work 'n play

It is with great pleasure that I will tell you about the little details of my place of work which make it wonderful, despite my oft-idleness and long hours:

I like my desk right by the window, where I can look out and see who is arriving for work and watch the Hong Fook Center Bus drive down the small street several times a day. I can watch all the old Asian people living in the tall housing complexes behind the office walking to and from stores, leaving with empty bags and coming back with full ones. I can watch everybody who works in this building and the building next to us take their cigarette breaks under the same tree. I can see how fast the wind is blowing by watching how fast the Volkswagen sign is turning. I can watch the day go by as the shadows change on the textured panels of the housing complex building.

I like walking to the lake on sunny days and sitting on the sloped grass and having a picnic all by my lonesome while reading a book and watching the other workers on their lunch breaks walking briskly around Lake Merritt. There are groups of ladies who are a little overweight who walk in groups around the lake and talk in loud voices like they were coming straight off of the pages in a chick lit book - I like watching them. In the middle of the lakeside park there is an amusement park called Children's Fairyland and a big marble gazebo. There are geese who migrate around the lake and chase you if you have food or get too close to them. I like being one of the grown-ups, strangely enough. I like knowing that everybody is on their lunch hour and I am also on my lunch hour. I like finding local eateries when I forget my lunch and sitting at a table by myself while drinking Diet Coke and reading a book. I like walking with my sunglasses on and swinging my purse bag. I like wearing skirts everyday and feeling more grown-up when I see myself coming towards me when reflected in windows. I don't know how I feel about not recognizing myself.

I like a lot of the people who work here. I like the man name Claude who told me I couldn't take lunch breaks until I had worked here 90 days and once said I had to bring donuts for everybody on Fridays and who then said, "I don't have a serious bone in my butt." I like the older man Pat who has 'PAT'S' labels on a bunch of office equipment like the automated stapler and three-hole punch and who says things like, 'It's not the size of the wand that pulls the rabbit out of the hat' that are cryptic and weird. I like Irene who gives me those looks when she is working with the older Asian guy who makes people feel uncomfortable when he clears his throat every four words and interrogates them about their lives, who has a very good heart but no social skills whatsoever. Most of all I like Brian, who does good impersonations and accents, and Anjela, who believes she's been visited by aliens, who work in the same room with me - I like that they get it, like me, my auntie, my brother, and Michelle do. We have a conspiracy about the number 22 and I have laughed until I cried so many times already in this room with them. I even like the creepy guy who now works in the room with us because it has provided us with Anjela's 'I'm scared' faces and lots of hilarious awkwardness and even more knowing looks within the room. I like that there is hot chocolate mix and an Arrowhead water cooler in the breakroom. I like that we get the SF Chronicle and the accountant who works here has learned to automatically hand me the 'Datebook' section. I like Luis, who has four children and a car with a sticker that says 'Couples for Christ' and next to that a sticker that says 'Kids for Christ,' who told me that he is glad that I work here.

I like the product catalogs and I like the fact that there are floorplans wherever I walk. I like imagining the conversation between the old Asian couple outside my window right now trasnferring the paper bag between them that says 'NEW LOWER PRICES.' The lady looks upset. I like the new lady who works here with the impossibly quiet voice.

I like to push my chair in and turn off my computer at the end of the day. Closure is always a significant moment.

a small story

Let me tell you a story that will warm your little, oh-so-fragile hearts. The story starts back two years ago during my auntie's graduation present to me - a trip to Disneyland. Little did we know that from this trip we would bring back an undying love and fascination with these little guys (http://fsmat.at/~dreiner/america/disneyland/DSC00366_shitty_mushrooms.JPG). (By the way, I found this image by using Google, even though I have many mushroom pictures on a computer somewhere, and I'm offended by the title of this lame guy's file name.) My brother, auntie, and I have signs, drawings, and little dances dedicated to the parade performing mushrooms. We also have matching mushroom pins.

So I've got my mushroom on my purse that I carry around everywhere. He just ended up there. Flashback to Saturday night. I'm leaving this Japanese food place from dinner and walking through the Little Tokyo plaza and our waiter, this incredibly effeminent skinny Japanese guy with blue contacts and bleached hair, jogs up and asks me, 'Is this yours?' He is holding my little mushroom pin. This is amazing. I am speechless. I think I manage to squeak out, 'Thank you!' but luckily Alex is there to tell him how important it is to me (aka, how much of a big nerd I am). I want to give this funny waiter boy a big hug because I love him because I am a big nerd. Do you know how upset I get when I lose things? If I had lost this... Thank you, kind waiter. I hope your hair never falls out due to bleach and I hope some instant karma is coming your way.

question:

answer you me: would you pay $30 to go see king tut in a museum?

why? how important is it?


now, read this:
"Yes, Tut is back -- loot in tow -- and this time he's bringing family. Of the 130 items on display, more than half come not from Tut's tomb but from the royal graves of the 18th Dynasty (1555 B.C. to 1305 B.C.). Tutankhamun items on display include the golden crown (royal diadem) that the boy king wore, a coffinette that held his liver, a golden ceremonial dagger and falcon collar. The now-iconic golden mask that traveled the first time will not be part of the current exhibition, as it would have added unwieldy travel and insurance costs to the exhibition."

talk about false advertising.

fabulous

"If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth - even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4097258.stm

Oh, BBC, I'm glad you're here to tell us these things.

productivity, fine!

Nowadays, I have nothing to do at work 75% of the time. It is not even two weeks in and already I have altered my own job description. My aim is to now top seven office hour toilet visits. Each day, I will try to top the last day. This is a good goal: it allows me to look productive while I walk back and forth from the water dispenser looking very official with ceramic mug in hand. And every two cups or so, I need to go to the bathroom - which also gives me direction. I also try to sharpen my pencil as many times as possible. Productivity at its finest, kids.

i am a mermaid with golden hair

I have taken up once again with my musical fervor. After a week of listening to nothing but my Andrew Lloyd Webber mix, and only stopping because the CD got too scratched up to listen to with my car's crochety old CD player, I've taken to doing something quite out of the ordinary - listening to musicals I haven't heard three hundred times before. That doesn't mean that I'm going to take up listening to new musicals - or RENT or West Side Story or any kind of hoo-haw, but I did listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Aspects of Love" the entire way through over the last couple days. I don't think I've ever heard the whole thing before, and if I did, it went right through one ear and out the other because I was probably 6 years old when I heard it. Besides, why should I try to listen to it again, my auntie saw it and called the musical "Aspirins of Love" because she needed a bunch to get through the play. But, guess what, I enjoyed it. Funny how that is. I just bought the sheet music for $5 on Amazon. A whole new world of piano playing possibilities - how joyous. The intended incest in the show still kind of gets to me though...

JENNY
If you were a sailor
And heard my song
Would you be lured by me?

ALEX
I wouldn't be
Foolish enough to
Go near your rock --
I'd steer my galleon out to sea..

BOTH
..lonely and lost at sea..

e.

i had an epiphany. know what that epiphany is? it's that i have issues. i never thought i'd be a person to have issues, but i do. mostly issues with expressing myself verbally. isn't that awesome?

i get to go here in two weeks. i am ecstatic.

you may hate me, but i'll remember to love you

yeah, i'm doing something with my life...

inspired by jon carroll, a columnist for the sf chronicle, i have decided to try to write a daily or semi-daily or at least bi-weekly column about things i think about while driving in the car to and from work. i have become one of those rolling along the freeway at a rip-roaring speed of fifteen mph every morning and evening, and with two hours of that sort of idleness, i've got to be able to do something with it other than sing loudly along with musicals and have music loudness competitions with the bumping and grinding black suv next to me. it would help if i could write some notes while i was driving, but i can't. it would help if i had one of those mini-tape voice recorders, but then again, it wouldn't, because i wouldn't be able to articulate my thoughts in verbal form or listen back to it when i'm trying to write my columns during work / my lunch break.

what will i do with them? i don't know. have them, keep them by my side - read them back to myself. maybe i will make a new website just for the shit i write. i certainly won't post them here because posting something structured and even maybe edited here would be against all blogging rules. maybe i can offer them up to a 'zine or, gasp, the mac weekly. the point is, there's a lot of stuff out there to think about and what you can think about, you can write about.

for example, the one i'm writing today is inspired by a car i saw this morning whose license plate was ORCA WHL.

i am inspired, in general.

i fail at life.

i absolutely hate making phone calls and my job right now consists of a lot of them. it's taken me twenty minutes to make two phone calls because i am petrified.

'baby, remember on the bus and my hand was on your knee
when U love somebody it's hard to think about anything but to breathe
baby, I am the cub who was washed out in the flood
when U love somebody and bite your tongue all you get is a mouthful of blood'

i never thought i was the girl, but i'm the girl waiting around all day to get a phone call from marcus. this is not any marcus, this is the marcus who holds a summer job dangling in front of my nose like that dog in 'pirates of the caribbean' to those pirates in prison. he dangles a summer job and a weekend down in SoCal. i left a message with his secretary and on his message machine. i can do nothing but wait.

it seems like i've been the girl who has been waiting over the last couple weeks. waiting for a phone call from barnes & noble, from any of the dozen places that has my application waiting stalemate in their giant vaults of kids desperate for summer jobs. although i haven't had to put much on hold, today i did, and this upset me. since 12:30pm, i have been performing activities that i believe will help me pass the time while i wait for marcus. it is 5pm. marcus may be leaving work now. he may have left the blinking light on his message machine alone today because he had a long day. i can understand. but marcus, oh marcus, why won't he call??