Canary in the coal mine

Beginning with the staff meeting at my full time job a few weeks ago, my cycle of life reevaluation is in full throttle. That meeting was one tiny canary in the coal mine; my full time job could conceivably be removed from my life come July or shortly thereafter. And,like clockwork at this time of year, I am reviewing my life, making plans to make plans. And maybe it is some astrological force field or some disturbance in the cosmos that affects me during this time but damned if I don't feel the need to transform everything all at once.  I usually review my year during December, despite that it isn't over yet and invariably I look back and think "I spent too much money." That isn't different. Particularly since I just this very minute purchased some Christmas gifts. One of the earliest resolutions I'll make for the coming year is just an echo of all the times before it, when I made the identical resolution. On the one hand, it is good to keep reaching for goals. On the other, it is really stupid that I have this cyclical need to change and never do.

 In keeping with reevaluation on a life scale, I am almost completely positive that I am done with my career as it has been for the last decade. In 2014, I will have worked as a librarian, in different capacities, in different libraries for 11 years. Forgetting the fact that I have been working two jobs for five years in order to live comfortably, I don't recognize any of the reasons I chose this profession anymore. I don't care about anything that goes on and I do not feel valued at any of my workplaces. I don't necessarily need to draw validation from my work, being fully aware that what one does for a living is merely a means to an end for the majority of the world (the majority that isn't concerned with how to put food on the table/make ends meet, that is) and I've come to accept that and not expect my job to fulfill me. But working two jobs needs to have some kind of point. I don't see the point here. Despite the fact that the grass is always greener in my head, I'm kinda really done with overworking for underpay. I won't even go into the torture that is the civil service system of libraries in my county but I'll say this: it is a completely useless, ridiculous way of running a large consortium of libraries that grinds people down until they regret their degrees and their careers.

Gone is the verve and enthusiasm I once had for leading people to information. The people who want information can generally find it on their own, leaving only the people who want you to do everything for them. I feel bad about this. Also, in keeping with burn out, I have become rather negative about the future and the average level of intelligence of most people. Someone with that attitude should not be in the capacity to help the general public. Don't get me wrong, I have felt moments of reward (and never ending humor) in the 11 years I've done this; I've made wonderful friends that I would never give up. But overall, with libraries completely transforming, with the only things left that I love about the profession being things I can do whilst working in another field (reading, researching, attending annual meetings, etc.) it has actually become time for me to move on. I keep hedging around this because I have a natural fear of change, everyone does. There are only so many times I can send a resume in for a library job and get no response or get a response with a salary that that is on the level of what I made as a freshly graduated undergrad in 1998. I feel strongly that the coming year is going to call for action on the job front. Of course, all of this will be null and void should my dream library call me for my dream job, at which point I will be happy to eat crow by the forkful. If the last four years I spent actively pursuing this are any indication, that should be happening aaaany second now.

 I actually feel elated. I'm sure that will turn into something else entirely once the new year arrives and it becomes time to take action. Look for the next volume in this series called Panic. 

Just when I thought I was out

In my infinite wisdom, I have decided to diet hardcore just in time for the holidays to deep fry all food items and set them down in front of my face at all times. Por ejemplo, I came into work this afternoon, after a particularly debaucherous evening last night, determined to be healthy and what is awaiting in the break room? Literally two large and full boxes of candy. Just endless candy of the best kind: Hershey bars, Nerds, Sweettarts. I feel like Michael Corleone.

In other news, I attended my first "advanced" yoga class yesterday morning. I was only one of two people in attendance and I was already intimidated. The other person in the class was a middle aged guy who moved around with a dancer's agility. Like most people who teach and attend the particular yoga studio I frequent he was really nice and even a little self deprecating and I was put at ease. Anyway I kept up and was even able to hold my headstand for a long time. And there ends my explanabrag. I realized recently that I always assume, when I'm successful at doing something, that I am doing it incorrectly. Is that a sign of low confidence? I also assume that if something comes easy to me, it is easy for everyone. Like the masters program I did for librarianship. I thought that was one of the easiest degree programs I've ever taken and I don't even really consider it a real masters degree. Though now that I really think about it, a decade of being a slave to the whims of the department of civil service may have deadened my accomplishments a bit. Anyway, advanced yoga is a lot like unadvanced yoga in that it is amazing and fun and you don't have to be good at it to enjoy it. This is a lesson that yoga teaches me, daily.

Last night I went to Port Jefferson to attend a beer tasting with some friends at the Port Jeff Brewing Company. There were some fantastic beers, the highlights being the peppermint porter and this brewery's Tripel, which was called H3. Port Jefferson was in the throes of the annual Charles Dickens festival and combined with the temperature which I would place at about "fucking freezing" degrees, the little tasting room was packed with swaddled beer tasters. Sometimes I really think that heaven will take the form of a tasting room. These micro breweries keep sprouting up all over Long Island which is a very good thing. It is also the reason I remain bewildered that people go to bars and order Budweiser. That beer is not any cheaper than the really, really good, locally sourced beer that is practically flowing down the streets. My neighborhood alone has two breweries and one "brewtique" that readily serves and sells local beers. Sometimes, when I'm embroiled in my usual "should I stay or should I go" battle royale, I'll make a list of reasons to stay. On each one of those lists are the words "local breweries in walking distance." I am not kidding. 

It is relatively quiet here at work today, offering me plenty of time to eat candy, which I'm trying not to do. We are going to be getting some weather later, possibly the first snowfall of the season. I want all the heavy snow to hold off until January so I can have some snow days off which is really the only thing winter is good for. I don't want any snow between now and Christmas because I have a flight to take and stuff to do and I fail to understand why the weather doesn't understand that.


I got nothing else.

Did you ever notice how when you are sampling beer at a local brewery beginning at 4pm, the hours go by so slowly and the outside world is so dark by afternoon and seems really late when in reality you are back at home in your pajamas before 9pm? Did you? Because I'm noticing it right about now.

I am, in fact, falling in and out of sleep this evening and I had not realized the late hour and that I haven't posted for today. This is what happens when I don't spend the long long day at work in front of the computer. Day drinking. Don't do it, kids.

That's irritating

Yay! It is my 200th blog post. I never thought I could fill 200 blog entries with inane crap but check it out: dreams come true! For anyone reading, thank you for reading. I sincerely hope that you continue to be entertained by my ridiculousness.

Overall it has been a largely negative week for me. I don't know why but I've just been in an overall foul mood. Talking to my coworker last night I realized that I kept saying "that's irritating" over and over again. I had to catch myself at least two more times even after I realized what I was doing. In addition, I've had some issues with bitching to my friends and family about stuff that doesn't really need to be bitched about. It is all kind of stupid. I'm determined to make things better in the coming week starting right now.

Tonight was a good night because I stuffed myself with Greek salad, watched a dumb movie with an old friend and drank a lot of wine. That last thing might explain why my attempt to build a book Christmas tree ended in this

This is pretty much an accurate representation of all the crafts I attempt to do ever under every scenario. I've got my strengths and being crafty is not one of them.

Happy Friday everyone!

Whirligig

I'm already mining archives of old blog posts. Strangely my expedition resulted in my finding this entry which is especially enlightening to me for various reasons. I'll explain in a moment. First, the entry, dated December 11, 2003. I was 27 at the time.

i don't wanna make it rain, i just wanna make it simple

the rigorous testing process at my job-to-be (maybe) has ended and it is now my duty to...wait. 

there is a cold rain in the city today that i simply don't mind in the least. 

i picked up tim o'brien's the things they carried again for the first time in years and so far i have wept openly three times. if you want to be left alone in new york city, start crying on a crosstown bus, or anywhere full of people with not a lot of room to move. people are afraid of solitary criers. me personally? i am afraid of solitary laughers (despite the fact that i have been one on more than one occasion). laughter can turn quite maniacal at the drop of a hat... but tears are usually melancholy, or angry. today mine were empathetic, as they always are with mr. o'brien. 

maybe i'm feeling a bit sissy-fied today. it is one of those days, unique to this life i'm living, where i don't actually feel i know anyone. perhaps i spent too much time walking around midtown this morning. i feel anonymous. i feel solitary. wholly without connection to another person. 
i am lacking and wanting connection, physical and otherwise to one other person. 

of course this is all a product of reading about war. cold isolation is the partner of knowing about what can and did happen, i suppose. but it has to be told and it has to be read, doesn't it?

you know what i need right now? i need some ice cream.

The title of that post comes from Rufus Wainwright song "Want" which was new at the time. I loved that album something fierce, still do.

I don't know what job-to-be was at that time. Maybe my indexer job? Maybe a job I had interviewed for and didn't get? It is difficult to say since I was doing a lot of interviewing back then, fresh out of library school and in the midst of a swirling, bustling economy. Remember those days, when they would give out jobs offers free with proof of purchase. Yeah, me neither.

I remember rereading Tim O'Brien's book. I was very, very big into Tim O'Brien at the time. I had recently read "In the Lake of the Woods" which tore my brain and heart open. That reminds me, I should reread that book. I loaned my copy to someone and never got it back; someone should buy it for me. I also remember crying on the bus and I'm still very suspicious of solitary laughers...laughter can cross over to mental instability without much warning.

In that post, I chalk up my feelings of isolation to "reading about war". But I know now that I was wrong. What I never remember, what I should remember, is that sense of isolation and loneliness I felt and that I felt it even living in NYC. I usually romanticize that time in my life into a perfect circle, something whole and formed solidly all the way through when in reality, it was an amorphous blob. My brain still worked the same way as it does now. I still want everything at the same time. I still gobble up time with going and doing and planning and getting, wondering why nothing is quite sticking. I also still turn to ice cream in confounding moments.

 I think many people who know me well are confounded by my ability to do a lot of things and still be bored, to be around a lot of people and still feel alone. This is a chronic condition I have, regardless of where I'm hanging my hat. It may serve me well to remember that when my solution to everything is "move somewhere new". I think my own version of nirvana will be calm contentment as opposed to blissful, ecstatic happiness. What can I say? I"m a whirligig.

In which I'm not really a musician

At the library last night, I passed by a table with a closed flute case resting on top of a stack of school books. The owner of this flute had wandered off to find books in the young adult section. I had a Proustian moment when I saw that lonely flute case there. I half expected an 11 year old in a plaid Catholic school uniform to saunter slowly up to the table with oversize glasses and awkward baby fat, a bewildered expression on her face. In other words, I expected me, at 11, to walk right out and bust right into my choppily played flute solo from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

I started to spiral down in that way that involuntary memory has: suddenly making you physically stop what you are doing to run your hands slowly along the inside of things you used to do. (Bored brains are especially susceptible to this). Music was a huge part of my adolescence. I used to play a musical instrument on a daily basis. I remember enjoying it and being relatively "good" at it. Memory is tricksy so I use the word "relatively good" with extreme caution and a pillar of salt. Playing the flute was never something I found particularly difficult to do and no one ever had to remind me to practice. I truly enjoyed it from the second I started it. I played it in fifth grade and all the way through high school and pretty much preferred it to most other activities, apart from reading. In grammar school my teacher tried to get me to also learn the oboe and the clarinet, neither of which I enjoyed because of the wooden reeds. I have the same reaction to touching that thin, splintery material with my lips as I do when I touch peach rinds: freak out. Something about the texture sets off unpleasantness in my brain. I do regret that I couldn't get past it and learn the oboe, since it is one of my favorite instruments.

I was a band geek I guess and it was one of my favorite classes, though I didn't really hang out with anyone from band if I didn't already know them from another class. I was also in my school choir and participated in all the musicals, even scored a lead in one. There are a few videos of the high school me singing various solos. I had way more control over my voice back then than I do now. It is kind of bizarre. I've never been a strong singer but hearing myself from back then, I think if I had tried even just a little, I could have gotten better. Or maybe not. Who knows?

I think I hung out more with the musical theater geeks than the band, though there was an overt, overly sexual energy in the musical theater crew that I didn't really understand. I didn't really even recognize that that is what it was; I was slow on the uptake with that one. (I would later learn through doing musicals during summer breaks with a local theater group that musical theater people have a lot of sex with each other. And if not, they pretty much exclusively talk about it all the time. Then again, maybe that's just teenagers.) By the time I got to college, I had become a full fledged introvert and I much preferred poetry to singing solos in front of people. And my college had a huge performing arts school with amazingly talented people. Even my dorm room had non theater and non music majors that were way better than I was at everything music related; I was intimidated. Simultaneously, I got more into writing and focused a lot of my creative energy on that. But please don't take what I wrote during that time period (aside from a few pretty good love poems) as evidence of that creative energy. I often cringe at the memory. I digress.

I can still read music though it is in the exact same manner and at the same pace at which I read Spanish. I've got to translate it in my head first before it actually makes sense and my comprehension is more in context and likely riddled with errors. In college I took a lot of music theory classes and I did ok but I was on the verge of graduating and didn't really care that much so I'm not even really sure I absorbed any of that info. Music theory didn't really interest me much. I was always more interested in music history. I still have some "mix tapes" from my History of Western Music class. That class introduced to me to Monteverdi, Purcell, Brahms and Mozart's Don Giovanni among many, many other things.

In recent years I haven't really played much music, unless you count singing at the top of my lungs in the shower and in my car. I bought a ukulele and learned two chords. I've thought about getting my flute, which I still own and keep in its original blue velvet interiored case, tuned up and repaired (it is missing a few pads) but then what? Would I sit in my living room, playing arpeggios? Would I learn that killer flute solo from the Beach Boys' awesomely trippy "Feel Flows"? Likely that flute would sit in a pile next to my uke and my keyboard, gathering dust.

I took a trip to Albany over the weekend and visited my friends who are musicians. I listened to a few of their songs and sang along to some covers like we used to in high school. I realized that I missed that. I completely understand how people form communities around music. I don't know if I ever fully appreciated it in high school or college. It remains one of those if I had to do it all over again  things.

Life is lousy with those.

The shiny gloss of unsalted popcorn

Because of traveling and having a busy autumn and (insert some other lame excuses here), my quest to see a lot of films this year stalled out around September. I also must say that losing interest in volunteering for my local theater and simply not having the time anymore to do it has limited my film intake. The shiny gloss of free films and unlimited, unsalted popcorn wore off around about the time when I grew weary of living on Long Island. There just needs to be salt on my popcorn. And it happened just in time as we just got word that the theater is changing and growing and will likely not even be located up the street from my apartment in a year's time. I'm happy for the progress of the  scrappy start up theater and that fellow film buffs are alive and well but sad for the loss of my own private Idaho. Nothing gold can stay.

So far the tally stands at 162 films in 2013. I may just leave the list alone at that, seeing as we are in the tail end of the year. Then again, it is only the third day in December so I might add to it.
Anyway, here's what I watched since the last time I listed the movies I watched.

Le Auberge Espagnole (2002)
Les Poupees Russes (2005)
The Bling Ring (2013)
World War Z (2013)
Blue Jasmine (2013)
Sidewalls (2011)
Gravity (2013)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
The Razor's Edge (1984)
A Perfect Man (2013)
The Karate Kid (1984)
The To Do List (2013)
This is the End (2013)
Rushmore (1998)
The Happy Poet (2010)

I just finished that last one, The Happy Poet. It was an interesting, little film with your standard unlikeable characters and bizarre, immature life decisions, just like real life. However, and this happens more often than I'd like it to, I was completely distracted by the film's score. Throughout the entire film, there was a sporadic note played on a piano and held for a few seconds. Sometimes it was in the middle of a scene, sometimes at the beginning or end but it didn't matter because it always seemed random and unnecessary. It completely took me outside of the story every single time it happened. The last time I was this distracted by the music in a film was during the ENDLESS organ music that accompanied the ENDLESS corridors of Last Year at Marienbad. Holy crap that just about ruined that film for me. You can hear some of it in the trailer if you are so inclined.

Irritating.

As a whole, I was unimpressed by the films I have seen since September, apart from Blue Jasmine, Gravity and the ones that were rewatches. I am really excited by several films that are on the horizon, not the least of one is Spike Jonze's latest called "Her". I just have a strong feeling that it might break my heart and if I know how to do one thing well, it is seeking out various ways in which to have my heart broken.

Also, the new Justin Bieber film looks phenomenal.