Report from the People's Gaypublic of Drugifornia

"But I've got something serious to say...Dude, what the fuck is going on with Robert DeNiro?"

These were words spoken by a couple of hirsute cineastes on a sidewalk outside of a restaurant in San Francisco on Friday, overheard by me as I stepped out to dial Sugarpockets. But you can substitute "cold4thestreets" in for "Robert DeNiro," readers, because I know and you know that's the query that's been lodged in your hearts these last several weeks. What the fuck is up with c4ts?

Well, first off, while I had hoped -- and promised -- to report to you juicy tidbits from the frontlines of my not-new job, a strange thing has happened. My former (tor)mentor has lost interest in crushing my already reluctant capitalist spirit. I am not sure if I made it past some sort of hazing period, or if I broke down his expectations so expertly that when he actually had a chance to review some substantive work I'd produced, he was moved by its seeming coherence and spell-checked presentation--and came to be genuinely surprised my abilities. That is, the George W. Bush effect may have taken effect here: I am in my boss Sean's good graces because I have wildly exceeded the earth's-crust-level expectations he had set for me...Of course, things didn't turn out too good for W in the end, so I'm hoping for some sort of narrative divergence in our tales, but for now, I'm in a numb -- if not happy -- place at work.

I go in. I close my door. I try to focus, fail, stare at the screen, pound on the keyboard, space out, eventually produce something, give it to my assistant to file; she invariably finds several errors in it, which I have to then correct. And off we go. That's an honest day's work for our generation of ne'er-do-wells, so mortified by adulthood we find spiritual meaning in things like this. I'm happy to have a job. I really am. But I'd be so much happier just having the paycheck.  Or maybe I just need to keep my door open and hope for some hijinks worth reporting in these pages.

The other day I wore a blue polo shirt to work on casual day, and my neighbor -- who tucks his shirt into his jeans and his jeans into his white sneakers -- said, "What, did you just step off a college campus or something?" I think this was meant as a put-down. I don't know. Maybe, I should just keep my door closed after all.

Shit Gets Real

I've never really understood what it is to hate your boss until I started work at ________ LLP.

When I worked at Tower Records, I had a supervisor, Talulah, who used to give me shit for sitting on the back counter during slow periods in cash register duty, but she was okay in the end. She smoked weed competitively and took solemnly her designated charge, the R&B section; whereas I was going to college in the fall and her authority was a fucking joke to me.

Years later, when I was a school teacher, I had a principal who generally left me alone, but one day--maybe the second or third to last day of school in my last year, when the kids were doing nothing but cleaning out their desks--she had the temerity to say something to me about young Joshua Reyes. He had been pissing me off and I had kicked him out into the hallway. Well sort of kicked him out into the hallway, since we weren't actually allowed to do that; so instead I made him stand in the hallway while keeping his right hand inside the classroom. That way I knew he was there and hadn't wandered off. Unfortunately, Joshua, who I wanted to kill constantly and who I also loved like my own flesh, bone, and blood, a duality only teachers know, couldn't keep still and started doing some ADD jig out in the hallway. This caught my wandering principal's eye -- though to this day I still don't know how she managed to lift herself to the fourth floor, part of her dominion she never patrolled. She barged into my classroom and dressed me down for kicking a student out in the hallway, even though, if she weren't such a narcissistic and moronic midget, she should have known I had not technically done. I mean, his hand was still pasted against that inside wall. Come on.

By the way, I had a double class that day. I had been minding another teacher's entire homeroom. I was doing my principal a favor, so I was doubly pissed at this affront. I stared daggers at her, and when she walked away, having deployed her bile, I yanked Joshua back into the class room, sat him down at a desk in the corner, and slammed the door -- hard. The kids all hissed "Ooooooh" in unison: I had just slammed the door on my principal. They knew it. And she knew it. She turned around, came back in and summoned me into the hallway. I can't remember our conversation, but, even though I was in the wrong, even though I had slammed the door on her back, if not her face, and had disrespected her in so unquestionable a way, I held my ground. I made it clear to her, in less profane terms than I am making it here, that I thought she was an unreasonable bitch and shouldn't have dared talked that way to me in front of my kids, that the classroom is my kingdom and I would not tolerate her meddling in my jurisdiction....blah blah blah. Youthful exuberance. I told her, more or less, she deserved my outburst. To her credit, she walked away, before things got really out of hand. Before Shit Got Real. But we were on icy terms for the next week or two. We came to a detante during the summer school term. But I never apologized to her, and she never apologized to me. That fall, I went off to law school, but in the years since I have visited my old school and she has always warmly received me. Water under the bridge, I suppose.

But around the time of the incident I do remember thinking, What the fuck is she going to do? Fire me? I bust my ass for this school, and I am good at what I do. She needs me here more than I need to be here. Let her fucking try.

I think of that incident now. I think of the collected moments in my life where, muddled by stupidity's slightly better-dressed cousin self-confidence, I didn't take my superiors' shit. I think of all those moments where I believed--and I acted in accord with the belief--that my employers needed me more than I needed them, that I had no fear of getting fired.

I think of that incident because I am no longer that person.

Now I have a boss -- let us call him Sean -- who sees himself as something of a teacher, but who has no patience at all, who fulfills television's worst stereotypes of lawyers (brimming with rage, mirthless, committed to destroying his adversary no matter how inconsequential the stakes), and who constantly belittles me, questions my intelligence and work ethic, and who I am beginning to think I will never win over. Now it should be pointed out the vast majority of the things that drive Sean to the brink of Hulk-like hysteria -- a comically melodramatic shuttering of eyelids, followed by a one-handed massage of his own temples, accompanied by very loud nose-breathing -- the vast majority of these things he is fully justified in criticizing. I fuck things up. This job has been a challenge to me -- I know nothing about the industries the firm's clients hale from and I did not have remotely the same level of responsibility in my previous job as I do now. Couple these realities of my job with my generally plodding way, and you can see how disaster might strike -- how it might strike all the time. I have no problem with Sean criticizing me, or my work, but what is bizarre is that he thinks bullying me, breaking me down, is the way to make me a better lawyer.

Now I know a lot of people have had bosses from hell, and maybe I've been lucky so far in my career in that this Sean experience is a new thing for me, but that doesn't change the fact that his tendency to fly off the handle causes me anxiety, makes me nervous, and consequently leads me to make other foolish mistakes that in turn draw further ire from his being. And none of this changes the fact that it's astonishing to me -- and I would think to you -- that Sean thinks he is helping me when he talks himself down from violent outbursts in my presence.

The other day Sean told me I don't have a "killer instinct" because he didn't like a fax I had written to some opposing counsel.

The day before he expressed his displeasure with the fact that I had taken a vacation "really early in my time at _______ LLP." I was dumbfounded. I racked my brain for a response to this statement; I thought I should defend myself. What would my younger self had said to Talulah if she said this to me? To my old principal? But no response sprung to mind. I had taken a week off after four months of work, and monitored my work email while away, and made sure the one or two matters I couldn't reschedule were covered by others. I had done it by the book, and now was being told I had done something shameful. Sean's statement hung in the air, and I just stared at him. I didn't mean that moment to mean anything; I thought this was just another example of him unloading on me and me just taking it. But then something strange happened. My silence, my dumb-stricken face looking at his, were counterpoint enough. Sean must have realized how preposterous his statement was, as it hung in the air, a stale fart from his mouth. He must have realized this was a bridge too far. He stammered, "I mean vacations are good. We all need them, but, you know, work piles up..."

I kept staring for a beat or two more. Then I gathered my papers, and said matter of factly, "Thank you, Sean," and took my leave of him.

I guess there's still some fight left in these old bones, but the fights going forward are going to be the tootless, bloodless kind.

We All Grieve in Different Ways -- Shamon!

The death of Michael Jackson had a profound impact on this blog, muting us for nearly a month. In the old days that kind of an extended reticence would not be tolerated, but E and I are now older and wiser (and wizened). We know quality trumps quantity, and, shit, even Perez Hilton has a ghost blogger. So, you will forgive us -- and we will forgive ourselves.

Now with the big news: I may have been silenced by the sad death of a childhood idol and the carnival of ugly it begat, but I am spurred to action, at least to couch-borne typing, because dear reader Anonymous Alex and dear friend, his lovely bride Anonymous Tsipora., whose wedding shower this blog once covered in a rare bit of cutting reportage (but to which I won't link because I am not sure what kind of anonymity we are continuing to provide them with), last Monday brought into this world a beautiful little girl, one "delicious" (to quote 'Pockets) anonymous Middle-Name-I-Have-Not-Yet-Been-Told. 'Pockets and I can't wait to meet her in September. Good job all around.

Now, gettting back to the typical busines of the blog, where do I begin? So little has been happening in the otherwise dull alleys and beige buildings of downtown San Francisco, that one does not know even where to begin. Some bird outside my building placed a nest in a low-lying tree and then viciously attacked pedestrians who walked too close to its eggs. This sent CNN into Anna Nicole Smith journalistic excellence mode, and gave rise to a lunchtime crowd with no mission other than pointing and laughing at the unitiated.

Meanwhile Adam -- whom you will remember is my broham to the max from ------ Consulting Group days -- has been keeping me informed of all the happenings at the old job. Here's a run down: Smokey got fired; Lindsay Poohands got fired; The nice lady who answered the phones and worked herself into a sexual seizure telling me how good Brad Pitt looked in The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttom got fired. There is no joke to be made here. These are all good people and while I may have enjoyed a laugh or two at their expense in these pages -- especially L. Poo -- it was in good fun. The point is this: this recession fucking sucks.

So, -------- Consulting Group continues to hemorrhage staff, butAdam has managed to hold on to the temp job -- and the Wesley Snipes Shrine continues to hold a place on the wall in his work station (including, notably, my still of Wesley from the preamble to the "Bad" video where he steps to Michael and gets an earful of You aint bad. You ain't nuthin'! ). Like the Dread Pirate Roberts in the Princess Bride who promised the (non-Snipes) Westley death at the close of each day only to ignore his promise the next morning, Augusta, the project leader, has fired Adam five or six times since I left, only to rehire him shortly thereafter. Oh, and apparently, my old alien-robot nemesis Abigail has evolved into a friendly being resembling a carbon-based life form. The whole time I worked there she wasn't the problem; I was. I suppose no one is surprised.

Still, even though I resigned my post from -------- Consulting Group, the braintrust there manages to mess with me: 1) in the days after I resigned, they sent me a notice of termination in the mail; and 2) as reported by Adam, the other day Augusta called him into the conference room and announced, "We have been talking about something behind your back, but now I want to bring you in the loop." Of course, he assumed the worst -- another pesky firing -- but was told instead that ------ Consulting Group was going to treat him and all the other employees to a sailing trip, and some serious debate had happened behind closed doors, some serious number crunching, and although some in the group wanted to invite me on the sailing trip, ultimately, they concluded there was not room enough on the boat. They wanted Adam to know this. I had not made the cut. They had done all that they could do, and this information should be kept to himself, and away from me -- to protect my fragile heart from the weight of the near possibility of maritime bliss, or maybe to prevent me from going all postal and renting my own schooner and ramming it into the side of the S.S. ------- Consulting Group. I don't know. But of course, this information was reported to me within the minute, and of course, I have turned it into blog fodder. And, of course, Adam and I enjoyed a good laugh, just like the good old days. Suffice it to say, I will never again work at such a wonderfully strange organization.

So maybe here's the lesson: Just like with Michael, eventually we forget all the ugly and just remember the good times.

Or maybe Celine Dion got a hold of some Soul-Glo (see video above) and no amount of wishing and hoping can ever make you forget the ugly (see video above).

Either way: shamon, bitches.

The Post Where I Tell You What's Up and What's Funny

I want to write a sweeping post about the death--okay, the evolution of--comedy, a result, obviously, of the Internet's fracturing of our popular culture and its promotion of quirk. But that would mean some bullshit bandying about of academese that no one -- I especially -- wants to endure (well, maybe Thumbu excepted). So, let me check my "discursives" and my "normatives" at the door, and say this only by way of opening query: Remember when only things that made you laugh out loud were truly funny? I have vivid memories of the scene in Naked Gun (or one of its sequels) where Frank Drebin uses the bathroom without detaching his microphone and everyone is made to listen to his bodily functions; that Barry and Levon $240 worth of pudding skit from MTV's The State; that Moleculo the molecular man skit that Conan O'Brien did when he was on Saturday Night Live. And I remember laughing hard at each of them and knowing that, that right there, that's funny. The first of these skits/scenes was universally funny, if the universe was peopled by awkward 10-year-old boys. The second of these ventured into some welcome absurdism, which my high school self had some appreciation for. The last of these I caught at a friend's house one Saturday night before a night out with a large group of people, none of whom got or cared for the joke. I remember standing in this friend's living room, doubled over, as ten people looked at each other, totally perplexed.

I have since watched all three scenes/skits and find them notably less funny than when I first watched them, but I don't think this diminishes their value at all. The thing to note is that all three at one time in my life made me laugh out loud, really hard. Why is it then that these days so much of what passes for humour in our popular culture evokes maybe a half-crooked smile? Robert Downey, Jr.'s minstrel show in Tropic Thunder? Virtually every moment of The Office ever? These -- the performance and the show -- have been haled as virtuosic examples of comedy by many people I respect, but neither have encouraged the slightest snicker from my person. It occurs to me that quirk, that certain boldness of performance, perhaps what Derrida would call differance (French pronunciation; also, just fucking with you...), these are the measures of good comedy, but where is all the stuff that makes you keel over because you're convulsing with laughter? Look, I like Zach Galifianakis plenty, but is clever and discomfiting the same as funny? Seriously, is it? I like Keyboard Cat (see above) too, but does he even qualify as amusing, or is he just the latest example of the mainstreaming of quirk brought on by the internet?

Don't get me wrong. I am happy that laugh tracks are going the way of GM and the newspaper industry. I like that we, collectively as a society, have put up some resistance to cookie-cutter comedy (e.g., America's Funniest Home Videos) -- and yes, I know there is plenty of evidence suggesting we haven't -- but is it too much to ask that things that purport to be funny make us laugh out loud?

That's my piece, and let me end it this way. There are two people on the Internet who make me laugh almost without fail. Aziz Ansari and Gabe Delahaye. They are also both my secret boyfriends, and I not so secretly hope that one day they make a baby together. Recently they both posted throwaway items in their blogs that made me laugh, and as anyone who has ever read the vile trash that is The New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs section knows, it's not easy to elicit that kind of reaction through the written word alone.

Here's Gabe on the upcoming season of Entourage, and here's Aziz on IM'ing with his brother.

Suspended Animation

First of all, let me be clear from the outset. This post is chaff. Just a throwaway thought to keep honest Anonymous Alex at bay. Somewhere in my e-marrow I can feel he's been prepping another Your Blog Is Dying missive, so I'm going to cut him off at the pass. I'm going to nip him in the bud with my arsenal of mixed metaphors. Here is a post. The blog is alive.

I've been working at my new job for about five weeks. I've resisted blogging about it because while the old job at ________ Consulting Group was temporary, a consequence-free way of earning a living, without having to have a career, the new job is not temporary. It cannot be shrugged off with a midday fro yo, and some clever banter with Adam over gchat. The new job has big-C Career written all over it, and I am trying my best not to fuck it up. That is to say, I'm trying. Part of trying means not blogging about every stupid fucking thing my coworkers do. There is an obvious element of self-preservation in checking myself in this manner. But it also suggests some delusion on my part as well. This blog, read by a discreet and gifted few, will never make its way to the web browsers of the employees at _________ LLP, my new professional home. I would have to morph into an opposite-marriage-supporting, LOL cat with a crush on Obama to achieve the kind of broad internet fame that would bring this blog to the attention of my colleagues. Still, you never know who might stumble here, who might crack through my nom de guerre, my made-up names, and expose me to the world.

So, I've hemmed and I've hawed about how to talk about my job, if at all. But now I've come to this conclusion: what made the old job tolerable, what, believe it or not, made it fun, was knowing that I could catalogue all the day's ridiculousness in these pages. Why deny myself that? Still, I am not going to blog about my new job without first imposing some stringent security measures: Because the new job has me doing some very un-hero-like and very specific kind of lawyering, I am not going to talk about the work itself -- and this is for the best; also, in addition to continuing to invent names, I might try on some composite characters and Hills like reality script tweaking. I expect no love from Oprah Winfrey.

Now, the only question that remains is this: Will I have anything to blog about? These days. I go to work in an office that is mine alone. My sliver of a window provides me with an angle on a tiny section of the Bay Bridge. Work comes in. Discussions are had. I try not to make a fool of myself. I eat sandwiches. I ask the Secretary outside my door questions about formatting documents in Word. I tell everyone how to pronounce my name correctly, and then the next week, tell them all again. I put post it notes on my sandwiches before putting them in the Fridge. I struggle to remember how to make .pdf's. I made an early play for a seemingly unwanted plant before anyone else could score it, and pumped my fist when it became mine. I stare at the dull canvas of beige in front of me and think about putting up something on the walls, but probably won't. Do I really want to make this place homier? Do I want to acknowledge that it is, in fact, my new home? I don't know the answer to that yet.

I do know this. The other day right outside my door, two junior associates, one of whom is quite friendly and the other quite sour, meditated loudly and passionately on whether or not one must have two spaces after a period. The sour one could not imagine a world where teachers and parents alike did not beat their children senseless for their cavalier and lustful use of the one-space. The other was somewhat more charitable, arguing that, "you know, there's no real reason you need two spaces," but conceded, ultimately, only a diseased mind would bunch his sentences together so brazenly. This was about 8 PM on a Friday. I felt overwhelmed by sadness for everyone involved in the discussion, myself included, as I was right then beholding it. I packed my things and scurried off between the two stalwarts of classical debate, and recalled with great joy that morning when I passed Dick -- you remember, Dick, he of ________ Consulting Group fame, he of the extended vowels ("401kaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy") on my way to work. It was about 9:30 and he was on his second or third cigarette break of the day, circling the block. Suddenly two low-flying pigeons swept in lightly towards his head, but to Dick they were like spray from an M2 Carbine. Their legs lightly grazed his hair. He dropped his cigarette and crumpled to the sidewalk like the first unlucky bastard out the boat at Omaha Beach, and mumbled "shit," mirthlessly and with no emphasis on the vowel. He sat there as I walked by -- I thought it best not to exchange pleasantries . Stunned, he remained half-splayed on the ground for a goodly while. His cigarette burning, wasted.

What fear does to us to a man.

__________ Consulting Group, you are the gift that keeps on giving.

Must Desi TV

Hey, everybody. There is a hot new blog on the scene. Thoughtful vivisection of television done by brianiac grad students, Tubatv is the half brainchild of devoted reader Thumbu Sammy, who this past week makes the rather astute observation that all four of the shows comprising NBC's comedy lineup last Thursday, The Office, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock featured South Asian people. Yay for pop cultural presence! Boo for the fact that the South Asian people in question (pictured above)-- Aziz Ansari, Maulik Pancholy, and Mindy Kaling -- played characters named Tom, Jonathan, and Kelly respectively, just like that lady from Texas wants.

Aziz Ansari, who has been a personal favorite of mine since occasional reader Sweet Daddy Purns introduced me to him in the summer of 2005 at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater (right before his killer "Aziz Ansari Punched a Wall" show), has always eschewed the rather limiting ethno-centric style of lesser comedians, but Tom Haverford? Desi, please...Still, I hesitate to condemn after one episode; he struck gold with his "I'm what you call a redneck" line in the otherwise mediocre pilot of Parks and Rec, but gets several demerits for the following statement, which while funny and self-undermining, does nothing to explain really why the fuck he can't be of Muslim heritage on TV: The cold hard fact is that dark-skinned people with funny-sounding Muslim names just don’t make it very far in politics...Yes, OK, fine, Barack Obama, Why does everyone always bring up Barack Obama?

How Can I Supposed to Carry On?

I was recently telling E. about an Igbo prayer, sometimes whispered into the ears of newborn children that I have always held in high regard and hoped would have application in my comings and goings as well: May your life always surprise you.

What I like about these words, I think, is the fact that they do not in themselves constitute a blessing, at least not as we understand a blessing to be. They do not hope for success or happiness, contentment or riches. They understand that life's narrative fails only when it fails to surprise. In this regard a life of unceasing and undisturbed contentment is something to be avoided, or at least something to be hoped against. We may be blindsided in this life, with great triumphs or stunning failures, but I think the Igbo mean to say that that's okay, that that, in fact, is what has been hoped for us.

With that in mind, I report news of great surprise: I have thoroughly mismeasured the dynamics at my office, as explained below, and -- yes, I'm burying the lead here -- just after posting perhaps my darkest post in quite some time, a post excoriating them, the Gods of capitalism, who cast me out so brutally in October, have made the surprising choice to invite me back into the fold.

On April 6th I begin a new job. A permanent one.

I have been deeply humbled by my five months in the woods of professional confusion (though I am constitutionally incapable, I suppose, of being able to adequately demonstrate humility in this forum). And I am deeply grateful -- despite my protestations otherwise -- for the chance to resume my career, or a career, in any form or fashion. The new job is with a law firm, a smallish one. It's not saving kittens from trees or anything, but it's a gig. One day yet I will find myself doing good works. That day is not today, but it will be here soon enough. For now, I go back to the private sector's teat. But fear not. Having mother's milk makes Jack a happy boy for now, but soon enough he will go back to his ungrateful, bitching ways.

I received word of this new job two Fridays ago, mulled it over for a few days, and then accepted last Wednesday. But strangely, in so doing, I found myself contending with various emotions. You see, I have spent the last few months, as you know, cultivating a deep bitterness for my "co-"workers, the alien robots who treat my co-temps and I like human vessels of the Black Death (a virulent strain of Black Death that not even aliens and robots are immune to). Augusta, Tessie, and Abigail especially have made it clear to us that we are there to be seen and not heard, and certainly not acknowledged. Given the malignant work environment I found myself in, for months I had hoped that I might have a chance to quit the job before the job quit me, a chance to give notice with great scorched-earth gusto. But the day I accepted my new job, I found a strange new feeling growing within. Like the dull pain of a toothache you push against with your tongue, like the scab that you get used to picking, the job had become -- very much to my surprise -- the sad-sack routine I was already beginning to miss.

On that Wednesday, I called the bossman at the new gig, exchanged some pleasantries, professed undying fealty, and returned to my cube, returned to an electronic batch of documents, perhaps my last, returned to my overgrown Wesley shrine, and to charts of my ever-declining metrics that Adam had sketched and affixed to my bulletin board, returned to Lindsay Poohands' soothing voice ("Linked-in is in my opinion the top professional networking site...Myspace, on the other hand, is mainly for teens."), I returned to all of this and saw that I had made a home for myself here. Unwittingly, I had turned my torment into my solace. And now I was readying to leave it all behind.

A man, I suppose, will miss anything if he is entertained.

So, I sat on the news of my immintent departure through that day. Finally, at the end, I mustered the courage to tell Adam, causing a great rift in our beautiful bromance. But still I could not bring myself to inform Augusta, or Abigail, or Ira. The next day, I told the other two reviewers, "Rookie" and Helen, and did so, weighed down with survivor's guilt. They were happy for me, to their limitless credit. But I felt like a d-bag. I was getting out, but why me? Finally, I made my way to Augusta's office, a moment I had always fantasized about, but when I told her the news, the strangest thing happened: my semi-despondency was trumped by her clear disappointment. Wait, you're leaving? You found another job? When's your last day? I mean, I can't believe it. You're going to leave? I had spent so much time hating these people for their social awkwardness, their petty pullings of rank, I had never entertained the notion that maybe, possibly, they actually kind of liked me. Augusta leaned back in her chair, bowled over by my news and told me how happy she was for me -- how genuinely happy -- and how much I will be missed, how invaluable I was to the project. I said earlier in this post that I am not always good at the humility thing, but in this moment -- quitting my limbless, lobotomized chimpanzee job -- I was deeply humbled.

And then Augusta said something that I am still trying to process. So, we're going to do a happy hour in your honor. What do you think? We can book the roof terrace where I know you and Adam like to have lunch, and we can do it next Friday, and you can bring your wife. Does that sound good? I agreed, of course, baffled. And as I got up to leave, she said, So, what's up with you guys and Wesley Snipes? I mean, you two are so funny. I looked at that [your shrines] and got such a kick. What's Adam going to do without you? We had always thought there was little we could do to make these people notice us, to convince them that we were their equals, but I was clearly wrong.

My head reeling, I returned to my desk.

The next day, which was last Friday, Augusta told Ira and Abigail of my resignation. Abigail, stoic to the last, said this to me in lieu of parting words: Umm, so your ID, remember to turn that in to the receptionist. Ira hugged me and promised to watch Let the Right One In, which I had recommended to him months ago. Adam and I were denied bromantic histrionics because he was out of town for a wedding. I put a bottle of Jack Daniels in his drawer, and consolidated my Wesley shrine with his. I packed up my cube, which took about three minutes, and put my feet up on the desk and shot the shit with the other two reviewers for a while. In these blog posts they have been bit players, but they are good people, and I very much enjoyed distracting them from their jobs.

As my melodramatic heart waxed and waned, as I considered all that happened in that space for the last three months, I was expectorated fully and forcefully back into reality. Abigail -- perhaps for my benefit -- did maybe her most what-the-fuck act of my entire tenure at _____ Consulting Group. She picked up the telephone and dialed Helen, my co-reviewer, who sits five feet away from me. This is to say, Abigail, who sits fifteen feet from both of us IN OUR OPEN OFFICE PLAN, decided to introduce a telephone into a conversation that could well have been whispered into the air. I almost died right then and there. These people. They are complete fucking disasters. All of them. Nothing they do makes sense, and I am convinced that they are an alien robot race sent from the future to confound us.

But I'm going to miss the fuck out of them. It's true.

I grabbed my coffee mug, waved a few goodbyes, promised to see them at the happy hour, and sauntered into the sunset.

TPS Reports

Here are the top three words that vowel-extending HR guy Dick loves to say in his care-free, sing-songy corporate patois:

3) Lift tickehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhts
2) Bloomingdaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyle's
1) 401kaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy

These are words that he uttered while orientating Buck into life at _______ Consulting Group. When he finished his presentation to Buck -- ostensibly a presentation on billing and tax information, but which seemed more concerned about the best Tahoe lift ticket deals than anything else, he said to Buck, "You know where to find me if you have any questiuhhhhhhhhhns." Buck responded, "No I don't. You're never in your office.'" This made me choke on my morning oatmeal. Now I love Buck like a sister -- he called Dick on his bullshit. Dick does no work. Zero. None. He is the biggest scam artist in the chain gang of corporate criminals I work for. His day consists of cigarette breaks with Tessie, Brad Pitt-related gossip with the receptionist, and J. Crew sales -- bags upon bags line his office. Occasionally, he reminds us when time sheets are due, a task that takes 3 minutes out of every fortnight. Still his job remains a full time position despite the fact that industry after industry takes its own life in this country, victims of corporate largesse.

I am a realist. I have made peace with the fact that a revolution is coming. It will foment in the streets. It will spill upwards through the elevator banks of our tasteful corporate edifices. And it will claim me as collateral damage, but it will make an example of Abigail, Augusta, and Dick, so who am I to complain? Dick is a man whose starched shirts have never met the indignity of sweat, and for this, all of us at _______ Consulting Group -- masters and servants alike -- must suffer. Now I don't want to die, the stuck corporate pig that I am, I don't, but each morning my temp ass drinks coffee distilled from fine Kona coffee beans and sits in a temperature-controlled office and laments all that it never became. Where is that novel, you keep talking about, asshole? It's a figment of your imagination.

Look, I know when to call a spade a spade. I get paid handsomely to mark wildly irrelevant emails non-responsive, while my corporate overlords make fake representations to the client about all the important work that they're doing. And Dick gets to lounge in his office, day-dreaming of the powdery goodness at Squaw Valley and do nothing else, knowing full well that his job is secure. Somebody has to input the hours these retarded temps write on their timesheets! When the revolution comes, I will feel sorry for myself. I will. I hope it will be quick and painless. But I know it probably won't. Still, I know that when the world is rid of me and its Dicks, when HR stops being regarded as a a life-station of middle respectability, and comes to be recognized as the deep, pustulous scourge that it is , then I will know I will not have died in vain.

Never in a million years did I think I'd say it, but my mother was right. I should have sucked it up and become a doctor. I should have done something with my life. I should have helped people. Instead, tomorrow, I will read obviously privileged communications between in-house lawyers and the client, and make heart-wrenching decisions about their emails: Was so-and-so's turkey brining recipe the smoking gun I've been looking for all this time? Who knows? Maybe I'll have to roust Dick from his nap and get a second opinion. Or else, maybe we'll duck out of work early and hit the slopes. Anything's possible when you've got a job that could be performed by a limbless and lobotomized blind homo erectus.

The Luckiest Dreamers Who Never Quit Dreamin'

In the final season of the hit ABC comedy program Growing Pains constant fuck-up and born-again Rapture looking-forwarder Mike Seaver took in a homeless boy. In the biz --the biz of nostalgic blogging about hit 80's comedy programs-- this is called a game-changer. A last, desperate stab at ratings gold. a misguided attempt at keeping it fresh and/or jiggy. Holler at me, Michael Steele!

Anyway, the trick didn't work. We didn't buy it, and we had already had it with the potential game-changing introduction of new Seaver child Chrissy. So Growing Pains gave way to the ungodly TV crimes of the 1990s. See Bud Bundy. The Seavers packed up the house and moved to DC, off-screen. But who was that poorly orphan? Who was he? Who was he? Leonardo DiMotherfuckingCaprio. Knowledge, son.

And so it is with life at _______ Consulting Group. Things were getting a little dull. Abigail wore astro-turf colored flats with a funeral director's get-up the other day, and it barely registered with me. Same thing, day in, day out. But then this week they brought in a gamechanger. Just to keep me entertained.

You see, the thing is, Lindsay Poohands is the world's worst salesman ("Hey, it's Lindsay Poohands from _____ Consulting Group. What's the 411?"). He needed help. Badly. The other day I saw him in the breakroom, where he was munching on a half-dozen hardboiled eggs and sipping on some joe, and I thought seriously about smacking the cup of coffee out of his hands. Coffee's for closers, Poohands! Good thing I didn't because they brought in a new salesguy, Buck, and gave him an office (even though Poohands toils in a cube around the corner from mine). Now there's much potential for treachery and professional jealousy. It's going to be like having HBO at work.

And here's an added twist: On Buck's first day, he walked up to me and introduced himself. We chatted, talked a little about his recent trip to Santa Cruz, generally had a very pleasant conversation. So, Buck is totally fail. Between filling out tax forms and figuring out where the bathroom is, Buck didn't have time for the Eradicating Common Human Decency in the Workplace Seminar that is mandatory of workers at ______ Consulting Group. Poor Buck. He thinks temps are people too!

Fortunately, Buck's reeducation wasn't long in coming. Tessie, the office manager and one of the "nice" people at the job, took Buck around to "meet everyone." I had told Adam about Buck and how normal he is. He got excited and thought we might recruit him into our Wesley cult. As Tessie took him around, Adam started sprucing up his cube, so that Wesley would be in full, unobstructed view. Tessie took Buck to Abigail, and he asked her if she was "a reviewer too, like cold4thestreets." No. I'm a senior consultant, snorted Leprechaun feet. Poor Buck. No recovering from that. And then our turn came. Tessie walked Buck right past us and back to his office. Silly Buck, you're one of us now. You don't have to talk to the help.

Devil's Avocado

My days of whine and metrics are soon drawing to a close. In fact, I have more or less been fired two times already -- the first time culminating in an unauthorized temp farewell party on the rooftop terrace, which goes sadly underused except by Smokey, a gravel-voiced, middle-aged second underling of Abigail's, a man who spent three days last week sorting four or five boxes of documents that we had already reviewed and more or less dismissed in their entirety. Fyi, Smokey smokes. On the roof. Yeah, sometimes, when nick-naming, clever gives way to expediency. And sometimes clever triumphs, if I don't say so myself, as I have taken to calling (and gotten Adam to call) the IT guy who matches business slacks and loafers with track jackets and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap the Human Mullet. Party on top, business down below. I'm too clever for my shirt. Too clever for my shirt. So clever it hurts.

Anyway, we've been fired twice, told not to come in the next day, only to be told shortly thereafter that in fact more work has been uncovered, a box of documents has been discovered, a privilege log now needs some assembling. We are managed by geniuses. Obama should ask them to solve the energy crisis. So, on the precipice of doom, we retreat; we return to the morbid spectacle of a wholly superfluous corporate enterprise. California has a 10.1% unemployment rate as of today, and yet in a well-appointed steel and glass edifice in the downtown skyline a team of "consultants" gathers almost universally irrelevant documents from a distracted client and hands them over to a disaffected group of attorneys whose careers have fallen engine over wheels off the rails. When these consultants -- Abigail and her totally absent supervisor Augusta -- mismanage the batching of the documents or fail to give us proper instructions, we are made to re-review old batches of documents, but still they call us out in meetings for our poor metrics. It's a rather elegant con they have going. When the client complains about the slowness of the project, they can lay full blame on us, the incompetent attorneys who appreciate not their munificence. Sadly, for them, though my fellow temp attorneys conduct themselves with some decorum, I'm a mouthy sort, and tend to document heavily each and every one of the obstacles they place in the way of our efficiency and recount them with great gusto in team meetings. Abigail is never pleased with me.

But things are not all lost in the job: True, Abigail maintains her icy ways, refusing to fraternize with us, the help, but Ira has begun to show qualities that resemble that of the species homo sapiens. A few weeks ago in his nervous formal style he asked if he could interrrupt our diligent web-surfing to have a talk. He pulled up a chair and in his stumbling way invited us to the firm's happy hour that Friday. We felt we had been accepted and cried tears of joy. At least on the inside. Then Friday rolled around, and the whole office cleared out for pre-happy-hour birthday cake in the breakroom, and guess who wasn't invited? What to make of this affront? All ten people in the office walked by us on their way to the breakroom for delicious cake, and not a single one thought to ask us if we too eat cake. Perhaps they thought us a cabal of diabetic lawyers. A few minutes later -- resisting the dark ways of his colleagues -- Ira returned and invited us to the celebration. We accepted. Little of note happened. Mostly we were looked upon with confusion; some regarded us with all the warmth a newly sober tri-delt might offer the townie she finds in her bed the morning after the big party. Then the idle talk (not by us) about the greatness of Wicked was interrupted by the ringing telephone. Why is anyone calling the breakroom?, someone asked. Maybe it's a bomb threat, Smokey offered, rather helpfully.

The party broke up, and we returned to our stations. Before the birthday cake, I had resolved to skip the happy hour, preferring as I do, strangely, the company of friends to the company of robots, but Adam persuaded me into going. What alcohol might do to T-1000 Abigail's nervous system was a point of some curiosity, I did admit to him.

The whole group showed up at the happy hour: Abigail, Ira, Smokey, Human Mullet, H.R. guy who greets people exclusively with "Hellloooooooooooooo", Lindsay Poohands (sales guy who I once saw emerge from a bathroom stall after dropping a deuce and walk right out the door without stopping at the sink), and many more, including mysterious bossman. Bossman threw back a few glasses of Syrah, and opened up to Adam and me. I asked about the history of the company, which has a vaguely pharmaceutical sounding name. As the tanins set into his drunk face, he said to me, Do you know when we opened the company? Do you know? September 10th. September 10th, 2001. And then let that knowledge sink in. I pretended to understand why that meant anything, since we were in, you know, San Francisco. Adam asked why he chose the unusual name for the company. He said it was a term his wife learned in medical school before dropping out to produce their brood. Adam offered, At least the med school tuition was worth something. Bossman parried, That's not all it was good for. She learned some important things about the human body too, if you know what I mean.

We did not. We left, immediately ruing the day we stopped being treated like the help.

Some Motherfuckers Are Always Trying to Skate Uphill

In the later part of last year, I unentertained you with my Paxil-starved posts about the plateau and fall of my legal career. Last I left you I had walked out of a dressing-down/interview with a temp agency, depressed and debilitated, only to be offered a reprieve from an ex-colleague, who was looking for some contract attorneys to review documents -- what I like to call white collar bedpan cleaning, except without all the actual hard work and poor compensation. Anyway, I seized on the job, and have settled into the humdrum of office life, and now it's time for an update.

So, the job sucks. Well, not really. It's actually all pretty hilarious, but more on that in a second. We -- the other three contract attorneys and I -- sit in an open office plan, amid the permanent worker bees of the organization. They are, to my understanding, in charge of gathering from the client the potentially relevant documents in the case, scanning them, and uploading them onto the document review program. Logic dictates this is what they do. Except they don't really talk to us, so we don't know for sure, and the two worker bees-- let's call them Abigail and Ira -- who are in charge of liasing with us are bizarre and incomprehensible for separate reasons. Ira is fairly nondescript, except for two things: 1) he hates Colin Farrell, as I learned the hard way and 2) he listens to Black Sabbath on his iPod in the break room. Also, he thinks he works in some sort of real professional organization and so insists on wearing neckties, and he likes to telephone coworkers IN OUR OPEN OFFICE PLAN, who are within voiceshot, and talk to them. On the phone.

Abigail, more important, is my new mortal nemesis. (As for my old mortal nemesis, there is not room enough in this post to recount the Benjamin Button-style epic hate story I have going with Sara Burnstein. Alas...)

Abigail's a raging megalomaniac who shuns personal conversation, saying hello or goodbye, and prefers to dress in a variety of perplexing styles. Here are my favorites: 1) Justin Timberlake fedora with knee-high boots and capri pants; 2) sailor outfit with beret; 3) Sigourney Weaver's business suit from Working Girl, though with enhanced shoulder pads. She also likes to bitch about our "metrics," but then makes us wait hours on end for new batches of documents. She's self-serious and ambitious and lusts for victims to throw under the bus in her singularly focused climb to the top, to the top of what I am not sure. I know I should just let it go. But assiduous readers know, I let nothing go. I hope and plot for Abigail's downfall, even as I've stopped communicating with her directly and relay all messages through Ira.

But hate is just one kind of medicine -- the affliction being boredom. The boredom of a job that has no future, no worth, no point. A job where one can make mistakes with almost zero possibility of consequence. I suppose I could inadvertently authorize the disclosure of an otherwise privileged document, which could then be the basis of opposing counsel's potential waiver of privilege claim. But that would take some serious fucking up. Mainly I decide if documents are relevant or irrelevant, and even the relevant ones are totally unenlightening.

Now, there's another kind of medicine for boredom. It's called distraction. This is why an innocent conversation I had last week with a co-attorney about his visit with friends in Venice Beach (obviously) led to a discussion of White Men Can't Jump, especially Wesley Snipes' outfits in the movie, and our sincere hope that one day Abigail will come to work dressed as him, painter's cap with the brim flipped up and all. This in turn led to another distraction. I challenged my co-attorney friend -- let's call him Adam -- to a shrine-in-Wesley-Snipes'-honor-off, and now our cubicles, once barren, save for a phone list of all the people who sit IN OUR OPEN OFFICE PLAN, within voiceshot, none of whom talk to us anyway, but whom we could telephone, well, now our cubicles are things of beauty. I have a blown-up picture of the interlocking hands (one black, one white) from Jungle Fever in my shrine; a healthy serving of Wesley armpit hair as he reaches for his blade in Blade; Wesley in drag; Wesley doing a funny dance with his wife; Wesley with a gold chain and medallion, looking all hard and matchy- matchy, in New Jack City. But that wasn't enough. Now we photocopy all official correspondence to include Wesley's image and distribute it to our two baffled fellow attorneys. Adam even found the letters of reference Woody Harrelson and Denzel wrote to the judge in Wesley's tax evasion case and put them up -- Woody Harrelson is a man who knows what kind of impression good letterhead can make. Also, I now subscribe to a "Wesley Snipes'" Google news alert.

All of this may seem like the stuff of, if not legend, then at least the subsidiary plot line in a mediocre episode of The Office, I am fully aware, but this is my medicine. This is what keep me not necessarily sane, but at least sane enough not to unload invective on Abigail for questioning my "commitment to serving the client's needs."

Thank you, Wesley Snipes.

Adam and I will be there to break you out of jail, should you finally be made to go there. And we are planning your comeback vehicle -- if Spike Lee doesn't beat us to the punch. Our movie poster is above. In the film you play a mild-mannered temp attorney, just trying to fill a discovery request so you can buy asthma medicine for your son. But little do you know you work in an office staffed by alien robots. You uncover a hot doc, which the evil supervising attorney tries to suppress. You review diligently and you deploy karate chops fiercely. In the final battle against the attorney controlling the alien robots, you snap his neck, and as his body falls to the ground, you say sternly, "Motion denied." I will be famous for putting these words in your mouth, and you will be famous once again.

This could be huge, Wesley. Call me.

Save me from Abigail.

And if you know Colin Farrell, tell him I've got a part for him.

ps -- Everyone should read this article on The Way of the Snipes. Do it for the children.

Slow-Day Observations: Hollywood

Hey, don't you think it's cool that Will Ferrell did a movie with Sacha Baron Cohen and then turned right around and did one with Sasha Cohen (pictured)? Yeah, me neither....Also, there is something to those Mormon tablets. Otherwise, there's no plausible explanation for how far supremely awkward Napoloeon Dynamite guy has stretched his fifteen minutes.

In totally unrelated Hollywood non-news, how is it that The Office, which--to its credit--has one of the most diverse casts on television only recognizes five cast members in its opening credits--all of whom are white? Is Ryan (straight man, rotting from within) more integral a character than Kelly? Or Karen? I'll accept that Stanley, Oscar (from Season 2), and the Warehouse guys are all subsidiary, and maybe Ryan gets a little bit more screen time than all but the four principals, but he's not the reason I watch...Anyway, Dunder-Mifflin, our little spring fling was fun while it lasted: 30 Rock's back on Thursday.