buzz buzz buzz

Charlotte and I are sitting on my bed right now watching a re-run of ANTM (typical) when we heard this weird buzzing. We look around for what we guess is a bug, and finally see that it's a bug in my overhead light fixture. This fixture is like a plate stuck to the ceiling with the bulbs between the two, so you can see lots of little bug corpses that have chosen it as their final resting place. They like light, yknow. This buzzing was coming from this one giant ass bug who is cruising around the plate and eating all the dead bugs. "I like him. He's like one of those fish that suck all the algae off the side of the fish tank," says Charlotte.

Best pest ever.

We're both coughing and hacking, because even when team face is separated, we get the same illnesses. Her long island birthday weekend was dee-liteful.

Adulthood, Step 3

As of today, I have a stack of business cards with my name on it. I feel a little bit more adult.

My First Solo TL Article

So, if you ignore the co-written sidebar on flight passes (which I suggest you do) that I wrote with Josh last year, this is my first TL piece:

http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/tv-fan-getaways

I can't say it's exactly what I wrote in round one, and I can't say I like the fact that I'm sending people into the baltimore slums (the irony was edited out) but, there have been worse things written.

Wrong side of the bed.

So right now i'm watching the Today show that's being taped in Colonial Williamsburg as part of Today's tour of...battleground states. So far, the number of early-rising/visible Mccain/Palin signholders drastically outnumbers any Obama supporters; in fact I don't think I saw a single one.

Where's the WM I thought I knew? Did the open-minded crowd of people sleep late? My heart sank. I am embarrassed.

And then they glamorized Sarah Palin in a segment about her tour of Manhattan. There were cops EVERYWHERE in the realm of the UN yesterday and the day before.

Ugh, loss for words. Need coffee. And a shower. And an absentee ballot.

Leafe? Oh, nevermind

On my commute to work, passing through a nighlife-ish area, I saw a sign for the Grean Leafe. And I got really excited. And then I realized that it said "Green Leaf Nursing Home." And then I got really sad.

livestrong, yall

Holler at not Working in Investment Banking

Suck on it I-Bankers:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/21/news/companies/goldman_morgan/index.htm

they just got pwned by the govt (kind of)

RIP David Foster Wallace, 2/21/62 - 9/12/2008 [II]

I can no longer resist: I've got to eulogize. Lacking a more appropriate venue, I'm subjecting all Post-Williamsburgers and whatever stray readers we may/may not attract to this breathless encomium. Take it or leave it.

---

Despite never having met him, David Wallace has had a huge influence on me -- on the way I write, the way I think, the way I perceive other people. It's safe to say that his impact in my life has been greater than that of most people I have met. On or off the page, I've never encountered a writer with such myriad gifts; his compassion and intellect were unparalleled, and few could engage the ironic mode so deftly without collapsing into cynicism or solipsism. Wallace found an intimate, covalent bond between the comic and the tragic. He used laughter to make us think, atrocity to make us laugh, and every gradation in-between. Not once did he abandon his defining principle, that fiction was about what it feels like to be human:

I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.

Reading his work really was like occupying the skull in which he was "marooned," exposing yourself to the full and beautifully messy brunt of his consciousness. Not a day passes when I don't wonder what he'd make of some quotidian detail or major social phenomenon. Philosophy, politics, sports, addiction, psychology, depression, interpersonal communication, ethics, lobsters, porn, snack cakes, hangnails ... life. He could tackle the microscopic and macroscopic with equal aplomb and grace, an earth-shattering insight lurking on every page, lapidary prose tucked neatly in every footnote. My own writing is no more than a cheap pastiche of his own, self-self-self-conscious, an attempt to attain that intoxicating and infinitely expressive blend of high and low vocabularies.

I'm a member of a listserv devoted to him, and the past week has seen an unmitigated outpouring of grief and remembrances. Hundreds have written about how he affected them, and the media's coverage has grown exponentially. If any self-respecting fiction-lover hadn't heard of David Foster Wallace, the secret's officially out. It seems that he was unanimously respected not just as a writer but as a human being. I envy those who counted him as a friend.

The closest thing I have to an anecdote: In late January, when W&M's philosophy department sought a new professor, Sam and I took a candidate out to lunch. He made an offhand reference to a brilliant undergrad he'd advised at Amherst in the late '80s, a mathematical, philosophical and literary prodigy who whipped up two summa cum laude honors theses in one year, finishing both of them by spring break. I asked who, knowing full well what the answer was going to be.

Once the professor left, it was agreed that I looked like I'd spermed myself.

In a way, not having known Wallace personally makes his death even stranger, somehow less comprehensible. The proximate aspects of grief are irrelevant; we won't feel his absence on a day-to-day basis, i.e., at an atomic level, the way we do when someone close to us dies. It's a more confused, distant absence, something off-kilter. Since he was never "here" to begin with, it's all too easy to forget that he's no longer out there, feeling, breathing, helping us come to grips with twenty-first century American life. It's as if we've mysteriously lost touch with the world's most dedicated pen pal.

I only wish I'd had the guts to write him back when I could.

Holler at not Working in Insurance

This is fast becoming a series:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/16/news/companies/AIG/index.htm?cnn=yes

Brightening everyone's day.

RIP David Foster Wallace, 2/21/62 - 9/12/2008

I know you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can rush through your head in just the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s flood of thoughts into words. This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. – and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

From "Good Old Neon," Oblivion, 2004

one year ago today

I want this again.

Fast-track to Middle-age

Hello, Williamsburg expatriots. I actually got a real-person job! I'm writing to you from my desk in a very professional office building, in which I currently serve no real purpose. I think they're still looking for things to keep me busy for the time being. I'm a pharmaceutical market researcher -- a job that I'm neither interested in or qualified for, but I got bills to pay! I'm not sure what my job title fully entails, but essentially I'll be researching which drugs doctors prescribe and why.

Actually, I can't complain about the company; the office is really nice, and everyone is extremely approachable. And they left a little gift bag on my desk the first day with chocolates and gift cards to restaurants. From a dating perspective, this company's mack is HUGE.

I'm fast realizing, though, that watching "The Office" and living "The Office" are two very different things....

But until I actually have real responsibilities, I'll be posting up here!
P.S. for the love of god please gchat me

Also, halfway through my first day the entire building started to shake like there was an earthquake, and there was an awful noise coming from the roof, as if a helicopter was crashing over and over. All of the employees started to freak out, and we had to evacuate the building. Butttt it was just the giant industrial air conditioner on the roof that exploded (we're on the third and top floor). But now we don't have air conditioning and it's like working in a Taiwanese sweat shop, so they keep sending us home early. Hooray!

-Andy

Holler at not Working in Finance

http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/14/news/companies/lehman_workers.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008091507

Titties!

Today was the Susan G. Komen NYC Race for the Cure 5k - my first 5k ever I ran with josh, and after correcting for the 7 minute late start, we ran it in 33 minutes which I think is pretty good. The Amex team raised $53,000 but, alas, neither of us won any of the raffle prizes at the afterparty, a very corporate catered brunchy thing at lincoln center. 

I think I may be getting my salaried position in January. I'm proving myself every day and had a really kick-ass pitch meeting this week. Not much else is happening but I'm pretty proud of my performance today. 

ah this yuppie life. 

...is lame

here's what the title is about:
today, a seriously great Mexican singer/songwriter, Julieta Venegas, gave a concert at the Kennedy Center (for you non-DC'ers, the Kennedy Center is DC's premiere concert venue--it's where the National Symphony Orchestra and the National Opera 'live') for FREE. at 6pm. I really wanted to go, but the people I was planning to go with bailed on me last-minute. I will be the first to admit that I hate going to shows/movies/meals by myself, so I was super lame and didn't go.
...So i think i'm going to take a page out of Dean Edwards' book (as you all know by now, Dean is my go-to man in this DC life...him and his bed) and start writing on my pre-existing blog, La*Chelita, with upcoming events and junk. so not to clutter post-williamsburg with such things.

ok well i hope that some of you can join me at the next excellent dc event!

Today I fought the urge to kick a pigeon...

...and I probably love pigeons more than anyone I know.  I count them among my style icons.  And I really dislike animal cruelty.  It was that kind of day.  

I don't know what has happened to me but I can no longer get my rear in gear in any kind of quick pace in the morning, so for a 9:30 class (and an 8:40 trolley) I figured I should wake up at 7:15.  That's just not my scene.  

So as I am exiting my building today, some batshit insane-looking (and not in the fun way) oldish lady stops me and asks

"Were you using cable yesterday?"

I paused in such a way that I was quite sure she could visualize the ellipses going through my mind over my head like a cartoon idea lightbulb, until I released a low, guttural "uhhh" (Charlotte, you know the one) and said

"yeah, my cable worked yesterday, like RCN you mean?"

Homegirl went on to accuse me of blasting "some loud movie all day into the night" and reminded me how thin the walls and small the building are.  Lady, I probably did not wake up until after noon, nor was I even in the apartment all day, and god knows the sounds from my wee little TV intended for a kitchen could not reach the opposite end of the building, let alone your apartment, if it tried with all its might.  Nor did I hear "the loud machine noises next door" she also questioned me about.  What the hell, don't stare me down as I exit my building, you culotte-wearing wackadoodle.

So, as the semester has started, the Route E NYU buses have gotten considerably more crowded, as I expected, but I don't think I expected herds of the undergrads to take a bus when, in reality, they have an approximately 10-block walk to class.  GTFO my breathing space.  For the few days I couldn't locate my ipod last week i wanted to punch a hole in the bus window (if I had managed to snag a seat) and dive into traffic.  In a related story, I'm pretty sure I want to become one of those twats with giant puffy noise-canceling headphones.  

I still haven't been to all my classes yet.  My phenomenology course is mad theory-heavy and the books double as doorstops, but that's kindof what I need (sidenote: Dear W&M, offer more strictly theory courses, luv, Beaton).  I seem to have to do a presentation or show-and-tell (dead serious) for all of my courses, so I'm scheduling myself into these according to what will keep me most sane within the syllabi.  Also, there's this Blackboard Scare at NYU; it's really a lot like the Red Scare.  The faculty and law school are apparently losing their shit about getting caught for copyright infringement, which is good for authors and publishers and all, but bad for killing trees, checking out reserves, and my wallet.  

Also uggggh, no, I do not know why the new printer is not connected to all the computers at work, I am not a wizard, it is not my fault, do not shoot the messenger, she is not getting paid anymore, and will only be okay with this when I see my name on the front matter.

Surprise, there's like a dead zone in NYU's insurance.  That was super fun to find out as the price of a prescription MORE THAN DOUBLED THIS AFTERNOON.  Speaking of drug stores, my trusty old friends BenGay and Medical Tape are back in my life, as I seem to have recovered from last week's first ballet class by developing shin splints in the middle of the night or something.  I am now taped up like a steroid-injected racehorse.  

In happy news, the section of street adjacent to the fire hydrant in front of Team Face's apartment building has been filled in with fresh asphalt, which means perhaps the lovely puppy piss odor might linger a little less.  

I also find slight comfort in the fact that I get to GTFO the city in the near future for Charlotte's birthday AND reveling in my four day weekends just after that by visiting my dear dear best friend Laura at MSU, who, by some aligned stars, has cranky days when I do too.  

Excuse me while I read a shit ton, nurse some chocolate soy milk (I am a child), and unrealistically hope that Andy Murray beats Roger Federer.  I will probably disappear really soon now that I have a routine.

Buddha, etc.

The one exciting thing happening in my life is that I've begun tutoring a Buddhist monk in ESL. His name is Sit-ka. He's thirty-two and a refugee from Burma. When I first found out I was going to be tutoring a Buddhist monk, I relished the opportunity to engage in some sort of cultural exchange and to show off my religious studies knowledge (was he in the Therevada, Mahayana, or Pure Land School etc?). However, I didn't stop to think about why I was teaching him, namely, that he doesn't know English. My hopes of talking with him about his Buddhism and his flight from his home country were squashed once I walked into the temple and realized this fact. Still, our first meeting went well, and while we couldn't relate to each other verbally, we were able to show kindness and our appreciation for one another. We were both nervous. I talked/hand-motioned to him about his tattoos and gathered that he had gotten them when he had entered the monastic order as a young boy. The meeting was only an introduction but I'm looking forward to our first session this week.

In other news, I kicked ass on the GREs. The thought of grad school in a year is the only thing getting me through living at my parent's house this year.

In fun news, I went to a wedding last weekend, got plastered, and danced the night away. We even got the DJ to play "Bizarre Love Triangle," clearing the dancefloor of the Jimmy Buffet fans who populated most of the wedding party. Also, I've discovered the Galaxy Diner's PBR deal in Carytown: $4.50 for a pitcher. That's pint night every night. Oh, that reminds me of what also happened this weekend. So I was with Brandon and Luke at Hooters (reserve your judgement) and we were waiting for a table. Just our luck, all the lights suddenly went out. The Hooters hostesses turned from flirts into bouncers, not letting anyone leave the restaurant until the power came back. They were especially cruel overlords. With no air circulation, the bar quickly became filled with smoke, causing many customers to complain that they could not leave and go outside. When one gentleman complained to the hostess, she feigned concern and reached for a menu, waving it in front of his face and replying, "Is that better?" We got the hell out of there since we hadn't even been seated yet. This provoked many behind us to yell louder at the hostesses. I can only hope that this turned into a ridiculous bar brawl with wings, cigarettes, and boobies flying everywhere. We left and went to Chili's. Instead of paying $4.50 a pitcher, I paid $4.50 for one pint. We discovered the Galaxy Diner the next night. Fuck Chili's.

Screw us

Maybe we are, well, "screwed," to say the least.

dramz

Hey guys,

sorry i haven't written in a while. I am especially sorry because it's taken me over a week to muster up the energy to write about a very hilarious experience I recently had with one of my fellow p-w bloggers and recent birthday boy, Dean Edwards. Here goes, just cuz:

Last Friday, I met up with some fellow WM graduates for happy hour. I ventured out to the sticks of virginia (Courthouse, to be precise--DC living has sadly enhanced my inner geographical location snobbery), where they all live. Two of the ladies in my company are roommates of Dean's, so once we all got tipsy thanks to empty stomachs and $3 Amstel lights, we decided to continue the party. We ended up at Dean's house, reveling until the wee hours. Before I knew it, we were dancing to Springsteen in the living room. It was around this time that my inebriated self began to panic about having to sleep in a bed with some stranger (they have a pull-out couch in the living room, and i thought that i would be made to sleep there with the other person who was at the house who didn't live there, this guy named Tyler i think?) so i literally broke into Dean's bedroom, threw off my pants, climbed into his twin bed with him, and pass out. I woke up at 7am, terribly parched, so I get up and am shocked that I am not wearing pants or a bra. i put these items back on, chug some water, and return to dean's room to see him grudgingly making the aerobed for me (Thanks Dean!). We fell back asleep and woke a few hours later to some pleasant pillow talk. All in all, I'd like to thank Dean publically for having a sleepover with me, even if it was thrust upon him without consent.

In other news, work rules, I got my reader's badge for the Dumbarton research library this week, and got some sage advice from Dr J.P., one of my Pre-Columbian studies icons. Am literally drowning in books in papers in my boss's office; he keeps mailing me more and more material from his stops in Argentina and Chile. For you DC-ers, my museum is opening its newest show very soon, a survey of Fritz Scholder's work (contemporary art), it's going to be super so let me know if you'd like to go!

My house is coming apart at the seams. Part of my housemate's ceiling came off during the storm we had on Saturday, and we have illegal scaffolding set up in front of our house. An inspector from the DC government came by unannounced and called our living situation "slum living". It was kind of embarrassing. While we are taking legal action to assure that no one will ever again call us victims of a slum lord, we fear the clusterfuck that is the DC government/court system and its ability to actually prevent our hosue from falling apart. Wish me luck, I'm going to landlord and tenant court tomorrow.

that's life in a nutshell.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO DEAN!!!!!!

WOOOOOO GET DRUUUUUNK 22 BIG ONES HOLLA

Just a Note

I never really liked (i.e. never cared for) Pilchen anyway.