And it’s wonderful! I’m busy all of the time doing a lot of things (See Magazine, PopMatters, CJSR, Juicin my pecs etc). Sure – I don’t make any money doing most of these things – who needs money when you’re so happy and have enough money to scrape by for a while?! Answer: No one!

I haven’t updated this in a really long time b/c I don’t have anything entertaining/funny to post. Life is great but I don’t encounter the type of people that I used to, and I don’t get the kind of quotes/experiences I used to. C’est la vie. Trade good quotes for happiness!

I’ll try and update this with general musings (if I feel they need to be shared) but also check out: Real Talk, where I’ll update about my radio show.

All’s well, over and out.

First, the all-over work bummer for those I’ve not told in person: the whole department that I work for is being laid off.  I guess it’s not that bad of news for me since I’m not really in the dept. that much, and serve a completely different function, but I still think that my two day a week sustenance is coming to an end.  They’re decentralizing (which I don’t think makes any sense in modern business) and so everyone will gradually lose their jobs as others in other areas are trained on how to do those jobs.  So, I guess that’s a bummer for most of the people there, but i kind of doubt they’ll be doing mass layoffs before xmas, you never know with that lot though.

Now to the real bummer, The Bummer.  She doesn’t work in my area any more, as they’re consolidating left and right, but I still get to see her about once a day when she pops her mousy little head in to pick up some papers.  Often these paper pick-ups are accompanied by complaints (which seem to be getting more jolly, like she’s not so down about it, she’s kind of excited or maybe thinks her luck is so bad it’s now funny) about her life in general.  Same old complaints: mostly about her sick dad.  Something new that’s come to light which makes her situation even sadder is that she’s recently dropped the bomb that her whole family hates her.  So, she takes care of her Dad with her one brother, but the rest of the family hates her.  “They don’t want anything to do with me” were her exact words.  For me, this is mind blowing because this lady is very nice, she’s just incredibly annoying – I have no idea why a whole family wants nothing to do with her.

On the bright side, she does have some new complaints, and her new excitedly incredulous delivery makes these complaints worth hearing.  About a week ago, I asked her how she was doing and was met with

“It’d be going a lot better if I could get these darn warts off my foot” while she limped past me to share the same complaints with some co-workers.  I didn’t respond at all but figured the next time it came up I should try and get a bit more out of her.

So, a couple of days later I saw her again and asked her how she was doing and got a similar reply:

“These darn planter’s warts are getting bigger on the bottom of my feet and are making it hard to walk around.”

To which I replied “Can’t the Doctor just burn them off for you? With some Nitroglycerin?”

And she seemed please to share the following information with me.  I feel like she was anticipating someone having some kind of experience with warts; someone who would know the regular procedure so that she could share her outrage at her Doctor’s aberration. “He’s not going to try that yet.  He told me to buy some stuff from the pharmacy to put on it but it’s just not working”.

My response: “Oh, was it Compound W or something?” (I had warts when i was a youngster, I know the lingo).

And to this she gave her best response: “I don’t know what it is, but it’s killing all of the skin on the bottom of my feet!”

Just amazing.  Such  a gross picture and she was almost proud to finally get it out.  Afterwards she seemed to be limping a little less, the weight of that information no longer putting pressure on her painful foot warts.

Sometimes they just look good

So, how many years ago was it that hipsters/indie kids started growing mustaches as some kind of ironic fashion statement (I’m going to use ironic as a way of saying insincere I think, though I don’t know how ironic fits)?.  I think we’re far past the point where an insincere mustache can come across as cool or cutting edge, the only way to now wear a mustache is to wear it sincerely and be proud at how grown-up and sexy lipgear can make you look.   So, since it’s come to the point where mustaches should not be worn jokingly, it’s time to get another signifier to let those in the know know that you’re in the know.

How about Goatees?  Can a Goatee be worn ironically? Have we moved to that point yet?  Like, can you grow a goatee and someone will say/think “oh, funny goatee, guy” or will they always just make you look like you’re in a bar band, or like a 35 year old techie?

I think for mustaches there were distinguishing looks that would tip people off to what you may have been going for.  Like the handlebar (kid toucher etc), a rare look when sincere, so obviously it would be a joke most of the time, but I don’t know if goatees have the same type of versatility.  I mean, there’s the nu metal goatee (taken from some guy’s blog after a search for “long goatee”):

There’s the alternate braided nu-metal goatee:There’s the 40 year old dad:

There’s the Eddie Vedder soul patch:

The separated:

The Nostache:

The Artsy/Euro/Depp Separated:

The Diddy:

What do you get from all of these goatees?  I get SERIOUS.  They’re all too serious.  There’s no playfulness to them. Does anyone else get this?  When they’re long and outrageous they look creepy, and when they’re closely cropped (ala Diddy) they are all business.  You’re not going to get a good time buddy like this guy:

Sometimes a goatee can look good. Not your usual frat dude/bar band goatee, those always look bad, but the proper mustache/soul patch combo can look quite fetching (depending on who you are obviously).

I’ve gotten off topic.  I’m trying to say that goatees cannot be worn ironically, because you look like dude from Finger 11 or something, it just doesn’t work.  Even though your Dad had a goatee, or your BBQ having uncle, or some guy from a goofy band in the 90s, doesn’t mean it can be taken to that level of insincere facial accessory the way a mustache can.  A goatee is some in between facial hair, too much effort to be a goof- not enough effort to be a real achievement, and for the most part there’s not a whole lot of style going on in your typical goatee.  So, let the mustaches be sincere and the goatees scarce.

So The Storm is really gone.  It actually happened.  Still reeling with disbelief I went back to work on the Wednesday following Black Friday (the day she was canned) and there was nary a trace of her.  Her account and password had been deleted so I couldn’t snoop around on her computer to see what she’d been up to before she left.  All that was left of her were tonnes of boxes of pens, highlighters, and Liquid Paper which she had been hoarding in the cupboards above her desk.  There were literally 5-10 boxes of 20 pens and about 5 boxes of 10 highlighters, 5 boxes of Liquid Paper, boxes of paperclips, a number of staplers, and more – quite weird.

I realize now (you always realize what you’ve missed once they’re gone) that there are a number of things about The Storm that I’ve failed to write about on this site, and that some of these things are really worth mentioning in order to understand this woman.  In the comments section of the last post, SW said he thought The Storm may have been reading my blog, and was thus gaining inside info into the goings on at work, like Rita’s exit letter, and I can understand how someone could think that if they didn’t know how out of touch The Storm was.

To start I think I need to give a physical description:  She stood about 5″10, and was quite large, like she was probably pushing 220 pounds (probably less, I’m always terrible at estimating women’s weight) but woreit very well.  She wasn’t doughy but certainly had some girth to her.  For a long while she had really long hair, and her face was slightly feline – a friend at work nicknamed her The Lion (The Cowardly Lion after she canned him while he was home sick so that she could avoid all confrontation).

She wore these really long trench coats of varying colours, one of them was actually Black Matrix-like pleather.  She wore dress pants every day and 80s styled power suits once in a while, in colours like bronze, wine, or maybe a powder blue.  When she wasn’t wearing a padded-shoulder number she was wearing flowing blouses, she did a lot to disguise her girth, and these flowing blouses were always in swirling designs that would play upon a single colour.  They would be orange and black, but all swirled around.  With black pants.

Sometimes she’d wear a turtle neck with a padded-shoulder blazer over top.   She always had a number of earrings in her ears and they were almost always dangling.  She would pull her long hair back and link it to her hair on top with one ponytail, and would then give it another ponytail further down her back.  I hope that makes sense. Her hair was dyed a rusty orange-ish colour and she really did look like a sickly male version of the king of the beasts.  One day, she even wore a swirly orange blouse with a sleeping lion covering her whole back.  The coincidence was almost too much, like she knew that she was known as The Lion and wanted to let us know, in her passive-aggressive way, that she was aware of all that went on around the office.  Then she got her hair all chopped off, or a lot of it anyway (it was nearing her waistline) and had a kind of side part 80s cut like this:

All the same length – still worn with the old outfits, so the overall effect was much the same.  She had kind of crazy wide-open eyes, a weird grin, too much make-up, and incredibly long and elaborate fingernails.  She was an eyesore yet she must have put so much effort into her outfits and still looked completely out of touch and dated.  Kind of sad really.

Two other important parts: She loved dogs, and used to moonlight as a dog trainer.  She referred to her one dog (she had two until this job but had to let one go because she just couldn’t care for both of them with such a demanding job) as her baby, and would sometimes refer in the first person to her and the dog as “us”.  She also wore a headset whenever she was on the phone.  And I mean that. Whenever she was on the phone.  As soon as it rang, even if you were sitting beside her teaching her how to do something, she’d say “Just a minute”, then with her long nails and excessive hair she’d try and wrangle this phone-headset onto her big head.  It would take a while, sure, but she didn’t care.  The person on the other end would have just about given up – thinking she wasn’t there – when she’d finally get everything worked out and say “hello” into her mouthpiece which would be suspended right where it should be: in front of her heavily lipsticked lips.  When it was a 10 second phone call, she’d go about it with some sort of dignity.  She would go to the trouble of wrestling the headset off of her and put it back down on its holder which was right beside her phone, and she would turn back to you like “where were we?”.  That was one of the baffling things about her.  She acted like what she was doing was perfectly natural.  Yet, if you said something that was the slightest bit off, she would attack you with a “OOOhhh Kay, Rita, whatever that’s all about” or something similarly sarcastic.

It was things like that: sarcastic comments, passive aggressive behaviour, firing anyone that didn’t show her the respect she thought she deserved, her petty comments, her thinking she was always right when she very seldom was, her dishonesty, and her general smugness that made this pathetic woman worthy of ire.  Usually you’d think she’d be deserving of pity – but she certainly wasn’t.

So, this is my memorial (I realize that I’ve referred to her like she’s dead throughout this, just because I don’t see her any more, pretty selfish right?) to the Storm.  I hope to never see her again.

An update from last week, if anyone is still reading (something I always must mention just so that i can show that I am aware that this might just be a personal diary).

The woman who quit (Rita) and who was going to be sending a 10 page exit email, got canned early! She was going to be leaving last Friday – but I think the Storm got wind of her upcoming snitch/complaint/truth/real talk email and told Rita to leave on Wednesday.  The Storm is so crafty! She totally dis-empowered her by making her leave early. And because she had no time to send her email, it’s probably languishing in her Drafts section of Outlook.  I wasn’t even there when it happened, but The Storm knew that I knew what Rita was up to.  When I returned to work she asked me to go talk to her, well she actually kind of tricked me.  I had just gotten a hair cut and the Storm spied me down the hall and bellowed:
“Did you get a haircut?”
I responded with “Yes”
She said, “Oh it looks really good, come over here and let me see it”.

I thought that it was kind of a weird request, and when I was nice enough to indulge this weird request I realized that I had actually been tricked.  She didn’t care about my hair, she wanted to tell me about her canning of the troublemaker, and wanted to pump me for any info I had come across in the day prior to the forcing out of the letter writer.

“So I heard that Rita said something to you on Tuesday”
“Really, she did? I don’t remember”
“Well, someone overheard her saying ‘Too bad you won’t be in tomorrow, things are going to get exciting’”.

Now, I remembered her saying this but it was in regards to a couple of other gals who were saying they were going to quit on Wednesday (which didn’t happened), and I’m no work-snitch, it’s not worth it.  I wondered who had snitched on Rita, I had a couple of pretty good guesses.  My reponse was:

“I don’t remember her saying that, she seemed upset but I don’t think she said anything like that”

The Storm seemed a bit shocked; could it be possible that she had canned this woman based only on her snitch’s suspicion that Rita was planning something?  The Storm had been backing herself into a corner since she started, and this Rita incident put her right against the wall.  You see, this was how she dealt with every employee-based problem; if there was a chance that someone was going to blow the whistle on The Storm’s incompetence, The Storm was going to make sure that they left abruptly so that they could have no communication with a higher up.  I’d already seen her do this kind of thing to other employees, it was the most calculated  work she’d done – if only she could’ve applied herself to learning how to be a supervisor, or how to not be incompetent/petty/miserable/idiotic.  The Storm had actually escorted Rita out of the building so that she wouldn’t be able to say anything to anyone without the Storm knowing about it.

“So, what do you think Rita was planning to do?” I asked, playing her game, “I mean, I know she was unhappy here, and rightfully so, but I couldn’t see her doing anything crazy, she wasn’t like that”

To which The Storm responded “Oh I don’t know, there was something going on with her, I’m not sure what it was, whether it was drugs or booze or something, but something was up with her, she had a lot of rage, I just hope she gets the help she needs, I really hope she gets that.  I’m worried about her and I just hope that she can work through all of her problems.”

Fucking Incredible.  Rita’s problem was The Storm and the fucked-uppedness of the workplace.

This Storm was amazing at this kind of thing.  She was always feigning concern for other people, which was completely unbelievable.  She had other excuses too, “I had to send her home, she was making too many mistakes, and her attitude was just poisoning the atmosphere around here.”  This was where the Storm excels, trying to convince you that what she’s doing is always for the benefit of someone else, and that her choices aren’t always entirely self-serving and indulgent endeavours.  Luckily, no one really believes her.

So, once the fuckery of Thursday was over, I had a nice weekend, went out of town, relaxed, had fun, saw old friends – WONDERFUL.  Then on Monday I get a call from work, from a higher-up saying he needs a minute so that we can have a “chat”.  This made me a bit nervous and I told him “I’m driving right now, let me call you in a minute”.  So I call him thinking I’m being fired from my two day a week tech writing job – which wouldn’t be terrible except that I need the money.  When I call back and we talk he tells me:

“We let The Storm go on Friday.”

Unbelievable.  She was bad, she was among the worst people I can imagine being in that kind of a position, but I just thought that b/c of bureaucracy/politics that she was going to be around forever.  And now she’s gone!

I’m going back to work tomorrow – I can’t wait to see how things have changed.  It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that I am going to spend a day at that place without the most incredibly awkward and inept boss around.  I’ll keep you informed.

Not sure if anyone’s still reading this , and I’ve been a bit lazy, but I wanted to write out just what’s going on this week at work.  I’m only there two days a week right now, which is quite nice because I feel so apart from the craziness/office culture that goes on there.  When I came back one Monday the Storm took me aside to fill me in on all that had been happening while I was away.   It seems that someone handed in their notice, one of the older women with whom I get along really well.  So, I thought it was kind of a shame at first and then thought: Good for her, get out of this place.  The Storm told me that Rita had quit because she didn’t like how loud it was, and because she had a problem with this terrible woman who is always bothering everyone.  The real reason is this: no training, no accountability, no help, lots of blame-placing, no structure, it’s a stupid stupid job.

So, when I was talking to Rita she told me about why she was leaving and then said that she had prepared an exit email which she will be sending out to the ENTIRE COMPANY.  She said it’s currently 4 pages long but will swell to 10.  I’m really excited about this, it should be getting sent this week.  What will people do though?:  My guess is a lot of people will pretend that they don’t see it, while others will pretend that they don’t know what Rita’s talking about in this email.  Either way it’s going to be a tremendous exercise in denial that I can’t wait to see.

Cam’ron news will appear as it comes – I’m also writing an OverRated/Underrated music of the week column-type-thing at Elitish.com.

Since I’m coming back to work a couple of days a week to do some technical writing and manual preparation, The Storm is still very much apart of my life.  Today I spent a bunch of time doing some training with her, and then she asked if I wanted to sit in on an interview, initially I said no, but when she asked later I figured it would just be some down-time with the possibility of funny stories.  Prior to the interview she said she needed to get a “dwink of wa-wa” (seriously) and talked in baby talk a lot of the time.  When she returned with her gwass of wa-wa, she turned to me and then said, as if she was letting me in on some kind of secret:

“Hey, check it out my desktop”, and she kind of nodded her head to her computer.

“Wha?” I replied, thinking that I was going to see another picture of a storm.

Then I looked at the desktop and it was a picture of an owl in front of the moon, I was bewildered.

“Oh, what’s that? Is that real? Who took that?” I asked, trying to find the right question that would be appropriate: one that would get to the bottom of the picture but would also seem like I had some kind of interest in it, so that she would explain.

“Oh, I just found that in clip art on Word.  I was looking through the Halloween clip art, and just copying a bunch of it into a slide show on Power Point”

I noticed that she had a Power Point file open, and that it was titled “Halloween”.  I don’t know why she was doing this, I didn’t even want to ask after all of that, it just seemed to be going nowhere.  The picture kind of looked like this, but not entirely, it was more of a close-up, it was really weird:

Cam’ron – Oh What a Night

Soon I’ll get back to some more real posts, and will have some posts on another site which I will tell you about once I get my act together this weekend and submit all of the things i’ve been trying to do but have been too busy and have not been able to put forth the real effort and thought needed to craft FOR REAL THOUGHTS.  Anyway, this song is rad, my brother reminded me of it after saying that the new Cam’ron songs reminded him of the “Oh what a night” song off some mixtape a number of years ago.  I don’t know if a full version exists, but here’s the 1.5 min version.  And I always thought this was a Billy Joel sample, but I was way off, actually The Four Seasons, either way, Billy Joel needs to be sampled more, The Longest Time? Perfect.

Cam’ron – Oh No You Didn’t [Dirty/CDQ] at 2dopeboyz
It sounds super cartoony and weird, and I just don’t like the guy’s voice who is singing the chorus – but it’s still new Cam and he sounds energetic and funny.  The song sounds a bit like Hard Knock Life, no? And the song is all about someone owing him money?

I like the following lines:

Grams, Grands, Gucci – I’m G’d Up

Actually, that might be the only line that I really like, but the rest aren’t bad, they just don’t stand out in terms of originality/weirdness.

About David Banner’s new song

It’s true, he’s gotta get off that garbage tip and get back to it.  I finally listened to the song, and though it’s not as strong as I would’ve liked, it delivers for me.  Good, sample based, bouncy David Banner.  He goes in on the usual stuff: Obama etc.  which is so refreshing after talking about whatever the fuck he was talking about on Greatest Story. 

David Banner come back, we (I) need you.

UPDATE – Forget to put this up like a week ago: Kid Sister, who I think is OK, has a song and had the amazing taste to hit up Banner for a guest verse:  FAMILY REUNION - Check it out and let me know your thoughts, I think it’s pretty good, Banner does well, Kid Sister does well in rapping and singing.  There’s something about Kid Sister’s annunciation that comes off as bratty or something (maybe that’s just an association based on her name), it doesn’t get on my nerves too much but I doubt I could listen to a whole album.