Office Work

Is tiring. Is boring. Is everything everyone has ever feared or hoped.

God bless office work.

Parks in Bushwick

The parks in Bushwick are a lie.

There are several "parks" near my apartment in East-Williamsburg-Bushwick, none of which, as far as I can tell have more in common with a playground than they do with a parking lot.

In Bushwick, "park" is code for an empty lot paved over with asphalt, demarcated by a chain-link fence, and hung with a sign commemorating some historically important ethnic minority. That, my friends, is not a park. It is a lie.

Living in NY is something of a lesson in socio-economic disparities in America. The parks, in my opinion, are the perfect manifestation of the inexcusable disparity between rich white New Yorkers and poor Black and Latino ones.

There are also several parks by my work in Cobble Hill. Cobble Hill is home to some of the first low income housing in New York. These walk-up Brownstones were built in the mid-nineteenth century, where rooms were let for mere dollars a week. Today, the same Brownstones go for 4 mil. The parks in Cobble Hill, needless to say, are very very nice.

Maybe some day the low income housing that surrounds my Bushwick apartment will be declared historic. Maybe someday the parks board will decide to tear up the asphalt lots and plant grass. Maybe.

But by that time all of the black and latino residents will be long gone and rich white women with 3,000 dollar strollers will be taking their kids to play at Rosa Parks Playground.

Somedays in the Park

Every morning for the past month and a half, I have taken the train to work. Yesterday, I took it to Central Park. Working seven days a week is not difficult, it isn't exhausting, if anything it is strangely hypnotic. A person, without any free time, is more of an automaton than a human being. You are a worker, a commuter, an eater, a sleeper; a machine with many capabilities simply churning out the daily quota.

A person in central park on her first day off in a month and a half, however, is all flesh and blood. The park, in case any of you didn't know, is beautiful. It is meticulously designed and obsessively maintained in order that New Yorkers might forgive the oppressive concrete forest that is the rest of the city. And it works.

The park is the city's playground. People feel free to climb, jump, run, don a batman costume and breakdance--in short, they do what they want. There are trees and winding paths and big rocks. There are ponds posing (almost convincingly) as lakes. Dogs. Jugglers. Roller-discos. It's awesome.

The libertine attitude fostered by the park's sheer openess was reinforced this past Sunday by the presence of, what my sources tell me is the best Fall New York has seen in 75 years. The leaves having turned brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red. The beautiful people of the upper east side sporting their best Burberry attire in honor of the dazzling sunshine and crisp Autumn air.

This is all very cliché, I know. Fall in Central Park is beautiful--it's pretty much like saying Micheal Jordan is athletic. And my jaded, post-everything self should resist buying into cliché because that's just what I do. But today, I am resisting the temptation to inject bitter skepticism into everything. Today I am saying, I love central park.

Tomorrow, we'll talk about the parks in Bushwick.

A Defecit.

I just finished reading a rather lovely book by Nick Hornby called the Polysyllabic Spree. This collection of essays put out by the people at The Believer traces Hornby's book purchases and book readings.

Hornby approaches his own patterns of reading and book buying with equal parts contempt, fascination, and pride. He makes us (other readers that is) feel simultaneously superior (Oh, you're only just now reading Nine Stories, how old are you again?) and inexcusably inept (Really, you read twelve books this month? How many children did you say you have again?) In other words, it makes us realize that even a published author, a man who lives and dies by the books he reads, writes, and reviews, is only human and, therefore, can only read so much.
Hornby's column works because, unlike most other "What to read" epithets, Hornby's book refuses to either adhere to or fully reject the canon. He does lie to us every now and again, whittling down the list of books bought or tossing out a cheesy paperback (by his own admission). But isn't this what we all do as readers? Hornby makes the reader comfortable in his or her own taste, his or her own personal idiosyncrasies.

So, I guess the point of this little blurb review is that most of us literary types are scared out of our fucking skins. We spend just as much time trying to seem like we've read the right books as we do reading books that we actually love. We keep notebooks filled with the titles of books that we should read and mentally note any book that has appeared in Oprah's book club in order to avoid seeming ignorant or (worse) in bad taste.

Hornby, on the other hand, loves what he loves and hates what he hates. He doesn't tell us all, but who ever really does. His book gives the reader courage to follow his or her own interests, idiosyncrasies, and bad taste. Honestly, I probably wont take that advice, I'll probably keep pulling titles out of my little black mole skein, but if I ever to do happen to read some grocery store paperback, I might not feel so bad about it.

Nothing to Do

With anything. This post, that is.

I was just reading an article in the New York Review of books about our current situation in Iraq and (more broadly and perhaps more importantly) the Iraqis' situation in Iraq. "Is this 'Victory'" strives to deliver an easily digestible explanation and assessment of the theopolitical and military situation in Iraq. The situation, as it turns out, is a hopeless mess. The current "surge" is dependent on American allies that happen to be Iraqi enemies, the oracle has foreseen the birth of a new era tyranny.

This reminds me of a night when my parents left the house. They left the house together then, fairly often, come to think of it. In any case, they had left the house and my sister, brother, and I were left with a sitter. Bobby had gone to bed hours earlier (I imagine he was actually still wide awake laying in his bed, eyes fixed at the ceiling, his brain reeling with plans for world domination). My sister and I had been tucked in some time before, but, as often happened, we refused to fall asleep or even pretend to. On this particular night, we were fighting over whose limbs were on whose side of the bed.
The babysitter had heard enough of our fighting and came in to make us shut up so that we didn't wake our little brother (who, I am certain was not asleep). She told us to build a wall out of pillows. I thought it was a stupid idea and probably told her so. Then something very strange happened: Randy, the babysitter, told me that I was Iraq. I was Iraq and my sister was Iran and we were having a border dispute. She told us that we could fight it out, like we had been, but that it would lead to injuries, maybe even death. Then, she told us that she was the UN, that she had come to negotiate a peace treaty. I apparently found this argument compelling (I remember today, even though I am almost certain that at six years of age I had no idea what Iraq or even the UN were). I think we decided to stop talking and fall asleep, in order to stave off the fight until the next night.
This may have been my first lesson in diplomacy. I wonder what stories John McCain's babysitter told him to make him fall asleep at night. I wonder if Obama ever shared a bed or settled a domestic border dispute. I wonder about the little lessons we all learned before we were old enough to understand. I wonder how many of them have simply become us and how many of them were forgotten too long ago to ever be remembered.

NEW MAPS

Or rather format...in fact I am getting tired of all of this map talk. It's pretty fucking cheesy, don't ya think?

I have peeps in the header for christsake.

Okay, so I decided last night that I want to be a magazine writer. Yeah, I feel kind of like six year-old me has crept up again and one day I want to be a ballerina, the next a fire truck.*

So the new plan for the blog is as follows:

I will live my life. I will eat foods, watch television, listen to music, read books, go to bars, etc.

I will review as many of these items/experiences as possible. This will mean that I am going to have to get some form of internet in my apartment (which, I will of course, review).

So, be prepared to find out what I am doing, whether it was a waste of time or not, and hopefully be entertained by my burgeoning journalistic voice.

The fun begins immediately.

*Actually I don't think I was ever this type of kid. In fact, I am fairly certain that six year old me had a much better idea of who she was and what she wanted to do, which was, for the record to write and illustrate children's books. I wanted a Caldecott Prize and a Newbery (yes I was pretentious and ambitious even before I could ride a bicycle).

The Edge of the Map

I am going to quit my job tomorrow.

It's the edge of the map, uncharted territory, looking off at the horizon hoping those aren't shark infested waters. It's that space near the compass rose where the most artistic cartographers among us draw in seven-headed serpents.

My boss is having an affair with her best friend. Her husband (the cuckold) has funded a business-venture cafe which is currently providing my boss and her brother a livelihood of their own. I am stuck in the middle of family drama of the worst kind: snide comments made behind closed doors and long, long harbored sibling rivalry. These factors have propelled my boss to select me as a scapegoat, whipping girl.

Her husband does not enjoy her company. He seems to like me, even (unlike my boss herself) smiles every now and again in my presence. Her brother knows that there is a problem with customer service (my boss's supposed area of expertise). I bring the level of customer service up to an acceptable standard and am immediately pinned with all of the restaurant's hospitality failures.

I hate, more than anything in this whole fucking world, I hate being told that I am something I know I am not. This hatred is only intensified if the person mislabeling me is a superior. It is brought to an uncontainable level when that superior happens to be entirely incompetant.

Anything, I think must be better than this. Except, perhaps, an eviction notice. But even that wouldn't be the worst thing imaginable.

What Ptolemy Knew

Obviously this post is much belated. Apologies.

I have been living in Connecticut, Minnesota, and, now, New York. I have been making sandwiches, coffee, and lousy excuses. But for some reason, I feel happy. There are no more ghosts walking through the quad (in fact I see the real living breathing people of Wesleyan on a nearly regular basis). There is, as expected, still a lingering existential doubt. But now I work through it, rather than wait for it to work itself out. Now I feel like a living breathing person figuring herself out.

That's the cheesy first bit. I needed to get that out of the way to get on to the cheesy later bit.

What Ptolemy knew, then, was a complicated bit about the nature of the stars and the planets and some math, maybe. He knew about cartography, the mapping science, and he was extremely good at it, better, in fact, than any one else of his age. Long before Galileo stood before the pope and denounced his brilliant discovery--the earth rotate around the sun, blasphemy--Ptolemy insisted that the world was round. He made a map for it and everything. Now, today's scientists will tell you that Ptolemy was wrong, he shorted the circumference of planet earth by more than a small margin and (if memory serves me right) still stood by the whole planets-in-glass-balls theory. And he was wrong, strictly speaking.

But Ptolemy was on to something. Even more than that, he knew something that no one else cared to figure out: world-round. Important stuff, right? But try putting that on a resume. In today's job market, the young Ptolemy would have undoubtedly ended up working at a coffee shop. No one really goes in for original thought these days, especially not as the sole qualification on one's resume. Can you imagine his cover letter? It would have looked like little more than hot air.

So, the moral of the story: today's job market sucks. Not because there aren't very many jobs for far too many applicants, or because nothing pays much of anything, but because there is so much automated bureaucracy in the hiring process. A human being can no longer hire another human being to work under him, instead, a computer sifts through other computer databases and picks the job candidates based on key words.

The human element has been completely eliminated. Which means, in short, that it is very difficult for me to get hired.

Toward the Frontier

Eleven days until graduation. Only one more Monday. One Tuesday. Only eleven more days. It's difficult to deal with this, as you might expect. I knew, from the outset that the end of the year would be difficult. I wouldn't have any money, any plans, any connections to people who could help me find either of these things. I knew that it would be me on a raft without any compass or paddles, using my arms as oars. All of this, I knew and it freaked me the fuck out.
What I didn't know, what I didn't expect, in a characteristically Jaime fashion, is that I wouldn't care so much about any of these things. Sure, there is still some anxiety. It still takes me an hour more to fall asleep at night than it should, but somehow I get the feeling that all of this (the panic) is nothing to worry over. Instead, I have found a whole new slew of disconcerting items (Listed below).

1. When I walk around campus I feel like a stranger in a ghost town or a projectionist that has inexplicably been sucked into the nostalgia film he has been projecting.
2. Time seems to have stopped.
3. Dishes and laundry and recycling multiply at alarming rates.
4. Goodbyes seem empty. I refuse to comprehend the undeniable fact that I will probably never see these people again.
5. I can't imagine a life not here. I can't imagine a life here either for that matter.

Not to say that it's all bad though. It's great, mostly. Just strange....

Key

The basic facts are as follows:

1. Graduation: May 25

2. Occupation: Undecided

3. Location: In Transit

In other words, the simple life is quickly coming to an end. The territories ahead are completely uncharted and don't lend themselves to simple mapping. I have no idea where I am going or what I will do as I go there. So, this blog is for you all...the family and friends who wonder what it is I am doing with my life. Who ask the dreaded question, "what are your plans after graduation?" I am sure that I don't have an answer and I probably never will, but this will give us all the illusion that perhaps the invisible, the imaginary trajectory of my life can in fact be charted. These are the impossible cartographies.