bloodletting

I’d like to write something reflective and insightful about waiting to find out whether I am going to be layed-off this afternoon. I can’t seem to come up with anything though. Maybe because I’m distracted by the fact that my hands are shaking. Nathan just got called into our manager’s office.

For the past couple weeks we watched as it started coming down the pipes. The company made a loss for the 8th straight quarter. Or maybe it’s the 9th. Marketing is being cut by 40%. I heard someone crying in the bathroom. HR and IT have already had their lay-offs. We thought the Web group might survive relatively unscathed because we’re already pretty small, and we do a lot. But then last week we learned that our VP was going to be leaving too. And with him now out of the loop, the rest has just been speculation. And rumors. And, oddly, lots of joking. But you could cut the tension with a knife. For the last several days we’ve all just been trading resumes and monster.com postings.

Welcome to the club, I guess. Having been in a limbo between freelancing, temping and being unemployed for the last two years, I’ve at least been spared the mass lay-offs. Now I too may get to tell a story about starting a new job and two months later being laid off. Except I don’t even get the severance because, like most of the Web team here, I’m employeed as a contractor. Cheaper to employee, but also cheaper to cut.

Rumor was that it was going to be our group this week. Tuesday, was the word on the street. Then Tuesday came and went.

This morning a couple of us were hanging out in Anthony’s office, shooting the shit, trying to keep our cool, when Jason poked his head and said: “It’s starting.”

Now all we can do is wait.

being a car

I saw a bumper sticker last night that made me laugh out loud — I think it was the element of the unexpected — a random streak of humor on an otherwise humorless Ford stationwagon (the sort with the other bumper sticker that reads “God Bless America”). In fact, the owner of the stationwagon may not even have intended it to be funny…but it was…

If going to church
makes you a Christian,
does going to the garage
make you a car?

spring

Well, it’s been a hell of a long winter.
But I think Spring is finally here.
The first gin & tonic weekend of the year…

“shut up and listen”

Last night I saw They Might Be Giants at the Avalon. “You??” said my roommate incredulously when I mentioned it to him. Yes, it’s true – you only think I’m a serious-all-the-time bore who spends her life sitting in cafés muttering to herself. In fact, little do you know that I have a secret “cool” streak. A real dark horse am I.

Maybe not. Wandering around Lansdowne Street, I have to confess, I did feel a bit old and demure. But once there, the Lansdown Street/Average Joe types were in the minority. And that’s just what I like – a roomful of misfits and oddballs. They ranged in age from the under-twenty-ones to some pretty hip-happening geezers.

Anyway, it was a really fun show. I’d never seen They Might Be Giants perform before. In fact, truth be told, I don’t think I’ve even listened to them since college. But I guess that’s precisely what I enjoyed most.

It made me really nostalgic for an old college friend of mine who used to have this routine called Shut Up And Listen. Basically whenever Dave made a new friend that he especially liked, he’d sit said friend down and force him or her to listen attentively as he played all of his favorite songs from his frighteningly extensive CD collection. One after another. And if you tried to talk, or if your gaze even started to wander, he’d bark: “Shut up. Listen” – you were supposed to be staring at the speakers – with this great big little-boy grin on his face. He would get especially excited about certain chord progressions, and would eagerly point them out in case you failed to appreciate these spots on your own. This could go on for hours if nothing interrupted his manic music tirade. Fortunately Dave himself didn’t have that long an attention span and the new friend would eventually be saved by Dave’s own capacity for self-distraction.

Dave used to love They Might Be Giants. It was he who introduced them to me, in fact, during one of our early sessions of Shut Up And Listen. Unfortunately Dave has gone the way of Friends Of The Opposite Sex Who Get Married And Can No Longer Be Friends. I don’t know why this should be the case, but it seems it is. The last I heard from old Dave was a mass email announcing his engagement. That was about three years ago. I still send him Xmas cards but I don’t know whether I should.

Anyway, I really missed my old friend last night. But it was a good sort of missing – the sort of missing where you recognize that although the person is no longer in your life, you know your life is that little bit richer for having known him at all.

headache

This morning my cat managed to convince me I was late for work at 3:30 a.m. How she succeeded in doing this is something of a mystery, but I did actually get up and stumble grumpily into the bathroom before looking at the clock and going back to bed. The wily Tosca spent the remainder of the night in the hallway.

Despite the fact that I had just been gifted with three whole hours of sleep left at my disposal, I was unable to make my way back to it – I woke up every half hour or so convinced that my alarm had failed me and that I had grossly overslept. Nope, only 4:47. 5:12. 6:27. Oh hell, why don’t you just get up then?! Sleep…please, I just want to sleep… And consequently when the alarm did finally go off for real, not surprisingly, I woke to a blinding headache. Blinding – I literally couldn’t see. Sinuses I think – the weather keeps changing and I guess that’s what does it. It snowed again during the night. The ugly kind too, that you have to break out the window scraper for. So much for spring.

Today is going to be hell, I thought, as I pulled on my comfiest black cords and then climbed back into bed. For another fifteen minutes I dozed and dreamed of vice grips, and how one goes about prying them loose from their temples.

Finally I got back up and managed to get the rest of my clothing on via the reverse psychology of determining to be as late as possible for work. The reverse psychology aspect didn’t really work – I agreed with myself that being indulgently late for work was a great idea – but it did have a somewhat liberating effect, thus loosening the vice grips half a notch.

I decided that I would not go to work until my headache was gone. A daring decision, considering such headaches have been known to last for three days at a stretch. This was a small but important act of rebellion to aid in my daily wrestling match between my apparent need to waste time and dawdle and the relentless fascism of the clock. And so I sat on the couch with my coffee and stared at the wall. Didn’t even drink my coffee, just sat there, apparently looking crazed enough to cause my roommate to come in to ask if I was okay.

It was kind of cool, though, because the pain of my headache actually conquered the domination of the clock, and I was released into the lovely relativity of empty space, the only time being the rhythmic pulse of my temples.

And so I sat, blankly, tuned into nothing but the swirling, throbbing rhythm inside my head – disappearing into thoughts, returning to the throb, disappearing again, and then returning to find the pulse had slowed, lightened, little by little the vice grips were loosening… And then finally, after returning from one of my wandering thoughts I found that the vice grips were loose enough to remove, the throbbing was gone and only a slight fog was left.

I drank down my cold coffee, got to work plenty late, and have spent the rest of the day in a state utter elation.

This is the wonderful thing about pain – when you emerge from it it’s as though you’ve been reborn. Life is just too wonderful, if only because your headache is gone…

spin

Like the hear no- see no- speak no- evil monkey, I have my hands over my eyes, ears and mouth. Everyone has an opinion about Iraq. Everyone except me. I don’t know what to say or do or think about this whole war thing. I don’t support it. I wonder whether I would be less opposed had it been Gore or Nadar or just about anyone else that was making this difficult decision rather than our current loathsome sick-joke-of-a-leader. So neither do I protest it. I acknowledge just how limited my understanding of global politics and strategy really is. There are some things that must be done even if they are not “right.” I don’t know whether this is one of them or not. I guess it depends on what your goals are. I’m not sure what America’s goals are exactly — I think they are more complicated than oil, they obviously aren’t freedom, and I certainly don’t think they are “rightness” or any sort of simple morality. That just isn’t what nations are about. I’m not sure whether that is what humans are about.

But there is one thing I’m pretty sure about: you can’t believe anything you hear or read anymore — if you ever could. The media is full of bias and spin and half-information. Even the “good” media. And everyone else just seems to be towing one line or another — with great emphasis but little real understanding. I wonder whether there’s anybody at all who really knows what they’re talking about. It seems important to think that some do, but I certainly don’t know how to differentiate bullshit from reality anymore.

Though, I still find myself a sucker for an eloquently written essay…biased or not, Arundhati Roy is always good for that…

dream

Last night I dreamed that I was going to die next week. Not as in, “you’re very sick and have one week to live” – but more like, slotted in amongst the various meetings and appointments and errands I have to do next week was my death. I was okay with this. After all, we all have to die sometime, and it just happened that next week was going to be my time.

It wasn’t a tragic dream. Like I said, I was okay with the knowledge of my death. However, I began to find that once people found out that I was going to die next week, they started badgering me about the various preparations I needed to make for my death. I didn’t have much time, they told me. I needed to be concerned with selecting an appropriate coffin, arranging the presentation of my body, the funeral, who was going to do my hair and makeup (since I couldn’t), and, perhaps most importantly, what I was going to wear – after all, this would be the last outfit I would ever get to pick out, so it better make the appropriate statement!

I was invited to a demo of someone else’s death preparations, which I grudgingly attended. It was a man, either soon to die or newly dead (I couldn’t tell, but he seemed content – smug even – with how nicely his death had turned out), looking very tidy and well groomed in his fresh black suit. As he was being slotted into his shiny mahogany coffin, the heals of his patent leather shoes made a neat little click-click against the wood of the coffin. This somehow added to the general smugness of the occasion, and the sound sickened me so that I finally just cried out, “For fuck’s sake, can’t you just dump my body in the river!” I insisted that I didn’t want all the hassle or the formalities, it wasn’t what I was about – I simply wanted to be left alone to enjoy the last of my life and then die with simple, quiet dignity.

“No,” they told me. I could not simply have my body dropped into the river. I could not escape the ritual. “This is the way these things are done. What’s wrong with you?”

And my response – perversely – was, “Well you know what then? There’s only a 50/50 chance I’m going to die next week anyway. And I’m going to choose life. If this is what I have to do to die, then I’m going to see to it that I live!”

And I woke up upon storming off, muttering angrily to myself in disgust, leaving behind the hoards of trite idiot “death-planners.”

It took me the better part of the day to work out what that dream was all about – but I finally connected it to a conversation I was having over lunch yesterday. We came to the conclusion that to be sane in this world, one must be seriously fucked. The certifiably insane drooling freaks are probably having a much more sane response to this ludicrous reality we have no choice but to share than the most “well-adjusted” among us. Myself, I keep it together as well as most, but sometimes I feel like I’m straining to do so. My psyche fragments, the gears slip. I woke up this morning with the sensation of my mind having melted, like plastic left too close to the heat. So I make myself a quadruple espresso and re-contort myself back into the appropriate socially sanctioned distorted shape and prepare to face the day.

But I can’t escape the dissonance. I’m torn between the desire to fit in, be accepted, achieve, please others and the desire to live a life more authentic than this superficial, plastic, quarterly-driven world affords us. And as my mind strains under the unnatural contortions mandated by modern society, my sleeping psyche reveals to me the perversity of a world in which even death is mocked, where no human experience is left sacred, and where the individual is denied the option of ever experiencing anything – anything at all, even in death – that is truly authentic, truly personal.

This is, I think, the source of that ache for something more. And yes, I tell myself, as long as you suffer, you know you’re still alive, still among those that choose life. If that ache ever goes away, you’ve quite possibly been successfully assimilated into the soulless hoards of cheery “death-planners.”

To Live is to Fly

We all got holes to fill
Them holes are all that’s real
Some fall on you like a storm
Sometimes you dig your own
But choice is yours to make
And time is yours to take
Some dive into the sea
Some toil upon the stone
To live is to fly
Low and high,
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes

– Townes Van Zandt