Oh - a bit of a plug.   Everyone reading this should go out and see one of my favorite punk rock boy bands, Xs for Eyes, in the final night of their residency at The Trash Bar in Williamsburg (www.thetrashbar.com).  That's right - after tonight, they'll be Doctors of Punk.   Hear some of their tunes at www.xs-for-eyes.com.   Tonight they've promised to do a Celine Dion cover.   I can't wait.

Of course, I think everyone who reads this blog is either in the band, married to a member of the band, or a senior citizen in Thailand, but still ...




- posted by Marguerite @ 9:29 AM

 
So begins the job search.  Motivated by not having enough money to pay the rent, I'm now looking for a full-time job. 

Looking for jobs reminds me of dating, only without alchohol and the possibility of ending up naked.  Strangely, dating never reminded me of a job interview.  For an interview, you have to dress up and pretend to be interested in every last word the other person says.   As Jerry Seinfeld famously said of his 20-some odd years of dating, "that's a lot of acting fascinated."

Job interviews are like going on a date with someone who doesn't drink or have sex.  Ever.  The kind of date who would ask for the check if you use off-color language, or if you show too much skin.  But, if the date goes well, they might give you a sizeable annual salary and health insurance.

- posted by Marguerite @ 9:11 AM

 
It has been suggested to me that blogging is a giant waste of time.  This statement does have some basis in fact.  In the grand scheme of things that are a waste of time, however, blogging has some stiff competition.  The first thing that comes to my mind?  Video games.

Paul, my fiancé, plays a lot of video games.  I just don’t get it.  For entertainment value, these things rank just above the Slinky, in my book.  Remember those metal coils that, if placed at just the right angle at the top of the stairs, would simulate a metal coil falling down a stairwell?   They sold millions, maybe billions of them.  The moral of the story: never underestimate the economic and social power of a thing that is a complete waste of time. 

At one point, I even tried to like video games, just because I’m the kind of person you would expect to like them.  I have any number of socially marginal pastimes, mostly based on an unfortunate fondness for science fiction.  I have been known to begin sentences, Remember that Star Trek episode where …  But video games are where I draw the line, in the way that casual drug users draw the line at, say, doing heroin.  It seems like they must put something subliminal in the game programs to make them so addictive.  Like in that Star Trek episode where … never mind. 

Some of the smartest people I know live for their X-Box and/or PlayStation 12.  They devote a sizeable chunk of their free time and disposable income to this mental illness - I mean, stimulating (to the economy, at least) form of entertainment. In college, I knew a guy who seriously considered getting Depends so he wouldn’t have to get up to pee when playing video games. True devotees don’t think this is taking it too far.  These people can spend eleven hours at a time driving a simulated car around a badly simulated racetrack, to beat a nonexistent opponent.  These are often the same people who insist they’re way too busy to put up a new shower curtain (or, for that matter, to shower). Personally, I can’t imagine spending that much time doing anything that won’t result in a paycheck, or at least firmer thighs.

In an effort to better understand the elusive thrill of video games, last night I played one called “Ratchet and Clank.” It goes something like this: Ratchet, a sort of alien bobcat wearing an Amelia Earhart hat, runs around a psychedelic planet with his robot friend, Clank, hitting crates with a giant wrench being while being chased by retarded frog-chipmunks with an apparent motor dysfunction, as they can’t hop in a straight line. (Maybe they’re supposed to be drunk?  Or maybe I’m supposed to be drunk?  The whole thing might make more sense …)  What sounds like the soundtrack to a 70s porn flick plays in the background (an electronic waka waka bow-wow, ad infinitum).  The graphics are pretty amazing, and it’s not easy, but still.  Grown adult – alien bobcat whacking crates – you do the math.

Video games used to be just for kids, but the Atari kids of the 80s never outgrew their love of shooting commas at a spaceship made out of punctuation marks; it only evolved.  Now they make games that are just for adults, although I’m told they don’t have any “adult” video games, the kind you might play on a XXX-Box (“joystick” related puns abounding).   That, I could at least understand. 

Are there any positive benefits to these electronic mazes?  Advocates of video games – the kind of slightly-deranged-looking people who appear on T.V. with the words “Video Game Advocate” under their names - say the games “promote hand–eye coordination,” although they can’t point to any actual evidence to support this assertion.  It’s kind of like the Smoking Advocates who insist that smoking prevents death by helping prevent malaria, because the smoke scares off Tsetse flies.   Even if you live in a country that has no Tsetse flies.  Or malaria. 

Recently, Paul asked me what kind of video game I would make if I could make my own.  This is kind of like me asking him, Which color lipstick would go best with my top?  Speaking for all men, he typically replies, It makes absolutely no difference.   

But as for video games – there is one I would like to play.  It’s called Time Killer!!!  In it, you have a choice of several weapons, including a sledgehammer, guns, and various weapons of mass destruction.  The object is to break into your fiance’s apartment and destroy all of his video games in an enjoyably violent manner.  You can smash the individual games, such as Complete Waste of Time, and Complete Waste of Time 2, but the ultimate object is to get the machines out into the desert, and watch as a mushroom cloud rises up over them.  Now, I think that’s a video game I could really get into.   


- posted by Marguerite @ 12:45 PM

 
In Jacksonville.  It's 1:33 a.m., but I can't sleep.  Here in the suburbs, nighttime is all about darkness and silence. It's about ... sleeping.   After seven years in New York, silence and darkness are about the only two things that prevent me from sleeping.  I need to get one of those "white noise" machines that reproduce the sounds of the garbage trucks on West End Avenue.  I'm pretty sure the garbage men (sanitation workers? trash musicians?) on my route are aspiring to be in "Stomp," they make such a production of throwing the trash cans around. 

Based on what I hear every night, I imagine the scene to be as follows:
 
On a dark stage (W.E.A.), a spotlight rises on SANITATION WORKER, wearing an orange Lycra unitard and a maudlin expression, sitting backwards on a chair.  SANITATION WORKER 2 rushes across the stage does a 3-turn pirouette, to arabesque. He finds a cane and top hat underneath some old Billy Joel 8-tracks in the trash. And the show begins ...
 
LIGHTS UP on PASSING MOTORIST FROM STATEN ISLAND.
 
PASSING MOTORIST:  Fooooooock you! 
TAXI DRIVER: (allegro) No, fuck you, myfriend. Youarea mudderfokker! 
PASSING MOTORIST: (fortissimo) No, Fock yoooooooou!
 
PASSING MOTORIST and TAXI DRIVER get out of their cars.  Although come from different worlds (signified by different colored unitards), they are united by their shared passions for Billy Joel, the choreography of Twyla Tharp, and hitting trash cans with a lead pipe.  
 
For the next half hour, the trash cans will rattle and bang. Motorists and sanitation workers will exchange profanities. But in my mind, they're dancing, too. 
 


- posted by Marguerite @ 10:08 PM

 
At a café in Greenpoint, Brooklyn - Greenpoint Coffee House. Noon on a Tuesday, and the place is packed with hipsters, their sock hats aglow in the light of Apple laptops.

“Does anybody in Greenpoint have a job?” the barista asks, to nobody in particular.

Looking around the place, I wonder where all these people live. You don’t see them around the neighborhood, which is largely populated by working-class Poles. I think there must be some sort of underground tunnel that takes the hipsters from their “artist” (quotations being key) lofts to this quasi-French cafe. Step outside, though, and you would think you were in Warsaw. (Although, from what I remember, Warsaw looks much less like a former-Communist wasteland than Greenpoint.) Greenpoint is not green; it’s mostly concrete-colored. The building style is similar to certain parts of the Eastern Bloc, but in Poland they were never blighted by the 70s-era aluminum siding craze. People always speak to me in Polish around here, and seem genuinely surprised that I don’t understand them. The idea is that if you’re not Latin, you must Polish (or one of a growing number of Pol-a-ricans, as it were).

Greenpoint is the new SoHo, according to the Transitive Property of Pretentiousness. See, once upon a time, the East Village was the new SoHo. Then Williamsburg was the new East Village, and now Greenpoint is the new Williamsburg. People come further and further out, and put up with more and more shit (quite literally, given the proximity to the waste recycling plant), in search of “affordable” housing (read: $1500 a month for a “loft”, a.k.a. “studio with no kitchen”). The cool places to live in Greenpoint are all former factories, many with actual bloodstains on the floor, which is odd, since the factories were usually making shirts. Poorly ventilated sweatshops have been turned into poorly ventilated apartments that are impossible to heat or cool. But then, there’s the consoling proximity to hipster coffee houses, which makes it all worthwhile. Or something.

Why do we put up with living in New York? Those of us who come from vast, comfortable suburbs always have this question in the back of our minds. At this point, my friends just roll their eyes when I insist that I’m leaving before winter sets in again. For the past seven years (especially in the winter) I’ve been threatening to leave – getting all Ralph Kramden about it. (So help me, New York …). At a certain point, maybe you get so used to it that you wouldn’t know what to do if you left, like old men who’ve been in prison for 30 years, and can’t adjust to life on the outside. For instance, it would be weird to have a car, and to not be able to walk down to the corner to get pretty much anything you want. New York is a monument to convenience. So is America, for that matter. People come from all over the world to this country where they can get a Slurpee at 3 in the morning. Not that they necessarily want to have a Slurpee, at 3 in the morning, or any other time. It’s about knowing that it’s there - glowing and churning, waiting for you to not want it, all night long.


- posted by Marguerite @ 4:51 PM

 
Boy, am I ever depressed. I have to leave for work in about an hour. It's a nine hour shift (with no break); the place is packed, but I'm barely making any money at all. I feel like I'm either lazy or weak or maybe both because none of the other girls seem to be phased by nine straight hours of running around. (I think I can say "girls" and still be P.C., because they're all about a decade younger than I am). Am also feeling very old and oh-my-god-what-have-I-done-with-my-life.

I have to get a better job. It’s not that I mind waitressing – actually, I rather like it – but café jobs are not very lucrative, because the tabs on cakes and coffee don’t add up to much, and we have a high percentage of customers who come from countries where tipping is a foreign concept. In Japan, for instance, tipping is considered insulting, and I guess it's hard for people to understand that here in America, we like to be insulted generously. Lots of 10% tips from Europeans, which is way more than they would tip in their countries, but still. I’m the oldest waitress at Café Lalo, and one of only two non-foreigners. It’s the kind of job you get when you’re 19 years old and don’t have the right to legally work in the country. (Been there, done that.)

When you’re a waitress, people are always asking what you “really” do. I hate this question. I would say I’m an aspiring writer, but that’s just too fucking humiliating, because the next question is always, “where might I have read something you wrote?” to which I have to reply, “well, uh, you might have stolen my laptop?” Of course, the great thing about writing is that nobody can stop you from doing it. If I wanted to be an actress or an astronaut, or breed miniature dachshunds, I would have a lot more to complain about. But when it comes to writing, the only one you can blame for not doing it is yourself. You don’t need a stage or a Space Shuttle or a fertile pair of weiner dogs, just a piece of notebook paper.

So, lately, I’ve been telling people I’m trying to break into being a chicken. You see, I’ve been thinking of selling my eggs. We have millions of them, so what’s a few less? The process of “harvesting” your eggs is supposedly rather painful, but compared to working in an office, I’m thinking, not so much. It’s definitely less fun than donating sperm. But still, it’s a lot less harsh than what a lot of the factory farms do to the hens to get them to lay more eggs. When I lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, there were a LOT of chicken farmers, and sometimes you would – no joke - hear insanely loud heavy metal music coming from the hen houses.

“So they lay more eggs,” a farmer’s kid explained. I was about eight years old, and didn’t know much about the chickens and the bees, or how loud AC/DC music figured into the whole reproductive dance (something I would wonder again, years later, at a bar in Daytona during “Bike Week”). But it’s more scientific than it seems – if you want an animal to have a shorter estrus cycle (i.e., lay more eggs), you want to frighten it - hence the insanely loud music. The chickens think the world is coming to an end, and thus churn out twice as many eggs. Like Chicken Little (only, in a little black “Megadeath” tour T-shirt).

Apparently, you get “up to” $7,000 for selling your eggs - more if you are over a certain height, have blue eyes, or went to an Ivy League school. These are like the eggs you get at the health food store, fortified with Omega-3 (or, Pi Beta Phi, I suppose, in the human version). As a short, brown-eyed public-school type, I guess my eggs are the kind you get in a styrofoam carton for 69 cents. If they start playing AC/DC, though, that’s where I draw the line.

- posted by Marguerite @ 12:54 PM

 
(I wrote this the other day, on the Fourth of July, but didn't get around to posting it, partly due to laziness and partly because I was afraid it sounds like I've finally read one too many self-help books, which is not entirely false ... )


Freedom. It’s the Fourth of July, which gets me to thinking about freedom. Of all the abstract concepts, it is the most slippery - the most easily corruptible and the hardest to define. For me, the word “freedom” conjures up images of George Washington crossing the Delaware on that impossibly cold winter, about to face the biggest army in the world. Like most Americans, freedom is also a term I associate with feminine hygiene products. I don’t know what freedom is, but it apparently has something to do with “dri-weave.” According to the maxi pad commercials, Freedom! is a woman in white pants and a jaunty hat of the sort you usually see on the head of some irrelevant member of the royal family.

No, but, like, seriously, dude - what does it mean to be free? According to George W. Bush, the terrorists hate us for our freedom (now, with Wings™!). So what does freedom mean?

I suppose I should know. When I was in high school I won an essay contest sponsored by the Freedoms Foundation (an actual organization). The subject of the essay was, “What Freedom Means to Me.” The winner was to receive a hundred bucks and a trip to Philadelphia. Even now, I feel kind of guilty, because I wrote the whole thing tongue-in-cheek, thinking of “What A Hundred Bucks Means to Me.” I rolled around laughing as I dashed off the essay, which strategically alluded to Lincoln and baseball and rolling waves of strip malls (or words to that effect). “Freedom is the taste of lime-green popsicles at a Little League baseball game, on a hot summer day,” I wrote (seriously – albeit not-seriously). The text suggested, however cautiously, that the Strategic Defense Initiative was justifiable because kids in the Soviet Union never got to eat artificially flavored, lime green frozen treats. It was my first attempt at satire, and nobody got it.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom, because I feel strangely free for the first time in ages. I have remarkably (read: embarrassingly) little money, but I’ve never been happier (although I would not refuse donations, mind you). Money comes and goes in the course of a lifetime, and it doesn’t make you safe or free. It does, however, let you buy attractive clothing, which is one reason I would like to have more money.

I used to think of freedom as being able to do what you want to do all the time. But now that’s a ridiculously immature vision of freedom, appropriate for our ridiculously immature culture. Freedom doesn’t come from a lack of responsibility, but from doing the things that you know you have to do. And only you (not your parents, spouse, friends, boss, annoying co-worker) can know what those things are. Most people seem to think they can’t do whatever it is they most want to do, whatever terrifies them the most. We all have a long list of elaborate excuses as to why we can’t have or do the things we need to do. Freedom comes when you stop making excuses for yourself, even though this is not what anybody wants to hear (including myself). I’m talking about your purpose, and if you don’t know what that is, you should figure it out fast, as if your life depends on it (because, really, it does).

In our culture, we tend to mistake our purpose for our job. Sometimes the two overlap, usually they do, but not necessarily. Maybe your purpose is to be a good friend, or to rescue stray ferrets. Maybe nobody else will understand why you want to do what you have to do (especially if it turns out to be the ferret thing). You might make money at your purpose, you might not. But in doing it, you’ll find your own private definition of freedom. The bad news is that it won’t be easy, and it will require lots of work. Even more than you think. Way more. Which is why we tend to terminally distract ourselves - we create storms in teacups, fan the flames of the mini-dramas of our lives, all to keep from finding out what it is we have to do. Because from that point on, you have no choice but to start doing it or start dying. Sounds dramatic, but I think it really is that simple.

Of course, our culture tells us not to listen to ourselves, because if a person even has a vague inkling of his or her own power, they can’t be manipulated as easily. That person doesn’t feel inadequate (because she/he knows that there is no such thing) so she doesn’t have to fill the hole in her life with excessive consumerism. We live in a fear-based culture that would have you believe that your inner voice is hokey (okay, it sounds hokey, I’ll admit). So we don’t listen to ourselves, and by not listening, everything else gets so loud, and we have to drown it out - with psycho-pharmaceuticals, with alcohol, with buying crap from Wal-Mart, etc. The economy is vested in your misery. I remember in high school and college, I would read beauty magazines and then feel hideous, so I’d run out and charge makeup and clothes and other crap I’m still paying for. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We live in a hierarchical world that tells us that there’s only so much of the good stuff to go around. We think happiness is like a currency, carefully limited, its flow controlled by some imaginary Fed run by mean-spirited angels. If there’s only so much happiness available on Earth, and you’ve got yours, then there’s less of it for me. It’s easy to resent people who are doing what they want to do, whether it’s running a dog grooming shop or writing successful novels (although I am allowed to hate people my age or younger who do that, right? ) On some absurd level, we see their success and think that it somehow takes away from ours. But in reality, it makes us stronger. If you are fulfilled, you’re doing your work, whatever it is, then I’m better off. We’re all better off. We’re more free.

People stay stuck in jobs/relationships/habits they hate because they think they have no choice. People will tell you can’t leave your miserable job, for instance, because you won’t be able to afford to keep your house/car/food/ferret, etc. And in the short run, they might even be right. But if you’re doing what you really should be doing, you won’t care, and, in most cases, you’ll end up making more money. Much like all great story arcs involve the central character taking a leap of faith, so does every life. I hope if you’re not doing what you need to be doing, you will be soon. When you are (whoever you are) I’ll be that much better off. So will everyone.




- posted by Marguerite @ 12:23 PM