employablog

Over the last few days in anatomy lab I’ve ventured into the bowels of … the bowel. Before starting dissection, I had happy notions that maybe they empty the cadavers our before we see them, maybe they stuff them with potpourri.

So not the case. My professor ambled over, reached his hands into our bodies abdomen and started poking around.

“Mhmm, mhmm,” he said, squinting his eyes, “Oh yes! This feels just like a live specimen! Seems you have a very light preservation.”

‘Light,’ here is a euphemism for “not.” We have something that should be preserved, but is not, so it is decaying.

He then went on, destroying my ideas of cleanliness.

“So, for you guys, under no means are you to open the colon. If you do, yknow, just yell ‘CODE BROWN,’ and I’ll run out the room.” He smiled and laughed, and walked away.

Since then, there have been a few silent code browns, and today, as I was doing my …

my business. It’s what I do after I finish my coffee, I noticed a familiar smell.

Dead poo smells just like real live poo.

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.

Hello, work? Are you out there?

It’s me, Ryan. I’m bored. I’m trying to find something to do. I know, we both thought it would never come to this, but short story longer, it has.

It turns out that doing nothing at work is much more difficult than doing something, and infinitely more difficult than doing nothing at home.

Work ebbs and flows, and sometimes its ten-feet thick with floatsom and jetsam, and other times it’s fished out. And while this week is a calm before a storm, it’s a frustrating calm that lasts from 10 AM to 6 PM each day, guaranteed since I am paid hourly.

So while I’ve developed coping mechanisms, they are somewhat maladaptive. I drink water constantly so I can urinate as many times as possible. Same with coffee, only for twosies. I check my email infinitely, and have sparked long-lost, new-lost, new-fangled and spangled conversations on instant messenger. And I’ve been playing with travel websites so much that it’s even a little vulgar.

But now it’s Friday. On my way out the Russian maid will say in a heavy bolshevik accent,

“Thank God It Fridayed,”

And I’ll agree, wish her a happy weekend, and pray that tech spits me something by Monday.

Doing nothing at work is not relaxing, it’s actually high stress. My boss gives me my work, but I’m in direct observation by my boss’ boss. While he is also my supervisor, he does not give me work, nor does he have work to dole. He’s a nice guy, and for that, I do not want to make too apparent, the great stack of nothing, that I am working on.

I’ve even been asking for work, tagging along to irrelevant meetings and being more proactive than pimple wash (oo, that’s a good one).

Thank God It Fridayed.

I just started my second week of my first real job, and beyond all the things I expected with being vaulted into the upper-lower-class-white-grey-collar society, one of the most pervasive is my changed poop schedule.

From working 40 hours a week, balancing a Sunday restaurant shift and trying to eke my money’s worth out of a gym membership (I’m a little too svelte), I am gone a lot.  And between all the coffee I drink, and my bizzarre and obsessive eating habits and my bizzarre and obsessive working-out habits, pooing away from the home is a necessity.  Factor in me never really being home except directly before and after sleep, and additionally factor in my dashing regularity and I’m pooing in foreign territory so often that I almost consider not making a toilet-pater seat caddy each time.

Though crazy thoughts like that never last more than mere nanoseconds, same with crazy thoughts like using my hand instead of a the tip of my shoe to flush and / or lower the seat.  But now, I am fully into and accepting of pooing in nearly anything that flushes.  But I’ve also crafted an alarming Howard Hughesesque ritual that surrounds each of these trips, and they go, hand-in-trembling-hand throuhout each day.

Everyone should work in a restaurant, you learn important things there.  As someone recently pointed out *probably Joel* struggle is more interesting.  It’s better to write about, it’s better to read about and hell, it’s perspective.  So, delving into my recent food service experience, in the first of many parts, I’m going to tell you about Jesus.

Jesus, pronounced “Hey, soos!,” stands just over five feet tall, and he does not have an easy life.  He works over 60 hours a week, often 18-hour shifts just to scrape by doing the shit work at my restaurant.  He walked to the border with his friend Felix, also a dishwasher (and also very, very small) over the course of a few weeks.  They were starving, but they made it.  And then they came to the United States.  Felix has a bit of a harder time than Jesus because apart from the blessed name, he also speaks an indigenous language, being fluent in neither English nor Spanish.

Jesus wears a red Yankees cap to work every day, and has a smile that stretches all across his face.  He has a slightly high pitched face, and really, is just an adorable little guy.  But he is 43-years old, and does not have an easy life.  He has children back in Mexico.  Once I wrote a script in English for him to go and buy an international phone card at the bodega, during which I realized, that I can write better in Spanish than he can.  Not as a matter of pride nor showmanship, but this poor guy never got a decent go, even in his native country.

Today Jesus showed up in his red cap, as always, but he was also wearing a smart button-down short sleeve shirt, with good pastels and stripes.

“Que guapo!” I told him, to which Jesus told me that today was an important day.  I knew, because yesterday, he opened his wallet and showed me a tiny scrap of paper with a name and a number: Elena, and we’ll go 555 … from there.

“Ella habla Español y Inglés, y solo cuesta trienta dolares,” Jesus me dijo.

“She speaks Spanish and English and only costs 30 dollars,” Jesus told me.

And even though era comprando amor para una noche, Jesus still dressed like it was his first date, and confessed to be just as nervous as he left work to go meet Mary Magdalene.

A large part of what I do for a living involves using the Google to track down specific facts, numbers, and statistics about the industries or companies that I happen to be looking into that day.

Of course, another large part of what I do during the day involves using Google to read news, send emails, look up friends‘ blogs (I still don’t know how to spell parantheses), check the weather in Minnesota and find the cheapest price of some classic book that I’ve happened to have decided that I can’t go any longer without reading or at least owning.

This has resulted in Google becoming hopelessly confused about me and my interests. Am I a dedicated businessman interested in tools to help me find cash flow information on the high-tech companies in my portfolio? Am I a marketer interested in buying $100k consumer preference datasets? Maybe I’m an 18-year-old myspacer who might like to watch a Coca-Cola sponsored YouTube video about a couple guys spending the week crossing the country in their new Ford Focus. Or a school librarian who needs more tools for cataloging my copies of The Old Man and the Sea and On the Road.

I’ve noticed the Amazon recommendation engine has the same problem. Its suggestions for me involve lots of scholarly studies of international relations and environmental economics (required college reading), a few John Mayer and Dave Matthews CDs (presents for my sister), and The West Wing, Seasons 2-7 (wow Amazon, really going out on a limb on that one, huh? I wonder what tipped you off?).

The point is, because my searches for work are combined with my searches for whatever else it occurs to me to look at, Google can’t seem to get a good read on where the hell I’m going with my life. Google, I feel your pain.

Really, though, most of what Google decides I might want doesn’t seem to match me at all. Google is laughably off-base. Google couldn’t be more wr— wait, how much did you say that book categorization software is? And actually, that dataset might be kind of useful, I should ask my boss if we should buy it and OH MY GOD Google knows me better than I know myself.