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.

Smell of flowers and ooze

I bought my plane ticket to go on holiday to Hawaii this December, and immediately I began dreaming of the place again. The details are pretty sharp, especially the smells. Last night, the coffee was blooming. That's an awesome time. Mock orange figured pretty prominently in the olfactory landscape as well. It's weird to wake up and still be in Brooklyn, although thanks to Hurricane Earl, we've been getting some real wonky winds off the Atlantic, and the smell of the open ocean when I step out my door is definitely the smell of Hawaii.

The turning point for me, when I moved to New York, was when my dreams began taking place in the city. I upgraded myself to "I just moved here" to "I live here" when that started to happen. Mercifully, I never started dreaming of the way that New York smells, which is just awful no matter what the season. It's not that it smells of garbage--except on garbage day--or really any smell I can put my finger on; it's just that New York is a gross, filthy urban cesspool that taints everything with grit and ooze, so if you want to imagine how that smells, on you go. I wash my hands a lot.

But I digress. I'm going to Hawaii in December. The last time I went back home, I went in the month of August, which is just a bloody useless time to travel to a tropical zone. It was already warm in New York! I'm being clever about it this time and going just as my pissing and moaning about the cold ramps up to a full-blooded wail that frightens the neighborhood children. They tell tales of the banshee that lives on Columbia Street...

Besides flappers...

Besides flappers, here are a few other things prejudiced against women with big tits and long hair:

Punk rock.

Paper shredders.

Near future urban dystopian hellscapes. (Even that triboob chick from Total Recall got iced in the end.)

And here are a few areas big titted Rapunzel women excel:

Comics.

Prog rock album covers.

Alternate history urban steampunk hellscapes.

Enjoy your week, my little peebles. Don't step on the seaworms!

Where they dance in New York City

I get around this place. Uptown to Randall's Island, downtown to South Street Seaport, cross-borough to Queens and even across the river to New Jersey. I hear music in most of these places, too, live music, music that's considered by and large to be very good. But I rarely see anyone dancing, and it's always made me a little sad. People should dance when they hear music. Dancing is a joyous expression of complete abandonment of the self. And if you've spent any time in New York City, you can see right away why we don't dance. New Yorkers are almost pure ego. They couldn't survive without a constant awareness of self.

Enough of this discussion. It bores me. Let's talk about the Jazz Age!

Yesterday, the BF and I took a ridiculously short ferry ride out to Governors Island to attend the Jazz Age Lawn Party. (Seriously, the ferry ride is literally a minute and a half long. I could swim the distance.) There are a lot of odd little subcultures in New York, so I wasn't that surprised to learn of a whole community of 1920s nostalgists that dress up like characters from "The Great Gatsby," listen to early jazz, and dance the Charleston.

That's right. They dance. The Charleston.
There's something so wonderfully weird and happy about these people. They aren't exactly "cool," but neither are they geek chic anti-cool. It's like they reached back far enough into history to locate a mode of fashion that's too classy for irony. The whole thing is just too sincere to believe. Look at the Dreamland Orchestra. Just look at them.
Not only is there a band in New York that plays 1920s jazz, but there's enough people who know how to DANCE to 1920s jazz that they get together for lawn parties. And I know it's hard to tell from looking at the pictures, but they aren't playing dress-up or wearing costumes. Most of them are tooling around in linen suits and flapper dresses like they dress like this all the time, and like anything else they have to wear to fit in is just disguising their true 1920s selves.

I'm not about to join their ranks. The flapper look is prejudiced against women with big tits and very long hair, and the overhead on that lifestyle seems kind of high (who can afford gin these days?). But they're out there, dancing and boozing and looking fabulous, and I though you should all know about it.

Cheers, darlings. It's been a wonderful summer.

Pedestrian Anxiety

I read somewhere that most of the crosswalk lights in cities are on timers, and the big buttons on the lamp posts--"Press here to walk"--are just there to relieve pedestrian anxiety. I love that term. I've got a lot of pedestrian anxiety and I always have to press that big button, or lean over to peer down the subway tunnel to see if the train is coming. If I had (yet another) supervillain alter-ego, or a punk band, it would be called Pedestrian Anxiety.

I think I get pedestrian anxiety over things that I KNOW are going to happen, like the changing of a traffic light. Events that may or may not occur, like the birth of my children or my acceptance ceremony for the Pulitzer Prize, these have no power over me. It's like a quantum block, to use a term from "Doctor Who," where the observance of the event makes it exist (here's the Wikipedia entry for Shrodinger's Cat if you're confused). Those events in my life that have a quantum block on them fail to frustrate me. However, events without a quantum block bring on a flood of pedestrian anxiety, which is why I carry around so much crap with me when I leave my house; I need something to distract myself from my own impatience.

All of this is apropos of nothing in my life, but it does come with a fun visual aid, courtesy of the artist Jason Eppink. Have a great day, and remember that observation changes the outcome.

Small Triumphs

I'm back from Washington.

I have a new job. Permanent. Union. The exact opposite of the Temp Guild, which didn't actually exist, but was just a fantasy I created to give myself pretend-ninja powers.

I found a copy of an out-of-print trade paperback I've been searching for since Valentine's Day, 2010. I find it a little creepy I can so easily recall the date I started looking for it, but that's overshadowed by my deep happiness and immense pride over buying it at retail price rather than jacked-up eBay prices.

I know I should be talking about my new job, since that has a much larger impact on my life than this comic book, but f**k it, I'm making bra soup in my bathtub and I've got some time, so you're going to read about comics. Again.

My local comic book store, Rocketship on Smith Street, finished the five-year lease on its property and decided to shut down rather than renew. It broke my heart on many levels, firstly because it means my nearest comic book store is now St. Marks Comics in their Brooklyn Heights location, and I don't like their attitude; and secondly, because I'd only found them a couple of months ago and was so looking forward to building my relationship with my friendly neighborhood nerds. I actually cried a little.

But, the good news is that Rocketship liquidated their stock, so I picked up a buttload of comics at half-price and a framed poster of The Authority (cover of issue 16, drawn by Frank Quitely, if anyone's keeping track of this nonsense). It's on my wall now, above the Gauguin print and to the right of Warhol's Brooklyn Bridge. Just because I have superheroes on my wall who are "going to save the world, no matter who they have to kill," doesn't mean I'm not a classy, sophisticated lady.

I've been trying to collect all of the trade paperbacks of The Authority, but for whatever reason, Volume 4 has been out of print for years. None of the other 10 volumes, just number 4. Sure, I could buy it on eBay for about $30, but where's the sport in that?

I checked all of the comic book stores that I knew of in New York, and even called Jelly's, my old comic book shop in Hawaii, to see if they had it in stock, but no luck.

Wow, this story is starting to sound a little pathetic even to me. I called a store halfway around the world to find a comic book. I'd tell myself to get a life, except I already go to jazz concerts and march in parades and appear in TV shows and hand out condoms in the West Village, so actually, I'm pretty damn terrific and I regret nothing.

Anyway, I went to Spokane, a place so painfully unhip it's some kind of wonderful in its own right. And wouldn't you know it, The Authority Volume 4: Transfer of Power, was waiting for me in the Comic Book Shop in Spokane, resting on the shelf between Volume 3: Earth Inferno and Volume 5: Harsh Realities, like G-d and the Flying Spaghetti Monster intended.

"F**k me sideways!" I exclaimed aloud when I saw it, prompting deep embarrassment and many shushes on the part of the BF.

I waited until the cashier had swiped my credit card, but then couldn't contain myself any longer.

"This one is out of print," I bragged.

She raised her eyebrows. "You're lucky the owner didn't know. Normally he pulls those from the shelves and sells them on eBay."

I'll bet he does.

So even though I had to spend a buttload of money and travel across the country in order to save a few bucks on a comic book, I consider the whole episode a rousing success.

Excelsior!

Ritual sacrfice and other trip preparations

My cousin is getting married next week and it's my Daddio's birthday the week after that, so the convergent events mean the BF and I are taking a trip to the inland northwest for familyness. Therefore I'll be out of range of my blog until mid-August, so I'll leave you with some self-congratulatory tidbits.

My short story "Manhattanhenge" is going to be published in Bamboo Ridge Issue 98. I've cleaned up the typos considerably since I posted it on my blog last summer. It's the only piece of creative writing I've actually finished in the past two years, so it's pretty gratifying to have it published the first place I submitted it.

And the editors at Hawaii Women's Journal read my review of "Inception" and invited me to write a movie column for their October issue.
See? I write!

Aloha and see you in August.