful by the secular. Moon missions don't feed the poor, and every new scientific advance seems to take us farther and farther from the literal word of the hastily scribbled mystery books upon which western societies have in part been founded. By popular definition "Liberals" think these big scientific endeavors are wasteful because all we need to do is step back from the brink of industrial madness and let Gaia Earth Mother braid our dreadlocks and give us sweet berries and rainbows to eat, and "Conservatives" don't know what the hell the point is of all this fancy book learning when all you need to do to work at Wal-Mart and not be some sort of god-hating elitist is some basic arithmetic and phonic reading.
Science is politically uncomfortable, and sociologically uncertain in its plastic certainty, and the beauty of that makes the whole enterprise worthwhile.
The thing that's been stuck in my craw for a couple days is the pedestrian furor over NASA's LCROSS experiment, the context of which being that we would launch two fucking giant centaur rockets at the moon and then proceed to get a massive erection because we just launched two fucking giant centaur rockets at the moon.
I've been seeing three responses:
Response 1 - Horse Laughing: For those unfamiliar with a horse-laugh, it's the derisive snort one gives immediately before saying something like "Yeah, THAT'S a good use of tax dollars," or "Yeah, SURE a plane hit the pentagon." There's usually not a follow-up argument, just a cranky cynicism that 79 million dollars got sunk into a fluffy pile of moon dust rather than, I don't know, giving it to people who horse-laugh at NASA missions.
Response 2 - Unfounded Terror: No joking, an acquaintance of mine literally feared that the moon would crack in two and leave its orbit, either crashing into the earth or flying away into the sun, causing a global cataclysm. I know that when you see a nuclear explosion on television it pretty much dominates the screen, and that nuclear bombs can wipe out whole cities and stuff, but remember: even though it's really small compared to the earth, the moon is really really really fucking big! If New York City were transported to the moon and put on the side facing earth, and all the lights on were left all the time you wouldn' t even see it! Nothing is going to happen if we shoot missiles at the moon - it's a giant rock-solid ball of empty.
Response 3 - Batshit Lunacy: Thanks to the egalitarian premise of examiner.com, one of my beloved fellow Detroiters makes the claim that our launch of kinetic rockets into dear and sacred Luna, sky-mother, mistress of tides, is a violation of some UN charter or something - look, I didn't bother to read past the part where he starts referencing papers with unlikely titles from agencies that don't have web pages and professors who decline to be named, and I didn't' pay much attention to the part that came before that because I don't speak the sophisticated language of people from tinfoilhatistan, but I am going to say that if there anyone is living on the moon, my god - they don't need AIR to BREATHE! KILL THEM NOW BEFORE THEY KILL US! NYEEEARRRGGGHHHHH!
Contrary to what people seem to think, NASA is made up of scientists. Even those swaggering cowboy test pilots that people love to romanticize can do math problems in their head that you couldn't do with a Cray supercomputer. Watch NTV and you'll see what I'm talking about: in a follow-up press conference, the operators involved rather clearly pointed out that finding drinking water and a nice place to live was not neccessarily the goal of this experiment. This is something the media, and indeed the world at large, seem to get wrong with disturbing frequency. Science is not results driven - that's product development. Science is, science does, but to start an experiment with a predetermined outcome is to taint the data.
So they found odd metals, lots of dust, and not a lot of water - what does it mean? Who knows? What does mean mean? Step back, let the research happen!
There was a time when this culture embraced science for science' sake. Now it seems to be vilified as blasphemous by the religious, and wasteful by the secular. Moon missions don't feed the poor, and every new scientific advance seems to take us farther and farther from the literal word of the hastily scribbled mystery books upon which western societies have in part been founded. By popular definition "Liberals" think these big scientific endeavors are wasteful because all we need to do is step back from the brink of industrial madness and let Gaia Earth Mother braid our dreadlocks and give us sweet berries and rainbows to eat, and "Conservatives" don't know what the hell the point is of all this fancy book learning when all you need to do to work at Wal-Mart and not be some sort of god-hating elitist is some basic arithmetic and phonic reading.
Science is politically uncomfortable, and sociologically uncertain in its plastic certainty, and the beauty of that makes the whole enterprise worthwhile.
A Reprint to Inform the Chronological Reader
(This entry originally appeared on 9-10-2009 in a journal I no longer keep)
I've been back in Detroit for three weeks, and despite my best intentions I did not find a nice well-paying office type job, and failing that I did not find a shitty well-paying office type job, nor even a shitty poor-paying office type job. Rather than climb to the top of a tall building and hurl myself off, I decided to go back to Buddy's Pizza and see if they had work for me.
Luckily, they do. Monday I go to finalize things like pay, hours, etc. I am for all intents and purposes on the manager track, and it doesn't look like anything is going to pull me off that track any time soon. I have only one application / CV out for a job I'd actually like (prof at MCC) and everything else was sort of a shot in the dark.
This is all probably a good thing.
When I went to Buddy's, I wore my best suit. Why? Because frankly I had a really wicked case of the crazies. Seriously. I talked to my old manager, was offered work, went home, and did not change out of my suit. I sat on the couch watching True Blood with my little sister until my dad came home, and only then did I change so that I could go out to the boat to pick some things up. Then we came back to the house and I got insanely drunk.
It sucked, but I had a long (and again, insanely drunk) talk with my dad about what I was doing, and about how deep down inside, all I really wanted to do was come back here and work at something like Buddy's while I continued to send out submissions and work on my game. I didn't want to make a nice middle-class salary in exchange for 40 hours a week.
In short, I did not want to go back to the exact same shit that I left when I went back to school six years ago.
There are worse things for an artist than a job that just expects you to show up, and there are many better things for an artist than a steady and comfortable paycheck.
So I'm going to be poor for a while, but it's the kind of poor that I'm used to: 40's on the porch poor, not having a nice car poor, and still hungry to create poor.
So congratulate me on doing what I need to do, and come buy me beer - I'll be the guy who smells like pepperoni.
I've been back in Detroit for three weeks, and despite my best intentions I did not find a nice well-paying office type job, and failing that I did not find a shitty well-paying office type job, nor even a shitty poor-paying office type job. Rather than climb to the top of a tall building and hurl myself off, I decided to go back to Buddy's Pizza and see if they had work for me.
Luckily, they do. Monday I go to finalize things like pay, hours, etc. I am for all intents and purposes on the manager track, and it doesn't look like anything is going to pull me off that track any time soon. I have only one application / CV out for a job I'd actually like (prof at MCC) and everything else was sort of a shot in the dark.
This is all probably a good thing.
When I went to Buddy's, I wore my best suit. Why? Because frankly I had a really wicked case of the crazies. Seriously. I talked to my old manager, was offered work, went home, and did not change out of my suit. I sat on the couch watching True Blood with my little sister until my dad came home, and only then did I change so that I could go out to the boat to pick some things up. Then we came back to the house and I got insanely drunk.
It sucked, but I had a long (and again, insanely drunk) talk with my dad about what I was doing, and about how deep down inside, all I really wanted to do was come back here and work at something like Buddy's while I continued to send out submissions and work on my game. I didn't want to make a nice middle-class salary in exchange for 40 hours a week.
In short, I did not want to go back to the exact same shit that I left when I went back to school six years ago.
There are worse things for an artist than a job that just expects you to show up, and there are many better things for an artist than a steady and comfortable paycheck.
So I'm going to be poor for a while, but it's the kind of poor that I'm used to: 40's on the porch poor, not having a nice car poor, and still hungry to create poor.
So congratulate me on doing what I need to do, and come buy me beer - I'll be the guy who smells like pepperoni.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Biography
Author's note: This page updates every so often. Last Updated 8/14/2011
I teach English and I sell guns. I dance, I party, I write, and I paint little toy soldiers.
I'm a native Michigander, and I've come back to the state after seeing much of the US and a goodly chunk of Europe and a tiny little sliver of the Middle East. I love to travel, but I also love the comforts of my own bed and a home-cooked meal.
This blog details a long and twisting journey - I started it just about the time I finished grad school and moved back to Michigan, and it's still going strong (coming up on 300 posts). I think it serves as a much better biography than any single entry I could post.
I write, and I write some damn good stuff - stuff so good that it's only a matter of time before someone else figures out that it's good and decides to pay me so much money that I won't have to make pizza. Until that day, please feel free to give me money.
I teach English and I sell guns. I dance, I party, I write, and I paint little toy soldiers.
I'm a native Michigander, and I've come back to the state after seeing much of the US and a goodly chunk of Europe and a tiny little sliver of the Middle East. I love to travel, but I also love the comforts of my own bed and a home-cooked meal.
This blog details a long and twisting journey - I started it just about the time I finished grad school and moved back to Michigan, and it's still going strong (coming up on 300 posts). I think it serves as a much better biography than any single entry I could post.
I write, and I write some damn good stuff - stuff so good that it's only a matter of time before someone else figures out that it's good and decides to pay me so much money that I won't have to make pizza. Until that day, please feel free to give me money.
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