Warm Fuzzies # 7: Classifieds

There really are nothing like best friends and sisters to renew one’s sense of self-confidence when a girl’s feeling blue. For whatever reason, last night was one of those no-one-will-ever-love-me nights. I more-or-less spent it holed up in my room, alternately reading a book, eating Hershey kisses, and checking Gchat for loneliness-combating “company.” Luckily for me, my dearest Pittsburgh friend Emily was online. She asked how my day was, and rather than depress her with my mood (which I instead briefly summarized as “weird”), I told her about a phone call I had received at work from one of my father’s friends:

ME: she asked me how I was. she wanted to know how I liked my job and then she wanted to know if I was dating anyone

and THEN she asked what I was waiting for

EMILY: :)

did you tell her an intelligent, athletic, articulate, outgoing bookworm/musician who loves to cook with lots of vegetables to come sweep you off your feet?

oh and i forgot to mention that he has to love to hug

ME: hahaha

I told her that I was working on it.

and that I had to go back to work

EMILY: hehe tell you're doing your job of looking pretty and being an independent sassy girl who knows what she's passionate about and its all up to him now

ME: ok I'll do that. and try to live up to it....

EMILY: don't worry, you already have

Can you see why I love this girl?

Meanwhile, I was exchanging emails with my sister, who is wrapped up in finals. I was actually trying to offer her support, seeing as she is certainly stressed out with all of her studying and paper-writing at this time of the semester. However, for whatever reason (probably my no-one-loves-me mood), I added a long p.s. on one of my emails, saying something to the effect of, “It’s no wonder the guys I have semi-crushes have no reciprocal interest in me; I’m just a silly 23 year old girl pining in vain. How pathetic.”

My sister’s response was nothing short of a well-written classified advertisement (mixed with a little violent sisterly affection, of course):

STOP PUTTING YOURSELF DOWN! if you keep doing this I may be forced to come up to NYC and hit you on the head a few times! You are not just a silly little 23-year-old and you know it! stop it! you're a beautiful and intelligent and athletic working woman and don't you forget it! Nothing pathetic about it.

Sisters. What would we do without them?

A Bottle of Wine

The request wasn’t a particularly difficult one: Buy 8 bottles of red wine and one bottle of champagne, to be given as gifts. Keep the cost within reason. A pretty straightforward directive. However, to an alcohol-illiterate non-drinker like me, my boss may as well have asked me to fly to Greece and pick out some good books.

Except for the fact that its label is usually written in English, I don’t know cooking wine from Pinot Noir, never mind the difference between a bottle of “1982 Ponzi Oregon Pinot Noir Drouhin Serene Argyle” and a bottle of “2006 Loring Pinot Noir Santa Rita Hills.” If you ask me if it’s red or white, I figure I have a 50/50 shot (unless I can see the bottle, in which case my guess is usually more accurate). All those bottles, all those years, all those locations and foreign titles…. Needless to say, I felt a bit daunted by this seemingly simple task.

Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge. I figured people who work in these alcohol establishments should know what’s good, so I would merely ask them. The next challenge came in getting so many bottles purchased so quickly and transported to the venue where they wouled be distributed. (My team at work was having a party, and the wine was to be awarded as gifts to various hard-working editors on the team.) My initial assumption was that I would just go in person to the local liquor store, but my boss suggested that I call, instead (it was raining outside) and that perhaps they would deliver the wine for us. This seemed logical, so I called. The nearby store referred me to their other, more distant branch, which then told me that they would email me the order form, which I could fax back to them. And yes, it could be delivered today.

I waited for the promised email for two hours, trying to simultaneously attend a meeting and draft a bibliometrics report for a journal at the same time. When the form finally arrived, I took one look at it and blanched. Apart from all of the lines for billing information, the only other item on the form was a blank white box labeled “Order.” I scrolled through the pdf again, closed and reopened the file, and finally concluded that no, there was not a wine list include; I was expected to know exactly what I wanted.

After trying in vain to search the internet for what I needed, I called back and tried to explain my situation again to the wine store employee who answered the phone. “Just fill out what you need and we’ll do the rest,” he told me. “I’ll fax it back to you with some suggestions.” Personally, this seemed like way too much faxing back and forth to me, but I did as instructed and then waited for a reply. It was 12 p.m. when I sent the fax. We needed the alcohol delivered by 4 p.m.

At 1:15 p.m. I still had not received any reply, so I called again. “You didn’t fill out any of the credit card information,” the guy told me with obvious irritation. Of course I didn’t, I thought, there’s no order on there yet! I’m not handing over my boss’s credit card so you can ring up whatever you feel like charging her! “We need the numbers and stuff, to process everything,” he told me. “And this Nine Lounge,” he added as an afterthought once I confirmed that I’d fax the completed credit card information to him, “it’s not a bar, right? It doesn’t serve alcohol. Because we can’t deliver there if it does. That’s illegal.”

This was the point at which I threw up my hands, donned my raincoat, and trekked out to the store as I had originally planned, hours ago. Inside, I told the worker what I needed and how much money I was willing to spend. He gave me a few choices, I blindly guessed at the one that looked the “nicest” (and wouldn’t break my budget), and clomped the four long blocks back to my office in the rain, the ten bottles of wine in one big, ostentatious purple box. (The tenth bottle was a kosher wine I needed to take to a Sedar on Thursday. We were getting a 10% discount for buying so many bottles, so I figured I should take advantage of this! Don’t worry—I reimbursed my boss for the expense charged to her AmEx.)

At the end of the day, when it was time to go to the party, my boss came back to her office to collect her things, saw the box of wine, and quite sincerely said, “What am I supposed to do with this?!” In short order, she, two other colleagues, and I “smuggled” the wine into the venue in various coat pockets and discreet bags. I couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief yet, though, because we still had to present the wine to everyone. What if someone didn’t like my selection? (A very likely possibility, considering I didn’t know a whit about what I had chosen.) What if I had gotten the wrong number of bottles?

Before my boss started her presentation of thanking everyone, she asked me to help her pass out the wine (one bottle at a time). Therefore, I stood a bit behind her and to the side, passing her the bottles as she finished each of her speeches about individual editors and the work they had done for our website. Finally, there was one bottle of wine and the champagne for the website developer remaining. She asked me how many were left, and when I told her “one plus the champagne,” she said, “Oh, that’s mine,” and proceeded to present the web developer with his champagne. Then she went and got the last bottle herself, which I presumed she intended to open for everyone to try (because there were some editors there who did not receive wine), and how I was horribly nervous, because this would be the test of whether I had chosen good wine or not. Suddenly, though, she announced that she had one last presentation. That’s right. One more person to present with wine, who had put in an unbelievable amount of work and without whom this project never would have been possible….

I must say that I was so shocked when she handed me that bottle of wine, I must have turned twelve different shades of red. And I’m not really the blushing type, typically. Thank goodness I had chosen a dark venue for the party—good planning on my part! I was so surprised and flattered, I didn’t even know how to react. I haven’t even been with the company six months, and my boss, this important person has shown me such a kind, considerate, public display of appreciation. I was truly touched.

Blogging About Texting

Technically I’m “texting” right now, aren’t I? Because essentially the term “texting” means “sending a bit of text from one person to another.” By that definition, we’ve been “texting” since we developed the telegraph and the postal system.

However, the word “texting” has only existed since the age of cell phones—more specifically, cell phones that transmit and receive visual, rather than auditory, messages. (Remember those old clunky pieces of plastic with chop-stick-thick antennas? Hold up your Blackberry and imagine trying to text on one of those old devices.) This probably runs hand-in-hand with the fact that the trend in communicating by texting—rather than, say, letter-writing (heaven forbid), emailing or even calling—has spiked within the last few years. When I graduated from high school, everyone was still excited by IM-ing. Little did they realize how limiting that form of communication was. (It chained you to your computer!) When cell phones came along, the floodgates opened. The freedom almost was almost too much to believe. You could contact anyone. Anytime. Anywhere. (Unless, of course, they did something ridiculous like turn their phone off or go somewhere without service. But there’s just no helping some fools.)

Needless to say, I did not join the ranks of cell phone-carrying devotees until approximately one year ago. That means that people could not contact me anytime, anywhere. Admittedly, this was probably a bit of a deterrent to my social life in college, but seeing as I did not seem to have much in common with most of the people there anyway, I doubt a cell phone would have made much difference. (Instead, I used all that money I saved on monthly phone bills to study abroad and travel to cool places like London and Amsterdam and Barcelona!)

At the end of my senior year, however, when I finally determined that I would be moving to NYC to begin the next “phase” of my life, I decided that it was time to take the plunge. Forty dollars-a-month or not, cell phones had undeniably become the number one form of communication between members of my generation, and if I wanted to create any sort of lasting social ties in my new place of residence, I needed to make it easy for people to contact me. What’s more, this would be my first residence that did not come pre-equipped with a landline. Formerly, everywhere I had lived—at both my home and my college dormitories—had already had a telephone installed. From my perspective, it seemed silly to have two phones. If someone wanted to reach me, they could leave a message. Besides, if I wasn’t there, I was probably too busy to talk to them anyway! (I detested when people answered their phones in the middle of a meal or chattered mindlessly while wandering through a shopping mall. One task at a time, folks!) This time, however, there was no pre-arranged phone line awaiting me. Therefore, I figured, I might as well buy a cell phone.

Thus, last May, I purchased a two-year, 450 minute-per-month plan with Verizon. With the exception of one stressful month during which I was alone, unemployed, uninsured, and desperately worrying that I had made the wrong decision in plopping myself down in this city and expecting to “make it work,” I have never exceeded my “talk time” allowance; most months I am lucky if I use even half of the allotted minutes. Therefore it seems impractical, never mind unnecessary, to have texting as to supplement my plan. Why should I waste an additional $5 (+ taxes!) per month on yet another form of intrusive communication when I can’t even use up all of the service for which I am already paying?

Unfortunately—as before—most of my peers do not agree with this reasoning. They refuse to simply be pleased that I have finally acquired a cell phone; they must immediately berate me for my lack of texting capabilities. “How do you survive?” they want to know—the same thing they wanted to know before I bought a cell phone. “It’s just five dollars a month.” This is a lie, though, because the true cost would be ten dollars, assuming I don’t want to be counting people’s texts to make sure they don’t push me over your “text limit” for the month, since “everyone” has unlimited texting (because “everyone” is on a family plan). Paying $120+ per year to type more than I already do simply seems unappealing. I’d rather use that money to buy a one-way plane ticket!

Yes, sometimes there are instances when I want to relay information but don’t really want to have an entire conversation with someone. And yes, my lack of texting availability probably prevents me from receiving some spontaneous, thoughtful messages and invitations from various people who only operate “on the fly.” But the payoff is that my life is less chaotic. I’m not always waiting for a reply from someone I have just texted (which is exactly what happens on IM—I want an instant reply! Now! If they’re sitting at their computer, like me, why don’t they just write back?). In the same vein, not having texting prevents me from being forced to give an instantaneous reply to every message—or any more instantaneous than cell phone calling etiquette allows. I don’t treat my phone like an extra appendage, and so I don’t expect others to, either. (Admittedly, this can lead to some major frustration and disappointment, when I am stuck in the company of someone who spends more time staring at and talking on their cell phone than interacting with me).

Perhaps all this hemming and hawing makes me into an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy. Perhaps I’m one of those girls who will grow up into an anti-technology old crone who is always reminding everyone, “Back in my day….” However, the most likely scenario involves me caving in to peer pressure and add texting to my plan. The problem is, by the time I get around to doing that, some technology will come along that lets us all read each other’s minds, or some such thing, and then what am I going to do? (Expense aside, I draw the line at revealing my plans for world domination to the likes of the Burger King cashier.) I suppose I’ll stick with my pre-cell phone mantra for now: “I’m not morally opposed to texting. If you want to pay for it, I’d be happy to get it!”

Snapshot Book Review: The Conqueror

The Conqueror by Jan Kjærstad

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Admittedly, it has been a significant amount of time since I have read a “serious” novel: a novel that takes me more than a week to read; a novel I would consider structurally and thematically challenging (but worth the challenge!); and a novel that has been translated from Swedish, at that.

I think I would deem this book “good” in the thought-provoking, challenging, academic sense whether or not it was translated from another language. The structure is unique—a narrator telling a story being narrated by another storyteller. It creates an interesting “voice” paradox, because the overarching voice was always that of the primary narrator, but in the majority of the chapters that told of the life of Jonas Wergeland, the voice had to “coat” and mimic a second narrator’s voice—that of the character recounting the story to the writer. So the chain was thus: the mysterious woman told the story to the professor, who retold it for the readers of the book he was writing, which happens to be the same book the real-world readers are reading, which is consequently written by the real author (Jan Kjaerstad) and “retold” (i.e. translated) by the translator Barbara Haveland. Complicated, no? And yet tremendously fascinating!

Not only was the narrative structure of the novel complexly layered, but the plot of the novel was also arranged in an intricate pattern. The ending was apparent from the beginning—Jonas had killed his wife Margaret, and a professor (the narrator) had been commissioned to tell the tale—but what remained unapparent as the tale of his life unraveled was why it was being told as a mock-defense by a mysterious woman. “Is it possible to change a life by recounting it?” asks the first line of the last fifteen or so chapters. That seems to be the mission of the whole novel—to change the reader’s perspective on Jonas Wergeland’s life, creating one impression and then altering it slightly with a single anecdote about another seemingly unrelated but somehow pivotal event that occurred to Jonas as he matured from a young boy into a middle-aged man.

One of Kjaerstad’s major strengths—or a strength of this particular novel, at the very least—is his ability to find meaning and importance in the smallest, almost mundane details and events. Kjaerstad transforms a simple hockey puck, a silver broach, and a pearl into poignant thematic symbols that recur throughout the novel and have meaning not only to the reader, but to Jonas himself. Another noteworthy skill is Kjaerstad’s ability to make Jonas internalize his actions and observations in ways that take on both immediate and long-range meaning so that they apply both to the scene at hand as well as the overarching structure of the novel. Near-car-crashes, snake sightings, sexual intercourse—all of these affect the immediate story being told within the chapter as well as the overarching tale being constructed by the novel.

These features are all proof of an extraordinary novel. However, The Conqueror would be nowhere nearly as elegant and refined a novel without its exquisite language, and whether this is due to Kjaerstad's original word choice or Haveland’s interpretation, the result is a beautifully crafted, complex novel that is bound to make a lasting impression.


View all my reviews.

Strangers on the Bus

The ride was going so well, until he mentioned dumpster diving.

As a rule, I typically avoid talking to people on buses. Short-distance riders, long-distance riders—they (or do I mean we?) are a relatively creepy lot, and I figure I am better off keeping to myself rather than engaging in a potentially awkward conversation with a fur-coat-clad woman carrying three trash bags or a 6’4” black man whose earphones—which are not even in his ears but, rather, dangle limply around his neck—are playing rap music so loud, it’s audible at the front of the bus.

That I keep my distance assumes, of course, that these individuals do not try to strike up a conversation with me. I am not one to be rude, after all; I don’t like to snub people. Therefore, if someone initiates conversation, I will respond. This does not mean I will attempt to further the conversation, but there is no reason to ignore a perfect stranger just because they are collectively a member of bus-riding weirdos. After all, I take the bus. (It fits my budget!)

So because my general rule is to avoid talking to strangers on the bus, I was slightly comforted when, after making a joking comment about the driver’s announcement that our bus would be “running express” and “would only stop for ‘number two,’” the passanger in the seat next to me commented that he had never spoken to a fellow bus seatmate of his own volition before. A kindred spirit, I thought, as he recounted his last bus ride stuck beside a fifty-year-old woman who held him in captive interrogation for the entire five hours. We’ll get along.

And we did. I found out that he went to school in Connecticut—he was in his final semester studying Psychology, although he had tried out English and History before finally settling on Psych. He asked me what I had done while staying in DC and told me all about the various museums he had visited and music performances he had seen. It seemed like a pleasant enough conversation, and I was enjoying it in a detached sort of way (although I did kind of want to finish the novel I had in my bag, since I was in the last few chapters, with only twenty pages to go). However, I figured I had a full five hours to read my last twenty pages. One hour of chatting would simply help to pass the time.

My first clue that something was a bit “off” occurred when Chris (that was his name) asked me what I had done in DC for the second time. When he asked, I assumed he meant to imply the word “else”: “What else have you done during your stay in DC?” However, when I started to quickly rehash what I had already told him, merely for context, he leapt at the information like it was a new avenue of conversation. “Oh the Eastern Market!” he exclaimed. “I love that place! I bought a pound of coffee there.” When I had told him about going to the market earlier, we had had a discussion about how both of us had gone to see the Crepe Man, and he had wanted to know if I had bought anything interesting. He hadn’t mentioned buying coffee, but I suddenly feared that if I mentioned crepes, he would start telling me, “Oh! I had one of those! I love that guy!”

His next slightly odd comment was $25 for a show was “five times too expensive for his budget.” We were talking about things to do in NYC, and he was expounding on the “culture available” and “for so cheap.” “I guess there’s stuff up at my school,” he said, “but it’s always to expensive. Tickets are, like, $25. Five times over my budget limit, that’s for sure.” Okay, I thought, so maybe he’s just a poor college student. Maybe I used to think that $25 was a lot for entertainment back when I was in college, too. I don’t remember. It would probably depend what show.

After showing me a pamphlet from an avant-garde art museum he had visited, which featured disturbing, somewhat creepy art by Louis Bourgeois, he asked if I had ever heard of some sort of soup-kitchen-type organization called “Meals not Bums.” (Or something like that. I’m pretty sure the name used alliteration, but I cannot remember what he called it.) I hadn’t, which surprised him. “They must have a group in Queens,” he kept saying. Apparently this group takes excess food from restaurants and stores and redistributes it to “whoever wants it.” Unsurprisingly, this demographic usually consists of homeless people.

“But you can’t use stuff from places like Panera,” I pointed out. “They’re too worried about getting sued.”

“No no,” he assured me, “we just get our stuff from mom-and-pop places. Buffets, stuff like that.” He paused. “But I’ve definitely taken sandwiches out of the Starbucks dumpster. That stuff is good.”

Now I began to look longingly at the book in my lap. Who the heck was I sitting next to? Why do I innately want to believe people are normal and kind? Of course, he did volunteer for this organization, so he probably was at least kind….

“Life just sucks,” he told me a little while later, after he had elaborated upon his plan to marry the girl he had just visited in DC. They had broken up two years earlier, this girl was about to join the Peace Corps in Africa, and they intended to marry each other in 2012 if neither found another suitable partner. “I can’t get married before I’m 24,” was his reasoning. However, following the “life just sucks” comment, he asked, “Have you ever been arrested?”

I told him no.

“Me neither,” he said. “But I watched my friend get arrested. It sucked.” When I didn’t respond, he continued, “It was so stupid. He was just at this Wal-Mart and tried to return a garden hose off the shelf. A f***ing garden hose! It was, like, twelve dollars.” Chris shakes his head. “So stupid.”

“Why did he try to return a garden hose?” I was a little confused.

Chris looked at me like I was a moron. “Because it was on the receipt.”

“But if he got the hose off the shelf, where’d he get the receipt?”

“He found it on the floor.” Chris suddenly leaned back with a smile of pride. “We made good money this one time; we returned this flower pot. Forty-five dollars! It was so sweet.”

We? This guy not only ate out of dumpsters, he scrounged shopping lots for discarded receipts and stole merchandise! I clutched my bag more tightly between my legs.

“That’s really wrong,” I told him. He shrugged, and I suddenly had a flashback to my favorite movie as a little kid: the cartoon version of Robin Hood, with the fox that plays Robin Hood and bear that plays Little John. Was this nothing more than a small-scale modern-day version of that story? Rob from the rich (corporations), give to the poor (college students)…. But of course, this guy isn’t giving away anything. And he’s really just stealing from everybody. After all, who manufactured that garden hose and threw that clay flower pot? Probably some underpaid child laborer in Taiwan. And now here’s this oh-so-cool hippie-esque college guy thinking he’s entitled to a free ride in life while the rest of America loses their jobs….

I feigned being asleep for the rest of the bus ride. (With my bag clamped between my legs.) So much for finishing my book, but some sacrifices just have to be made for a little peace of mind. Maybe this will teach me not to talk to strangers on the bus.