corporate slut

Things got broken. But it wasn’t my doing.

Tuesday morning they laid off my manager. Which seemed kind of odd protocol, given that nobody had laid me off, and my manager was the only one who even knew what I did. As Anthony carried boxes to his car, Joe looked at me and I looked at Joe and we both kind of said “now what?” and I was wondering, but now who’s going to fire me? And I said, “Joe, will you fire me?”

But then Joe got laid off too. I went round to find him for lunch and the tell-tale boxes had appeared in front of his cube. Uh-oh. I went back to my own cube to hide.

But I swear to god, I never saw Joe smile so much in the whole 6 months I’ve known him as the day they finally laid him off. Freedom!… Over the next couple hours you could actually feel his personality start to grow back.

And I too started looking forward to breaking free of this hideous corporate hell. No, not even hell, it lacks hell’s fire and it lacks hell’s edge. This is corporate fucking purgatory. Stale and bland and beige. It drains you of life, but then just spits it all out on the sidewalk…wasted…nobody is even getting fat off your blood.

But still, nobody fired me. I gathered it must be because I’m a contractor, and seeing as how Anthony’s boss got fired before he bothered to process my contract extension, it was due to expire at the end of the week anyway. So be it. I’ll just hang out for the next four days and then I’ll get some summer vacation too.

So the next day I went in to work late, intending to leisurely copy my files, print off my writing samples, and pack up my shit…only to find a note on my chair from the new VP asking me to give him a call so we could “sit down and talk about the future direction of the Web Group.” What the fuck? Does this company even still have a “Web Group”? And what do you want to talk to me for? I’m just a lowly contractor without anyone to report to.

So I gave him a call, and he popped by and introduced himself and started in on the requisite spiel about difficult decisions and sorry nobody came by to talk to me yesterday and plans going forward for those that are still here, and I had to interrupt him to ask “um, am I still here, or am I not still here?” Which of course he didn’t have a simple answer for. Rather, it went something like “uh, how much do you know about the globalization stuff that Anthony was working on…” and you can only guess where that was going. I wanted to burst out laughing, but I kind of had a headache. And then: “and do you happen to know what stage the Support section redesign is at?”

I kind of grimaced, and said “look, I really don’t know much about any of that stuff — I sat in on a few meetings, but…” and, strangely, he brightened and said “that’s fine, because nobody else knows anything!” And I thought, oh my god, would you please just fire me?! Please don’t make me do this…

I am a corporate slut.

But it is at least a little liberating to acknowledge this sad truth for what it is.

In my remaining time I’ve been vying for a copywriting position. It’s a senior copywriter they’re after, but I’m saying, “hey, I know I don’t have direct marketing experience, and I don’t have concepting experience, and I don’t have 10 years of experience doing anything, but what the hell — I’m cheap!” If I’m lucky they’ll try me out for a month, because it will take at least that long to hire a senior copywriter anyway.

This place makes me feel so dirty.

But c’mon, at least I’m using them too…

ennui

Sometimes I just want to break things.

Not things as in the clutter around me, but more like the clutter inside me.

Sometimes I just get so sick of the boredom, the inertia, the futility…all that I want in life, all that I love…I just want to sweep it all off the table in a single furious swipe and hear it smash to the ground. I want to feel the pain of loss, the latent appreciation for all that I have. I want to sort through the rubble and start over. Free. Because nothing matters now. Because there’s nothing left to lose.

Last night, sitting on a Somerville rooftop with my taekwon-do teacher, I leaned close to the edge and felt a vortex form around me. Silently, motionlessly, I heard myself scream into the night, rage, whimper, stomp my feet; I saw myself step forward off the rooftop, sail hands-above-head into the street below. I didn’t move. Vertigo. The heavy, sweet August air enveloped me where I stood, smoldering in my impotent rage. Crickets sang, I could see the lights of Boston through the trees and rooftops in the distance…

Fucking ennui.

Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, rage against the dying of the light…

become the breeze

I’m lying stretched out on my bed, head at the foot, gazing out the window. It turned into such a beautiful day, but I don’t really know what to do with myself. Just ate lunch, nothing I feel like doing. Don’t want to read my book. No errands that need running. Nowhere I feel like walking to. So I just doze.I doze and I wake and I doze and wake… Cat stretched out on my stomach, purring like a lawnmower. It’s the sort of summer day that whispers wordlessly with a constant rustling of leaves. I can feel the breeze coming in through the open window, tickling my leg, my face, I can feel it on my hand. I want to rouse myself from my afternoon slumber, get up and do something; such a waste to doze the day away. But I feel so heavy, my consciousness surfacing only to sink back down into the somnolent depths.

Strange, I never sleep so much in the middle of the day…

It occurs to me that it may be over-stimulation I’m feeling. The relentless sensuality of the breeze tickling, caressing, soothing, the din of rustling leaves, chirping birds, church bells, laughing children, the kaleidoscope of memories these summer sounds evoke — sometimes the aching beauty of our world is just too much for our meager minds to absorb. And even as my consciousness tries to retreat from its cluttered ebb tide of circular arguments, random memories, bits of songs, and dog-eared worries — wondering why I can’t just shut off the racket in my head and enjoy a moment — another deeper part of myself rises silently up to take it all in; to bear witness to the fragile beauty caught in a single second of just another summer day.

As I continue to wrestle with the congestion of pointless thoughts taking up space in my head, contemplating what sacrifice I’d be willing to make to escape modern life and its entrapment of insipidness, another thought pushes through: I wish I believed in god.

Why? I ask myself.

I wish that I could pray, could believe in something, could attempt a dialog with something bigger and deeper than the human psyche. I wish that I could speak with my soul and expect to be answered back.

And I think of stories of die-hard atheists and cynics who become believers as they age. Not that I am aging at 29, exactly, but much on my mind lately is the delicate spiders’ web thread separating life from death; so fragile, so easily torn. Thus my persistent attempts to just-shut-up-and-appreciate-this-goddammed-moment-while-I-have-it.

But then I think with a sigh that I don’t expect I’ll be one of those cynics-turned-believers. I remember myself at the age of eight trying so hard to believe in god, as my Episcopal schoolteachers said I should. But how can you make yourself believe? Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of believing? Yes it does, I answer my eight-year-old self, because at the time nobody did.

And I question myself again, why does it matter whether I am able to believe in god or not?

Because it’s devastating to think that we are so all-alone in this vast universe, with no one to watch over us, no one to protect us, no one to care.

We aren’t alone. Far from it, I answer back. It is only our preciousness that causes us to feel alone. Because we are so preoccupied with our human importance. Listen to all the birds out there — how could you possibly think yourself alone in the universe?

I turn from my Judeo-Christian upbringing and contemplate the question from another angle. I know that I understand very little of Eastern theology, but still I am aware that generations of Buddhist monks have dedicated their lives to little more than escaping their ego, humbling themselves to that of a grain of sand.

Feel the breeze on your skin, I instruct myself. Become the breeze. Once you become the breeze you will no longer feel the absence of god.

won’t you take this love from me

On the pulling end of a long-distance relationship, evenings and weekends run long. I am teaching myself not to fear the empty spaces, the time on my hands, the evening breeze, the longing not to be alone.

I fill my weekend days busy, busy running errands. Refuge found in the din of a crowded café. A good book, a long walk… but still the nights loom on the horizon like a storm.

Tired of constantly trying to scare up friends, I stand defiant against my loneliness, against the silent empty house.

Dinner and a movie: I wait until I’m hungry to go grocery shopping. I cook myself a feast of homemade tacos. Caramel pudding for dessert. I sit outside with a glass of beer. No one to see me crunch taco down my shirt. My cat runs excitedly around my chair. Crickets chirp, Kris Delmhorst sings from my stereo:

I guess we’re all the same, we walk our days looking for a little more fire
And we all sometimes have to sit on our hands
We try to hold ourselves together
We try to talk about the weather
When all we really want to do is take each other by the throat and say

Won’t you dream my dream with me
Don’t you leave it here drying on my pillow
Wont you just soak a little up for me
Won’t you give it just a safe place to go
It just needs a safe place to go…

kindness

Listening to Brian Ferry on the way to work this morning brought me back to a Roxy Music CD a friend gave me years back. I was 16 at the time, and had never heard of Roxy Music – in fact had never heard of anyone really if they didn’t make the top 40 play list of the local pop station. Gary was maybe a little bent on broadening my teenage, Southern Louisianan horizons – with the Roxy Music CD, with the t-shirt he brought me from Australia, with his gentle lectures about spending less time worrying [about my petty teenage melodramas] and more time living: “life is like surfing, just learn to ride the waves,” he used to tell me. Gary was 24, English, and a soccer coach, who somehow had ended up in Baton Rouge. I had met him on a plane when I was returning from visiting my grandmother and he was returning from a soccer match. The kids he coached were roughly my age, but somehow I ended up in a conversation with him rather than with one of them.

What interest this 24-year-old English soccer coach could possibly have had in a 16-year-old girl was something of a mystery.

Or perhaps it wasn’t a mystery at all. So thought my mother, who met him with an incredulous “Do you have ANY IDEA how old Heather is?!” when he showed up at the door one summer afternoon, tennis racquet in hand, having driven an hour from Baton Rouge for a game of tennis with me. I don’t recall how Gary responded to her ill-mannered (though perhaps justified) shriek, so devastating was my teenage embarrassment. But I’m sure he was extremely polite, in that very English way of his, despite the fact that in her muddled rage, she had just addressed him as “Chris” (Chris being the other 24-year-old guy that I had recently met, also on an airplane, who called frequently and once even came into town to take me to dinner…).

No, it probably wasn’t a mystery at all what a 24-year-old guy might want with a 16-year-old girl such as myself. The term jailbait had been circling around me from the age of 12. But to Gary’s credit, his intentions truly did remain a mystery; looking back with all 20/20 worth of hindsight, I can honestly say that he never showed any desire to be anything more than a friendly presence in my life. And he remained a friendly presence for a good while.

The last time I saw Gary was when I was 21, at which time I had called him up crying while driving back to Louisiana from Austin after a failed rendezvous with an old flame. I don’t think I’d spoken to Gary in at least a year, but he didn’t seem the least surprised to hear from me, even full of tears and anguish as I was. I told him I didn’t want to go back to my parent’s place yet, and could I come see him instead? And he said sure, come on by. He wiped away my tears, cooked me dinner, put me to bed on the couch, and the next afternoon we went to a movie. Then I drove home. That was all. So innocent.

Again and again I have been accused of being naïve, and have been told by many a well-meaning male that all men are pigs. And generally I would have to agree, as I’ve learned the hard way that, saddly, my mind just isn’t that interesting. And I’ve even come to believe that there’s simply no such thing as true altruism – everyone wants something and nobody does anything for nothing; that’s just the way we’re wired. But the memory of my old English soccer-coach friend reminds me that there are no absolutes. And perhaps some people really are simply benevolent beings.

I wonder what ever happened to old Gary Williamson?…