Galileo and Blah Musings

galileo's head was on the block
the crime was looking up the truth
and as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
i try to trace them to my youth

and then you had to bring up reincarnation
over a couple of beers the other night
and now i'm serving time for mistakes
made by another in another lifetime

how long til my soul gets it right?
can any human being ever reach that kind of light?
i call on the restin' soul of galileo
king of night vision, king of insight

then i think about my fear of motion
which i never could explain
some other fool across the ocean years ago
must have crashed his little airplane

how long til my soul gets it right?
could any human being ever reach that kind of light?
i call on the restin' soul of galileo
king of night vision, king of insight

i'm not makin' a joke
you know me, i take everything so seriously
if we wait for a time when all souls get it right
then at least i know there'll be no nuclear annihilation in my lifetime.
i'm still not right

i offer thanks to those before me
that's all i've got to say
so maybe you've squandered a few bucks in your lifetime
now i have to pay

but then again it feels like some sort of inspiration
to let the next life off the hook
but you'll say, "look what i had to overcome in my last life
i think i'll write a book"

how long til my soul gets it right?
can any human being ever reach the highest light?
except for galileo, god rest his soul
king of night vision, king of insight

sigh. Thank you Indigo Girls.


Am deeply disturbed on this night. I shouldn't be so bothered by things. But I am. I'm getting married on 22nd October and it's not that I don't love Bil -- far from it! I have a nice little vision of the wedding -- fairy lights and glowing orbs or lanterns or whatever, squashy cushions, black and creams, etc, very Harry Potter, I guess -- and yet I have such antipathy towards planning it. I do love Bil and I do want to have some sort of festivities to celebrate our love and all that shit, but I don't know if I really want to deal with the wedding itself. I mean, a couple more years, and we'll be married whether we like it or not thanks to common laws.

I think that part of why I'm feeling this way is due to the sense of isolation that has been washing over me since picking up and moving cross country. I haven't really kept in touch with the vast majority of my college friends. There's Bil -- we're in this adventure together -- but I haven't properly talked to Tash since Election Day, when she called me while I was rallying around the tragic Dems in Copley Square...
I've become a Gap hermit: I spend the majority of my time either working at the Gap or reading about the trials and tribulations of other people's lives on their blogs. I have my roommates here and some decent work pals, but no real get-tarted-up-so-we-can-go-out-and-make-drunken-asses-out-of-ourselves friends. And I must say that part of this is due to the lifestyle change of being in a relationship, but I never go out with the girls anymore (even for coffee) because I don't have any girls to go out with. It's good in some ways -- I'm reading a lot more, which always suits me -- but I wonder if I'm destined to always be a person who is on the outside looking in like some vicious voyeuristic peeping Tom. The upshot it that I guess we'll have a smaller list of people to invite to the wedding, and thankfully I have a huge family, so the bride side of things might not be completely empty. But Bil has so many friends from so far back. My friends slip through my life -- sometimes it seems that I'm trying to hold water in a sieve, my friendships come and go with such fluidity. And I'm reduced to cheesy metaphors... alas.

I'm not really complaining -- I've always been a bit of a loner and I really do like to have time out from the rest of the world to center myself. But it's weird, only in the last six or so months have I realized that to be a loner is a very lonely path. And I have no idea anymore how to even go about making friends.
Perhaps it would help to throw myself into an artistic pursuit -- I've been in a bit of a creative funk as of late (alright, it's more of a creative void...).
I really need to do some fucking theatre. Or something... Anything... Argh.

I'm going to stop with the blathering now and go reread Running in Heels. I must say Anna Maxted really fuckin' rocks. I might wanna be her when I grow up. I think that I'd like to be a writer. If I only had a story.

That is really all.

Meet Bruce

Hi. I'm Bruce. The new Betta fish in town. And if you fuck with me, I'll kill ya! Especially any a you cats out there. I'm just waitin to bust outta this jar and getcha. Bitches.





That is all.

I think I might love...

...applying for jobs. Does this make me some sort of masochist? Who just applies for jobs just for the hell of it? I mean, I'm always trying to improve my standard of living or whatever, but come on! What the hell's wrong with me?

I actually enjoy writing cover letters. I never write boring form letters anymore, oh no! I write very cheeky silly cover letters. Take, for example, this one that I wrote yesterday to the producing director of a summer theatre in Northern Wisconsin:

"Dear Mr. 'Black',
Hello. I'm sending along my resume and a link to my
online portfolio in hopes that they will intrigue you
enough that you might want to consider hiring me for
the position of costume designer for your 2005 season.
Let's see if it works!
About me: I'm recently out of college (University of
CA, Riverside, March 2004), and am currently living in
the Boston area following a brief stint in northern
New Hampshire last summer, where I worked as a
designer and a stitcher in the costume shop of the
Weathervane Theatre. Since moving to the Boston area,
I have designed the costumes for an independant film
that I fear may never see the actual light of day.
Other than that, I've been waiting for the right
opportunity to take the world by storm, and working
retail.
Attached, you'll find my resume in rich text format,
and at www.devodesigns.net you'll find another copy of
said resume with portfolio pics of a vast majority of
my work.
I'd love the chance to chat with you about the
'Northern Lights Playhouse', so please don't hesitate to
call me!

Regards,

D."

Who writes this shit? And more over who actually enjoys it?

For me, it's almost like some sort of perverse game: how out there can I go and still get a response? And how memorable is too memorable in writing a cover letter? God forbid that I'm actually boring. And even with the above letter, I've already gotten a response in which Mr. "Black" has sent me his private number with instructions to call when it's convenient. Who knows, I may end up in Wisconsin for the summer.... keep your fingers crossed, I guess......

That is all.

You know what I hate?

So, after an eight-hour-long extravaganza of an interview with the "marketing" company, it occurs to me that there is a very fine line between marketing and sales. This job is not so much a marketing position as a sales position -- a door-to-door sales position. But, when you reach a certain level you don't have to do that anymore -- you get a cushy desk job. I like the cushy desk job part okay, and the sales part isn't really all that bad, as the service that we sell is shipping with UPS. That's right -- the guys in brown. So, it's not like I'm trying to sell Granny's Great Gift Wrap or anything.

Anyhow, at the end of a battery of interviews and running around downtown with an irritating girl from Texas I'll call "Leslie", I had definitely decided that 1) she would offer me the position, and 2) I would carefully turn her down. Somehow, though, this was not possible. The money was really good, and I thought, well, I can't turn it down really.

I started at 8 am on Monday. All work is on a commission basis -- there is no hourly wage. I was placed with "Leslie" again for Training Day 1. Great. I can't believe my good fortune. I must be the luckiest girl in the world. This explains the phenomena of what happens when I go to Vegas. Yippee.

We drive to the middle of Bumfuck, Massachusets, get out of the car and set up shop, which means we start going door-to-door. Even to the "No Soliciting" doors. "Leslie" laughs at me as I hesitate to go into one such door, "We're not solicitors: we're giving these people another option to something that they already need." Stop me if I'm wrong, but isn't that still solicitation? Are we not working on a commission based on how many sales we make? Whatever. The point is that not only is she clearly deluded and possibly insane, she's a megalomaniac from Texas. It seems that there may be more than one Texas village that's missing an idiot.

We somehow make it through the day. She tells me halfway through that if she makes three sales today, she'll give me credit for one. We make two complete sales and she fucks one up. I don't get a dime. Lovely.

Finally, at 5:30pm, after telling me that if I think that we're done, we need to knock on 5 more doors, it's time to head out -- not back home, like I'd like to after a nine hour day, but back to the office for an ominous sounding "Atmosphere Meeting." Fanfuckingtastic. I get back into the office, ready to be in and out of this meeting lickety-split so that I can get home and eat some supper. I go into a back room, and there's a gaggle of people all excitedly talking in pairs and writing on whiteboards attached to the walls. I chill out in a corner, hoping no one will talk to me, as all these people are unsettlingly chipper. As I wonder what's in the Kool-aid, one of them approaches me. Great. Here we go again.

"Hi, I'm 'Ben'. How was your day out there?"
"Uh, good."
"Oh, well.... We actually should grab a pen and talk through it on the whiteboard while it's still fresh in your mind. Then we can set four goals for you to achieve tomorrow."

Wait a second. Goals? What? Anybody who knows me knows that as a proud underachiever, I have never had any more goals than 1) to get through the month, and 2) to remember to eat. That's it. I can't have four goals a day. Not fuckin' happenin', bucko. Maybe, though, I'm just not as enthused as I should be because I'm tired and hungry, and maybe these people are fucking insane, I think to myself. I don't say any of this to "Ben" as he has disappeared to locate the all-important magic dry-erase marker of doom.

While he's gone "Sabrina" walks up to me, and asks me how my day was. I tell her it was good. She wants to know what was good about it. As I am lying about the "good" part, and am tired, I have trouble coming up with a decent response. I finally tell her that it was joyous to meet all the dear deserving people of Bumfuck, MA. I think that she bought it too, so I'm sure that there was something in the Kool-aid. I privately wished that it was Jack Daniels.

Then it got really weird. At an unknown to me, but somehow predetermined signal, everyone moved into a circle and started clapping their hands. At this point I was hiding in the corner, hoping to go unnoticed. "Leslie" reappeared and banged a small-sized gong and ran around the cirle and slapped five with everybody (excluding me -- I have a touching thing -- I really don't like touching people, especially the dreaded high five, which truly is the lowest form of human contact ever devised, but I digress). Others now do the same, always banging the gong and running around getting their filthy hand slapped by others with equally filthy hands. (I may be neurotic, now that I think about it...). Suddenly, "Leslie" grabs me, pushes me toward the gong, and says, "Go for it," all too encouraging for my liking. Oh, balls. I bang the gong, but I'm told to do it harder. I comply. And then, I trotted around the damn circle, the misanthropic curmudgen that I am, and slapped people's hands. Apparently, I missed one. I know this because the owner of said hand chased me around the circle and stopped me to get a redo. Just fuckin' kill me.

Moments later, "Leslie" whisks me out of the door, and offers to walk me to my car. I decline, politely, but she follows me anyway, wanting to talk business the whole way. She offers the names of people who I'll undoubtedly want to "get with," and I sincerely hope that she's talking about talking with them about work and not "getting with them." Fianlly she leaves, and I can go home. I call my parents on the way home, as they are eagerly awaiting my news of my first day. I tell them all about it, after which my mother says, "But Dev, you're Daria. You don't slap five." No shit, Sherlock. I had decided to quit by the time that I got home.

And all night, after I fell asleep, I had unsettling dreams about Kool-aid, a sales pitch and doors, tons of doors. I worke up to go to work and called in with "food poisoning." I'll quit tomorrow.

Thankfully, while I was looking at the want ads, Dot from Gap called me and offered me some hours for the evening. I can have my old availability back, with a possibility of more hours from other local stores, and they mentioned wanting to bump me up into management soon. I guess all's well that ends well, but man, I still hate gongs and fives.

That is all.