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May 30, 2003

Quotes of the Day


"Is there such a thing as 'silicone' without an E?" -- woman in my office

"Never heard of it" -- other woman in my office

Posted by me at 3:29 PM | Comments (1)

Slammin'


A former YWW kiddo of my acquaintance, Eli Rosenblatt, is featured on the 2002 Freedom to Speak collection put out by the National Poetry Slam. Go Eli!

Posted by me at 12:28 AM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2003

You can't deny it --

and I'm sure it's been said, but

Donald Rumsfeld is

Sam the Eagle.

OK, so disposition-wise John Ashcroft is more like Sam, with his tendency to see everything around him as awash in moral turpitude. But Rummy looks the part.

Posted by me at 10:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

damn lawyers

Damn lawyers. I want ice cream. -- james

Posted by me at 12:54 PM

Diary of a Procrastinator, Day 2

10:10 I get sidetracked by the music. Statra Records leads to Mateo and Matos leads to Crazy Penis leads on back to Thievery Corporation leads to Jazzhole and then off to good ol' Hotel Costes 5, which I have heard so many times in unpleasant office situations I imagine I won't want to download it. I'm really peeved I can't find clips from Crazy Penis's album "A Nice Hot Bath With..."

10:15 Still fooling with music. I tap the touchpad instead of clicking, then remember I'm not at work when it doesn't do anything. I could set it up the other way but a clamshell iBook is set up so that doing so makes for a number of catastrophic errors. grr.

10:19 I'm still procrastinating. My 11:00 sleepiness is starting to kick in early.

10:33 Still working on the studios piece. Can't wrap my head around the problem of how to mention that the biggest studio in the piece has made neighborhood activists angry and received a questionable subsidy from the Giuliani administration. This is a pro-studio, pro-Brooklyn article. Still haven't started on Coney.

10:57 Aggravation at how *not* close to done I am sets in. I am still wrestling with the studios piece. The problem with big media people is they give better soundbite. This guy delivered better than the tiny documentary studios I interviewed earlier.

11:00 None of you get to read this horrible piece of claptrap, agreed? I'm doing what on my part amounts to delirious raving: I am leaving in whatever cliche and fluff comes to me.

11:11 Tea time.

12:17 If I manage to get anything more done on the studios article -- and I'd better; the lead is creaky and the quotes are strung together like damp Froot Loops on a shoelace -- it will have to be tomorrow. It is currently twice as long as it ought to be. I need to give Coney the last of my attention and artificially-caffeine-enhanced alertness now.

12:30 Fantastic! The Coney Island lede and nut graf wrote themselves! (We love to misspell our jargon, because it doesn't actually appear in print to reveal us as the philistines we are.) And I'm not embarrassed of them! At all! No labor pains at all -- it just popped out, whoosh! It's even compelling! And it has flippers and fangs! And I think my editor will like it! She better.

12:33 Do I really know what "vicissitudes" means?

12:38 Mind's wandering. Read yet another review of Capturing the Whatstheirnames today -- that family from Long Island which was accused of child molestation... the Voice's piece on it was quite good... While I believe that children should be listened to and believed when it comes to sexual abuse, I needed to hear the things the Voice writer said about studies which show most pedophiles are gentle and many young children think nothing of being fondled until an adult tells them it's wrong -- though pondering these ideas feels like almost unmanageable blasphemy at times, I think it's worth deconstructing the media coverage of stories like these... I think I was permanently damaged by the satanic-nursery-school-and-child-prostitution hysteria of the early 80s... fostered an exceedingly negative concept about sexuality... Also inhibited my ability to get into relationships with men older than I am... past about six years or so I start to feel creeped out by anyone gettin' amorous towards me...

1:01 "It's a wonder that the Wonder Wheel survived." I am the motherfscking Cole Porter of budget freelance journalism, yo.

1:33 Another diversion: Coney Island film festival to Insane Films. The primrose path to procrastination is paved with... primroses. and people playing the guitar with their penis.

1:37 New ergonomic problems are posed by laptop: My knees hurt from supporting the damned thing.

2:02 Should be done by now, but I'm not dead yet, why mess with momentum.

2:09 I type "seat otters" by mistake, correct the error, then consider changing it back. It could be my only chance to get published in the New Yorker.

2:11 From penis guitars to walruses. Distraction is so easy. Why is this educational puff piece so much more klutzy than this one? (Heads up, Sylvie, that last one's an otter link. It will totally make you cry.)

2:14 Time to turn in. I'm losing feeling in my fingers.

Posted by me at 2:24 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 28, 2003

Anatomy of Freelance Work

8:58 After a half hour of settling in, it strikes me as I stare at the depthless screen of my laptop that I didn't do any of my interviewing right. I didn't even do any of my interviewing the way I would normally do it. I was assigned to write happy, boostery articles about Brooklyn for a happy, boostery publication, and that's what I set out to do. As a result none of my notes or interviews make any organic sense. I have a couple dozen jagged pieces of tin to work with. None of them ring prettily when struck.

9:16 I make a note -- TKTK. I don't quite even know what it means -- I've learned everything I know about journalism on the job -- but I know my editors stick it in the text when they want a fact checked. My concerns are niggling little things which nobody would probably notice if I just let them in, but they have the ability to stop me for hours at a time. Hours. Probably Jayson Blair doesn't agonize like this. Maybe that's what separates the people who get the big stories from the rest of us.

9:27 369 words in the studios article, and I've only mentioned two studios. Is the editor's scheme to set a pay rate for a word count which is impossible to meet, then inflate the number of words in the article, so I get paid less per word? In 500 words you can't possibly write something as grand and overarching as she proposed. As a matter of fact, I bet her assignment was about 500 words.

9:42 Finishing up the "dog-ate-my-homework" letter to my editor. Should I mention that my computer had a peculiar and startling crash earlier tonight, for sympathy points? I have already spent too much time agonizing about whether I've pestered her too much tonight, whether she'll deign to throw me a freelance piece ever again.

9:57 Now I'm glad I skipped dance class. I needed that extra time to dick around before I sat down. It could be 11:57 right now.

10:04 Bury that lede! Bury that lede! Woo! Two paragraphs into the Coney article and I still don't know which metaphor I'm using for it. I think the anecdote about my grandma is out, though.

10:38 Joan Acocella's article on theatrical hip-hop in the New Yorker leaps off the couch and starts humping my leg. Now I'll never get anything written.

11:09 I know I have a good story here someplace. It's about a stingray, a sideshow freak, Jacob, and the Funny Face logo, or maybe something about work. If I publish that here instead of turning it over to my editor, is it stealing?

11:25 Literal eleventh-hour interview from a studio owner in an obscure neighborhood whose name even he doesn't know. Doesn't yield good quotes. Half of my interviews yielded no good quotes.

Posted by me at 1:05 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 25, 2003

unsolicited commercial email

You know, one of these days I'm going to snap... I'm going to go house-to-house with a Jackhammer shotgun, and ask the question "Do you send unsolicited commercial email?" of each inhabitant --glyph

Posted by me at 12:56 AM

May 23, 2003

Comics To Buy


Jacob has set up a mini-store where you can buy his (incredibly cheaply-priced! and funny) Skullboy series for $1 a copy, as well as the "hairy sack logo" Beetle shirt. Both of which are well worth it, but don't let Jacob determine your size for the shirt. Plus he has a new Surly Boy storyline up, which I think I came up with the idea for. If you are my sister you should read it especially. So what am I, Jacob's personal promoter, or something? Yeah. Not officially, but yeah.

Posted by me at 4:57 PM | Comments (0)

best choices

We've none of us exactly made the best choices for ourselves. -- jwh

Posted by me at 2:13 AM

Blood Hunger And Haiku


I am really proud of how this haiku turned out. (The next two and the previous one are also mine. You could do a search for "gus," but it also turns up all the poems about cunn!l!ngus. Which is fine, I dig that too.)

Posted by me at 1:19 AM | Comments (2)

May 22, 2003

Boulevards of Death


What? Are you saying the Dancing Sausage Web Journal has absolutely no editorial vision to speak of? Why would you say that? Is it because I'm linking to the ten most dangerous intersections in the United States, and Queens Boulevard isn't even on there? Yeah, you're probably right.

Posted by me at 10:58 AM | Comments (3)

May 20, 2003

Adventures in Communication: Bulleted Lists

This week's jihad: Men who insist that women leave an elevator first, even when they are closer to the door than the women are. An absurd number of men in the building where I work do this. I have consciously avoided giving any indication that I was eager to leave the elevator, hanging back at the handrail on the wall, and even with this noticeable pause they still make a gesture to the door and won't walk out until I do.

I don't mind certain forms of politeness; for example, I don't mind people holding doors open for each other -- I do it for other women, they do it for me, we do it for men, men do it for us, everyone does it for the guy with no arms or the woman pushing a stroller -- but this is a highly gendered form of "politeness," and it's dumb and slows everyone down and I hate it. I'm trying to work up a good comment. What I have so far (none of it is particularly witty, which frustrates me):

None of these really sum up my continually unfulfilled desire to simply be seen as a thinking, productive, non-sexual entity by the people around me who I am not looking to fu(k (i.e. 99.999% of the population). It being nearly summer again in New York, I'm wearing less clothing for the sake of being comfortable, and I am sort of disgusted by how much time I spend angrily stewing my comeback lines so I have a fresh steaming one ready for the next a$shole who whistles at me. Come on, men of New York. Guys in other cities aren't half so bad as you are. Settle the fu(k down.

(This jihad was inspired in part by one woman's thoughts on men sitting on subway seats with their legs spread as if their test!cles were as big as their heads. I think she's entirely right, and I would add that the societal expectation that women sit with their legs crossed makes for excessively tippy subway riding.)

* * *

My absolute least favorite people to interview are small-time government officials. I imagine the same is true of many big-time government officials. It's nearly impossible to get them to give you a meaningful quote. This morning I called a guy at a Coney Island governance organization for this article I'm doing, and he gave me nothing but a mouthful of cliches. This may be a matter of my own failure in interviewing; I wanted to get a picture of what Coney Island means to him in the kind of the warm, personal, quirky terms that I was supposedly trained to evince as a literary journalist, but even when I asked how the C.I. boardwalk physically looks different in the wake of economic development, he heaped comments about his mother "giving back to the community" on top of pabulum about the local schools having a "children-first philosophy" and garnished it with cream about how people in Coney Island "work together and have a team attitude." I gave up.

* * *

And now, a public service. The following doctors have REALLY BAD HANDWRITING:

These people are in the job of communicating the nature of ills to other people, in the interest of of remedying them. They really ought to have good handwriting, and they don't. Fix it, guys. Further bulletins as I identify more doctors with REALLY BAD HANDWRITING.

Posted by me at 3:25 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 19, 2003

The Temp Index

Approximate minutes I spent today removing staples: 60

Average number of pages attached by each of those staples: 2

Estimated number of staples removed: 500

Estimated cost to this company of that hour of un-stapling: $26

Approximate minutes I spent re-stapling those sets to each other after copying them: 30

Number of staffers who told me not to double-side the two stapled pages while copying them: 2

Number of copies I made erroneously: 23

Approximate days I previously spent entering the sheets I copied today into the computer as tabulated data: 14

Number of days since I started here that Jacques Brel’s Jackie has run through my head nonstop: 2

Days til the weekly office ice cream binge: 1

Posted by me at 1:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 17, 2003

DDRcana and Other Geekery

I guess I never posted anything about PyCon back in March. I wonder how that happened. The setup we managed to wangle for DDR, though somewhat neck-injury-inducing, was even more awesome than the projection screen we managed at H2K2. We had a whole conference hall, PA system, and a massive screen. I had a great time kicking everyone's asses playing Tekken with dance mats instead of hand controllers. And I met some really bright and entertaining people, including the folks over at Roxor Games, with whom, as a result, I am now working on another dance video game. Oh, and we played a killer game of 1kBWCs on the last night -- I don't know if anyone has posted the deck online yet. Glyph has more pictures up, including a demonstration of the reason why Caltech's faculty club stopped using fabric tablecloths.

Posted by me at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)

Detritus: Physical Attributes of Queens, etc.

This is the time of year and violent quality of weather which brings a sidewalk death to baby birds. I see them everywhere, in agonized jags underfoot. It adds a certain horror to the city's usual sidewalk litter.

* * *

I think I wrote something recently about the New York tendency not to consider anything beyond a three-block neighborhood of your dwelling "your neighborhood." Mostly this is an imagined boundary. But Roger and I were out walking tonight in Sunnyside and we found the end of the universe, the beginning of the Nothing, the place where you expect to see the giant bats and the warping of the fabric of space. It's 39th Avenue, I think.

* * *

Today I went to the open house at Teacher's College. (I did mention I'm going to Columbia, right?) Lots of excitement over it, but the two things I want to talk about (in the Eqbal Ahmad sense) are thusly:

Remembering my first day of Hampshire -- and to some extent other beginnings in my life -- while sitting in the balcony during the TC administration's welcome was something. Even though I'm not sure yet whether this degree is what I want to pursue, I feel like I've made a much more clear-headed, better-informed decision this time around. From this vantage point I feel like I wasn't even a sentient being when I applied to Hampshire. I went there for all the wrong reasons, most of them social. I came in with so many doubts and expectations of the place and myself. I remember being all pumped up about being one of the smartest students there, which was completely ridiculous on Hampshire's terms even if it wasn't yet unimportant on my own. It was very important to me that I prove myself. I don't even know on what terms, except that I guess I wanted to be recognized as a writer. Published in the New Yorker, maybe, because that's what you do when you're the best writer. Aside from that, all I really wanted was for my teachers to praise me, as they always had, because that's who I was: no more than the sum of my teachers' praise. I wanted fellow students worthy of my love -- not just a small group, the whole batch.

(The professors frequently offered praise as a reward for no effort at all, and resistance in places that baffled me (why did the child development professor refuse to let me write an assignment where we were supposed to do a drawing? why wouldn't Michael Lesy comment on my essay's stylistics?). While more of the students were interesting than my high school classmates, my circle remained as limited as it had been.)

This time, I have it thought out. I have a few ridiculous aspirations which will probably fall by the wayside -- mostly about the total overhaul of the world's educational systems -- but I also have a list of practical skills I want to develop along the way. I know why I'm going to school: I want a multidisciplinary environment, and I wants me my praxis. And I want the three doctoral letters tacked onto my name, because I'm tired of being pushed around on the job.

As I wrote "GUS" in bigger letters than the rest of my name on my nametag today I remembered how the teachers at Hampshire gleefully grabbed onto that name and used it vigorously, resisting Gillian in what seemed like a sense that turnabout on the first-name-basis of the college was fair play. I had a dim awareness, as I spelled the three letters out again, that I was making a choice I hadn't thought to consider. It wasn't until I got to campus this time that I thought about how I was presenting myself. My debut on the Hampshire campus was so thought-out that I can still remember what I wore that day: it was fetching, but not like something anyone else would wear. I feel blessed that I've made it to the stage where I'm spending more time sussing out my new bunkmates than I am considering how I want to come off.

* * *

Certain displays of weakness in men, I can handle. Others I find so terrifying as to want to avoid those who exhibit them. I am still figuring out which, by trial and error.

Posted by me at 1:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 16, 2003

Memory-Limited, or, From the Hip

Went running today. My dad, an inveterate marathoner, used to encourage us to note whether we were leg-limited or lung-limited during a given run; it's only recently that this kind of take on a body has to me seemed limited. In dance class, I am frequently space-limited, back-limited, or arm-limited. Running must be about something more, too. I remember Li-Young Lee talking about a given poem of his coming from his rib, or from his hip. Surely running has a more spiritual side.

Anyway, today I was neither leg- nor lung-limited; I was pavement-limited. I took what must have been the digger of my life over on 44th Street when I jammed my right foot into a loop of my left shoelace. I scraped my palms, elbow, shoulder, shin, knee, and hip. I think that adds up to more points of landing than the time JT and I crash-landed near the Washington Monument.

To my memory, that was the only unpleasant part of my visit with him in DC, or even the entire summer before I entered college. The sex was good; he'd been writing me profound letters on a frequent basis; he sent me little gifts and I reciprocated; his mom and stepdad had flown me out and I was enjoying spending time with them; Kube came up and visited and we baptized ourselves at the Watergate. A fun time was had by all, I thought.

So it was kind of a rude shock to find that not only was this guy who I'd considered one of the greater loves of my life blogging unbeknownst to me, but he also had a totally different take on that particular period of time. (Inexact linkage; look for the April 18 post, or do a search for "Jill" on the page.)

I don't know how to take it, exactly. He had a big crush on someone else; he hadn't mentioned that. Was he lying to me? I'd never thought of him as a liar. Frank and thoughtful, yes. A liar, no.

Then again, memory warps in time, faster than glass does. Was my recollection of that time wrong, or was his? The DC trip was about eight years ago; maybe we're both wrong about what it was like. Time for some reconceptualization. I'd also always presumed I meant as much to him as he had to me, a preconception which that post and others took apart. It had already proved a dangerous presumption -- about three years ago, in some fit of crudely-conceived empowerment, I experimentally asked him to marry me. He backed off speaking in the kind of "nice doggie" tone you use to augment your use of a big stick against a menacing dog. My head was pretty hazy at that point with low-self-esteem in the depressurization period after college, so I probably was too into myself to read him well; I never guessed how that stunt would impact what I read as bemusement in him.

Still, I thought I knew him. There is a terrible thing about going to the kind of school where the same people are together for twelve years or more: you come to think these people belong to you. They are symbols for you to play with. They have meanings which in some ways are the clearest possible distillation of who they are, and yet do not begin to touch who they are. Your meaning fits together with theirs, even if it is not anything like theirs; it can be an opposition, or a complement. And then everyone moves away, and the substance behind those meanings dissolves. For highly affective people like me, the shell of the meaning remains. I think it only gets in the way.

Posted by me at 12:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 15, 2003

You're From Coney Island, And Little Coney Island Is Famous For You


So I've been assigned to write an article about Coney Island. That includes the Sideshow, Mermaid Parade, burlesque reviews, the local "polar bear" swimmers group, possibly the local subway, and Bambi the Mermaid. And maybe the Russian community in the area? I should be so lucky! I am in hog fuckin' heaven. The catch? I get 750 words, and I also have to talk about economic development. Boo.

Posted by me at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)

The Dancing Sausage Comeback Special

You've fallen victim to the crazy hijinks of one of my less pleasant moods. The Dancing Sausage Web Journal isn't going anywhere! That wacky premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Always keeping things "interesting." Bet you were fooled!

(sound of crickets)

I promise I didn't do it for the attention. I was genuinely freaking out. All I've probably done is chased away my regular audience... counterproductive.

* * *

Fox recently aired a Beverly Hills 90210 reunion and a "Now-It-Can-Be-Told"-style dramatization of the Three's Company cast in rapid succession. While my stomach churned, I thought how nice it is that the Internet makes bullsh!t like that unecessary. I mean, think about it. Nobody is ever going to do a Homestar Runner reunion, for example; the whole oeuvre will (hopefully) be right there on the Web for time immemorial, barring the progression of the right-wing coup to total repression of free speech. If we see something like, it'll be a spoof of the kind of "reunion special" which makes some halfwit sitcom out to be a great cultural touchstone in which everyone participated (which, of course, The Simpsons has already done). Or maybe TV will be forced to do retrospectives of things like 2001's AYBABTU craze, instead. I can just picture some grey-haired, baseball-jacketed network producers scratching their heads and going "Who the hell gives a shit?"

* * *

New Yorkers, I mean the born-and-bred-and-raised-and-dyed-hard-in-the-wool-type New Yorkers, are CRAZY. I mean CRAAAAAAYZEEEE. They have a warped, twisted worldview inexplicable to the rest of us. I got a call today from a woman running a boostery kind of a magazine in Brooklyn, who said she'd seen my writing and loved my style, and would I like to do some articles for her? The first one she wanted me to do was about Coney Island, and how it has undergone a rebirth in the past little while... in passing, she mentioned the carnival freakshow, the burlesque show, the Mermaid Parade, the polar bear swim club that meets there, and the "unofficial mayor of Coney Island." All the while she was hemming and hawing, going, Well, seeing as you live in Queens and you're from California, you probably don't have an affinity for this story or for Brooklyn.

Let's take that again in slow motion: She saw my work -- which has ranged from pieces on dumpster diving to a performance artist who does an opera he wrote in a language he made up -- and she thinks I wouldn't have an affinity for this story. I'm twenty-six; I have to have an affinity for Brooklyn whether I live there or not. All the good stuff happens there. All the cool kids live there. (When buddy Rob Domingo and I went out the other day to run a half-mile with two giant chickens and their devoted flock of young crazies, he estimated that Williamsburg must have been totally deserted.)

Granted, you can't get to Brooklyn from here; the G train is a$s and everything else goes through Manhattan. But Coney Island is still the only beach in the city I go to. I was in the Mermaid Parade last year. And she bets that because I live in Queens I won't have an affinity for the story. I can only chalk this up to the New York mindset that anything outside a three-block radius of your house is Not My Neighborhood.

I told her the only borough I don't have an affinity with is Staten Island, and I'm taking on the story. She assigned me two articles, actually, both of which sound fun. Various things are coming up Milhouse.

* * *

When I wondered about the ethics of doctors, Catherine sent me a link to the Onion's "Zoloft for Everything" article. Perfect timing; it reads so much like the stuff I see at work.

Working in the bosom of Big Pharm is making me think. The pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (is there really such a diagnosis? it's definitely what I have) was really bad this month, longer than usual and involving a few paralyzing crying jags and a sh!tload of unfocused anxiety. Sifting through the doctors' diagnoses at work, I start to think, Gee, some people deal with depression as if it could be made to go away. I gave up on that a while ago. None of the social workers at Hampshire helped me any. I think I figured on my own that I was more depressed the week before my period -- four years ago, which was after about three years of mostly blaming my violent mood swings on my boyfriends, or else riding them out in terror that my body and mind were so unreliable.

It was about four years ago, too, that I told Catherine what I'd figured out about my depressive spells. She said Wow, that's a quarter of your life. I wouldn't want to spend a quarter of my life that way.

I mistrust. I have seen people who have taken Prozac up close, and watched them struggle with how it made them feel. I know someone who took Ritalin as a kid, and he has all sorts of weird vestigial compulsive behaviors and doesn't open up to you. I don't think drugs can just make these things go away.

I have taught myself, for the most part, to deal with the dysphoria. I remind myself to take things with a grain of salt during that week, as I may well be overreacting. I treat myself a little more gently. Experimentation with placebos -- whoops, herbal remedies -- seems to have helped a great deal, as have attention to my sleep habits, getting excercise, and making sure I take my usual vitamin supplement. (My serious depression kicked in at the beginning of my second year of college; I have wondered if this is related to the anemia I probably developed when I went vegetarian in the months before.)

The very knowledge that I'm pulling myself out of a tailspin seems to improve my mood greatly. In the same vein, I would also like to try biofeedback, though nobody seems to do that much anymore. I would really like to do without the drugs.

At the same time, these episodes are so violent that they sometimes make permanent marks on my life. I can't rely upon myself to make major decisions in these weeks. And the continuation of my dark spells as the years go by shakes my faith in myself, which for an aware leftist is sometimes the only thing there is to have faith in.

Posted by me at 2:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 9, 2003

Command Decision

I'm closing this blog, or at least the main column. It's no longer doing anything I need it to. This started as a place to write things that I didn't want to have to rewrite time after time for everyone I knew. Then it sort of turned into a place to testify. I've also conceived of it as an audition piece for writing someplace else; all in all, that's a mixed burden.

It has always been pretty personal, because that's how I work; in the last year, with a few scares about employers seeing the site, it has been harder to be personal and frank. It is also hard to know that there are people reading the site who I do not want to reveal myself to. I don't mean the general public -- I am generally an exhibitionist -- I mean people I know whose feelings about me I do not trust.

A number of my friends have blogs that are all news or all intellect; largely impersonal. Most of them are guys. I don't think they and others have realized what it has done when they have said to me "I could never post the kind of things you write" in a concerned tone of voice. It has pressed down the lid of this outlet.

There was a time in college when I realized that the poetry and essays I had been writing since high school were mostly just a form of therapy. Trying to harness this therapy for class assignments was ultimately harmful not just to my work, but to me. Writing for this blog has become problematic. This is a performance space. I have to entertain. I'm hobbled by my poor understanding of libel law and of the way others see me. I have developed a tone which is sometimes omniscient, more frequently just pretentious; sometimes nostalgic, sometimes hysterical, often preachy; and I hate it. It's not human. There is no room in it for flaws. I can't be as uninhibited as the illiterate teenagers whose blogs I look down on, and knowing my inhibitions and scorn at once makes me hate myself.

It is really hard to put this blog down. I've always been proud of the title Dancing Sausage; I'm glad I don't have a blog named after something someone else wrote. I want to be open. I want people to know what's going on. I love being an exhibitionist, really; I always have. But I'm finding that I come home on a given evening and think about how I can package my life for this space, and that just doesn't do me any good.

Something will still be here; in fact, it may not look like much of anything has changed, since the right-hand column is still going at a fair clip. But I'm closing the site to myself, in hopes I'll sit down with a blank book instead, and try writing sense out of myself, for myself, the way I used to.

Posted by me at 2:49 AM | TrackBack

May 8, 2003

Panthers, in flagrante delicto


Today Robert Durff sent a link to a story in CNN about the arrest of Katrina Leung, an alleged Chinese double agent, which, he alluded, had something to do with our high school in Pasadena. I scanned the entire article and was mystified by the connection -- the story had a Los Angeles dateline, but that was about it -- until I looked a little more carefully and realized that the man who was her FBI handler was in fact wearing a Poly Panthers hat in an accompanying picture. Catherine did a little more digging and discovered that not only was the FBI agent a Poly parent, but the double agent was as well.

Both spies are up on charges -- he is accused of handing off important documents to her, as they were apparently lovers. This kind of drama is sort of par for the course in Pasadena; the town is lousy with all sorts of questionable love affairs. (Scientology, if I recollect rightly, was founded on the wealth of a Caltech professor's wife who left her husband for L. Ron Hubbard.) The real surprise is hearing, out in the open, about Poly parents' dizzyingly global roles. This is the most intrigue to hit the school since "Mrs. Robinson" (the famous one, not the one who was our math teacher).

The Star News article calls Leung a "prominent political activist," while the CNN story calls her a "prominent Chinese-American businesswoman." I can't help but wonder which is more accurate, and what both of those lines of work entailed... No, no, wait -- I see now! CNN says she was a Republican fundraiser!

Posted by me at 8:39 PM | Comments (0)

May 6, 2003

They don't like educators, either


Went looking for information on harmful side-effects of sleep medications (more on that soon?) today and found myself on a page from the Citizen's Committee on Human Rights. Alarmingly, I didn't notice much was wrong until a link titled "How To Start" pointed at a Scientology page. While poking around, I found a page on how psychiatry is destroying the American educational system. Love the use of graphics.

Posted by me at 1:11 PM | Comments (2)

Notes From The Bowels Of A Pharmaceuticals Advertising Company

Beautiful� I just want you to know� You�re my favorite girl�

My supervisor's station plays it every day. I swear, if I hear it one more time� It induces a Groundhog Day feeling about the workday. Total hysteria, deep nagging questions about the meaning of life. Script by Harold Ramis. But I digress.

* * *

�Gillian, I love your hair! Every day a new style.� I got the exact same comment yesterday as today. It freaks me out, powerfully, as �style� implies some kind of forethought or planning. I showered last night, slept on my hair, and literally did not comb it at all this morning. I did not subject my hair to even milliseconds of being in the same room as a comb, even.

I want to say something like, Like it? My stylist is up on 72nd Street� His name is Max N�Aux, and the studio is N�Aux Kombe Hair Styles� I can�t quite figure out how to make that gag work when it�s not in writing, though.

Would they be offended? They�re always commenting on each other�s clothes and shoes and hair. I�d like to say this commercial environment evinces more comments on my wardrobe, but it�s not really any different from the nonprofits or universities where I�ve worked. Abby was always going on about my hair, even when it wasn�t purple, and the harpies in the Bronx, comfortable in their own pathetic, low-budget concessions to style, chuckled over what they called "the return of the gypsy look" when I came to work in a broomstick-pleat skirt.

Today someone asked my boss, who looks like she�s maybe ten years younger than my mom, whether she was a child of the 80s. No, she said, mustering annoyance at the speaker�s misperception; she was being pegged as younger than she really is, which might be flattering if it wasn't by an incongruous twenty years or so. I�m a child of the sixties, she said. Tie-dye, bell-bottoms.

Was that all it was to you?

This is the same woman who was all excited because her husband is buying a Harley-Davidson � �just because I can say he rides a Harley.� I wanted to tell her if he really wanted to make an impression she should get him to buy a Moto Guzzi or a Ducati, but for some people cool only runs so deep.

* * *

Captain Picard was right. I fucking love Earl Grey. There�s this moment at about � of the way through the cup if I�m going slowly where I just start thinking how much I love people, and I know it�s kicking in. I don�t know how many people would be maimed if I couldn�t get any.

Teamaking in this office is high-tech and mysterious. You get a nondairy-creamer-like plastic tub of tea (there are similar tubs of gourmet coffee) which you insert into a machine, put a cup underneath, press a button, and it dispenses a perfectly-brewed cup. No teabags to save to pretend you will brew a second cup later. No steeping to your twisted predilection for tannin burns on your tonsils. Just a plastic cup which the machine sucks into itself for safekeeping. There's something unholy about it.

* * *

Much of what I do here is decode doctors� handwriting on surveys. The legends of its illegibility are true. I�m kind of shocked, though, because I thought they were taking classes these days to improve it. I mean, it�s probably worse than usual, because who can be bothered to fill out a survey? Maybe it�s the only concession they�re making to the fact that the conferences they�re reviewing are obvious shills for an anti-insomnia drug which I will call Oblivien.

There�s a question on the survey that asks them to rate how objective and scientifically rigorous the presentations are. Almost all of them rank them completely or almost completely rigorous. This is frightening. I have heard my boss describe our division over the phone as �an educational company,� but it is an arm of an advertising firm. If these surveys are in my hands, in this office, it is evidence the conferences are marketing tools.

They work, too. The doctors get paid $250 to attend these "symposia," and they get wined and dined at swanky restaurants. A number of doctors write that they will use more Oblivien as a result of what the �faculty� at these events tell them. The overwhelming majority of them rank the presentations 4 or 5 on a one (not objective) to five (absolutely objective) scale. I've snooped into the PowerPoint presentations the speakers use (and surprisingly, only one doctor complained that the tone of the lecture was aimed too low), but it's hard to judge what is actually said at the symposia; I can't help but wonder how overt they are about pushing the drug. I have to hope the doctors are too smart for this bullshit, and what they say on the surveys is just an attempt to flatter the company so they can get another free lunch.

At one point in the survey, attendees are asked to describe a typical insomnia case in their practice. The question doesn't end "for which you would prescribe Oblivien," but a few of the doctors supply that they would use it. The cases they describe are wildly diverse: workers on the swing shift, patients with fibromyalgia, homesick college students, and depressives already on a cocktail of five drugs which leaves them agitated.

Some of the doctors paint elaborate, almost lurid scenarios in response to this prompt; one said he'd prescribe the drug to a middle-aged man under stress, who has been served papers by a wife he didn't know was cheating on him. You see this range of detail and grow even more certain they're looking to medicate away the rough edges of life.

One set of doctors say they plan to prescribe the drug for long-term use despite the fact that the drug is indicated for short-term use. Meanwhile, doctors from another lecture say they'll only use it briefly while easing patients onto anti-depressants. A third set of doctors, blessedly, register questions about the appropriateness of long-term use. But the lack of consensus is alarming, especially when one doctor says he'll use one class of drugs for children, while another says he would never do so due to side-effects.

Beyond spelling, the doctors can�t seem to be bothered to read questions. They give cryptic one-word answers open to interpretation. They answer �yes� to questions that ask for descriptions. Their grammar is positively atrocious. So much for twenty years of school.

I have a number of friends who are just now finishing up med school. I want to ask them: Does anyone in their schools talk about how drug companies further their interests? How much skepticism are they encouraged to have?

I just sit back and hope most of these doctors who appear to be so enthusiastic about the drug are just being facetious.

* * *

Periodically my supervisors and the office manager coo over how efficiently I work. We liked the girl who was here before you, don�t get us wrong, they say, but it took her a day to tabulate a survey you do in an hour. I wonder what took her so long? they say, shaking their heads.

I wonder where her blog is? I think.

Posted by me at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 5, 2003

Problems with comments


A couple of you have written to me today saying you've had trouble posting comments to the site. One of you even thought he had the solution ;) I've made a minor adjustment to my IP banning in hopes that will change things... Try again, let me know if it works, and if not, what specifically is not working (left column, center column, posting from home/work/nude/whatever). If this doesn't work I'll check in with Kellan again on how to make it stop.

In other news, the bigbig project I have been working on is almost done... all that stands between me and posting it is conversion of an interview into some workable audio format (any suggestions? I don't know how to do streaming. I have HyperEngine to work with).

Posted by me at 11:29 PM | Comments (1)

... We love you, you're a jumbo hero sandwich, top it off with Peter Mansbridge, two huskies and a bucket of poutine...


Slashdot ran a link to a very sly little piece from the Ottawa Citizen headlined U.S. says Canada cares too much about liberties -- Terrorism report also says too little spent on police." Now I don't just have to be jealous of Canadians generally, I have to specifically be jealous of the headline writer who got to bang that one out and the journalist who got to rub his heavily-gloved Canadian mitts together with glee before ripping into the U.S. Department of State's Patterns of Global Terrorism report.

This is almost the kind of article I used to write back at Hampshire... Since we didn't really have journalism professors at Hampshire (again I say that with all love to the anarchic David Kerr), I didn't really know how to do "objectivity." I'd fake an objective tone, but then juxtapose sentences in such a way that bias poured through. Once or twice while reading the Citizen article I was reminded of how I once made Steve Weisler roar with laughter ; witness:

"Also, Canadian laws and regulations intended to protect Canadian citizens and landed immigrants from government intrusion sometimes limit the depth of investigations."
Under the U.S.-Canada Terrorist Interdiction Program, known as TIP, Canada records about one "hit" of known or suspected terrorists a week from the State Department's visa lookout list.

Makes me wish I still had the liberty to write like that. so to speak.

Posted by me at 11:17 PM | Comments (0)

May 4, 2003

The Secret Lives of Want Ads

When I was in my impressionable pre-teen years, my mother and her also-recently-divorced roommate, Lennox, would periodically sit at the table and read classified ads aloud. They would make a game of decoding the hidden meanings of the ads. Most people are familiar with this code as it applies to real-estate ads: "cozy" means cramped, "lots of parking" means the yard has been paved over, "restorer's dream" means the place is totally run down, etc.

Mom and Lennox also decoded the personals ads. "Seeing SWF for good times" indicated the guy was afraid of commitment, and possibly also racist. Any man who opted to represent himself as someone who honestly liked candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach was either completely boring or trying to mask some serious social shortcoming.

But then, most personals ads in papers -- before the advent of the longer, more evocative ads that web dating services make possible -- were pretty uniform. I remember my mom getting a good, unironic chuckle out of an ad which rhymed; part of it ran "Lots of smarts, rarely farts." I was heartened by this. When I couldn't convince her to leave a message for the guy herself, I snuck a moment when she was out of our shared bedroom to call and leave a message. (It led with something like "Hi, my mom really liked your ad, but she's too shy to call...")

Lately I feel like I've been seeing the same subtle or not-so-subtle messages in job ads. Witness:

"Individual must have excellent communication skills"

Read: A former employee snapped at a client and caused an international incident. Please don't make us relive that scene.

Proofreader/copyeditor needed... in fast-paced Office of Communications to work closely with production artist.

Read: If you can't handle the production artist's caprice about sudden changes to the layout and tendency to blame someone else when she neglects details, forget it.

Similarly:

Must be able to work well under deadline pressure, enjoy teamwork, and take direction.

Read: We will give you more work than you can reasonably be expected to handle, and blame you when you don't finish it. If you don't get along with us personally, you're fired. Don't even think of challenging our directions.

This is an exciting position for a creative and energetic technology activist who is committed to social justice.

Read: "Social justice" clues those of us who are left of the Democrats (we call it "progressive;" the term "liberal" is generally viewed as a dirty word) in to the fact that the people at this organization are doing work that is more openly political, has a more systematic social critique, or possibly works further outside the political and grantmaking establishment than your average nonprofit/charity. People who don't understand these distinctions will find themselves alienated by -- or alienating to -- their co-workers in this job.
Meanwhile, "energetic" suggests that you will be given little to go on, have to make your duties up yourself, and be viewed with suspicion if you ask for support.

The ideal candidate is excited by the potential of bringing an understanding of government and political action to young people

Read: By contrast, "government and political action" suggests an organization that seeks to work inside the system. Don't bring your civil disobedience tactics here.

Women and people of color are strongly encouraged to apply.

Read: I'm going to take shit for saying this, but I've watched it happen: If you're white, especially if you're white and male, don't expect to get this job. The New York City nonprofit establishment tries to make up for the glass ceiling in the private sector by keeping itself female, and thinks its clients will be better served by people of color. On the latter, I think they're mostly right. How ensuring that nonprofits remain a female-dominated ghetto helps anyone is beyond me.

Seeking a hip and young freelancer to write articles, copy, and content for a local ISP in New York... Good chance for an unpublished net-marketing-copywriter to find a home. You don't have to be Hemmingway [sic] or James Joyce, but some sense of style and grammtical correctness is a plus.

Read: We have no idea what we're doing; we just need someone to fill space. Our ears are totally made of tin. And we wouldn't know Hemingway if he turned up as a zombie and bit us hard on the ass and turned us all into bluntly-spoken zombies (BRAIN. I EAT HIM BRAIN BUT GOOD) with an unholy urge to go out and fill the world with Great American Novels.

Posted by me at 11:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hairy Shearer's


For those of you who missed it, The Onion ran an interview with Harry Shearer week before last. They don't ask him anything about Le Show, which is fine, because they get him talking about things I (at least) didn't know about him. For example, that he was a child star on the Jack Benny show. He also says a good deal about how Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, Spinal Tap and the rest were made.

Posted by me at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

May 3, 2003

Jon Land and the Shambling Beebs


Jon Land has gotten coverage on the BBC for The Spam Letters! Yay Jon!

Posted by me at 12:49 AM | Comments (2)