the pittsburgh-german secret society for…engineers?

you want a bizarre recounting of how incongruous subjects always end up together in my dreams? okay, sure, here you go:

last night i dreamed i went to Germany with CMU, as part of some class celebration or ceremony. we had our caps and gowns, and when we arrived there, we were taken to an ancient-looking pub, or beergarten, or whatever they're called in Germany, down to the basement, down, down, down a dark staircase with rich, dark wood paneling–walnut perhaps–to a smallish, windowless room where there were wooden tables and chairs, and a little bar in the left corner. and a stage, or a dais of some kind.

we stayed in a nearby lodge, and there the structure was more of a deep reddish brown panelling, like cherry. we seemed to be returning as part of a yearly meeting, and while we were there, we went to a festival or something, something with colorful tents and stalls.

this subterranean room seemed to be solely for our use, and i don't just mean me and my classmates; there was some historic connection between Carnegie Mellon and this German pub, where many years this occasion had taken place, as if we were part of an ancient secret society. there were crests and placards on the walls that seemed to confirm this, although i can't describe to you what the designs were.

i wish i could give more detail about the dream, but i waited a bit too long to write this post, and now the memory is fading.

anyone got a Carnegie Mellon-Germany connection they feel would shed light on this scenario?

*pic courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/26736936@N03/favorites/page8/?view=lg

chubby babies are the antidote

lately i've had to observe a lot of endings, and they will bring that sense of sadness with them. the end of my $16 a month netflix subscription. the end of my graduate school loan money. the end of many friendships forged at carnegie mellon, as people drift away. the end of harry potter. God, that one was hard.

normally i really embrace change. i normally feel like when things have gotten soggy and boring, change can't be anything but an improvement. but for some reason i feel an especial desire, as of late, to struggle against being pushed into the unknown.

i know this feeling will pass, because i can't bear moping or wasting time, and i prefer if possible to, like Lucy Honeychurch, "play on the side of Victory." that means looking for jobs that will let me write, continuing to write on my own, going to the gym, playing my ukulele, petting my cats, strengthening current friendships and embracing new friends, and generally having hope.

i think this is really important; in fact, if you read that last line, and secretly laughed to yourself, a little cynically, i think it's sad that you've already given up, because you have the opportunity at every moment of your life, to see something beautiful, or something beautiful that you could do. if you didn't laugh, well, then, good for you. you could be friends with Kenneth Parcell.

no one is so perfect as to be able to feel happy all the time, and indeed it probably isn't healthy, but still. i'm sure we can all try to be positive, and that makes a difference. David Foster Wallace reminded me that you can find joy even in a crowded consumer hell, and actually i do try to do that. usually i look for chubby babies in shopping carts to cheer me up while i wait in the checkout line.

so while many of my friends have left, and things are ending, i might as well keep looking for chubby babies and writing jobs. let me know if you find either of those–and share the joy, will you?

one small step

tonight i realized i was the first person on twitter to tweet about 30 rock's werewolf bar mitzvah song. or at least, the first to script it as #werewolfbarmitzvah.

should i feel sad at such a lonely moment…or proud to be the first?

to be continued

it's funny but now that i am "getting into writing," aka as a formal career, i realize how much fun it is–and also how hard.

mostly because apparently formal writing is like this guild that you have to be born into, or know special secrets to infiltrate, like the freemasons. and even they have a website.

but i feel good about where i'm going. something tells me that this is right. i'm still temping at a job that's not paying me very much, but the people are nice and it's not too bad. meanwhile i've applied for a reporter position a pittsburgh company in the southside, so hopefully a) i do well on the interview and b) it is actually a legit cool job with decent pay and, please God, health care.

i also started writing for a new pittsburgh magazine called PGH, but that's upcoming, so, to be continued…

solar return

as always, as i draw closer to my birthday, i start to think back on the year i've just been through, and think forward on what is coming. i'm reading a book now called how to get more love, money and success by traveling on your birthday. it's interesting in that it theorizes on how you can influence your life by physically moving yourself into a new environment during the time of your solar return.

whether or not you think astrology is a load of bollocks, it is a fact that, on the day of your birth, at the time you were born, the sun moves essentially into the same position of the sky as at the time of your actual birth. and yes, the sun does move, did you know that? well, maybe you did. i assumed it was still, which in retrospect, i guess wouldn't make sense. but who really thinks about these things?

anyway, isn't that interesting, even from a purely astronomical standpoint? it reminds me of how connected we are to the universe. we think we are these isolated little islands, moving independently about the earth, but we're more like fish in the sea, our movements always being impacted by the current and by the vibrations of external forces, and our own movements likewise pressing back against others. we forget how connected we are sometimes, i think.

the other planets, by the way, are in different positions, and supposedly you can take advantage of the time in which your sun comes back to you, to move in accordance to their respective influences. i am skeptical about how this is to happen, but as i'm only on the first page, i suspend my judgment until i've read further. i might be in another city on the 19th, after all.

* photo courtesy of http://www.nightscapes.net/photos/synthetic/gemini.html.

sure is tempting to be a temp

ah, the job search. so on thursday i went to the temp agency, in an effort to find employment of some variety while i figure how to become a writer. you know, one that gets paid.

i had a vague sense of what to expect, from having gone to one temp agency once in college with my sister. but it was awhile ago, obviously, and i was a college student then, so i felt i had to prepare myself totally differently this time.

on thursday morning i got up, showered and blow-dried my hair nicely, and put on my khaki pencil skirt, green flower-print blouse, and grey Steve Madden ballet flats with the ruffle accents. luckily the temperature had providentially cooled that morning from its previous 90+ records earlier in the week, so i was able to stay moderately groomed.

i walked outside and got on the 61C bus to go downtown to where the agency was. i had read good reviews of it, so i was expectant of finding at least moderately good employment. all the way down, i practiced in my head the things i would say about myself: "i am hard-working, very professional, a quick learner, and i'm great with customers." which are all true, i can say without boasting, but doesn't it always feel funny to promote yourself to strangers? anyway.

when i got to the building with the agency, i had to take a scary old elevator to the sixth floor. once i got there and checked in, the nice girl at the front desk set me down with a set of forms and told me to fill them out. feeling ridiculously nervous, i set about putting my life's information down on paper, remembering how bad my print handwriting is, because i usually write cursive.

then i handed back in my forms along with my resume, after which the receptionist set me up in the next room at a computer where i was to take a test on Microsoft Word & Excel, and a typing test. i was tempted to ask her if she got her job as a receptionist for a temp agency, from the temp agency itself, or from another temp agency, but i resisted.

instead i sat down to take the world's most impractical test. indeed, i felt like i was taking the GRE again. mind you, this is no slight meant on the agency itself; as i said, it had glowing reviews from previous clients. but the tests are designed to gauge your proficiency in typical daily computer-related functions, and in my mind, they were hardly reflective of what you would actually have to do at an actual job (much like the GRE).

the tests asked you questions in paragraph form, about how you would complete certain tasks. the questions were fairly drawn out, and identified features of Word and Excel with confusing names, that the average worker knows perfectly well how to use, but cannot name. i can't even recall the bizarre names given to certain features, but they were things like "navigation review home" and the "customize tablet." and they would ask you how to do simple things, but give you ridiculously complicated multiple-choice answers to choose from, when really you know you could do the same thing by right-clicking on the word, rather than by going through six panels of menu options.

for tests that are designed to show in the most practical way how effective a potential worker could be, this seems to be highly impractical. Microsoft Office applications are purposefully designed to be as visual and user-friendly as possible, but only a couple of the questions actually used a graphic as an aid for what the question was about. if they opened the actual Word program, however, and asked the test taker to click on the appropriate area to do a certain function, i feel a much larger percentage would have been able to answer correctly. and isn't that more productive in identifying good workers?

oh, and the typing test. that was great. my mom thought it was hysterical that they still give typing tests, but that's an aside. i don't care. i'm sure typing is still something necessary to test. at any rate, the subject of the paragraphs you were supposed to type was all about how the economy has been failing, and job security is no longer a given. isn't that a terrible subject to make people seeking employment, have to type about? everyone knows happy workers are more productive–wouldn't it be a better test of a worker's optimum abilities, by having them type about a vacation they're about to go on? just a thought.

really, i had thought i knew Word and Excel well enough, but after those tests, i was somewhat humbled. i went back up to the front desk to tell the receptionist that i'd finished. sheepishly i began to comment that i guess i didn't know Word and Excel as well as i thought, and she interrupted me to say "oh no, you did just fine. look–you scored 3.4 out of 3.5. you're in the 90th percentile." she paused and smiled at me, the corners of her mouth twitching. "you're pretty well qualified."

what? i'm not sure how to feel about this. oh well. at least that hopefully means i'll get a call soon for a job offer. i feel bad for other people having to take that test, however. i'm sure they're being poorly represented.

oh, and they didn't interview me at all. they said the companies themselves interview directly, which makes sense. but i guess i need not have prepared the mental speeches. oh well, those will come in handy soon.

anyway, so here i am, sitting and writing because i have nothing else to do and no idea how to get my name out there as this amazing writer (note to self: become an amazing writer). i'm eating from an industrial-strength bag of swedish fish™ as a consolation prize for not having work yet. wish me luck!

what are your epic employment/unemployment stories?

The Boondock Saints

Yesterday evening I watched The Boondock Saints with some girlfriends. It was the first time I'd seen the movie. The violence was not usually what I'm eager to watch, but it had some beautiful moments and a properly suspenseful plot. The kind of film that I can understand why it becomes iconic.

I couldn't help being bored, however, by the lame roles of the few female characters in the film. Now, you can come right back and say there are plenty of "women's" films that have cardboard male characters, and you're absolutely right. You can make your blog post about those. Right now I'm blogging about these.

There were a small handful of women throughout the entire film, in scenes lasting around 1 minute 30 seconds. They pretty much had no lines, and when they did talk, the dialogue was always vaguely unnecessary, something extraneous to the plot of the film. Some of them, I presume, were forensic scientists, since they wore white lab coats and had their hair pulled back in important, no-nonsense ponytails. But they never seemed to contribute any actual scientific findings to the crime scenes which they were investigating.

At one point in the film, towards the end, the main detective, who is a riot, is going nuts at the scene of one of the final crimes, a suburban home where massive shootings have taken place both in and outside the home. He can't figure out who these guys are, even though the Boondock Saints are amateurs and doing stuff that he says you "can't do in movies" (cue comic drum and cymbals!).

Meanwhile, the female forensic scientist is taking blood samples from a splattering on one of the new jersey-blue-blood-suburban-home pillars, and making over-exaggerated gestures of exasperation, making me think that she was not classically trained in Method acting. She expresses her distress at not being able to get a good blood sample, and hyped-up detective man comes over to help her out of what should be her job.

He leans over and sniffs the blood, has a conniption about it, draws out the drama of telling everyone what he's discovered, and waves a smear of the blood in the scientist's face, causing her to flail her head away and make a face. Eww! He put something icky near her!

It's ammonia, he announces. The Saints have sprayed it on their blood so that you can't get a decent blood sample. Those Irish scamps! Everyone gasps at the detective's brilliance, and the female scientist makes a figure of wonder and chagrin (she doesn't talk anymore; her dialogue moment is over). Ah, ammonia. Well, now we know.

But why didn't she know? Ammonia is a pretty common smell; it's in your urine, in bad fish, etc. And she's a scientist. I know one of the comic subplots of this film was to present the detective as brilliant and everyone else he works with as a hopeless rube, but even so. Would it have killed the director to let the scientist be the one to say "oh, it's ammonia," and then let detective have his monologue rant? I mean, this is a bloody scientist, but she can't figure out why that blood sample won't take! What a waste of a lab coat.

I bring this up mostly because when I watch films like these, the women in them are so one-dimensional and dumb, and I feel forced to identify with them. Maybe that's just how I watch movies.

Still, let me reiterate that The Boondock Saints is an artistic and powerful film, with a complex look at social justice. I get why it is iconic. But I get annoyed that portrayals like these are generally disregarded because something is iconic. It's like how slavery is kind of okay in Gone with the Wind because awww, look at those pretty dresses! There was a moment in Saints where the Don wants Rocco to tell a joke with the word "n*****", but I feel pretty sure (or I hope?) that the audience is supposed to feel suitably appalled by it.

Well, I've probably offended a great many people with this. If it helps, just pretend I was wearing a white lab coat when I wrote it and disregard the whole thing.

* photo courtesy of http://splashpage.mtv.com/2009/08/12/the-boondock-saints-coming-to-comics/