Love/Hate

Love this: someone just said, "if there isn't a word for what you do, say you're a consultant." With that in mind, I am considering one of the following for business cards:

• Candy Consumption Consultant (This would appeal to niche consumers of those teeny gummy cola bottles I'm something of an expert on)
• Persona Development Consultant (Who do you need to be? Valuable office employee? Attentive friend/wife/sibling? Let me help you develop an alter ego to handle the demands. Again, I'm something of an expert here)
• Conversation Survival Consultant, Small Talk and Other (Need a few quips? A couple stock phrases? Accurate weather reports for elevator encounters? Let me be your guide through the wonderful world of all things conversationally meaningless)
  

Hate this: the word "bespoke". In the first place, it's of British origin. Tossing it around as though it belongs to us is like saying, "I'd like a spot of tea" when you really mean you want a Lipton, no sugar, to go. Here, a few translations:

Bespoke Tailoring: Don't you dare bring that in if it's not a peach-colored blazer.
Bespoke Wood Floors: Only for people whose feet are free of those gross flip-flop heel callouses.
Bespoke Lingerie: If you've got back fat, we can't help you.

Love/hate this: Yoga.

Love this: You can order beer served in 16, 24 and 32-ounce mugs at the Halifax airport. When you place your order the waitress asks if you want the "junior", "man" or "lady" size.

"I'll have a 32-ounce lady, please".

The Truth

This girl I know, she:

• Has no (secondary) hometown pride.
• Likes that one song -- what is it called?
• Prefers white tuna to spicy tuna to fatty tuna to hamachi to yellowtail to eel.
• Feels guilty when she leaves a penny lay.
• Doesn't send food back if the kitchen gets it wrong.
• Looks forward to self-medicating.
• Only pretends to know what elegiac means.
• Hates parties and always has.
• Wastes money.
• Wastes time.
• Wastes money all the time.
• Doesn't hold the elevator, even when she can.
• Is wearing the wrong shoes again.
• Wishes she had never loaned out her copy of The Player.
• Apologizes for shit she didn't do.
• Has no available credit.
• Makes kissy faces in the mirror.
• Once watched a man steal a hat.
• Is losing her edge.
  

Alas, she's just a girl. And so am I.
We are, in the end, only girls.

I'm Going Through Change-Eh-Heh-Hehs

Let's start with: this hair.

Okay, when I first started this blog a super, duper long time ago, it was about change. I don't know if it's my seasonal internal turnover or the fact that I've recently found myself staring for too long at other womens' skirts and sandals, but oh yes, something's gonna give. I can feel it.

I'm thinking the first thing that's gotta go is this somber blog background. Butter yellow, perhaps? Something change-y and inspiring. If only one could "live" with a new blog color for a few days by painting little stripes of different hues on its walls as if it were a baby nursery or sun room...

Speaking of color, in my quest to be ever blonder, a new hairstyle has been whispering my name. I really want one of those platinum faux hawks. Now, before you say "but you just achieved The Kate Moss", here's my thinking: I need a shake-up. I need to find out if I have a single edge left in me or if it's time to start looking for a house on Long Island.

Besides, my Ipod is dying and I may have to dig out my old Walkman. In that case, I really have to have an ironic-cool hairstyle or I'll just look old and sad and broken.

Lloyd Dobler is My Career Counselor

Hello, fellow Chrysalians. Or Chrysali. Or, whatever. We need to come up with a good moniker for perpetual changelings. But that's not important now.

If I haven't lately, it's time once again for me to post my favorite movie monologue because, well, it's just so goddamn true. I've been chanting it like an all-out mantra because someone recently asked me what a day in my future perfect life would look like. While I still can't seem to encapsulate that elusive end-goal in John Hughes' tight, resonant language, I can damn well explain what I don't want to be doing in Cameron Crowe's shot-like-a-bullet-through-the-heart dialogue.

With that, I hereby invoke the spirit of the great Lloyd Dobler to assassinate the contract database builder who is currently revamping our office's inventory system (and blowing out my eardrums with pretentious minutiae). I call Lloyd forth to go to battle with this guy's words, because they are the absolute manifestation of everything I am categorically sure I never want to do. So, take that, "duplicative", "inventory" and "multi-platform menu". St. Lloyd has granted me protective status. I will never, never be that guy.

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

Maybe Lloyd was right. Kickboxing is the sport of the future.
I'm gonna have to look into that.

Ode to Jim (Or, What Do I Have to Do to Get a Decent Rock Star Around Here?)

I caught the Doors doc "When You Are Strange" on American Masters last night and went to bed dreaming of Pamela Courson's ironed red hair. I used to want to be her. In high school I had a thing for the arm candy of legends. Of course now I know it's not cool to idolize the dead junkie girlfriends of dead junkie rock stars. But still, I'd love to have her small nose.

This is a lament, really.

Man, they don't make 'em like they used to. Where are the self-styled rockers who can pull of a concho belt? I want spectacle, dammit. Bright stars who sizzle into burnouts. I love a deeply conflicted hero. Snarling, soulful screamer-poets? Yeah, those are my boys.

And the band, my God. When was the last time you went to a concert where 16 cops stood on stage keeping the peace? That's a show, my brothers and sisters, stamped with this warning: the frontman may or may not pull his dick out, but there are sure going to be decency rallies in response. Oh, how I want to live in that antagonistic world!

I know, I know, Jim's was a different time. There was actually a youth movement, a counterculture. Conservatism was worth bumping up against in your brown leather pants back then. I read somewhere that this is not a world a 60-something Jim Morrison could live in. True for Janis, too. And Jimi, for that matter. This time, our time--NOW--it's gone all tepid and complacent. We can't handle real rock stars anymore. We can't build 'em, either.

Sure, I've loved many. Stephen, Robert, Finn, Eugene. But I've never loved one who actually changed anything except the landscape of my heart. That's not enough, lads. I want it epic. The Doors still sell a million records a year. A million. Most of my sweethearts would be lucky to see a gold record in their dreams. And for a long time that's actually why I loved them. But watching that footage of Jim at the Hollywood Bowl again got me thinking, I'm witnessing a bona fide supernova. And I know, record volume's not the point. It's value.

But I want bigger bang.

'Tis a Quiet Thing, Ain't It?

I did a thing today -- a thing that's taken two, nearly three years to do. I put myself out there. In a big way. In the kind of big way where one risks crushing and crumbling of tender butterfly wings, etc, etc, etc, if it doesn't work out. We sent our pilot to LA, in a beautiful package, stuffed with enough airy popcorn dreams to fill an entire warehouse with wishing. There are times when every cliche on earth truly applies. Now would be one. I'll unleash a few:

"It's not the destination, it's the journey"
"80% of success is just showing up"
"Want it and it will be"
"Just do it" (whoops, where'd this one come from?)

And then there are parts of the journey where no pre-packaged, well-branded slogan applies. Today is a day when the act of breaking through a pane of glass to get to something I could see right in front of me all along is monumental in a way that no one will ever value as much as I do. It's a quiet thing, to borrow one of my favorite lyrics from the great Kander and Ebb. A very quiet thing.

It was supposed to happen in a big, loud way. We'd planned for 5 months to put that pilot package in the mail together with a big, ceremonial flourish and then rush off to Balthazar to drink a minimum of two bottles of champagne and eat shellfish. Celebratory, right? Hell yeah! And then, naturally, those good old best laid plans pulled themselves up and re-laid themselves elsewhere (isn't that the cliche?). For a virtual plethora of tech-heavy reasons, the pilot didn't go out on our big day. But we went out. We went out and swam to the bottom of a couple of bottles of this and that, trying to internalize that whole "ratio of expectation to reality" thingy.

Five furious days later, today, I took it to the post office myself. I filled out the forms and addressed the labels and held it to my chest and surrendered it and waited until I walked outside the building to exhale. And that was that. Me and it. It and me. In my hands and then gone.

A very quiet thing, indeed.
And maybe, in the spirit of all things Chrysalis, the very best thing.

What Color is Your Bulletin Board?

My office is moving. Yes, yes, I'm moving with it but we'll get back to that.

I've been here for seven years, in this exact space. Before that I was in another office in the same building for two years. All told that's nine years of my life. Half of my twenties and nearly half of my thirties. Packing an office you've been in for almost a decade is revelatory, to say the least. It's also depressing and humbling. I've spent two weeks packing my desk, which is one of those executive-y, cherry colored beasts that's so heavy the management has decided to just leave it behind. In the new office I will be facing a wall, but hey, I'll be sitting at a fancy-shmancy glass drafting table. So practical!

Moving on...

I've had a large cork bulletin board above my desk since the day I started working here, back in 2001. I never look at it except when I need the number off a Rolodex card I've got pinned up there or to confirm the time zones in Japan (I'll be taking that handy chart with me). But when I removed the tacks from its pocked surface today I saw what's really been three inches from my face for nine years. Archives.

Today I removed from my bulletin board:

1.) Two postcards: one my brother sent me when he lived in Nantes and one my sister sent me from her honeymoon in Belize. When I look at the backs of them I see their handwriting and wonder what they would think of themselves if they were to read them now.

2.) Four photos: one of me standing on the Peak to Peak Highway in Colorado in a pair of hot pink flip flops. It was taken the summer before my wedding when I still had a head of long, chocolate colored hair. That summer was the last before I started thinking about Botox. I also found a self-portrait from my father with a ridge of blue-veined mountains behind him, one of me and my siblings at the only Thanksgiving we've celebrated together since I moved to New York in '95, and a shot of my husband and I on a Portland ferry before we were married. He's been asking me to take it down since I started the job because he thinks it makes him look like my pregnant lesbian partner. It's down to stay. I think I finally see it now.

3.) A mass card from a funeral I attended just after September 11th. He was only 26.

4.) A fortune cookie fortune that reads: "A new voyage will fill your life with untold memories." It had no idea.

5.) A clipping from the Indianapolis Star that my grandma sent me in 2001. It's that photo of the men at the World Trade Center site raising that famous cross-shaped metal beam from the wreckage. On the top of it she wrote in lower case letters: "oh yes". I havent' seen her handwriting in more than three years.

6.) My own handwriting on a yellow sticky note, which was buried under two address cards and the directions for how to print a Quicken report. It 's Freud, imagine that. "When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it." Obviously not true. However, I do remember pinning that up during the 2006 winter Olympics. The American skater Sasha Cohen quoted him in an interview (weird). At the time, I must've thought it would be as easy as pinning up a sticky note to remind myself.

When I look at the remains of the bulletin board in my box I hear my own voice calling out to me. I see life and death and souvenirs. I think about how much I've seen and how much there is still to see. And I realize that everything changes, in spite of us. Everything changes. Always.