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Audacious Ideas

ninety-two

i've just come in from a morning walk with the dog. it's already sweltering outside. today's high is supposed to be 92 and you can feel by the current humid, sticky 65 that the day will reach its aspiration.

i have a meeting at 2 today. it would be great to get this part-time gig to tide me over for the next several weeks or months. i need to use the work muscle again. it's in complete atrophy. i know that women tend to define themselves by their relationships and men by what they do, but meaningful work is good for everyone's soul.

money woes aside, i think just having a place to go and some task to do will do wonders for my outlook.

current plans

1. meeting tomorrow at 2 for something temporary and part-time.
2. start revising all submitted memoir efforts from the semester for final "packet."
3. pack for charleston.
4. start growing hair long.

click the link for my favourite

I made Charmcitypublishing.com. Scroll down. I'm last (at this point).

heading to the gym soon

the goal is to focus on lifting today with only intermittent cardio. blasts, i suppose. i've gained momentum in TBDF and will soon be ready to start reading ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and/or Karen Brichoux's Coffee and Kung Fu.

"even after all this time i can make no case for who we were or what happened."

some assembly required decoder ring that came with The Boy Detective Fails. The quote that functions as the title of this post is from one of the stories I wrote, though.

recap

my meeting this morning went well. the situation would be a good match for me in many ways, though this was only one step in the company's process. and there is one area where my skill set doesn't perfectly mesh with the position, so i'm prepared for the fact that other candidates may emerge who are a more ideal match and who would be more likely to garner second interviews. so, for the next two weeks, i'll be doing some combination of waiting and canvassing the greater baltimore area (gba) with my stats (resume) and hoping to create interest in my skill set in more places (playing the odds). 

as soon as i made it home (my feet pounding from walking in heels on the rain-sluiced concrete), i ate lunch and applied for another job that has potential to be a good fit. i think i'm learning a lot about how to keep moving, not letting my thoughts linger on anything too long...

The [Girl] Detective Fails

i've been reading Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails off and on (mostly off) for the last six months. i started it while on a beach holiday early last fall and then my semester dictated that i read and focus on assignments. once i had time again (over the winter break), my mind was on other things. Other books-for-leisure have come between me and "The boy detective," but now i'm giving this worthwhile, experimental, quasi-interactive work of fiction my attention. again, because i suspect that my days of unemployment are numbered (and i am so hoping and praying that this is the case), i need to get to the conclusion.

i need to know how and why he ultimately fails. it isn't for want of trying.

am in a contemplative, yet productive state tonight. it's a tea and honey and chet baker night.

Twitterpated

i've had a twitter account for a few months now, but i'm still woefully late to the party. i'd been thinking of it as facebook, but with only status updates (admittedly, the status updates are the best thing for me about fb), and that seemed like a duplication of efforts.

i wasn't really focusing enough on the constant barrage of sound bite updates element. for an information junkie like me (who hit refresh no fewer than 200 times tonight), well...

maybe it's just the novelty of having snapshots of the thoughts and interior lives of people i'll never meet for real (i only "follow" two people i actually know). that's a huge selling point for this medium and a point of divergence from fb. no pending approvals. just knowing the last thing larry king wanted to pass along, just like that.

i knew it was time to leave my home page when john mayer signed off 'cause that man is a tweeting fool. seriously. no one tweets more. i had this moment after he said he was signing off for the weekend where i felt panicked and a tiny bit bereft...

yeah. i can see that this is going to be a huge problem.

days of leisure

i cannot be certain, of course, but i feel these coming to an end. that is a good thing, really, because it's not true leisure if you can see an end to your money from the place you're standing. thankfully, a number of factors came together to keep me afloat. the DLLR, of course, was not one of these factors.

i've been to the gym every day this week, in fact i went twice on both monday and tuesday. my eating hasn't been as austere as it should be to accommodate true weightloss because i still have too many easter leftovers and holiday candy. but the fact is, i'm marshalling the inner troops.

i'm drinking more water, collecting new music, and pushing for the next thing.

summer, i hope, will be full of promise.

at the root

pharrell williams, half of the production duo Neptunes, producer in his own right, frontman of N.E.R.D, and solo artist is responsible for most of the addictive beats of the latter 20th century and early 21st century, is at the root of most of the music that makes sense to me. the music that i love. part empresario, part skater kid, his finger is on the pulse of what moves the lower and upper torso in rhythmic, synchopated jerks (aka dancing). i once wrote about rappers as feudal lords of the fifedom in this space. Pharrell is no rapper. Pharrell is no singer. He is the architect of any rock/punk/fusion beat sequence that has made you leap from your seat--calling forth ancestors you didn't know you had to make you move. to something. yet, when he sings and he raps, i give instant credibility to the efforts because only the one who understands music from its nascent moment can truly rap, can truly sing. what i mean to say is that he is not simply a singer. not simply a rapper. he is music. i don't know him and he doesn't know me. But I get it. I see the intention behind everything and I am in favour of it.

easter morning

i was at club charles the night before to tie one on with my good friend Cheryl in honour of her birthday, so i was sluggish and disoriented when i heard my text notification at 7:21 hailing the first and only "happy easter" blast of the day. actually, the word "easter" was never used.

the message was from my almost lover and it is much more his style to focus on the general philosophies of renewal and rejuvenation that belong to spring, which is just what he did.

i could barely focus at first. i thought i was dreaming, then i realized that if my almost lover texted me out of the blue in my dreams it wouldn't be with a message about embracing 'renewal.' no, that's not the message i'd have chosen after all this time.

i got up for real when i heard cabinet doors banging and smelled bleach. C was cleaning her bathroom, so i forced myself into a semi wakeful state. there were eggs to attend to...

deconstruction

to quote Cher Horowitz in 'Clueless' "...but this time I would make over my soul..."

good friday

it's friday morning at the baltimore chronicles and i'm feeling hopeful and contemplative. i dreamed i walked into a florist shop i'd assumed was closed down, and inside i found a woman who looked so like my grandmother lillian that i exclaimed aloud. as it turned out, this woman was her daughter--someone i didn't know existed. we agreed to meet up for drinks...

Annie Fogg

i was recently found by an elementary schoolmate on facebook. she happened to post a scan of our 4th grade class photo to her profile pictures last night. not only did i immediately zero in on my 9-year-old self (looking more like 7, really), but on another person. Annie Fogg was maligned by most of the kids in 4th grade, and certainly by many in Mrs. Johnson's class.

Annie's nails were bitten to the quick. Her short, stubby pencils (when she actually had a pencil, it was always a short cast-off) bore teeth marks. She smelled vaguely of urine and unwashed laundry. She was teased mercilessly. Annie was not, from what i remember, a good student.

Our school, like many, had a yearly event generically called "Field Day." Princeton Elementary's school colours were blue and gold, so we were divided up into teams. i believe i was on the blue team (if this is true, i would have been thrilled by my luck at the time--i hated "gold," which i knew was just a glorified yellow).

Annie and i were facing off for the 5-yard dash challenge. My team loudly and rudely encouraged me to leave her in a cloud of dust. Responding to that crowd mentality, that cruelty so often attributed to children, i remember scoffing "she's nothing to beat!"

unbeknownst to me, the gun had gone off while i was trash talking, and by the time i started running, Annie was half done with the dash. i lost shamefully to her.

i think about this several times a year. Not the losing, but how much was at stake for her in that race.

i do not remember myself as a mean child. but i remember being disgusted by Annie, by her smell, by her fingernails... i do not remember being proactively unkind, as a rule.

Annie was prone to getting into fights with boys (she had a brother, i recall, so maybe that felt normal to her) and was disruptive in class. i do remember feeling that because of these things, she brought her treatment onto herself. i felt that she could help it and chose not to. sometimes i felt bad for her. at other times, i thought she should simply change.

it occurs to me now that whether what i said aloud on that "Field Day" was anomalous or not, Annie surely felt my judgment, the silent cringing i did. and that is my shame and my share in this.

Looking at that class picture now, i remember something--if only a vague sense--about every kid in it. and we all look so small. Some of us look optimistic, expecting good things. Some of us appear to be bracing for the worst. Annie's chin is drawn tightly inward, as though someone said something hurtful to her right before the flash immortalized her this way.

i guess what i'm trying to say to anyone who's reading this, to Annie, really, is that i hope she lived past that year (those years?), and that maybe if/when she ever looks at that photo of all of us, that she is forgiving, or remembers it as something only vaguely unpleasant. i hope her life changed.

DLLR Hearing

As of this writing I remain unemployed. As of yesterday afternoon, the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation (Unemployment Insurance Division) has set an appeal hearing for May 26th, 2009. Per DLLR protocol, when you want to appeal an agency decision, you do so in writing, by way of postal mail. Apparently, the point of this is so that they can set a hearing date for you far into the future. There's no one there, it seems, who is empowered to read a letter and make a determination based upon the case stated.

I've written letters to Elijah Cummings, Martin O'Malley, Barbara Mikulski, and the Editor of the Baltimore Sun asking for an investigation into this agency and its wrongheaded, deliberately obtuse procedures.

This is such an obviously deliberate stalling tactic on this agency's part. Is there any reason on earth to give me a date two months (practically) from my appeal date and three months from the day of my original claim file other than trying to get out of paying me the benefits?

next stop? Local News.

rainy city

shrimp & guac

tonight after epub i took to the two avocados i bought earlier. i sauteed the small packet of shrimp, scooped the guac into "scoop" tortilla chips and set the shrimp on top of each makeshift bowl. i think i'll make this as an appetizer for my next fete... whenever that is

a wedding

this saturday night i attended the wedding of my mother's goddaughter, and though she is five years younger than i am (we met when i was six and she was just a year old), i was her "first friend." She and her mom moved into the apartment above where i lived with my mom and her boyfriend (who would later become my stepfather) back in 1979 (or late 78). My mom, being the gregarious sort, made fast friends with this young mom and her toddler, and we're still in each other's lives.

I remember carrying this kid around on my back and playing any number of convoluted child-inspired games. How can she be someone's wife? More than that, how is it that she now makes her living as a parole officer? (Frankly, I'd like to get in on that action. I think I'd be great at it...)

the ceremony took place outside, and i found that i was glad of my coat. it was chillier than was comfortable, but in April you take your chances. Seven p.m., I think, is the perfect time for a wedding. Fading daylight. Dusky. It's just inherently romantic. And if yours is a winter affair, then it's full-on nighttime, which holds its own obvious magic.

Between the open bar and the inherent nostalgia, I lost my self-consciousness enough to dance, and went home happy and if not hopeful, then at least not disconsolate.

raining & pouring

it's a rainy friday morning here at the baltimore chronicles, but everything else is the same. it's taking me longer than i'd like to make it through Julie & Julia, but i'm experiencing furious bouts of facebook creativity. life is a trade-off. opportunities are arising. whatever happens next, one thing is clear. i'm about to be really busy.

details shall pour forth as they make themselves known.

My inexplicable anger toward John Mayer

it has nothing to do with Jennifer Aniston, though when i probed my subconscious for an opinion, they seemed ill-fated to me from the jump. i think i've been perturbed because his musicanship is incongruous with his choice in women. i guess i expected something different--not this slew of pairings with women who are wildly inappropriate for him (see Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jessica Simpson).

but when i remember that his personal life, though put forward by the media (and by himself) for me to inspect, is none of my busines and just set my iPod to journey me through one of his albums (Continuum, in this case) i remember something else. the genius (and i don't use that word lightly in the post-millenial way) of the song 'gravity.'

this has been a demoralizing week. 'gravity, stay the hell away from me... gravity is working against me... gravity has taken better men than me...' get at my humiliation in a way that nothing else could.

if that's not enough, push fast forward to get to 'vultures' and think of it as a case study on bird dogging... the hunt. the kill.

'how did they find me here?
what do they want from me?
they've never gone this long without a kill before...'

and

'power is made by power being taken
so i keep on running to protect my situation...'

my inexplicable anger toward john mayer is outrun by my love for the aristry and the gravitas of his folk-funk lyricism.

is it wrong that i just want to tell him if he'd pick a woman on his plane, he wouldn't feel the need to cut and run every chance he gets?

Activism

I wrote to the Honorable Elijah Cummings to stump for unemployment insurance reform. I'm thinking of taking my case to O'Malley's door next. I probably should have begun with him. Perhaps a Letter to the Editor in the Sun?

I'll write to the congressman under separate cover to tell him about the poor organization of the Job fair his office sponsored. He got my vote, now he can read my input.

What a cold, bleak day this was. After an early morning errand, I came home to walk the dog, to follow up on some things, and to go to sleep. A long bus ride (that included a transfer) made me tired and disconsolate. The weather is the likely culprit.

Once C was in for the night, we ordered from Lumbini--the best Indian/Nepalese food in the city.