Life, jobs, money, people: I’m so angry!

A lot of things are making me angry lately.  I don’t mind that.  They say anger can be a really great emotion: you’re angry, you figure why, and you do something about it.

But it’s that last step that I’m having trouble with.  I know the things that are making me angry, and I know why, but I can’t figure out how to effectively channel that into action.  Instead, I’m just left with the anger and the added frustration of feeling like I can’t do anything about it all.

I woke up just now at 4 p.m.  Not from a nap, but from a full’s night’s sleep.  That’s because my job sent me an e-mail giving me three days’ notice that they’d need me to temporarily work the overnight shift.  The full 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift.

That’s bullshit and I’m angry about it.  But really it’s just another thing in a looooong list of things they’ve done that’s made me realize: They don’t care about me at all.  They smile and say all these vague managerial things: “I’ll bring this up with corporate,” “Protocol,” “Blah blah blah.”

I’ve become terrified of certain managers.  They’re so entrenched in that corporate lingo, and customer service lingo, that I really think they’ve forgotten how to be a decent human being.  How to be a human being at all, really.

I didn’t mean to mention all that…but that is the main thing I’m angry about.  When you’re that angry about your job situation, one thing you can do to channel that anger is look for another job.  Which I’ve done a little bit.  But the one interview I’ve gone on so far?  Made me super angry!

The interview was days ago now.  And I’d been feeling strange about it for days, but I hadn’t been able to sort out all of the reasons why.  When I woke up just now, though, something occurred to me.

My interviewer, at one point, asked me something along the lines of, “So, would you be able to handle it when people are rude to you or disrespectful?  Because you just seem like a very sweet person.”

I wasn’t sure exactly how to answer that question at the time.  I wanted to say, “Well, yeah, I’m a sweet person.  But what does that have to do with being able to handle things?”

And I think that’s just it.  It makes me angry that she implied that a sweet disposition is an indicator of a weak person.  It’s not.  I am a sweet person, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not a strong person, too.

I think what’s really making me angry lately, when it gets down to the core, is realizing how much power and control a job, a boss, a work schedule can have over a person.  My life has been turned upside down because of the job I have right now.  I am a sweet person.  But walking out of work (at 7:30 a.m. because the person relieving me showed up a half hour late even though he lives two blocks away), I said to myself, out loud, “This job is making me an angry person.  It’s making me negative and jaded and it’s making me lose hope in humanity and my life.”

I know!  It’s dramatic.  But it’s absolutely how I feel.  I don’t want to lose my idealism and optimism.  I’m a romantic and a dreamer and I firmly believe that you should do what you’re passionate about in life–because that’s when you’ll be at your best.  I’ve been trying so hard to follow what I’m passionate about in life, but sometimes it’s not that easy.  Sometimes finding direction and knowing what the right steps are to take is the most difficult thing.  The signs just don’t come.

So you take a job you’re not excited about because you have to pay the bills, you have to feed yourself.

Anyway, I am angry.  But as of right now I’m still hopeful.  Even though I don’t have a clue what should be done.

A young writer

I recently got a rejection e-mail from a magazine.  It was a very nice rejection letter.  It didn’t sting all that bad because I recently had my first ACCEPTANCE email from a magazine.  I first saw it on my cell phone while crossing a street.  A huge smile came over my face and I said, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”  Then I got hit by a car.

Not really.  But back to the rejection email.  The following sentences struck me: “We are impressed with the fresh, appealing voice of these poems, especially since you’re such a young writer! We wish you lots of luck with your work, and hope to hear from you in the future.”

First, it’s incredibly nice of them to write such personalized sentences.  That rarely happens.  And I really do appreciate them taking the time to say what they did.  But…

I’m disappointed in the huge role that age plays in their message.  I’m disappointed in their implication that age and good writing go hand in hand.  You know?  That’s a bummer.  Sure, it stands to reason that the longer you’ve been alive the more time you’ve had to practice and hone your craft.   And if I read between the lines then they’re probably implying that although fresh and appealing, the poems can stand to be honed.  Which is perfectly acceptable.

But I can’t help feeling like it was a folly on my part to have given this magazine clues about my relatively young age.  The truth is, I’ll never know how much my age factored in to their decision.  Again, maybe it wasn’t a real factor at all.  Maybe it was only an afterthought.  A thought after they’d already decided to pass on the work.

Anyway, that’s all that’s on my mind.  In conclusion, poetry is great.  I especially like when it’s not boring and it’s not maddeningly abstract.  Here are a couple lines from a poet I’ve been reading lately named Marge Piercy.  It’s a rare thing, and such a cool thing, when a poem can make you stop and think.  Rarer and cooler, still, when a poem makes you think about something in a new, more illuminated light.

I cast myself on you, closing

my eyes as I leap and then opening them wide

as I land.  Love is plunging into darkness toward

something that may exist.

Here comes Santa Claus…

Sometimes people will send a note to my email address (notreallyalibrarian@gmail.com), asking: Dear Madame Librarian, Why are you so great?  Or sometimes: Dear ML, That last post really affected me. 

Or most commonly: Dear Madame, What are you wearing?

Tonight, the answer:

About sixty seconds ago, I was standing in my bedroom thinking, “I want to sit down and write on my laptop, but I’m a little cold.  Only, I don’t really want to put on a sweatshirt.  It will feel constricting.  A blanket would be nice, only my arms will be exposed and–”

It was at that exact moment that I remembered that my grandmother had given me a Snuggie as an early Christmas gift and it was not two feet away.  So I sit here, telling you this, wearing my brand new vibrant pink Snuggie.   It still smells like the cardboard box and the plastic bag.

Sadly I have no dashing, matching male companion tonight, but otherwise I look very much like the woman above.

---

As I mentioned, my family had an early Christmas gift-exchanging celebration today.  My pink Snuggie, as an added bonus, came with a free book light, which made it even more ideal.  I used it on the three-hour drive home from Grandma’s to read Prozac Nation, “…one girl’s journey through the purgatory of depression and back.”  Even still, I’m feeling almost giddy tonight.  It’s not just that I’m clad in Pepto Bismol goodness–it’s also that I feel the holiday spirit quite profoundly this season.  To be honest, I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve been unemployed.  It’s given me so much time to do seasonal things!

It started on November 30th when I happened to be reminded that the Tree had been lit in Rockefeller Center that evening.  Instead of going home, as planned, I battled a throng of people on 49th Street and saw that marvel, choosing to focus on the prettiness of the lights instead of the electricity they were using and the soon-to-be brown and dead branches they were strung upon.

I also had time to bake a gingerbread house!  Unfortunately, before I had time to construct and decorate the house I had to leave town due to a family emergency…but the baked pieces are on the counter waiting for me should I make it home any time soon.

What else.  Oh!  I had a chance to battle a different throng of people (or perhaps some of the same throng) and see Santa Claus at Macy’s.  Of the five other Decembers I’ve been in New York, this is the first one I’ve had the pleasure.  Sure, he was one of maybe eight other Santa Clauses serving Macy’s that day, and sure he didn’t actually look like Santa Claus, but I received a free pin that reads “Santaland at Macy’s 2010” that I will never wear AND I did not spend the $18.99 to receive a photo of myself and a spritely, trim man in a suit.

I list all of these things to explain that I truly am “in the spirit” this year.  Sometimes the holidays come and go so quickly that you wonder if they’re related to that man you slept with a few times in college.  (I never actually experienced such a thing in college, I just wanted to make a reference to sex.)  Anyway, the thing is, of all the beautiful and wondrous things I’ve seen and done this year, there is one thing I’ve encountered that has really pissed. me. off.  It also relates to Macy’s.  And it’s this:

Ew.  That’s disgusting.  It’s horrific and it makes my stomach churn and that’s not because I ate too much crap at Grandma’s, it’s because this advertisement is TERRIBLE!  Macy’s has spun one of the most beloved, wholesome, iconic figures (next to Jesus Christ) into an adultering, Cialis-popping, cradle-robbing doo doo head.  (There’s no other way to put it.)  Santa Claus in this ad might as well be Bill Clinton saying, Ssshh, don’t tell Hillary.  Santa is supposed to consider what little girls want for Christmas, not want little girls for Christmas!

Okay, okay, you might say, but Madame Librarian, Santa is just receiving a peck on the cheek from that newly pubescent young woman.  Nothing sinister is about to happen when he locks the door in the office adjacent to his workroom as the sound of elves using little hammers drowns out whatever noises he and that spritely, trim thing might make.

But I’m not buying it.  And guess what, Macy’s?  I’m also not buying from you.  I’ve got my free pin.  Take the rest and shove it.

Makeshift clothing

I don’t have a lot of pet peeves, but one of them, as I’ve written about before, is when my newspaper has American Apparel advertisements on the back cover.  American Apparel ads, for the most part, feature nearly naked girls.  They’re wearing the brand’s latest leggings or lace unitard and nothing else.  Which is decidedly provocative to look at.  And I usually read the newspaper on the subway, so I don’t feel comfortable contributing to the man across the aisle from me getting excited because of the thing I’m unwittingly holding up for him and all to see.  And I shouldn’t have to contribute to the man across the aisle from me getting excited!  It’s such a helpless feeling.  It makes me feel like a pawn in whatever sick game American Apparel and the man behind the company, Dov Charney, is playing.  Dov Charney, I DON’T WANT TO PLAY:

And I don't think girl in flesh-colored unitard does either.

So this week, when I picked up the latest Village Voice (which has a great feature about nitrous), I decided to be proactive.  Because I turned the newspaper over, and sure enough, there was a girl in some strange white lace panty get-up and nothing else.  It looks like something a 17-year-old girl would be forced to wear on the night of her arranged wedding.  So, I looked at the naked girl.  And I looked at the granny smith apple I’d just bought at 7-11, and I had an ah-ha moment:

It was so satisfying!  It felt like playing paper dolls as a child (which actually wasn’t all that popular when I was young and I never got a chance to do). 

An interesting development happened when I took the newspaper back to the office with me, though.  I left the newspaper on top of a microwave in the break room, newly clothed girl facing up, went about my business, and then forgot to grab the newspaper when I was heading back to my desk.  I kid you not, I got halfway down a hallway before I remembered, then turned back, and when I got back to the break room, not five minutes later, a male coworker of mine had ALREADY REMOVED THE GIRL’S STICKER SHIRT!  And she was naked for the world to see again!  I know it’s silly of me to post the very thing I’m so upset about being forced to hold up on the back of a newspaper, but I think it’s worthwhile to provide a visual of how naked she is:

Quite naked.

So there.  Upon picking up the newspaper again, I gasped, and I said, “Did someone take the apple sticker off of this girl?”  And my coworker said, yeah, sorry, and it was totally just like he was having a conversation and wanted to have something to fiddle with and not like he was trying to undress a two dimensional girl, but you know.  Subconsciously…

And I also realize that I’ve devoted a whole post to a company whose ads bother me and in turn created a whole new accidental indirect advertisement for them.  But whatever.  I really liked covering her up with that apple sticker.  That’s all I wanted to say.

Happy ‘4th of July’, indeed!

There’s a tab at the top of my browser that’s a shortcut for adding a new post on this here blog, and I’m happy to announce that this very post is the inaugural post for which I’ve used that shortcut.  Here’s to many more clicks on the shortcut and in turn many more posts.

In the past year or so I’ve realized my intense love for all things “road”.  I love road movies.  Road books.  Songs about the road.  There was a “This American Life” episode that reaired a few weeks ago, #102–entitled “Roadtrip!”  Ira Glass says at the beginning, after listing a slew of road movies and other road-related pieces of culture, “It is hard for an American to just hit the road without some expectations.”  I’ve experienced this.  I was even asked at one point in the trip, “What?  Did you think it would be like a movie?”  Still, I retain idyllic ideas about the road.  It calls to me.  It inspires me.  It even softens me toward cars–because that’s how I picture myself traveling on the road.  In a car.  Even better, though, are road-related things that involve the most inspiring, the most exciting and perfect form of transportation I can think of–the RV. 

The closest I’ve ever come to experiencing an RV was a rundown camper that was attached to the back of my grandfather’s truck when I was a child.  I heard stories about my parents taking it camping when my oldest brother was a newborn.  By the time I was born, though, everyone had stopped using the old camper.  The family had graduated to something much less exciting and mobile–a tent.  In our town there was a RV dealership that intrigued me and mocked me each time we passed it in the minivan to and from a trip to the grocery store or dance class or most frequently, the dump.  I remember the feeling of complete awe when I realized what those two letters stood for–Recreational Vehicle.  Wow.  A vehicle whose sole purpose is recreation.  On camping trips I’d stare longingly at the RVs.  I’d watch them pull up to the station where they unloaded their sewage.  Even that seemed romantic. 

My favorite part about stranger’s RVs, though, was when they had maps decorating the side.  These maps were the coolest idea in the history of everything because the owners of the RV could attach little magnets in the shape of US states to mark where they’d traveled.  Specifically, where they’d traveled in their RV.  It was like the maps inside of tourist destinations that visitors put colorful thumbtacks in to signify wherever they came from.  Oh, the status of being the visitor to put a thumbtack on some far-off locale–Nepal, Portugal, Madagascar.  What are Nepalese/Portuguese/Madagascarean tourists doing at this ice cream stand on Route 28 in Hyannis, Massachusetts?   

I digress.  Point is, I badly want to travel around in a “dusty old RV.”  I want to “ride shotgun from town to town.”  I want a man as my RV companion who hasn’t shaved in days and is starting to smell.  But it won’t matter because we’ve still got half a tank of gas, a bag of chips in between our seats, and we’re singing along with the radio and “staking a claim on the world we found.”  Basically I want something exactly like this Shooter Jennings song, aptly entitled “4th of July”–

Thursday Free Write

I’m eating a terribly bruised banana.  It’s way too easy to abuse bananas.  I swear.  You leave them alone for five minutes and they’re barely edible.  Just like children.

It’s a beautiful, mild day in New York City, but I’ve spend the majority of it in this dang’ed cubicle.  And wouldn’t you know it, during my 15 minute break, I go outside to catch the last of the day’s sunlight, and a guy soliciting my nonexistent money for a perfectly deserving organization sits down beside me.  Don’t you know, “Matthias” from “Greenpeace”, that I just gave a dollar to that drug addict on the subway the other night?  And he said, “Wow, a real American dollar bill!  I haven’t seen one of these in ages!”  And you expect me to also help do something to protect the environment and promote peace? … I guess that’s reasonable enough.

I went grocery shopping for the first time in weeks the other day and I saw this baffling thing on the shelf:

Who at Pepperidge Farm decided the word “pumpernickel” needed to be shortened to “pump”? And who backed that idea up enough for it to end up on that poor loaf of bread? It’s nothing short of tragic, especially in light of the word’s fascinating and bizarre origins I just found on Dictionary.com: Pumpernickel orig., an opprobrious name for anyone considered disagreeable, equiv. to pumper(n) to break wind + Nickel hypocoristic from of Nikolaus Nicholas (cf. nickel); presumably applied to the bread from its effect on the digestive system .

There’s something pornographic about that phrase, “Dark Pump,” right? I know it’s not just me.

I <3 Barbara Bush and Artificial Flavoring

Today I woke up and I baked cupcakes. The motivation came from wanting to give one to someone I love. But before I did that I was reading status updates on Facebook off of my phone, and someone paid tribute to this forever beautiful and gracious lady:

Barb Bush!!

“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.”

What a broad.

So back to the cupcakes. I prepared a box mix of marble fudge. And it instructs you to pour the fudge mix on afterwards, so it ended up creating some cool designs (because I didn’t try too hard to achieve a marble effect). They’re like the Rorschach Ink Blot Test! What do you see:

P.S. Speaking of box mixes with which to make not nutritious cupcakes, I HIGHLY recommend checking out the first two episodes of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.”  He’s completely British and brilliant.

You exist!

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result–eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly–in you. —Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

That same, shockingly, goes for all of these people:

Nuns: What the fuck?

I was patiently waiting (in the cold New England temperatures) and this nun flew past me.  And I was shocked!  What kind of person, nevermind nun, has chutzpah to pull that kind of stunt? 

The bus had just pulled up to its gate and she walked almost all the way to the front, and asked, “Is this bus going to New York?”  And upon hearing an affirmative, she just stayed there. 

Every human being inherently knows that you ask the last person waiting in the line any question related to that line if you intend to begin waiting in it should it be the line you need.  Ya know? 

Anyway.  It wasn’t, in the end, a huge deal.  No jihad was fought.  No back of the liners were turned away.  But what if?  What if.

Madame Librarian does it better.

Last weekend I was sitting in a hair salon (which is one of the places on Earth I feel most awkward), and I overheard an interaction between an employee and a customer that rubbed me the wrong way.  So much so that I told my diary.  And now I’m telling you.

The customer, a woman, was telling the employee, also a woman, what she was thinking for her hair.  She explained that she’d been blonde for a long time, and had just recently gotten married and had gone back to being brunette because she wanted her natural look in light of the occasion.  She said she wouldn’t mind going back to blonde now. 

And that was all fine.  I thought that was kind of a nice thing to do for your wedding.  But then the employee laughed and said, “Oh, your husband’s going to be so happy with you as a blonde.”  And all the women around them in the salon laughed as if to agree that ha ha men are such predictable creatures who just want to bang a chick with big tits and platinum hair! 

Can we stop with these generalizations that fail to serve anyone?   I recently caught an episode of “Sheer Genius” on Bravo.  It’s a terrible show about hair stylists competing for money and the chance the style hair in an issue of “Allure Magazine”.  Anyway, one of the challenges on this episode involved all the stylists working with a group of blondes who’d done terrible damage to their hair–to the point that some of these women would be bald soon if they kept doing whatever they were doing.  So the whole challenge was to tone down the bleachiness to make the women look, well, less damaged.

Only thing was, the show is filmed in LA.  And more than likely, these women had been sent to the “Sheer Genius” set by their modeling or acting agencies because it would give them a day of work.  Not because they were interested in changing their hair.  And that’s exactly how it was–once the women got into the chairs they ALL said, “I’d like to stay blonde.” 

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being a blonde.  I’m not writing all this just because I have brown hair.  It’s just annoying that being “a blonde” is such a thing.  They have more fun, they have more sex, they have less brain cells. 

These damn t-shirt companies are making money by pinning people against each other!  I don’t think it’s as silly or harmless as it can easily be brushed aside as being.  Like, I get being proud of your heritage, but are these really necessary on multiple days of the year, never mind as regular components of your wardrobe?:

That vampire shirt is pretty funny, though…  That one can stay.