Peripatetic

I need to vent for a moment. To wit:

I was sitting here minding my own business and looking for some information on the Website of one of the several professional organizations in my world, and I noticed that they were plugging their new social networking site, which is sort of like an industry-specific version of LinkedIn. So I went to investigate it, and browsing around, I noticed that they had a job forum. I’m not job-hunting, particularly, but I always like to keep my eyes open for new possibilities, so I looked at it. And lo and behold, there was a job that sounded perfect for me.

It’s a long story, but there are a bunch of subspecialties in my field, and my particular subspecialty is a little more obscure and less “hot” at the moment than the others, so jobs that are truly just right for me are kind of few and far between. This one, though, could have been invented for me: it requires someone with a content/writing/editorial background, and a library science degree is preferred.

And it’s at Zappos. Zappos, the online shoe store that is my favorite place to shop, from which I’ve bought countless pairs of shoes. The perfect job at the perfect place, in other words.

Before a) jumping up and down with excitement and b) zooming my résumé to them right away, I looked for a location in the job description. I had this vague recollection that Zappos was someplace in the Southeast—not my ideal, but not out of the question, either, depending on where in the Southeast we’re talking about. This could be good.

But no. My recollection was faulty. They’re in Las Vegas. I loathe Las Vegas.* Of all the places in the country that one might consider moving to, on a scale of 1 to 10, Las Vegas falls somewhere in the region of Miami. Or Camden, NJ. Or to put it in early Talking Heads terms, I wouldn’t move there if you paid me; I wouldn’t live there, no siree.

Not even to work for Zappos, alas. Why couldn’t they be somewhere else? It would be too much to ask for them to be someplace I actively want to move, of course, but couldn’t they at least be in Des Moines or Raleigh or someplace I could even remotely conceive of considering moving to? It’s no fair, I tells ya. No fair at all.

*I didn’t actually know that I hated Las Vegas until recently. I mean, I knew that the weather wouldn’t appeal to me, and neither would the city’s status as one of the fastest-growing in the country, especially because the growth seems to be mainly concentrated in new, faceless suburbs. But I didn’t have anything against Las Vegas, particularly. Kitsch doesn’t appeal to me (<–understatement) and I’m not much on gambling—no moral objections or anything, I just get bored as soon as I lose more than $5.00—but I was still fairly curious about the place, and believed that like any good American, I should see it at least once. Then I went to a convention there this past spring, and slightly to my surprise, I absolutely hated the place. Hated it. Everything about it. It’s depressing, it’s skeevy, it’s unpleasant. I hope never to go back.

So I joined a CSA this year. All organic produce, grown about 30 miles away. So far, it’s been pretty good, although it has stricter work requirements than the one I belonged to back in Mpls.* Actually, it’s been very good; it’s just that I’ve been kinda bad. I guess I’d underestimated the degree to which I just no longer do any real cooking. As a result, I’ve had to throw away a fair amount of produce.

But I’m trying to do better. And right now, I have literally about 15 beautiful heirloom tomatoes just waiting for me to do something with them. I also have various Japanese-type eggplants, a few peppers, some basil, and a bag of various types of baby squash. Oh, and some new potatoes. And green beans. But mostly, I have tomatoes, and I’m determined not to waste them.

With that in mind, I need help: What would you do with all those tomatoes? I suppose I could cook up some tomato sauce—I forgot, I have onions and garlic too—but that would be pretty boring. I remember making a tomato tart a number of years ago, but I have no clue where I got the recipe. Can canning be learned quickly, like in a day? Anyone got better suggestions? Please?

*Needless to say, I’m overwhelmed with sorrow and horror at the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. It’s particularly upsetting to me because I know that area well; I didn’t spend much time on I-35W heading north, but it’s quite close to where I lived, and I drove under that bridge every day for years. In fact, parts of the bridge apparently landed on the River Road, which was my route to work (and which was a delightful road to commute on—scenic, no traffic, very few stop signs). I just can’t even begin to imagine what people are going through there, and my heart is with them, and with the city.

There’s a question on my profile page over at LiveJournal that asks: “How did you spend summers when you were a kid?”

I decided that question deserved a longer-ass answer than I was prepared to post on LiveJournal. It’s started to get hot here, and my summer isn’t off to a very good start, so it’s kind of refreshing to think back on a time when I actually enjoyed this part of the year.

New Yorkers like to get their kids out of the city in the summer if possible, which is very sensible. When I was a little kid, that wasn’t possible, but we used to visit friends who had a house on a lake in Putnam County, about an hour outside the city, on weekends. Then for a couple of summers we rented our own house up there and spent pretty much every summer weekend there.

The summer I turned 8, I joined the ancient Jewish tradition of going to summer camp. The camps I went to for the next four summers were in the Berkshires, which is undoutedly why I still want to retire there–probably my favorite place in the US.

During my last summer at camp, my dad wrote a series of articles about the life and history of East Hampton, which “required” him to go out there every weekend in August. The next summer, he managed to parlay that into a longer series, and got to stay in a motel suite with its own private stretch of beach in Amagansett for six weeks. I joined him (my mom and brother came out on weekends), and during the day, I took riding lessons and cleaned out stalls and just generally hung out at the barn. That was one of the best summers of my life. The next summer, I stayed in a house near the stable in East Hampton with a bunch of other barn rats, riding and doing barn stuff every day and competing in horse shows. That was the summer of Watergate, which will forever be linked in my memory to my last days as a member of the horsey set.

I turned 14 the next summer, and got to do so in Sibford Ferris, a Cotswolds town so small that addresses there include the name of the nearest big town. That was a life-changing summer, boy howdy. I fell in love with England and everything English, not the usual touristy/stereotype stuff but the actual people—that was my first prolonged exposure to British humor, which went well with my own sense of humor—as well as minutiae like how much better their chocolate bars are than ours and the typeface that they use on signs (Gill Sans, I learned years later) and stuff like that. Ever since then, whenever I’ve had enough money to travel, I’ve gone straight to England. If I hadn’t had a job that allowed me to travel to Italy and Germany on business, I probably still wouldn’t have been anywhere else outside the US.

And I wound up there almost by accident. I’d wanted to go to France on the Experiment in International Living, but it turned out to be too expensive. To make it up to me, my parents found a summer camp in England called, er, Summer Camps in England. “Camps” because it was actually four camps in one: a travel camp, a boys’ soccer camp, a drama camp, and an archaeology camp. I was in the drama camp—not that I was really all that interested in drama, but I’d been in plays at previous summer camps and enjoyed it, and that was as good an excuse as any.

It was my first time out of the country (unless you count a dimly remembered trip to Puerto Rico when I was four), and it was also pretty much my first exposure to people who weren’t from the East Coast; the soccer players were mainly Midwestern and Southern, and I didn’t know quite how to react to them. That was good for me, learning that there was a world not too far away that was so different from my own. I preferred hanging out with the locals, though—mostly a group of older teenage boys who would descend a few nights a week on the school that housed the camp. They were small-town, working-class, slightly yobbish I suppose, but I felt more at home with them than the nice suburban soccer players somehow. And Sibford itself was so beautiful—I’d never seen countryside quite that green and lush and rolling, and it was impossible to imagine anyplace better at the time. But then late in the summer we made a four-day trip to London, and even in the sticky heat and our nasty cheap hotel, I knew I had found my favorite place in the world. I wanted to stay there forever, and I hated leaving and going back to plain old NYC.

That was my last summer away from the city, pretty much. I was a teenager by then, and capable of finding fun without leaving town. Which was just as well, and I had some great city summers during high school and college. Besides, it would have been hard to top a summer in Sibford, anyway.

It’s 10:24 p.m.

It’s October 2.

It’s 80 degrees.

I really, really need not to live here anymore.

(Actually, it’s Wednesday. But I am in love with Fridays. To wit:)

One of the things I love about the company I work for is that from Memorial Day through Labor Day, we get Friday afternoons off. Now, I’ve worked at other places where we had “summer hours”; they’re the norm in the publishing world, and even my last job, at the happy factory, offered some version of them. They always involved a tradeoff, though—we had to work extra hours the rest of the week to earn those four free hours on Friday. At my publishing job in Mpls., we weren’t supposed to shorten our lunch hours as a way of extending our Monday-Thursday workday, so I’d drag myself in at some ungodly hour like 7 a.m. and then stumble home exhausted on Friday afternoons, unable to do anything with those free hours except nap. Eventually I decided I preferred working normal hours during the rest of the week, and I gave up on summer hours (and then I got promoted to editorial director, and was way too busy to take whole afternoons off anyway…but I digress).

Here, though, there are no strings attached; we simply get Friday afternoons off in the summer. Of course, if you’re wrapped up in some big project or your client calls a meeting on Friday afternoon, you stay and work, but the message from The Powers That Be is clear: if you can, go home at lunchtime on Friday. They lock the doors and switch the phones over to voicemail, and the office is officially closed. Last summer, I was only able to take every third Friday or so, which was okay; I appreciated the ones I could take. This year, though, I’ve been in between projects and picking up little fillers for most of the summer, so I was able to go home early nearly every Friday that I was in town.

So the news we got yesterday was fairly fabulous: TPTB have decided to extend summer Fridays through the end of the year (or rather, through Christmas, since we close between Christmas and New Year’s, which is also fabulous). In addition to being delighted by this news, I’m feeling a little bit chastened as a result of it, like I’m obligated to Do Something with my Fridays instead of just wasting them the way I usually do. I confess that—probably due to its having been a pretty blah summer—I have once again spent most of my summer Friday afternoons napping.

(I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about my fondness for being asleep and what it means, and it’s been bothering me for the first time ever. Usually, I treat naps as a necessary part of dealing with day-to-day life as a depressive: existence is tiring stuff for me, and so I’ve tended to let myself off the hook for taking frequent breaks from it. But I don’t know, I’ve started to think that I shouldn’t coddle myself so much. It can’t be a good thing that unconsciousness is my preferred state so much of the time. And on a practical level, my frequent inability/unwillingness to do much of anything except sleeping all day on Saturday has gotten to be sort of a pain, because it means that I have to cram a weekend’s worth of chores and errands into Sunday, which generally means that most of them don’t get done at all. But just thinking about all of this makes me tired.)

So I’m entertaining the idea that maybe, just maybe, I should plan some sort of structured activity for my fall Fridays. I’m considering using that time to actually read all the information architecture books that I bought when I was preparing for a career switch; I’ve read the polar bear book and JJG’s book cover to cover, but the rest of them I’ve either skimmed or, in one or two cases, just barely glanced at, almost as though merely owning them was enough to improve my qualifications as an IA. I can never find time or atmosphere or, really, justification for reading them at work, so going through them on Friday afternoons might be a good solution. On the other hand, reading can be done in bed, and that usually leads to naps, so maybe I need to find an activity that’s a little less passive. I could set the time aside for going to the gym at a nice uncrowded time of day, and it would be great if I could be sure that I would actually go, but that’s far from a safe bet. Or maybe I should use the time to knit, which is a) realistic and b) sufficiently relaxing and c) might mean that I’d actually finish a project sometime soon.

But maybe there’s some perfect Friday afternoon activity that I’m just not thinking of. Anyone got any ideas for me?

I got a sales call at work today from Chase Manhattan, pushing a Southwest Airlines Visa card, because apparently the fact that I’ve ignored their almost weekly solicitations by mail led them to believe that I was just waiting for them to call me.

Sales calls at work are annoying, and of course I told the guy who called to put me on their no-call list forthwith…but that’s not the story. The story is that the guy, who had a very heavy Indian accent—when he went into the disclaimer spiel about their no-call procedure, I couldn’t understand everything he was saying, and I’m good with accents—and was almost certainly calling from India, began the call by saying, “My name is Jack Anderson.”

Um…no. No, it isn’t.

Seriously, what is the purpose of having offshore telemarketers use “all-American” names? Am I supposed to like the guy better because he doesn’t have some skeery furrin name, and therefore sign right up for the credit card that he’s shilling? Do they think that by having these employees use familiar-sounding names, they’ll get customers to overlook the heavy accents and incomplete grasp of English and think, “Oh, that Chase Manhattan is such a great company, they don’t outsource their entry-level jobs to India”?

The thing is, I wouldn’t have even noticed the name if he’d used his real one; telemarketers usually give their names, and I ignore them just like I ignore the rest of the spiel. Instead, I ended up thinking how creepy and really quite offensive it was that Chase won’t let its offshore employees use their own names. I truly cannot imagine what they were thinking when they came up with this policy.

Unless the explanation is simply that they’re idiots. That, I’ll buy.

I love memes. They’re the lazy blogger’s salvation, because they give you the opportunity to post without actually having to think much. Which is exactly what my heat-numbed brain needs.

My A-Z. Meme courtesy of Lauree on MySpace.

[A is for age]
44

[B is for beer of choice]
I don’t drink beer anymore, but I love Schlafly’s coffee stout.

[C is for career?]
Information architect/non-practicing librarian

[D is for your dog’s name]
Diane (RIP).

[E is for events coming up]
My birthday in two weeks; John and Marie’s wedding in a couple of months.

[F is for favorite song at the moment]
“Since K Got Over Me,” of course.

[G is for gender]
Female.

[H is for Hometown]
New York, NY

[I is for the instrument you play]
Mandolin, not very well but better than guitar, which I play badly, and piano, which I used to play well but don’t get much chance to play anymore.

[J is for favorite flavor of juice]
Tomato or grapefruit, but I don’t really drink juice very often.

[K is for kids]
None, but two wonderful nephews (who are teenagers, not really kids anymore)

[L is for last hug]
Bill, of course.

[M is for marriage]
I like it so much I’ve done it twice.

[N is for name of your crush]
Too many to list, but Edward Norton and David Thewlis are the ones of longest standing, I think.

[O is for overnight hospital stays]
None so far, I’m happy to say.

[P is for phobias]
Rats are my only real phobia. I’m terrified of fire, and I don’t love flying, but those aren’t phobias, exactly.

[Q is for quote]
“That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose.”—Alice

[R is for radio station]
KDHX, baby

[S is for status]
Married, employed, alive.

[T is for time you woke up]
Just before 6 a.m., and then just before 7 a.m.

[U is for underwear]
Cotton.

[V is for vegetables you love]
Asparagus, especially, but pretty much all of them except okra.

[W is for worst habit]
Too many to list.

[X is for x-rays you’ve had]
Chest, once. Teeth. No others that I can recall.

[Y is for yummy food YOU make]
I make the world’s best brownies.

[Z is for your Zodiac sign]
Leo, of course.

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen ever, or at least this week.

Stop-Motion Human Space Invaders

Recommended especially to those who, like me, are fans of old-school video games. I really do wish I’d thought of it first.

I started to write a long-winded rant about what a crappy week at work I’ve had, but then (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the laptop ate the post, and it’s really not worth reconstructing, because honestly, what’s more boring than people complaining about work? The point of it, anyway, was not so much to just bitch as it was to fret that because of various bits of nonsense that I had to handle this week (which were nobody’s fault, including mine; just the fault of the way my company is structured, which might be the most negative thing I’ve ever said about them/us), I’m now in danger of a) not doing as good a job on my current big project as I hope to do, and b) more damningly, running late on that same project. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t fuss too much about being behind schedule; I’ve worked at enough jobs where there were no significant consequences for missing deadlines that I’ve become far too cavalier about making them. But in this job, if I’m off schedule, that messes things up for a whole chain of other people, sometimes at great and wasted expense…and I really, really hate it when my screwups create problems for other people.

All this ties into my previously mentioned ongoing crisis of confidence about my ability to be good at my new career. (I mentioned this in passing to a friend a week or so ago, and for some reason it prompted chuckles and mutterings behind my back and at my expense; I’m still a little miffed about that.) It also ties in to the several odd dreams (okay, the second most boring thing in the world, after people complaining about work, is people telling you their dreams, but this will just be a sentence, I promise) that I’ve had recently about Minneapolis. Something is calling me back there, I think…not sure what yet, but as I’ve said in the past, in some ways, it’s the last place that I truly felt at home.*

I’ve been idly glancing at the Mpls./St. Paul Craigslist for rental apartments lately, and toward the end of the workday today, I looked at my old employer’s Website (not Twin\Tone, God knows—the job after that) and fleetingly considered writing to the two people who are still there to whom I am closest and saying, “I’ve had enough; I want to come back.” The scary (if somehow comforting) thing is that I probably could go back there; it would take some persuading and pleading, and a big pay cut, but it could probably be done. And here’s the thing: no crises of confidence would ensue, because if there’s one vocation I’ve been good at in my life, it’s being a children’s book editor. This is probably just me being a brat; I’ve always tended to duck out of things that don’t come easily to me, and it would be useful for me to remind myself that I’m still very new at a career that isn’t easy to master, one where you can’t just take a couple of classes in and immediately master; I need to stick with it before I can accurately determine whether or not I suck at it. One reason I refuse to give up on knitting—a skill that does not come especially easily to me, as I am arguably the least craft-ish person in the known universe—is precisely to combat that tendency to walk away from things that I can’t immediately master. It’s different, though, when it’s your livelihood, and your avocation (of sorts), on the line; that’s why it’s tempting to contemplate going back to children’s book editing, at which I am quite literally a seasoned pro.

But you can’t really go back, can you? and it would be pretty silly to waste my MLS—still the thing I’m proudest of in the whole world—to leave the library-related professions entirely.

Wouldn’t it?

I don’t know. I don’t know if I have the energy to venture any farther down this path of contemplation tonight; I think instead I’ll go and put some stuff on my iPod that’s been embarrassingly missing for way too long. And soon I hope to write about some especially exciting new music: the debut album by Dirty Pretty Things, the new band formed by Carl Barat, the non-drug-addicted, non-Kate-Moss-dating ex-Libertine of whom I am a massive fan. It’s due out in the UK in early May, and I’ve already pre-ordered it. Plus, my copy of “It’s Art, Dad,” the for-fanatics-only early recordings comp by the Clientele, should be on its way to me shortly. And there’s still Scott Miller to write about. But tonight, I’m going to go put “Rattlesnakes” and “Easy Pieces” on the iPod. Those are the only records I own by Lloyd Cole, which is sort of scandalous; someone who knows way more about him than I do (I have a vague idea that that someone might be known as The Krueg) needs to fill me in on the post-Commotions world of Lloyd Cole. I’ve heard, and liked, “Don’t Get Weird on Me Babe,” an early Cole solo record, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. I need to be clued in.

*Sort of. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel utterly, blissfully at home when we moved back to Manhattan and then to Park Slope in 1998; thing was, I didn’t stick around long enough to fully appreciate the feeling of being back at home.

I haven’t been looking at my blog stats much in the last couple of months, mainly because I haven’t been doing anything online in the last couple of months besides working. But today, in a rare moment of lull-ness—rare and fleeting; I’ll be back up to my eyeballs in work again later this afternoon), I had a chance to glance at February’s. Blog stats are curiously fascinating things; who are all these people, and how did they find my silly little blog? (They’re also vaguely creepy sometimes—there are more little bots out there crawling endlessly through the blogosphere than I would have ever imagined.) When I first discovered them, I checked them almost daily, and ran whois searches on the IP addresses to see if I could figure out who the visitors were. (Sometimes I could, sometimes not. There are people reading this thing and/or the Twangblog in Europe, even, which is indescribably weird to me. In a good way, but still.) Lately, though, like everything else in my life that isn’t w-o-r-k, stat-checking has fallen by the wayside.

The thing that fascinates me most about the stats is keywords. It’s relatively rare that anyone gets here through a keyword search, but it’s really intriguing to see the search strings that do get them here. Intriguing to me, anyway. After all, that kind of thing is my life these days…plus it’s entertaining to see what random, improbable combinations of words lead people here. (Or sometimes not so entertaining—someone’s fetish for penny loafers brought them here yesterday. I’m glad they were thwarted, at least temporarily. To each his or her own and all that, but fetishes skeeve me out.) And one of the keyword searches that appears more than once in the stats is “since k got over me lyrics,” so apparently, someone or several someones are trying to find the lyrics to my current (yep, still) favorite song.

The new Rosanne Cash record has been in heavy rotation in my ears lately, and there’s finally a new Scott Miller record on the horizon—only a month away, in fact. (More, likely much more, about that to come. I don’t talk about Scott Miller nearly enough these days.) And I’ve been playing the Morning After Girls quite a bit lately, probably because they’re playing at SXSW and I’m wishing I could somehow see that show without actually having to go to SXSW. But the Clientele are still dominating my personal playlist in a big way. So on the off chance that anyone else Googles the lyrics to “that song,” and since there are some completely garbled lyrics out there on the Web at some of those cheesy lyric sites, I’m happy to provide them.

“Since K Got Over Me”
Juliet
I get on my knees
Speaking in tongues
In a washed-out sun in perfect clarity
But I get so delirious, I think my sides will split
Standing on the sidewalk
Sometimes it’s as if

I don’t think I’ll be happy anyway
Just scratching out my name
And everything’s so lucid and so creepy
Since K got over me
Since K got over me

All my senses sharp
My hands are fists
I’m pretty tired of making lists
It’s just this emptiness I can’t chase away
And when the evening paints the streets
When the evening paints the streets
It’s like walking on a trampoline

I don’t think I’ll be happy anyway
Just scratching out my name
But everything’s so vivid and so creepy
Since K got over me
Since K got over me

There’s a hole inside my skull
With warm air blowing in
Standing on the sidewalk
Where do I begin?

I don’t think I’ll be happy anymore
I guess I closed that door
But every night a strange geometry
Since K got over me
Since K got over me