When I was 14, my family moved to Brownsville, Texas, a sleepy little border town best known for being the birthplace of Kris Kristofferson and the site of the last battle of the Civil War, in that order, and was (and I'd wager, still is) a cultural black hole for anyone looking to do more with their lives than go to the mall or slink across the border and immerse themselves in the kaleidescopic debauchery of Matamoros, Mexico. At 17 I left for college, coming back as infrequently as I could. Though my emotional connection to it was always tenuous at best, with each passing year I felt further and further removed from the city and its inhabitants. Eventually my antipathy turned into outright hostility, and I spent the hot summer days in my room, marking time until the day I could leave again.
No, not my room. The guest room. When I left for college, my parents gave my room to my sister, Sabrina. And for good reason. Sabrina and Samantha had been sharing a room since we moved. So I got the guest room -- bigger room, bigger bed, bigger TV, bigger shower, but the guest room still, filled with dried flowers and cowboy art and other vaguely Southwestern bric-a-brac. By the fourth day back I was referring longingly to California as home and no doubt breaking my poor mother's heart.
In 1999 my family woke from our collective stupor and moved back to our house in Oakland.
The room I grew up in was again given to one of my sisters -- again with good reason, this time to Samantha -- and when I came home from college I was once again shunted off into a room bedecked year-round in autumn colors and filled with wicker furniture and scented candles.
Ah! Then Japan, and my own decorative instincts -- or woeful lack -- were allowed to run wild. Not fancy, not even coherent, but definitely, unmistakably mine. Four years of accumulated J-crap covering every square inch of my apartment, from a framed 1000 yen stuffed into my shirt pocket by the head of the Owase yakuza for helping push his car to a gas station, to a 3-foot high plaster statue of the English teacher in the town just north of mine, given to me by my office for reasons that never really became clear, to a Christmas cartoon drawn by a 13 year old boy that included the words, "SANTA, I WANT THE BIG PINIS!" My room. Mine.
Then the day came that I packed as much as I could into four suitcases and returned home. My room, my old room, sat unused at the end of the hall, still filled with Samantha's effects while she was off at school -- but my parents were reluctant to let me move into it for fear of Sam feeling like she'd been squeezed out, so I moved back into the erstwhile guest room. I did my best to decorate it, going so far as to fill the shelves of my desk with the a bunch of j-trinkets -- a plastic diorama of level 1 from Super Mario Brothers here, a miniature bust of Stalin there. That, combined with the inevitable pile of laundry and bedsheets on the floor, and the room began to feel like home.
It was, in fact, the process of rooting through crates of my old stuff for things to further solidify the mine-ness of my room that, choked with something I thought was nostalgia but turned into something more, I came across a box of 8-mm films I'd made in college. A month later I was sleeping on my sister's floor in New York. You know the rest. I planned to stay there through the holidays, not because I particularly wanted to spend Christmas and New Year's cold and alone but because returning to Oakland for the second time in less than two months without having found a paying job felt like an admission of defeat. But then my parents bought me a ticket, and I was give the choice of coming to California or saying that I simply didn't want to come home -- not something you want to drop on your mom and dad a week before Christmas.
So, I came home to find myself sleepin in a room that has again been transformed into a khaki and burnt umber panic attack. My stuff has been crammed into boxes and thrown into a closet, while the room down the hall -- the room I grew up in, the room I still think of as irrevocably, fundamentally mine -- is now Sarah's, having moved back home to live rent free while busting her ass at law school. Home for me now is a rickety futon and inflatable mattress on a floor in Spanish Harlem. So it will be, at least for a little while.
And so, the lesson relearned. You can't go home again, and again, and again.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Why, lo! I mop well! -- Who will employ?
Reading over my blog so far, it strikes me that it has become less a chronicle of my time in New York City than a long list of humiliations, embarrassments and failures. Still, there's no denying that humiliation, embarrassment and failure are an integral part of the New York Experience, and they make for far more interesting reading than a bland retelling of what time I got up, what I ate for lunch, who I slept with, or how I'm feeling. But sometimes the unending wave of serio-comic tragedy that has thus far characterized my time in this city gets the better of me, and as much as I'd like to jump on the two-point-oh-happy bandwagon and blog about how OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1, I actually find it necessary to process my complex and contradictory emotional psychoscape like a healthy, normal, functional goddamn human being. And sometimes I just want to talk about what I did today.
Luckily for everyone, today was a conflation of the two -- I can manage my frustrations through obsessive listing and categorization, and you can take some small pleasure out watching me squirm beneath this city's thumb. Hurrah!
OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1 With no end to the writers' strike in sight, film and television production is at a stand-still, which means that any cachet my plucky-30-year-old-moves-to-the-big-city-to-start-all-over narrative buys me is being eroded on a daily basis. When you're on a set asking people for any leads on paying work having just flown into town the night before, you look like a fucking champ. When you're calling up those same people for those same leads a month into the most acrimonious, industry-shaking work stoppage in memory, you just look like an asshole with terrible timing.
And so today I took it upon myself to find a job. Rode the 6 train to Union Square around noon and resolved not to return home without some form of employment, however low-paid or debasing. By 12:30, there were a few important caveats:
1. I will not be a hot dog/pretzel/kebab vendor.
2. I will not sell DVDs on the subway, however hot/new the releases.
3. I will not busk.
4. I will not work anywhere that requires me to wear a hat of any kind.
5. I will not expose myself for money. For money.
6. I will not work anywhere that boasts of its number of locations, nor will I work anywhere that I can see two or more of without turning my head.
7. I will not work anywhere that requires me to remain behind bullet-proof anything.
8. I will not work anywhere that has punctuation in the name.
So, short of the myriad other jobs I am simply unqualified for, like lawyer or professional banking millionaire, the wide field of potential employers was quickly narrowed to bookstores, bars and coffee shops. Each has its relative advantages and disadvantages, but they all share one important thing in common: they are all, in the end, far too depressing to consider working there full-time. Plus I need to keep my schedule flexible so I can, I dunno, dick around. Write. Whatever. The dream is safe.
I. Coffee Shops
Advantages: Cute tattooed chicks, free caffeine, access to cork boards filled with information on improv workshops, open-mic nights, one-woman shows and classical guitar lessons.
Disadvantages: Low pay, incessant clicking of laptop keys.
Snobbery Level: Medium to High
The money isn't the best, but it's the only job I've ever held that was absolutely, irrefutably, cause-and-effect responsible for getting me laid. She and I were working the special midnight to 6 am shift during finals at USC. I was 19, it was late, we were alone and she was kind of crazy. One thing lead to another lead to a bit of the ol' nudge-nudge, wink-wink. So far so good, but I heard she tried to kill herself my senior year, which is why thinking back on it fills me less with the manful pride of the conquerer than with terrible, creeping guilt. Am I right, fellas?!
II. Bars
Advantages: Cute drunk chicks, free alcohol, tips, the irony of having been a drug and alcohol counselor AND a bartender within a year too sweet to pass up.
Disadvantages: Even nice bars reek of piss and vomit, don't own any skin-tight black shirts, couldn't mix a Cosmopolitan to SAVE. MY. LIFE.
Snobbery Level: <scoff> Is that how you always dress?
The advantages are considerable, but almost half of the bars I walked into require a headshot before the manager will even speak to me. And while the idea of a job where it is not only acceptable, but expected for you to be drunk at work is almost too good to be true, there's some small part of me that thinks it probably is. Plus, I don't know if I could bring myself to serve any thing with more than two words in the name or "-tini" affixed to the end.
III. Bookstores
Advantages: Cute nerdy chicks, free books, can say "Oh, well, that's Kierkegaard for you," and not have anyone call me on my bullshit.
Disadvantages: Air of quiet desperation, tried to hire me before I even asked for a job.
Snobbery Level: Can you start right now? How about tomorrow? Maybe you should fill out two applications, just to be safe.
Like most writers (or rather, like most people who tell people they're writers to make their unemployment seem noble) I love bookstores. My favorite used to be Book Soup on Sunset in L.A. I applied for a job there right after college, made it through the interview, and passed the drug and lie-detector(!) tests. I was set to start work the next week. That was on September the 10th. Then guess what happened? Maybe I should work at a bookstore just to stick it to Osama and finally even the score.
It started getting dark around five. With no job and no real solid leads I was feeling pretty rotten and decided to head home. On the way to the station I passed another intern on The Show Which I Am Contractually Forbidden From Naming. I told him I was walking around looking for a job, and we talked for a few minutes about unemployment and its general suckiness. I'm just a set intern, so I only go in on days we shoot. He's been doubling as an office intern, which means he is getting not paid to do five times the work. Or was. Turns out he was fired from the show last week. By Rosemary. He seemed reluctant to say more, but I said a few unkind words about her myself and he relaxed. Then he said a curious thing: "I thought you guys were friends." I assured him we aren't.
"Really? She talks about you all the time."
Suck it, Rosemary.
Luckily for everyone, today was a conflation of the two -- I can manage my frustrations through obsessive listing and categorization, and you can take some small pleasure out watching me squirm beneath this city's thumb. Hurrah!
OMG! LOOKING 4 WERK SUXCKS!!!!!!!11!!1 With no end to the writers' strike in sight, film and television production is at a stand-still, which means that any cachet my plucky-30-year-old-moves-to-the-big-city-to-start-all-over narrative buys me is being eroded on a daily basis. When you're on a set asking people for any leads on paying work having just flown into town the night before, you look like a fucking champ. When you're calling up those same people for those same leads a month into the most acrimonious, industry-shaking work stoppage in memory, you just look like an asshole with terrible timing.
And so today I took it upon myself to find a job. Rode the 6 train to Union Square around noon and resolved not to return home without some form of employment, however low-paid or debasing. By 12:30, there were a few important caveats:
1. I will not be a hot dog/pretzel/kebab vendor.
2. I will not sell DVDs on the subway, however hot/new the releases.
3. I will not busk.
4. I will not work anywhere that requires me to wear a hat of any kind.
5. I will not expose myself for money. For money.
6. I will not work anywhere that boasts of its number of locations, nor will I work anywhere that I can see two or more of without turning my head.
7. I will not work anywhere that requires me to remain behind bullet-proof anything.
8. I will not work anywhere that has punctuation in the name.
So, short of the myriad other jobs I am simply unqualified for, like lawyer or professional banking millionaire, the wide field of potential employers was quickly narrowed to bookstores, bars and coffee shops. Each has its relative advantages and disadvantages, but they all share one important thing in common: they are all, in the end, far too depressing to consider working there full-time. Plus I need to keep my schedule flexible so I can, I dunno, dick around. Write. Whatever. The dream is safe.
I. Coffee Shops
Advantages: Cute tattooed chicks, free caffeine, access to cork boards filled with information on improv workshops, open-mic nights, one-woman shows and classical guitar lessons.
Disadvantages: Low pay, incessant clicking of laptop keys.
Snobbery Level: Medium to High
The money isn't the best, but it's the only job I've ever held that was absolutely, irrefutably, cause-and-effect responsible for getting me laid. She and I were working the special midnight to 6 am shift during finals at USC. I was 19, it was late, we were alone and she was kind of crazy. One thing lead to another lead to a bit of the ol' nudge-nudge, wink-wink. So far so good, but I heard she tried to kill herself my senior year, which is why thinking back on it fills me less with the manful pride of the conquerer than with terrible, creeping guilt. Am I right, fellas?!
II. Bars
Advantages: Cute drunk chicks, free alcohol, tips, the irony of having been a drug and alcohol counselor AND a bartender within a year too sweet to pass up.
Disadvantages: Even nice bars reek of piss and vomit, don't own any skin-tight black shirts, couldn't mix a Cosmopolitan to SAVE. MY. LIFE.
Snobbery Level: <scoff> Is that how you always dress?
The advantages are considerable, but almost half of the bars I walked into require a headshot before the manager will even speak to me. And while the idea of a job where it is not only acceptable, but expected for you to be drunk at work is almost too good to be true, there's some small part of me that thinks it probably is. Plus, I don't know if I could bring myself to serve any thing with more than two words in the name or "-tini" affixed to the end.
III. Bookstores
Advantages: Cute nerdy chicks, free books, can say "Oh, well, that's Kierkegaard for you," and not have anyone call me on my bullshit.
Disadvantages: Air of quiet desperation, tried to hire me before I even asked for a job.
Snobbery Level: Can you start right now? How about tomorrow? Maybe you should fill out two applications, just to be safe.
Like most writers (or rather, like most people who tell people they're writers to make their unemployment seem noble) I love bookstores. My favorite used to be Book Soup on Sunset in L.A. I applied for a job there right after college, made it through the interview, and passed the drug and lie-detector(!) tests. I was set to start work the next week. That was on September the 10th. Then guess what happened? Maybe I should work at a bookstore just to stick it to Osama and finally even the score.
It started getting dark around five. With no job and no real solid leads I was feeling pretty rotten and decided to head home. On the way to the station I passed another intern on The Show Which I Am Contractually Forbidden From Naming. I told him I was walking around looking for a job, and we talked for a few minutes about unemployment and its general suckiness. I'm just a set intern, so I only go in on days we shoot. He's been doubling as an office intern, which means he is getting not paid to do five times the work. Or was. Turns out he was fired from the show last week. By Rosemary. He seemed reluctant to say more, but I said a few unkind words about her myself and he relaxed. Then he said a curious thing: "I thought you guys were friends." I assured him we aren't.
"Really? She talks about you all the time."
Suck it, Rosemary.
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