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June 29, 2004

:: reach out and poke someone with a stick ::

I've been writing this post for what feels like a week (but is really only an hour or so) and it's still a sappy piece of shit, so fuck it, I'm starting over.

I've been thinking about distance (in the geographic sense) and closeness (in the intangible/emotional sense) and how different my feelings about these things are now as opposed to a few years ago. A friend of mine left this morning (well, was planning to leave in any case - after yestereve's beer-fueled impromptu backgammon tournament he might still be around) for New York, and walking the last block back to my place after we said our goodbyes last night I realized that when I said, "I'll see you," that was exactly what I meant. No big gravity or air of finality, just a "see ya later" kind of a thing. It was not always so. I used to think somehow that when a person moved halfway across the country (or, heaven forfend, even further away), this great gulf would open between us and the friendship would wither and die for lack of contact. I suppose there are people with whom I've actually lost touch after they moved to one of the coasts, and I'm not just talking about the ones who went to LA and then insane, in quick succession. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I suppose: thinking distance was an obstacle made it so. It's extra-odd that I would think this way, seeing's how more than half of my family's friends at any given point in my formative years were several thousand miles away.

Maybe it was my recent bout of prolonged wandering that jogged something loose, or into place. Before I left, alongside the freaking out about going alone to a place where I couldn't even read, let alone speak the language, whether or not I could live without 50 pairs of shoes and other attendant worries, I thought about the possibility that I'd be forgotten when I came back. There is an appeal to the nomadic lifestyle that's borne out in the fact that you can be a stranger when you want to. I have more or less a love/hate relationship with that concept, and while I love going away and being totally anonymous, I also love coming home and being welcomed into the arms of my friends. And of course I didn't come back a stranger. One never really does, particularly when returning to such an established place. In the end, distance is really a very minor thing, and time in retrospect always seems shorter. I still find it difficult to believe that I was gone for the better part of a year, and yet when I came back it was as though I'd never left. Except that I totally missed the winter.

Which brings me to a point of sorts - at least, probably the closest thing you'll find to a point in this rambling mess: Dictionary.com defines distance as "the extent of space between two objects or places; an intervening space." I posit that the space between two people who are in the same room, inches apart, can be greater than the span of any ocean I've crossed. Friendship, love, the connections between people - none of these things are about geography. There are people I know that live right around the corner from me and I haven't seen them in years. By contrast, there are people I know on the other side of the Atlantic that I talk to almost every day. Who's at a greater distance?

So do me this favor: if you're a friend of mine, and you decide to move to another city or go be a hermit in the mountains for a few years or try out the Amish lifestyle [brief aside: the Amish have a web site?!?] and see if it suits you or meditate at Plum Village or something, unless you really intend to shoot me if I get within 100 feet of the porch, don't give me the grand old "be well," ok? It's got a finality to it that just doesn't fit our bill.

June 15, 2004

:: always charge your ipod ::

The scene: this morning, 8:20, at the coffee place. I was standing there waiting for my coffee (they don't move so fast) when i saw the bus outside, stopped at the red light. Of course it pulled away while the barista was pouring the milk, and I said "damn," just under my breath. The guy behind me in line, perhaps thinking I'd dropped something or sprained an ankle or somesuch (but in hindsight, probably just waiting for any kind of opening) says, "What's wrong?" Say i: "Nothing, just missed my bus." "Well, they come along pretty regularly," says he and I agree and start to walk away. No such luck.

Please bear in mind that at this point I have not had much coffee and am therefore ill-equipped to deal with any kind of situation.

So he says, "Do I detect a slight accent or is it my imagination?" The smart response would have been, "It's your imagination. You're crazy. Please go away." But because of the aforementioned insufficient caffeination level, I defaulted to polite mode. "Probably not your imagination," I said. This led to him somehow getting out in two sentences that he's an expert in spotting dialects and speaks five languages and blah blah and do I parle francais? And again, reflex taking over, even though I've begun to suspect this is a trap, I mumble en francais that yes of course i do. This opens the floodgates. I find myself sort of inching away backwards, sunglasses on, while this guy close-talks at me (and well over the decibel level required for such a conversation) in French about how he spent a summer there when he was in school and lived in the 18th and do I know Paris and he's buying a hotel in Montmartre and the Americans in Paris are all idiots (with the implication that he's the exception, bien sur) and he's got an Irish passport and wow, I'm thinking, how the hell do I get out of this now? I'm just waiting for a break in the stream to make a polite exit (did I mention how loud this guy was?) and there isn't one and then he says, "So, you live around here?" Aha, I think. Here's my chance. "No, my boyfriend lives around the corner. I live across town." At this point, the guy who's sitting drinking coffee and reading the paper at the table right next to us, who's clearly been listening, chokes and almost spits coffee onto his paper, trying not to laugh out loud. I silently curse him for being amused at my pain and not having rescued me with some quip about the Financial Times. Fortunately the gambit worked and Obnoxious Guy made a quick exit, but not before I noticed another bus speeding through the intersection. Jerk.

Moral of the story: if you must venture out in public before you're sufficiently caffeinated: headphones. Headphones are de rigeur.

June 9, 2004

:: marketing at its finest ::

It's one of those high-annoyance-factor days here in fluorescent heaven, what with the burgeoning sore throat and the never-ending trickle of niggling little changes and the blah blah whinge whinge, and I find myself needing to make a conscious effort to keep the cranky at bay. Fortunately, there's a fantastic presentation being made in the conference room five feet from my desk, and as usual they've rudely left the door open. I looked up just in time to catch the title page of the PowerPoint. It read:

idiom

Turning Content Management into
GLOBAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT

At first, for some reason, I just found this terribly amusing. I mean, how long of a presentation can one build around the introduction of an adjective? But after spending a few minutes (ok, seconds) perusing their web site, I began to get sort of a Dr. Evil vibe off them: Globalization Management Services? Sounds like something involving an ultimatum and one billion dollars, or perhaps just a giant and glorified version of babelfish. Maybe it's just me. Oh well.

While I'm on the subject of questionable marketing, I'd like to reopen the topic of utterly bewildering billboards. Two more that I just can't get my head around:

1. At the corner of Armitage and Ashland, there's an enormous full color billboard for the local classic rock radio station. It reads, "Now, MORE PETTY!" Lest we mistake this to mean they've hired a bunch of passive-aggressive DJs who now bicker on the air, this is printed in one of those retro-psychedelic looking typefaces across a twenty foot tall photo of Tom Petty. So, in this case, it's not so much that I don't know what they mean as that I can't fathom how this is a prime selling point.

2. Somewhere along the Kennedy, on my way out to the office, there's a Hooters billboard. About two thirds of it is occupied by their logo and the requisite morsel-in-tight-t-shirt, but then next to her there's this enormous bowl of salad. It's roughly the same size as her torso. The top of the billboard reads something like, "see inside for details." This one just has me mystified.

June 1, 2004

:: your taxi is here ::

Why do people insist on buying canary yellow sportscars? Seriously, try as I might, I can't come up with a single line of reasoning to back this up. It's completely inexplicable. Why, if you're going to spend $50,000 on a brand spanking new Corvette, would you want it to look like a motherfucking taxi? Why? The president of one of the companies I worked for back in the late 90s had a yellow Dodge Viper. It was hideous, but visible. Maybe that's the point, but if so, it's a dumb one - sure, people are more likely to notice you if your low-slung souped-up super-coupe is fluorescent in color, but then again, people are also a lot more likely to notice that you're a complete fucking retard.

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