employablog

In a tense, team moment I shaved my head. It isn’t a skinhead thing, more along the lines of that guy from Maroon 5. A Daniel Day Lewis over a Moby. You get the idea, there is a tasteful amount of fuzz, augmented by an equally tasteful beard. But that isn’t the point, of course I look good. The point is the haircut + office phenomenon, and a phenomenon it is.

I caused a commotion, and I love attention, but even I was overwhelmed. I haven’t gotten this much attention from people who are, essentially strangers, since I broke my arm in 10th grade before Battle of the Bands. That and homecoming court. The point is, barring terrible injuries and high school popularity contests, nothing turns heads like a haircut. I walked into work, and right away my boss’ boss pointed and said, “Whoa, haircut.”

My friend crush in some other department said, “Wow, it was time. What do people think? Me, I like it, great improvement” (He is foreign).

A woman I had never talked to or seen in my life, but I knew worked there (since she was there, why else) said that she really loved my haircut.

This sort of thing went on, all day. When I walked into my section it was like Christina Applegate walking on the set for “Married With Children.” I didn’t blush, but I didn’t pull up my skirt either. I tried to divert attention to my new chucks that came in the mail, but to no avail. It was haircut this, haircut that, I had quite a day. Furthermore, this weekend seemed to have been some sort of haircut nexus. Cube neighbor friend also got a dramatic haircut. (Dramatic: read, when done, it looks like there is a dead Lhasa Apso on the floor). Amazingly clever cube neighbor friend also got a haircut this weekend. In one graceful and parsimonious gesture he pointed at his head, my head and winked.

The only thing you can do to get more attention at work, it seems, is have a baby.

I was on the subway today with someone I respect, someone much smarter than me—one of my roommates. He actually made it in the journalism world.  He had a job, he even had an intern that would do his beckoning.  Then, get this, while at the job, the job that gave him a minion (a girl minion at that!) another job called him, and plucked him away, a few blocks south and one avenue block over. This job gave him even more money and less responsibility.

The bottom line is, this guy is smart and he’s not a douche.  We eat together and talk about stuff and love and laugh and live. It isn’t gay, it’s just pleasant.

So, we were on the L train, rubbing up on every other 20-something being whisked from the tip of Brooklyn to some office somewhere in Manhattan to sit at a computer inside some building and do something that on its own doesn’t shake the earth very much, but if you sum it all, still doesn’t shake very much.

I told him that I felt high, I had a cold and had just taken some sudafed to trade my cold symptoms for sudafed symptoms, which are both fun and harrowing in a carpeted mid-morning cubicle.

“Thank God it’s Friday,” he said. And he meant it. Other people said that today at work, people I also respect and enjoy. They say it, and they mean it, not noticing what they’re really saying. T.G.I.F. is only appropriate if referring to the blockbuster lineup of Full House, Step by Step, Family Matters and Boy Meets World. Other than that, strictly prohibited, it goes hand-in-paw with douchebaggery and being a big ‘ol toolbox. But something happens after enough 9 - 5 I think where people forget, they get tired, and in a quiet moment of desperate relief, it slips out with a pathetic little splash into the cosmos.

Thank God it’s Friday.

It’s ruined the same way you can’t say “Can you hear me now?” trying to get bars on your cell phone because of that assclown with the thickframed glasses who shows up everywhere. Instead you flip the syntax, claw for synonyms. “Now you hear me?” “Your hearing of my, it is better?” “Improved sounds go to you?” Those bastards, they took the easiest one and pooped on its face.

But back to TGIF, this phrase is both ruined by certain chain restaurants and a history of desperate smalltalk at the coffee pot, water cooler, what have you. It means that you suffer five days to live two, that isn’t me.

And it’s a cliché, and you know what they say about those don’t you?

They’re bad.

I’m learning how to be an office worker, and it’s hard. I’ve worked from 9 - 5 before, or at least some incarnation of a job that occupies the best hours of the day and seems to start a little too early to be fun. But up until now they are jobs of brute force, not blue collar — no collar, hell, sometimes no shirt. But, even on hangover days I never felt the crushing weight of all the world’s pent-up slumber like I do in my cubical (though my office terms them, pods.

This isn’t an attack on officeland, or my job. I like my job. But something about sitting for eight hours each day is not natural, it’s not right. I’ll take it any day over landscaping or waiting tables (my last two 9 - 5s) but it is not something that my body likes doing. But I slip into these trances. They aren’t sleep, let me be clear, they are trances.

I am awake, my eyes are open — I’m not slouched over like some dry-mouth geek. I’m even doing work during these trances, of (validated by outside sources) decent quality. I try to stay away from trances, but on a sleepy morning, the gray columns of copy and equations zonk my conscious out and I turn into editing robot, somnambulically marking pages and verifying changes.

But I’ll still be my conscious is a better editor than my subconscious.