employablog

First: Employee One, where are you? We miss you.

Come back, OK?

Next: I am a unique character. I leave impressions. For example, I play the “misheard,” game. It’s easy, and you can play it at home. Someone says, anything to you and you simply say a word that sounds similar, phrased as a question, or in a related statement.

Say that you say to me, “I like those new pants,”

Then I would reply, “I would love to dance!”

Then the person usually thinks you misheard accidentally, not that you are just being a douchebag, and clarifies.

“No, no, pants, I like those pants.”

Now we are in round two. I would say something like,

“Yeah, those ants are crazy.”

It goes on like this until someone catches on, and yells at me.

But, and especially now, the general public found a comeback to my particular breed of hyjinx. They say:

“I can’t believe you’re going to be a doctor.”

School’s Work’s out for summer!

Yesterday, just a little past six I walked away from my first and last office job ever. My six-month amble through rush-hour commuting, fabric cubicle walls, beady fluorescent lighting and high-school office cliquery is over, and it wasn’t so bad.

But my life is on a different road, and will have so much more.

During my last two weeks I’d get a lot of,

“I can’t believe you’re leaving us,” and “Oh! We’ll miss you! Who said you could leave?!”

It’s nice to feel wanted and loved, but I had no idea what to do with these. I was leaving, and elated, so, it wasn’t really that bittersweet, more along the lines of sweet. There is something grating and awful about moving the same way as all of humanity every day. We all get on the subway to arrive at work between 9 and 10 in the morning. Then we all pile out to the same places for lunch between noon and 1:30 in the afternoon. Then we all go home at the same damn time, after which we all go to the gym and then the grocery store.

Rush hour is nothing new. I understand why it exists, and God bless Chris Tucker. But this is more — it goes beyond the motions to and from the office, it reaches into everything. I can wear little skull earrings all I want, but I felt like my individuality was starting to crumble away.

And that is why I’m a quitter, at least in terms of this J O B. Now I’m off the schedule and finally on to the last leg of the first next leg of my track.

So, thank you work, you made this year possible, funded my trip to Peru and helped me, well, survive.

Smell ya later work, next time we meet I’ll have a scalpel.

The server where all my work is just went down. It could go up at any minute, but for now, it isn’t. Since all my work is there, that is why i am here. Server-down-day tastes sweet for the moment, but like any high-interest loan, we’ll all have to pay, and the sooner, the better.

BUT

In the meantime, I saw one of the higher ups, y’know, a guy who has not only an office, but an office with windows, walking by. I see him doing normal human things over the course of a week. Eating, getting coffee, washing his hands. He’s a normal guy, glasses, wavy short hair, mid to late 30s, but today he was doing something extraordinary.

He was wearing one of the best shirts ever. I instantly saw myself in that shirt. I was wearing my silver corduroy jacket, and a stylish hat, slightly askew. I was walking somewhere, nay — ambling. That was the kind of confidence this shirt exuded.

Or I was sipping espresso at an outdoor cafe, hiding behind a pair of aviators, reading something inspiring, like The Sound and the Fury … or Penthouse.

The shirt was bright pink, just a shade below overstated. It would never be called “pastel.” It had thin striping of a lighter shade of pink, just a shade above understated, and also definitively not pastel. Moreover, this shirt was anything but neon, rather it was classy. A cafe racer would don this shirt, he’d fucking don it with aplomb. And I want to don it too.

As I watched the boss-man swish away, I wanted to call out,

“Wait .. don’t go. Let’s talk, how are you?”

I would get him to see me as an equal, I would make small talk happen readily, dancing around the weather, Fridays and the weekend. It would be such great small talk that he would thank me before leaving and then I’d say,
“Wait … one more thing — where did you GET that shirt, I must have one.”

But it was too late. He had swished away, and with that, so had my dreams of that perfect shirt swished away like so many dried leaves on a windy November hill.

Taking it back to Freud, back to basics, there are two kinds of people—those who hold it in, and those who fling it at the walls of their cage.

I am expulsive, or more palatable, exceptionally regular. And right now this is my salvation. I go to the bathroom fingers crossed that the handicapable (though their capability is lacking ability) stall is free. And if it is, I am set. This stall has it all. Room, a sink, a mirror and paper towels, though, curiously enough, no soap. So if I ever see some relieved guy wheeling out of the men’s room, I’ll know not to shake his hand.

So I wash my hands outside of the stall.

But I have learned two tricks to deal with slow times at work, and they have two logical handles:

No. 1

No. 2

Number one is an easy game.  I drink as much water and coffee as I can and see how many times I can urinate in one day, and as I am a runner, it’s also logical.  Number two, well, I’m just really, a really regular guy.

My twosies have become a form of yoga.  Western yoga.  I zen out, punching the middle out of the toilet paper seat guard and TPing up any other yogi’s leavings.  Then I sit, and think, and push a little until inspiration hits.  Sometimes it’s a way to wake up, sometimes it’s an excuse to leave the chair, and sometimes it’s a way to just get out when my area is too hot, too cold, too crowded, too something.

And the best part is, that legally, technically and morally I am getting paid to do this.

So for five to seven minutes a day, I have the best job ever.

And I drink a lot of coffee, see No. 1 for more information.

Last Sunday it was nearly 70 degrees. People ran around wearing tee shirts in January, and ladies wore head-turning outfits. And it was not right.

On Monday every desk had a two-page green memo paperweighted by a new mug.

“Presents!” I shouted, sticking my apple sticker on my mug and going to the coffee machine.  The mugs replaced the waxy paper coffee cups, and are part of the greening of our office.  The memos were on our new recycling initiative, and my heart warmed, this time not from the greenhouse gases.

I mean, I’m from Minnesota, our biggest attractions center around lakes.  The North Shore, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, these are treasures.  But now they compete, and lose, to Minnesota’s other big tourist attraction, a mall that you can see from outer space.  So, any environmental step is good in my book.  But this step had weak footing.

First, it’s January and my office still has heat issues, namely, there is too much.  Which we combat with AC.  Yeah, it’s not right.

And moreover, we got our memos to recycle, on … paper.  Email, I mean, this is the 20th .. wait, even, the 21st century these days.  Or perhaps it was our first test, to see how we held up to the new recycling initiative and the thought police were already on us with their green cardstock memos.

Nonetheless, a few days later we asked the Russian office cleaner why she threw the recycling in with the trash.

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said, “the building doesn’t recycle.  You’re floor just says that they do, but no one pays me to take out the trash twice.”

Very Interesting.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said, “I don’t want to have trouble.”

I have to fly sometimes, and others, like this place’s co-author, fly quite a bit.  Until recently I’d reached an uneasy truce with flying.  I’d watch something on my laptop and order a drink, usually wine or a bloody mary.  It’s weak, but, if I go down in flames, flailing at an oxygen mask, I’d like to have one last drink first.

I’ve been doing a bit of jet-setting, nothing like Employee One, but still more than I’m used to.  And on my last flight I almost died.

I thought NWA had been had.  I collected a $300 voucher, stayed with my parents and extra night and flew back to Brooklyn the next day.  But about half an hour into the flight we hit a bump.

A bump?

Air is supposed to be smooth, it doesn’t have bumps.

Ah, turbulence.  But not matter, we’ve alll been through it before.  But then we hit another, larger invisible bump, the place lurched down at an angle, only to be buffeted right back from where it came, and then started tilting and swaying left and ride.  Another bump knoced it up, just before something hit it down to the diagnol.

This was it.  I put down the stack of papers my palms had sweat through, clutched my armrests and started talking to my neighbor while saying “Hail Mary’s” in my head.  The pilot announced that we would seek a higher altitude.

Terrifying minutes later, the plane ricocheting, heads snapping around on necks like palm trees in Katrina, the pilot grunted,

“We can’t go any higher.”

And that was that.  We just rode it out.  I checked to see the wings were still there, we were lurching up and down.  I watched one women hold her daughter’s head in her lap and listened to the carts in the plane colliding and tipping into each other and the galley.

Then after 10 or 15 minutes lasting eternity, it stopped.

And I didn’t die before 2007.

As I carreened toward ‘professional’ life, my

a) ammount of piercings
b) garishness of said piercings
dropped off at an alarming rate.

Pirate earrings toned down to mere studs. Three studs dwindled to one with two said empty holes in my ears. Cartilage ring was long gone. Eyebrow stud is just a blurry memory, a tiny scar in my grey matter … and eyebrow.

But I liked those piercings. And though, Employee One insists that our dichotomy is done, a memory still lingers, and a mission still carries. First, I am very, very new at this office thing, and never saw it coming. After week one, I realized that I did not have enough clothes to carry me through the work week unless I wanted my co-workers to realize that I was one a very, very regular four-day schedule. So I went out shopping, and happened upon a small pair of silver skull earrings. Naturally I had to buy them.

And, back to the integuments of the argument at hand, now I have a real domain email, and an actual title. I like my job, my office, etc. but it feels like an office vacation, I know that I’ll be starting school next fall to begin a lifetime of cutting out of people what happens to be bothering them (usually tumors, sometimes black stuff, but I’m no doctor yet.

And on Monday morning, when I looked in the mirror in the office bathroom I noticed that I had forgotten to take out my new, favorite skull earrings.

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.

I has been looking for a job, and applying to medical schools and interviewing for both.

Now I have both.

But before this whole process began, I had scruff, and more importantly, I had hair like a Roman statue.  Long curly flowing locks, highlited by the sun into a golden-brown explosion of curls.  It was sexy, and less homosexual that it sounds.  And moreso, I liked having long hair, a lot.  And I don’t like having a beard, but the option of toying around is a grand option to have.

That said, I started my new job on Monday.  It is for real.  It is in an office, and I have magnetic ID tags on a boing belt clip that is infinitely fun to play with in the elevator.  The office I work at, it’s really an office, there are even pregnant women who work there.

Pregnant women are nothing new, nor is the fact that they too have jobs.  But suddenly becoming a coworker who has coffee breaks with pregnant women, I mean, that’s the real world.  I’m finally old enough to know people who are pregnant on purpose.  Before now, my exposure to pregnancy in peer was those bad girls in high school.

But now, now I’m really doing it.  And now that I’m in it, I’m growing out my hair.

Nine to five … ten to six.  Even though I am busier than I have ever really been before, for the first time the ‘work’ is stuck in its own zone.  It isn’t allowed out of it’s time relegation, and if it rears it’s stinky little head, I beat it back with a broomstick.

Which nearly just happened.  I consolidated my jobs.  Like, loans, per se, jobs can pile up, and I was nearing four or five.

Research Assistant

Waitor / Manager

MCAT Teacher

MCAT Curriculum Writer

MCAT Tutor

And then there are my writing projects.  Needless to say, I was stressed.

But then, I started pooling them.  Three of said jobs are for one company, so I X-ed one before it began (MCAT teacher) and got officially signed up for the tutoring job very, very, very part-time.

The waitor job is going to only live on Sunday brunch once the MCAT writing job starts, and the health study should be ending in the next few weeks.  My life really was one of those shifty puzzles.  And like, say, a shifty puzzle, or, more realistically the New York Times crossword, the solution feels damn good.

Now, when I get home from work and the gym, I am home.  I can watch moves, I can paint, I can play guitar.

All this can, comes from the fact that when I get home, I’m there man, I’m there.