Working Late

There's a new moon tonight, so it's very dark over Brooklyn. A couple of weeks ago when I was coming home from the radio show, there was a laser sculpture over the city, a prism of colored beams in honor of the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

There's no laser sculpture for me to see from my building tonight. There is the Chrysler Building, though, with its yellow scallops of light at it's peak. It was designed by one of my company's graduates, so it always gratifies me to see it in the New York skyline. There's also the Empire State Building, green tonight with some red trim on the spire, for Christmas. Tonight is the fifth night of Chanukah; I feel like ESB should be blue and white for that, but so it goes.

Speaking of spires, I also see the unfinished 1 World Tower, which replaces the destroyed World Trade Center. The Freedom Tower, as it's sometimes called, is already the tallest building in the city, unfinished though it may be. It's covered in twinkle-lights right now, bare construction bulbs strapped to the exposed beams that make it unique in New York's nightscape. And speaking of spires, the Freedom Tower got one of its own recently. The added height will make it the tallest building in the Western hemisphere. Here it goes, on its way up for installation.

And in the student housing across the courtyard from my desk on the 6th floor, I see two girls decorating a Christmas tree that must take up the entire floor space. Well, there's less than a week left in the semester, so why not?

That's what's going on outside the windows tonight. It's quiet here when I'm alone. Except for the damn air vents that make it sound like the building is a 747 about to reach its cruising altitude.

Sick of chocolate now

It didn't take that long. As soon as I walked into the Hershey Lodge in Pennsylvania, into the muggy fog of artificial chocolate scent they pipe into the lobby, chocolate ceased to be a treat to enjoy and more a challenge to endure. I threw away the second half of my check-in Hershey bar, and didn't even partake of the baskets of free fun-size Hershey products the Lodge puts in every conference room. By the end of my business trip, after using the Lodge's soap, shampoo, and lotion, my whole body smelled overwhelmingly of chocolate and I was ready to go home.

Fortunately, my apartment no longer smelled overwhelming of pork sausage, otherwise I might have spontaneously combusted from the hideous combination of fumes as soon as I walked in the door.

Then yesterday, I hosted a party for a bunch of departments at my company and crammed my cakehole so full of cookies and brownies and--well, cake, that I'm pretty sure my sweat would give a butterfly diabetes. (Butterflies like sweat. And poop. Look it up.) We put ice cream in the eggnog, for heavens sake! Do you know how dense eggnog is with ice cream in it?

How dense is it, Big Island Rachel?!

Hey, I've warned you about that sort of behavior. Don't make me get Security.

But to answer your question, the eggnog was dense as reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" while watching the second season of "Game of Thrones" at the same time. 

Fun fact: the briefcase I was so excited to use on my business trip? It had been so long since I'd used that thing--

How long was it, Big Island Rachel?!

I'm getting a blunt object. You'd better start running while you still have use of your limbs, because I'm going to do to you what Maui did to the sun.

It had been so long since I used my briefcase that there were resumes inside of it. Don't struggle, you'll just give yourself internal bleeding.

Foolish questions

Last Tuesday at my radio show, I was talking to the monitors L and C, student workers who handle all of the technical aspects of the Rodent Hour, such as "are we broadcasting?" "can you actually hear us?" and "we have a band, make it so everyone can hear them." In other words, they do most of the actual work. I mostly just talk, tweet and blog.

C and I follow each other on Tumblr, so we were chatting about our various social media projects. L asked me, "You have a blog?"

"Many of them," I replied, "for the Rodent Hour and for myself."

"Why?"

I was confused. "Why what?"

"Why do you have a blog? What do you write about?"

C and I looked at each other. Then we looked back at L.

"That's the most foolish question I've ever heard," I said.

And the topic was closed.

I reviewed Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" over at my book blog, by the way.

Holiday Delay and Business Trip

I probably could have written a post yesterday, on my regularly scheduled day. But I got home from spending the holiday weekend uptown, sat down on the couch, took my pants off, and that was basically the end of everything I had planned for my Sunday. I think we all know how that goes.

There's a new book review over at Big Island Rachel's Books. I read "This Side of Paradise" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Short version: no short version! Don't be lazy! You can go over to the other website and read the whole review if you're curious.

My next post pay be late, too. I'll be away this Wednesday for a conference in Pennsylvania. That's right, I'm gonna put on my big girl panties and go on a business trip! I'll wear a suit, and carry a briefcase, and save my receipts for reimbursement, and I'm going to be so fucking grown-up I can't goddamn stand it! Woooooo! BUSINESS TRIP!

Where's the business beers and business water-park? I'm here on business!

How far I have come from the early days of working in New York when I couldn't even wear a pair of black trousers without wanted to punch my face full of holes and stick safety pins through them.

The Storm

I stuffed plastic bags and duct tape into the cracks of my window frames, turned the fridge down as cold as it would go, packed my little blue suitcase, and left my apartment on Sunday afternoon at the same time as my upstairs neighbor S and her cat. It all felt very familiar. Didn't we just evacuate for a hurricane last year? S said that she was taking her cat to her sister's place in Brooklyn Heights, but that she might come back herself and weather the storm in our building because Irene hadn't been that bad. On the one hand, that is specious reasoning and I did not agree with her with her logic--on the other hand, I left my laptop computer and all my jewelry in my own apartment, so I guess the specious was going around. 

I stood at the bus stop and watched the restaurant put tarps and sandbags down over their cellar doors. Two bulldozers were parked on top of the giant pile of salt across the street. The East River is right on the other side of that pile. Clearly the dock workers thought that shit was about to get real.

Won't the salt just dissolve in a flood?

A guy with a thick beard and horn-rimmed glasses came up next to me evacuating with nothing except a Scrabble box under his arm. He didn't even bother to pack a change of underoos. Hipsters and hurricanes, I thought. He's either the smartest or the dumbest person at this bus stop right now, but there's no way to tell until the storm actually hits. The bus pulled up and away we all went, leaving Flood Zone A and heading for the hills.

In hurricane preparedness, you learn that the most important aspect of surviving a hurricane (after you get to high ground, of course) is to keep yourself occupied. Panic is your biggest enemy. So for all of Sunday and Monday, while the BF and I were crammed into his little uptown studio, I read my books, did yoga, took baths, and groomed like a nervous cat until I'd shed my long hair in every corner of the apartment. And then it was time for a walk.

This was before the storm had made landfall. No one really knew what was coming, so attitudes ranged from the blase to the barely-sane. Vans full of police officers cruised the streets, looking very official and prepared. A crowd of them (what do you call a group of police officers? A pod? A pack? A pride?) came into a pizza place and the BF looked at me with his I-didn't-do-nuttin' face, but they were just getting their lunches. As if they'd be coming for him. They're coming for me if they're coming for anybody. I come from interesting stock. Parents have been warning their children not to play with my family for generations.

After lunch, we went to a grocery store thinking we might pick up a sack of clementines, but the lines were crazy-long and the shelves were almost cleaned out. Almost. Apparently when the end is nigh and civilization totters to the brink, people look at turnips, pineapples and cranberries and say, "Fuck that noise, leave it for the looters."

We got our first hint that this whole storm thing was serious business when the crane blew over backwards in midtown and the BF's family had to evacuate their building.

Witchcraft!

That was Monday afternoon. On Monday night, the tide came in, the hurricane hit, and our troubles began. We didn't know it at the time, though. The BF closed the curtains, turned on the white noise machine, and we had a quiet evening at home ignoring each other while we read our respective books. The lights flickered once or twice and he filled up the bathtub just in case, but we woke the next morning to heat, power, and Internet as if nothing had happened. Our biggest concern was if we'd get the day off or not.

Then we turned on the television.

Breezy Point, Queens. Anyone who makes a Call of Duty or a Mad Max joke is going to hell.

And checked the New York Times online.

Subway station in the Financial District.

 And Googled images of my area of Brooklyn.

Red Hook, the neighborhood just south of my own.

I tried to adhere to my Girl Scout training. We turned off the news and read our books some more. We watched Golden Girls and a re-run of Beetlejuice on television. We even went outside for a walk. Damage was minimal on the Upper West Side, a few downed trees and a lot of untidy leaves in the gutters. But the air pressure was still all weird from the storm and it felt like someone was jamming chopsticks into my eardrums. We went back inside and tried to stay busy, but I was starting to worry about what had happened to my building.

I live in a funny little neighborhood that no one really knows about. Google searches for my street just kept pulling up images of flooded Red Hook, the neighborhood immediately south of my own, and with all public transit shut down and all the bridges and tunnels closed, there was no way for me to get home and check my apartment. Important lessons were learned that day about getting my neighbor's phone numbers and not being so anti-social.

Wednesday was worse. My office was open, but there was no way I could get off the island of Manhattan. The BF got to go back to his normal life because he can walk to his school, but I was stuck in his apartment watching re-runs of X-Files and another round of Beetlejuice when I wasn't watching the news. It was Halloween and I had my costume with me, but I knew there was no way I was going to celebrate. My heart wasn't in it. I couldn't read, do yoga, or even groom. I just sat on the bed and wailed to no one in particular that I wanted to go home.

Fortunately, that was when R called me. "Are you coming over?" Fuck and yes, I was coming over. She lives across the park from the BF, and buses were running again, so I peeled myself off the mattress and hit the road. Traffic was Independence Day gridlock. I hopped a crosstown to the east side, but around Frederick Douglass Blvd my patience ran out and I just decided to walk. I got as far as 96th and 5th Ave. before my patience for walking ran out and I decided to get back on a bus. And it was the exact same bus I'd gotten off of half an hour before. (I recognized the driver and the Halloween costumes.)

When R heard my wailing about not knowing what was happening at my building, she stuffed me full of cookies and tea and we played Scrabble for a few hours. I think that hipster at the bus stop was on to something, because I felt a lot better afterwards. The BF joined us, we ordered take-out, and watched Spirited Away with her neighbor's cats, which is almost like Halloween.

He's dressed as Charlie Chaplin!

Thursday. My fourth day of evacuation. I was determined to make it my last. The night before I'd called the restaurant in my building and asked them what had happened on my street, and the hostess said they were dry, powered, and open for business. That was as much information as I was going to get without being there in person, and public transit was slowly coming back to life, so I put my books and teddy bear back in my little blue suitcase, kissed my BF good-bye, and started off across Manhattan.

I figured I could take the subway south, take a cross-town bus east, another bus south again, and catch one of the shuttle buses that was taking people between Brooklyn and the blacked-out parts of Manhattan. Even in daylight, it was eerie to go below 34th Street and see block after block of dark traffic lights and shuttered stores. It felt like a movie set before the director yells "Action!"

A city divided.

The bus spit me out at Jay Street and I began my walk home because I have never been able to find the start of my bus route in Downtown Brooklyn and the aftermath of a hurricane was a bad time to fight that battle again. Atlantic Avenue looked all right, streets clear, no windows broken or awnings down. I decided to be optimistic and stopped at the grocery store, and then I got pessimistic and stopped at the liquor store.

The bulldozers were still parked on the giant pile of salt, just where I'd left them on Sunday. The bookstore and the restaurant were both open for business, and the super of my building had put away the sandbags. The front door pushed away drifts of leaves when I opened it, but I didn't smell any sewage or mold and there was no mud on the floor. Apparently--impossibly, miraculously--my neighborhood hadn't flooded at all.

My own apartment was toasty as a hippie at Burning Man and everything in my fridge was frozen solid. The bonsai had shed some leaves but was otherwise fine. Every light turned on and the Internet fired right up when I plugged my router back in. I can't be certain, but I think that the heat and power and water was on the whole time I was gone. Would you believe I had more clean-up to do after Irene than I did after Sandy? I had nothing worse to deal with on Thursday than a carton of half-and-half that froze while I was gone and got all grainy when it thawed.

Considering the devastation in other parts of the city--and the lack of power, water, and heat to tens of thousands of people across the state--and the billions of dollars of damage we'll need to repair the damage--and considering that I live a block away from the East River and less than a mile away from a neighborhood that was under 6 feet of water on Monday night--I am one absurdly lucky Big Island Rachel. 

I made my triumphant return to work on Friday and immediately got in a fight with a customer over the phone. It felt good to be back to normal.

I Am Spartacus!

The danger about drifting off into thoughts of New York ComicCon at an industry conference is that you suddenly find yourself standing up while people are applauding you and you have no idea why. I was at a university up in Washington Heights this afternoon, playing with my necklace and thinking about my NYCC costumes (yes, there's more than one), and then my co-worker was tugging at my elbow to get me out of my seat while about 200 hundred people clapped for me for no reason I could see.

So I smiled and nodded, my go-to response for situations like this (I have a shameful amount of them), and ran a little movie clip in my mind of that moment in "Spartacus" where everyone was standing up and yelling, "I am Spartacus!"

I asked my co-worker why we were standing up and he laughed. It was super-embarrassing to have to ask him again because he thought I was joking the first time. Turns out we were standing up to be recognized for giving a presentation at the conference on good customer service. This was probably better than my first theory, which was that my thoughts were visible to the auditorium. I wouldn't blame them for applauding, though.

My costumes ARE pretty sweet. You'll see.

Retreat! (But never surrender)

Nothing makes me feel more grown-up than going on a business trip. I just like the way it sounds: "I'm afraid I'll have to cancel our regular rat-shivving appointment on the East River. Kindly convey my apologies to Long Lizzie and the Circus Twins. Oh, nothing fancy, I'm just going on a business trip." And then I take all my extra purses out of my absurdly cute overnight rolly-bag, the blue one with the turtles and monsterra leaves, pack it full of actual overnight stuff, and roll through Cobble Hill like a boss. No Hello Kitty lunchbox for me today; the office will be providing meals.

We spent the night up in Rockland County at the Stony Point Conference Center. It was hard to pin down at first, because on the one hand, the Center was VERY hippie-ish, with the peace signs and bookstore full of leftist pamphlets. On the other hand, there were huge dove and olive branch tapestries hanging in the dining room, and more crosses than you usually see at your run-of-the-mill commune. But then I read the guest information booklet in our room and found out that the Center is run by the Presbyterian church. Fortunately, our room had free wifi, so I googled the Presbyterians and found out that they're a very liberal and socially-conscious branch of Christianity, which explained the LGBTQ section of their gift shop. So know I know. (And knowing is half the battle!)

I would have loved to stay at a place like this for my Girl Scout camping trips, instead of up in the freezing cold highland desert, which had to have been the only ugly place in the state of Hawaii. Stony Point had lodges, a glass-enclosed dining room, fine art everywhere, rock gardens, a meditation solarium, and a Victorian Mansion perfect for a murder mystery that we got to bunk in. We shared it with an Islamic healing group also up for their retreat, so there were halal and vegan options at all the meals. (Fortunately, my one coworker had visited the Pork Store before the trip and we had plenty of prosciutto and pepperoni to keep our arteries nice and greasy. Gotta love the Pork Store.)

So, threw the Frisbee around, chased some deer, sat in the fancy parlor, discussed yearly goals for the office, ate some cannoli, and then came home. It was very peaceful and relaxing to be away from the physical office and get a fresh perspective on the things we do every day.

Coming home yesterday, my coworker and I were zipping down the Palisades Parkway behind our Big Boss's SUV in her sweet little Mini Cooper, and she remarked how grown-up SHE felt driving her own car home from an office retreat. There we were, just a couple of grown-ups grown-upping it up in New York.

Then I forgot my purse in her car when she dropped me off. I think I know why my sister always says that if you're still using the word "grown-up," you're probably not one.

Birkenstocks

I got a pair of Birkenstocks. I'm at that point in my life.

Strangely enough, I got the idea from "The Devil Wears Prada," which I rented on Netflix a few weeks ago. If encouraging its viewers to go shopping was the movie's intention, it succeeded nicely, because "The Devil Wears Prada" inspired in me a deep want for clothes. Anna Hathaway just looked so pretty in her perfectly-fitted little jackets and skirts that cost thousands of dollars in real life but she got for free because she worked at a fashion magazine. But every time she was out of the office, walking around the streets of New York or Paris in those ridiculous shoes, my feet ached in sympathy. The soles were all too thin for the cobbles in her Lower East Side neighborhood, and the heels were not at all conducive to the amount of running around her boss made her do. There's studies that show the long-term damage feet and legs sustain from regular high heel-usage. I already wake up in the middle of the night from cramps in my feet and calves if I've done a lot of walking; there's no way my body could take a pair of stiletto Jimmy Choos.

But the want--the deep, gnawing WANT for new, pretty clothes! I must have STUFF! I stared at a lot of people's feet on the subway for the next couple of days, which is totally okay and not at all weird because in New York everyone looks at everyone else's shoes, and I determined that T-strap sandals are in this summer. And one of the fashion websites I joined, Rue La La, was having a sale on Birkenstocks, so there you go. T-strap Gizeh Birkenstock sandals for Big Island Rachel. They're so comfy. I regret nothing.

I know that a girl's Birkenstock phase is usually in college, when she's attending Take Back the Night rallies and only wearing clothes from No Sweat. But I grew up country. My only shoes in high school were rubber slippah and white tennis shoes all chewed up from hiking. When I went to college, I went from farmland to urban Honolulu, and my roommate was a SoCal fashionista who took me shopping every weekend. I wore heels and full makeup to class and was usually the best-dressed person at the poetry slam. Little silk scares, y'all.

Living in New York, I've almost started to regress. I never wear makeup, because the pollution makes my eyes tear up and it would dissolve into a soggy raccoon mess by lunchtime. I always wear my hair in a tight braid or a bun because I'm afraid of what's on the back of my subway seat. And I don't wear high heels. The last time I put on a pair of heels was for the Tom Sawyer ballet in Kansas City, and while I looked great and it was a lot of fun, it's just not going to happen for me in New York. I walk a mile on concrete sidewalks to get to work every morning, spend my day in an office with concrete floors, and walk another mile over concrete to get back home at night. I need a flat shoe with a thick, chunky sole that can absorb the shock of all that hard concrete. So, Birkenstocks. I just wore them for a week straight and my feet feel fantastic. Can Anne Hathaway say that?

Well, probably, because she's a movie star and can afford to have some peasant rub her feet with crushed pearls and shea butter every night. But I'm a union member and I don't believe in exploiting the working man. Birkenstocks, y'all. Birkenstocks.

Earthquake in Brooklyn

The Big Island gets little tremors all the time. We're volcanic. It happens. It's not supposed to happen in New York City. If I'd known I would have to deal with earthquakes and tornadoes in addition to fucking WINTER, I might have just stayed in Hawaii with my earthquakes and tsunamis. At least there we have perpetual summer.

Virginia just had a 5.9 earthquake that we felt up here in Brooklyn, first as a maybe-it's-just-me tremor and then as a holy-building-evacuation-Batman shake that left us milling about in the parking lot for about half an hour in some pretty gorgeous late summer weather. So it wasn't all bad. I was standing by the office printer with a piece of paperwork and thought at first that I was having a sensory flashback to the great Hawaii earthquake of 2006. But then the hangers on the coat rack started to clink together and the floor began to sway like a boat (we're on the top floor, six stories up, so sway is actually a good thing. Sway saves. Brittle breaks.). My coworker told whoever was on the phone with him, "It's an earthquake, get out of the building," hung up, and looked at me and snapped, "Get moving!" Combat veterans: they always know what to do.

It's a good thing we just had a fire drill a couple of weeks ago. Everyone scurried briskly down the stairs, making loud human-noises similar to wildebeasts evading lions on the savannah. "Don't panic, don't trip, don't puke," I told myself. Self, all excellent suggestions. I was one flight of stairs away from the outside world when this guy in front of me suddenly stops, turns around, and says, "I'm going back to help get Admissions out of their office!" I shoved right past him, because Hero, I'm too young and pretty to die! Let others perish, I've too much to live for!

I got out into the parking lot, looked down, and realized that the only thing I brought with me was the piece of paperwork I'd been clutching when the quake began. I felt like finding the student who gave me the paper and saying, "When disaster struck, yours was the only thing I thought to save!" I didn't feel too embarrassed, because one of our student workers was in the file room before she evacuated, and she brought the paper she'd been holding at the time as well. And it was one of my emails! Bonding moment!

Hanging out in the parking lot with everyone from my building was actually pretty fun. If we'd had a couple of kegs and a grill, we could have made an afternoon of it. Alas, they made us go back inside and work for another hour. We received emails and text messages telling us that "the buildings are secure and workers are to resume all activity." So I went back to copying my sexual organs on the Xerox.

You know. Like ya do.

Natural disasters--I use the word loosely, I don't know if much was actually damaged, especially not this far away from the epicenter--have a fun way of bringing people together. It doesn't matter who's the boss of who, or who makes more money than who (whom?). If that building goes down, peasant and noble are squished alike.

Terror of the wrath of the gods: the great equalizer.

Undulating Wall of Sound

Summer is here! This is my fourth summer in New York. I moved here on July 8th, 2008, which means today is my 3-year New York anniversary soon. Praise me!

This is my first summer NOT doing gigs with the Village Voice street team. On the one hand it's nice, because I don't have to haul 30 pounds of earplugs and condoms around in 90 degree heat and listen to band after shitty band play the same bad indie music at the Knitting Factory. But on the other hand, street teamstering did get me out of the house and all around the city, and it gave me some good stories to tell at the bar.

Looking back, I would recommend that any young person moving to New York City get themselves one of those part-time jobs in promotions of some kind. It's like New York boot camp, where you have to find your way around using public transit while loaded down with massive amounts of crap, make nice with the mouth-breathing freeloaders that come to free crap like bears to a campsite, and learn to withhold free crap from said bears until they cough up some personal information so your parent company can bombard them with offers for more free crap. It's the circle of life, and it moves us all down the bowels of this great city we call home. You learn pretty quick whether or not you can hack it in New York once you've worked Electric Zoo.

All of this is on my mind lately because one of my coworkers recently said good-bye to a young relative who lasted exactly 5 days in New York City before she moved back home. She didn't even make it a week. Poor soul. I can relate. I was so freaked out my first night in New York City that I threw up in a Polish restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. I probably wouldn't have left my room at all if the BF wasn't there to hold my hand and show me around. A lot of credit also goes to my old housemates at 187, who took me to parties at the Tip Top and let me drink with them on their roof. New York is a scary place, and you need nice people to hold your hands while you paddle around in the shallow end, but eventually you need to just dive in there on your own and swim for all your worth.

Shoots, all that talk and I haven't even gotten to the subject of my post, which is a picnic I had with some friends on Governors Island last Saturday. I brought a shower curtain to put under my picnic blanket to protect us from getting swampass, which I feel was pretty clever, and in true Hawaii-style, there was WAY too much food, even with 3 friends showed up unexpectedly and doubled the size of our party. We were ostensibly there to listen to a free classical music concert, but instead of a little Mozart, Vivaldi, Handel and we'll call it a day, the orchestra played with minimalist, experimental composition from 1964 that the program described as "an undulating wall of sound." In my opinion, that phrase should only be used in a bedroom context. We listened for about 10 minutes before we completely tuned it out and talked about cheese. Apparently you're supposed to treat cheese like a live cat, and not put it in a body bag and stick it in the fridge.

Who knew?

Delicious cake, om nom nom.

Hey, there! Still not feeling my best, but I got some happyvibes from my friends about the Literati Scouts idea, so it's all cool.

There was cake at work today. When you work in a large office, or, as I do, in a small office that's nestled in a larger office ecosystem like the seven-legged cane spider that used to live in my bathroom and eat gnats and mosquitoes... hang on, that metaphor got away from me. I was too busy shuddering in terror at the thought of that damn spider. I didn't pee alone from ages 5 to 8. My Big Sister will never forgive me.

Cake! When you work in a large office, cake just sometimes appears. Maybe it's somebody's birthday. Maybe there's a new baby, or a graduation, or we laid siege to another department in the building and are now feasting on the spoils of war. I've learned not to question delicious noms that come my way. My overlords assure me that I am being amply rewarded for my efforts, whatever larger purpose they may serve.

Seriously, after nearly a year in this job, I'm still not entirely sure what I do. The orders come down from the tower, some short guy with two heads distributes the armor, and we ride forth into the haze. I've never gotten a proper look at the enemy--no one has--but the scarred veterans who ply their trade along the walls of the keep whisper that the beasts have command of shadows and shades. Rumors from the hut of the one-eyed witches say that the haze in which we fight isn't a haze at all, but the bodies of the enemy, spread thin and wide like a poisonous gas that hangs over the killing fields. Though if this is true, what then prevents the haze from smothering us all while we sleep?

I don't question. I follow my orders. Answer the phones. Service the customers and polish my blade. The haze is always worse in the summer. Tempers run short. I hope the overlords have lots of cake.

Delicious cake.

It is happiness to you

When we moved into the new office building, my second big concern was the length of the walk between my desk and a place where I could make hot tea. (My first concern was the floor-to-ceiling windows, total lack of window shades, and our department's location on the south side of the building. And our school offers Masters degrees in architecture AND interior design.) I solved the problem by getting a big insulated cup for hot water and a lovely blue glass sake bottle for drinking water.

It was such a beautiful bottle. After the first month had passed, everyone on the floor had gotten their "Rachel's guzzling alcohol at 9 in the morning!" jokes out of their systems, but I still regularly got compliments on it. The label held up well despite repeated washings, and featured a full-color reproduction of a Japanese woodcut of a geisha. The label was delightfully mistranslated and spoke of "rice pure 80% harvesting." It ended with the vaguely threatening "It is happiness to you."

Unfortunately, I never took the time to write down the rest of the label. And now, I'll never get the chance.

Yesterday, after I'd made my morning trip to the kitchen to fill up my vessels and wash my tea strainer, I put the full sake bottle on the edge of my desk and knocked it onto the concrete floor where it shattered into a half-gallon puddle of water and lovely blue glass.

The keening of my office mates was like the cooing of pigeons under the BQE. I almost cried. My bottle. My blue sake bottle.

Sometimes I used it to give me an extra foot of reach when I was taping manila folders to my windows to block out the relentless sun. Tall Boss said it looked like I was a drunken Spider-Man splayed out against the window, especially when I did it on St. Patrick's Day. Other times I read the label to the ladies from Financial Aid when we were sharing front desk duties, or compare it to my coworker's glass Mason jar he used for his water vessel. Rachel's guzzling sake and he's pounding moonshine.

Rest in shiny blue pieces, pretty sake bottle.

Today I brought in my replacement. It's not the same--but it'll do.

Excuse me--I have a bottle of sake to drink.

Fair Utica and other oddbits

It's been quite a while since I posted. A lot of the interesting things that happen to me these days are kinda-sorta confidential, because I spend most of my time in a Real Job and I have to protect my customers. Which is a shame, because I work at an art school, and you would not believe some of the--well, I won't brag about it. I don't want you to feel bad about what you're missing.

I can say that I went on a business trip up to Utica, NY a couple of weeks ago. Utica is a strange place, very Bruce Springsteen in its down-at-heel working-man vibe. They get 270 days of precipitation a year. It rained the whole time we were there and no one seemed to notice.

I've decided that business trips are pretty awesome. You get to stay in nice hotels with Sleepnumber beds and gossip with your coworkers around the breakfast table about what number you put your mattress on. (First night was an even 50; second night I cranked that sucker down to 15. It was like sleeping on pudding.) And you get to eat out for every meal, though that's a bit of a mixed blessing. Utica is heavily Italian and loves to cram meat and pasta down your neckhole, which is a big change from my usual diet of brown rice and steamed vegetables. Not bragging, it's just what's cheapest on my New York City working-girl budget. After ribs and steak and sausage and fries spaghetti with three kinds of cheese and spinach with breaded cheese topping, it was restful to get back to my Brooklyn apartment and raw peanut stash.

I love raw peanuts, by the way. I used to eat them out of birdseed trays when I was a little girl. Now I'm a big girl so I eat human peanuts.

Actually, Utica did have a lot of veggies to offer, but most of them were at breakfast. It's not my normal way of doing things, but it was pretty nice to have a big steaming heap of spinach, zucchini and carrots first thing in the morning. I'm going to see if I can work that into my normal routine.

Triangle Factory Fire and Unions

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGERY.

Sunday, the BF took me along on a tour of Lower East Side sites associated with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. March 25th was the 100th anniversary of the fire, in which 146 sweatshop workers, mostly young immigrant girls, lost their lives. The fire began on the 8th floor, and the workers on that floor and the management on the 10th floor mostly managed to escape, but no one alerted the workers on the 9th floor. When the flames began coming in the windows and up through the floor, the 9th floor workers were trapped. The elevator cables had melted in the heat, as had the bolts holding outside fire escape together. Panicked workers ran for the stairs, but the fire door had been chained shut by the factory owners, who didn't want girls "pilfering" thread and fabric from the factory. Those who didn't burn inside jumped to their deaths out the windows; the ladders on the fire trucks of the time only went up 6 stories and no one could reach them. Many girls jumped in groups, holding hands while they fell.


Every year on the anniversary of the fire, people chalk the names of the victims on the sidewalks in front of the factory and in front of nearby tenement buildings in the East Village and Lower East Side, where manyof the workers lived. The tour took us past a few of those buildings, and also to the sites of early labor union meeting places, which is of particular interest to me right now because I'm a union member.

This is the first time in my working life that I'm in a union, and I'm digging it. It gives me old-guy cred in case I want to go bowling or to the Staten Island Gun Club, and more importantly, it connects me to those brave women in the early labor movements who were trying to change the horrible working conditions in sweatshops like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The history of women in the labor movement gives me that swooping-heart, tears-in-your-eyes, fuck-yeah-feminism feeling whenever I think about it. I'm glad to be a part of it.

Not a lot of American workers are in unions anymore, which is kind of a shame. Most of us define ourselves by our jobs, and if you can feel that you're part of something bigger than yourself, then you feel a whole helluva lot better about that paper pushing. You feel working-girl pride instead of wage-slave ennui.

This one's for the shirtwaist girls. You are remembered.

I understand daylight savings time

Certain tirades of mine are seasonal. Twice a year, when daylight savings time kicks in, I set up some poor undeserving coworker or friend with my usual lead: "What exactly is daylight savings time for?"

It helps that no one actually knows the answer to this question. Most will mumble something about farmers. The fools.

"Oh yeah?" says I, I says, "Every single farmer that I've ever known gets up with the sun and goes to bed with the sun, regardless of what the clock says. So why the hell do they need daylights savings time?"

Hawaii doesn't do daylight savings time. We're so close to the equator that there really isn't much difference between summer and winter in terms of daylight. Maybe an hour difference, if that. So half the year Hawaii is six hours behind Brooklyn, and the other half of the year it's five hours behind. I remember it really used to mess with my TV viewing. They were always switching what time my stories came on!

So twice a year I bitched about daylight savings time. My script didn't change. It was like Dick Clark's New Years special.

Daylight savings time was on Sunday. We had to move all the clocks an hour forward, so it was a little hard for me to get up this morning (compounded by my nightmare about Mr. Spock turning into a crazed ape-man and trying to punch through the windows of my car while I honked the horn to summon the rest of the away team--G-d, I'm such a massive nerd). But after work this evening, I went grocery shopping and kept thinking to myself, "It's so light out. The sun is still up. What madness is this?" Self replied, "Daylight savings time, moppet [that's what we call ourselves in here]. You get an extra hour of sunlight in the evening because you got up an hour earlier."

The flash of insight was as bright as the sun on Atlantic Avenue. I get it now. All us 9-to-5ers get extra daylight for afternoon activities and I don't have to schlep the groceries home in the dark. Thanks, daylight savings time!

Seriously though, it has nothing to do with the damn farmers. See above.

Happy VD

Work is often unintentionally funny. You have to be so chaste and polite and careful to conceal what a true bastard of a human being you really are that sometimes weird stuff slips under your radar. You'll say something like, "Happy VD!" on Valentines Day and won't realize how dirty and strangely appropriate that is until it's already out there and you can't take it back.

I didn't say that, by the way. It seems like something I'd say, but I can't take credit for it. I just recognized the phenom and took quiet pleasure in the joy of knowing that it happens to other people, and not just me.

Man vs. Parking Space

So while I'm at work soothing the jangled nerves of this great country's future tempers/part-time indie filmmakers (which is pretty rich coming from me, considering the path my career took during my first two years in New York City), I have to wonder: what's going down in Cobble Hill? What happens in my neighborhood while I'm sitting high up in my sixth floor office, gazing out the window and wondering if the guy in the window across the way is wearing a shirt or if his bare chest is really that alarming shade of maroon, and should I call someone for help in case it's the latter, or would that just result in awkward inquiries and possible legal action?

On my walk to the subway this morning, I passed a car trying to pull away from the curb, but because there's currently more snow on the ground than on the bathroom floor of Studio 54 on New Years Eve, it was going nowhere fast. The first couple guns of the engine, I figured the driver would give up and go back home for a smoke and another cup of coffee. Even as someone who's never driven anywhere other than the Big Island, I knew that car wasn't getting out of that snowdrift. But the dude just kept gunning that engine, even though steam was coming up from where the wheels were melting the snow and the street stank of exhaust. I actually turned around and walked backwards on an icy sidewalk to see how far this was all going to go. Dude was still standing on that gas pedal before I had to turn around and go about my day.

Ten hours later, I'm walking the same route back home from the subway, and damned if Dude still isn't trying to get the car out of that same parking space. The car hasn't moved an inch as far as I could tell. And now he's got about five or six friends gathered around him giving advice. They've wedged a bunch of flattened cardboard boxes under the wheels to try and get some traction. These are my neighbors, toiling away under the streetlamps, undaunted by the cold, probably trying to get the project done before we get another three to six inches dumped on us tomorrow.

Here's the thing: I know that Dude wasn't trying to get out of that parking space the whole time I was at work. That's just silly; he had to have taken breaks, gotten some lunch, maybe called a cousin with a garage in Sunnyside to get advice, otherwise he'd have run out of gas and burnt the motor out. But in the movie of my life, from my limited little Big Island Rachel perspective, that man devoted his entire day to getting that car away from that curb, slowly adding and losing friends and comrades on his mad quest for glory, trying hot water and sand and sawdust and salt and all manner of schemes to lose his car from winter's vile grip--to no avail. Many were the times he sank down to his knees on the sidewalk and cursed the cruel fate that doomed him to this exercise in futility. Perhaps he reflected with keen awareness the hubris that led him to own a car in New York City. Perhaps, even now, at this late hour, he struggles on, dauntless (what is daunt, by the way, does anyone know?), unswayed by the dark and the cold and the exhaust fumes. A lonely warrior, a brave soldier of Cobble Hill.

He stands as a beacon of hope and perseverance to us all.

We're not paying for this!

I don't often write about work anymore, because I'm gainfully employed now and have to be careful about posting anything that might get me bundled into the back of a black van while I'm walking home from the bodega with my beer and ice cream, the camera frame lingering on the broken glass and melting ice cream in the gutter before the fade to black and the song "Last Dance for Mary Jane" plays over the credits.

But this is just silly and innocent enough to slip under the confidentiality radar. My department is moving to a new building on campus, so naturally we want everyone to know that we aren't going to be where we've been for the last 15 years. Tall Boss came up with the idea of having students make chalk drawings on the brick walkways around campus with big colorful arrows and footprints leading the way to our new digs--we are an art school, after all, so this would engage the students, and everyone pays attention to where they step--but that plan was too logical and the school wouldn't let us do it. Tall Boss then made a couple of funny signs, old trucks comically overloaded with households goods and the like, announcing the move. They were witty and informative, and while no one really reads the signs posted around campus, we can say that we tried.

Off the signs went for approval and printing, and here's where I stepped in. All of the Bosses are at a conference this week, so Tall Boss left me the task of making sure the posters were printed and put up around campus. Beginning at 9AM, I called the PR office every half hour to check on our order. Did they receive the signs? Did they have changes to make? Did they send me the changes for approval? No, don't send them to Tall Boss, he's at a conference, just send them to me. I have instructions to just approve whatever changes you've made, we need to get them up today before it starts to rain. Okay, I approved them--oh, you're at lunch, I'll call back. Did you receive my approval? Did you send them to the printer? Sorry to bother you, it's me again and the rain started, did you send them to the printer yet?

There's another person in my office who used to work for a newspaper, and this entire process delighted him to no end. "Once a journalist, always a journalist," he said. "Hound 'em 'til they answer."

The posters were finally ready at 4PM, so I went to pick them up. We'd ordered 50; they only gave us 25. Whatever, we needed to get them up so people know that we're moving. Wow, they changed our design. I mean they REALLY changed our design. The signs now reads, huge and highlighted in yellow"The office will be CLOSED," and then smaller "on December 3rd and 6th," and then underneath a campus map, in tiny 14-size font at the very bottom of the sign, "We're moving to a new location."

When I went to Student Activities office to get the posters stamped with the school seal, the student worker took one look at the sign and said in horror, "The office is CLOSING?!"

"Yes," I said. "Forever and ever. Budget cutbacks. Screw it, you're all on your own."

Back at the office, everyone agreed that the signs were absolute shite. They put the most important message at the bottom, in tiny letters, and put the least important information at the top and then highlighted it. Furthermore, since we're only going to be closed for two days, after those two days pass, no one will look at the signs anymore, thus further negating the true purpose of said signs, which is letting people know that we've moved.

Whatever. Tall Boss said to just approve them and get them up, so my coworker and I trooped off into the rain to put the posters up on every bulletin board on campus.

That was yesterday evening. Today, for those who don't know, is World AIDS Day, and guess how this school commemorates the occasion?

By putting black canvas over every bulletin board on campus.

To reiterate: we're not paying for those signs.

Bearded Lady!

Couple of things: first, I saw the Japanese movie "Late Spring" last night with a friend from work. The professor introducing the movie--it was open to all students and staff at the school, but was being shown as part of a film class--made it sound like it was going to be the type of movie I don't like. He droned on and on for fifteen minutes about the Zen-like aspect of the filmmaker Ozu's work, about the space between events and how his movies weren't about plot but rather about character development. No where in there did I hear the words "explosion," "mind-bending," or "light projectile weaponry," and I was sorely concerned. But then it turned out that the movie was great! I stayed interested and engaged through the whole thing, except the five-minute Noh theater performance, which made me fall asleep a little, and then I cried at the end. Which leads me to believe that all the other deathly boring "character-driven" movies I've seen have, in fact, sucked. It wasn't just me and my short, comic-book-driven American attention span! Hurray!

Now, the bearded lady.

I'm short and the counter at work is tall. When people walk in, all I can really see are their shoulders and heads. So when a bearded person with long hair and an Aloha shirt walked in, my first thought was, "Here comes Tommy Chong!" I got up from my desk and my coworker who sits behind me muttered something I didn't quite hear. Tommy Chong opened his mouth and spoke to me in the sweet, high-mannered voice of a lady. I really, really hope my surprise didn't register on my face, because I was shocked. I've been around cross-dressers and transgendered people all my life; this woman was neither. If she'd been a biological woman transitioning to male, the hormones would have changed her voice at the same time as they gave her that fine, luxurious biker's mustache. And if she'd been a biological man transitioning to female, she'd have shaved that shit. Obviously, one cannot simply ask, "Lady, what's with the 'stache and goatie?" so I just had to send Tommy Chong on her way.

I turned back to my desk and my coworker said, "Didn't you hear me?"

"Why? What did you say?"

"When she walked it, I said, 'female.'" He paused, and in all seriousness added, "She's nice. Teaches a circus class."

One month on the new job

Let the drinking begin!

I've currently clocked in one solid month at the New Job and am sitting pantless in my chair drinking a sake cup full of red wine, because drinking many small cups instead of one big cup means you aren't drinking as much.

My home chair, obviously, though going pantless at the office would undoubtedly increase my popularity.

I tried to be good; I really did. I walked to the subway the first week, promised myself I'd start yoga lessons in the school gym as soon as the semester started, and I even taught myself how to make shoyu chicken for the inevitable office potlucks. Responsible, stable Big Island Rachel, that was me.

For four weeks.

You see, I forgot about all the people on the OTHER side of the counter. The ones who yell at me and make outrageous demands; the ones who try to scam me; the ones who think the rules don't apply to them; and my personal favorite, the ones who cry.

Customer service, how I've missed you. Robot butler, another jigger of the shine! I can still feel my feet.