Well I thought for sure I was done with this thing... I have a girlfriend, we live together, life is good, etc, etc... But of course life inevitably turns to shitty and surprisingly this is just about the only outlet I have for talking through my feelings and crap. I guess it’s a good thing I’ve laid off this blog for so long, though.

I find myself once again with a girl who seems to not be able to stand me half the time. This time, as I mentioned, we live together, so it’s sort of worse (although when the last girl decided she hated my guts halfway through a saturday, it was usually too much of a hike for her to go back to her place, so she stayed and we smoldered and it was a lot like this).

A friendly acquaintance of mine has recently been put in charge of an advice column and I spend a lot of spare thought time mentally writing out hypothetical letters for her to answer in it. They tend to go somewhere along the lines of: “I can’t hang out with both my girlfriend and my friends because at some point she always turns sour and begins to act shitty. Are we doomed?”

Or: “I am catching myself looking at cute girls on the subway and out on the town and fantasizing about the possibility of a breezy cheerful relationship that isn’t so much ‘work’. What can I do?”

Side note: Around about the time of my last entry on this site, I had decided that I was going to write memoirs, and that it would be a bad idea to spend all my juicy energy on pouring out my heart in this blog when I should have been pouring it out into a manuscript or something. And then I decided that writing self-indulgent whining about everything that sucks was taking my focus in the wrong direction, and that I should be doing fiction instead of glorified journals. Or maybe it was that first and the other last. In any case I stopped writing altogether and realized I had managed to clamp down on my only emotional outlet. So I’ve been a little bit like a pressure cooker ever since. This entry is me letting the steam out before I explode.

Anyway, I’m having serious relationship problems, and I have zero perspective on whether I’m causing them or how bad they really are or what. I’m considering seeing a shrink just so I can get a fucking opinion. At this point it’s been so long since I’ve hung out with any friends that it would be severely lame to make this the topic of a conversation with any of them. If I ever WERE to hang out with them.

In other news, I finally quit my job and got another, more exciting one. Except I think I might hate the new job. Once again I have no way of getting any perspective on my feelings or experiences here. Other than my girlfriend’s warped impressions filtered through her own hatred for her job and unhappiness with her life (don’t get me wrong, she’s been very supportive to a point... she doesn’t like sitting through anything I have to say that takes me more than 10 minutes), I don’t have any way to talk to anyone about this that would give me any meaningful insight.

I bounce between thinking I’m just irrevocably burnt out in this line of work to thinking there’s a personality conflict with my new employers, to thinking the personality conflict is actually internal jitters and unrelated feelings of discontent (see above! heheh) that are manifesting themselves as unhappiness at work in order to insulate my romantic life from the truth.

In terms of the theme of this site, moving far away from the epicenter of hipness and excitement: the girlfriend believes that and acts like she’s nearing a point where living out here is going to drive her batshit crazy, so she’s been basically making me feel miserable about living so far out from the action. As if it wasn’t hard enough.

Tags: trouble in paradise

Ok, so I’m going to start off with the pap. I happened to watch a little television tonight, having gotten home late and needing something to distract me from a monster headache and a pile of unfulfilled dreams. I was canceling a gym membership and picking up (yeah picking up myself, not having it brought to me which is what ya pay for) a package from the fedex compound in Brooklyn, if you wanted to know.

So anyway, I was watching this new reality gameshow competition thing called “The Sing-Off,” which if you haven’t seen the ads is like “Star Search” but with group contestants only. Or as I’m sure the show’s creators pitched it, it’s like “Glee” meets “American Idol” by way of “So You Think You Can Dance.” Sheesh I’m done with the fucking quotation marks. Italics from now on. If you don’t know any of those references, it’s an a capella group competition with three judges (dude, Ben Folds is one, and he’s like a kindly yet serious high school music instructor).



I’m pretty much hooked even though I despise every single one of the other shows this thing takes it’s cue/influence from. Mostly because the groups competing are actually kind of bad. Plus they eliminated the only group with a compelling non-musical back story tonight (called Solo, from a poverty stricken neighborhood somewhere). Making it to the next round were at least two incredibly white lady groups who sang without much soul or character or emotion or whatever.

My favorite moment, other than the super short solo of the tall dude from Solo who had this buttery Lou Rawls meets Marvin Gaye with like a tiny smidge of Johnny Mathis voice that will definitely make him rich and laid, was when the elimination bit got down to its final two groups (Solo and Gaggle Of White Housewives [sic]). There was a moment when both groups were huddled together clasping hands tightly, waiting in painful anticipation. There was some serious shit riding on it, and both groups had reason to believe they were going home. I personally expected them to eliminate the WASPs.... So anyway, both groups had a member who was visibly praying to god. It was almost like a mini competition to see who could get god to pick them with the most devout pleas. I sound callous... Yep. White ladies church group no 1 won. Bleh. They sucked.

Other topics? Well... it’s Xmas time and I’ve got to decide who to blow money on. I’m in a little bit of a fight with part of my family, so I’m thinking of sending them all something really thoughtful to pour on the guilt. Haven’t gotten much in the way of family contact from them since we all “reconciled” 2 years ago that I haven’t initiated. They pissed me off recently so I haven’t initiated any contact with them and suddenly they’re all “you’re so quiet, is something wrong?” Well, if you get a christmas present, then yes, I hate you. Just not sure what to get them. I’m becoming a real fan of small stuff. There’s an incredible variety of tiny things to get people... It lends itself well to finding something “personal,” like a flask for a certain alcoholic asshole.

On the coworkers front: more and more surreal. I’m starting to get shit from the idiots new boss for not tattling on them when they don’t do their work. As I wrote that, I just realized that she probably had a few talks with them, and they probably blamed their lack of involvement in their own projects on me. Like I’m an ogre and I chase them away from their own shit. Sighs. It would be nice to work on something that isn’t absolutely embarrassingly awful. For once. Please universe.

Tags: sing-off, coworkers, holidays, gifts

Well I’m not sure what to focus on here. Job sitch: scary as fuck. Morale is at an all-time low across the board, bureaucracy is ascendant and personal accountability is keeping pace. So I’m in a work environment where blind devotion to red tape is making it hard (impossible) for people (and me) to get shit done, but a new philosophy of holding people responsible for their work means not getting shit done has consequences. Yikes. Don’t get me wrong, there’re a ton of idiots at my job who would’ve been fired years ago if they worked anywhere else, and I personally welcome any boss who decides it’s time to stop letting shit slide. I’m just worried about the whole guilty-by-association thing. How does a person decide which team member fucked up on a project? Safer to toss out everyone, right? I hope not. Let’s hope the union gives a shit.

Love life sitch: In a serious relationship. No more handjobs in bars by strange women for the H.I.E. Instead it’s trips to nearby metropolises to attend the weddings of sisters, weekends pushing the karaoke comfort envelope open, and evenings listening to lengthy recountings of daily minutiae. Lucky me those minutiae are often regarding encounters with J. Lo and Katy Perry... but I gotta say I’m having trouble sharing my hermit space with someone else. Most days it’s fine and fun to have a caring lady to cook for and talk to and cetera. And then it suddenly gets old and I can’t stand to have her around. And it’s hard not to interpret those feelings as being deeper than commitment phobia/panic and selfish desire to watch the bad TV I like. But I think this one’s going to be around a long time. As long as I work in some days off.

Except MAN i could save some serious dough if she moved in and split the rent. Holy crap. We’re talking max-out-the-Roth-IRA-contributions money. heh. Or whiskey.

Look for a more specific update this weekend as I attempt to hide from girlfriend relatives by pretending to work. Also, I’m toying with the idea of telling some dating stories just to get them out there before my new blissful state erases them from my mind. Let me know if there’s interest.

Tags: girlfriend

So it’s 12:42AM, Friday night. I’m at home. Here’s a thing about New York that’s subject to change, but hasn’t in the last couple years: Most people don’t really go out on Friday night. And if they do they royally half-ass it. I am giving in to this situation and Fridays will henceforth become Get Shit Done nights.

To wit: tonight I spent a fucking loooong time dicking around with my resume site. Of course I’m not going to link to it because I hate you all and I would never willingly let you find out who I really am. No but really, come on. And I had an interesting discussion about gentrification with a person I almost went on a date with from that cupid site, but we didn’t and now things have simmered down into a bland series of instant messages about the hood. We both live here at the ass end of Brooklyn, hence our original inclination to meet up.

Anyway (and I realize my blogs are like a million times too long, so I’ll trying to paraphrase here), it went like this:

Girl: I see more and more hipsters in our hood every day
Me: Oh thank god
Girl: No, but they’re going to ruin the neighborhood.
Me: Huh? How?!
Girl: Gentrification. I don’t want an American Apparel here.
Me: Srsly? But--
Girl: I’ve seen too many neighborhoods with charm and character destroyed by gentrifying rich yuppies
Me: Have you ever actually opened your eyes in this neighborhood? It’s all rich white people ALREADY! And they’re all TACKY!
Girl: Something stupid and irritating
Me: Somebody tell me when the yuppies get here

So I obviously edited for time, etc, etc, but the thing is, this girl is always complaining about how lonely and isolating living in this place is. And she’s right (when she says that part). Why anyone wouldn’t want a nice mix of people with a sense of fucking atmosphere to be injected in this pean to “Saturday Night Fever” of a town I’ll never know.

Back to the subject of this entry (right). I have now posted my resume online, and everyone I know who works in the biz I do finds something to dig into and pull apart, sending me into a spiral of self doubt. Everyone else, however, loves it and is positive. My industry is full of bitter jealous assholes. Myself included.

The rest of the time was spent trying to figure out how to get my stuff to show up on google. I think the consensus is you wait a month. fine. i will. Next stop, work on getting this garbage heap up to snuff.

Tags: resumes, websites, gentrification

Well so here’s the part where I jump into divulging mildly confidential info and am thus forced to keep this site anonymous forever and ever ever. But first, the noise problem.

The part of the neighborhood I moved to is made up mostly of people waiting to die. They are old. They are great as far as old people go, though. At least to someone who’s used to a certain stereotype of the elderly as quivering, barely mobile, mostly silent and lacking in the spunk department. Where’d I come up with all that awful bigot-ey bullshit? Well the southwest, natch. My point is, though, that here you get some real live wires.

Take my upstairs neighbors as an example. They scream at each other all the time, move furniture in the middle of the night (2 AM), and have crazy topics as fall-back conversation. When encountered in the laundry room, the old man from upstairs likes to wistfully declare that the “Indians” had it right. “Huh?”
“The Indians had it right hundreds of years ago.”
Me: “H- how so?”
Upstair Old Guy: “They never washed their clothes.”
Me: “Oh, yeah?”
UOG: “Yeaaah, they had the right idea, this washing stuff’s for the boids.”
Me: “Is that right. Well I think I prefer being clean. It gets a little unpleasant after a few days--”
Uog: “Naah, they really had life down back then, those Indians. You have a nice day.”
Me: “You too”

Problem is they’re fucking loud sons of bitches. Even when they are off to Florida until April, like the building manager (who’s sympathies lie firmly with the older residents) claims. In fact, as I write this I hear something large being dragged across the floor. And I have to be the crazy psycho who forces the sweet old couple to buy carpets (which everyone is required to have). And leave asshole notes tucked in between the doorknob and door jam. Which bitch about loud humming machinery that turn out to be in the basement and NOT in the “empty” apartment upstairs. So now I’m crazy.

Work
So two more people got fired last week. I’m wrapping up the last episode of the show I cut, and would probably be the next in line. And I bought an apartment. This is a new type of stress. And the messed up thing is I’m finding myself getting boxed into WANTING this job badly because of the mortgage and the inherent potential depression factor of being jobless in Siberian Brooklyn. Nuts.

Want a fun link? Not safe for work

Tags: neighbors, layoffs