Yesterday morning, I woke up and caught Luke Skywalker at the end of her workday. We caught up on the latest episode of Looking, which has been pretty good this season, although its pretty incredible to have show that’s been going for a season and a half and I still don’t know how to describe it in a sentence, or whether I think its any good.
I sent in the next step of my application to website-host-not-to-be-named. They asked for a weird “video interview,” and I jumped through their hoops, although I might have fucked it up by not wearing interview clothes. I really want to hear back from them, but I’ve done all I can for now.
One of my coworkers, Jennifer Lopez, just got a promotion to underboss at my site, and I’ve been doing my best to help my homegirl out. This week, this meant catching up on some useless busywork that is part of her job to collect and manage. We had one of those staff meetings to talk about doing the paperwork where no one can even engage with the fact that it’s all dumb and useless and worthless work, because that would just bring everybody down.
Work was fine. I’ve been a little sterner with some of the kids than I usually am, but as people around me have been promoted, I’m doing a little more assistant principal-y work. My moment of bliss for the day was seeing a 7-year old boy, Michael, come into the club with Groucho Marx glasses, and looking so cute because they are so large on his face.
After work, I grabbed a burger (I’ve been trying to stop paying for prepared food, but I was going from work to work and it felt like a treat yo’ self moment) and headed over to the Lloyd center, where I had signed up to be a participant in a consumer study on tobacco usage. It turned out to be a marketing through exposure thing for Swedish snus, and was basically an hour with the crowd of the worst people in the world. I try not to categorize people, but at some point, if it walks like a scumbag, talks about women like a scumbag, and smells like a scumbag, they’re probably scumbags. It was stupid and pointless, but at the end of the day it was only an hour and I walked out with some cash for my trouble.
When I got home, I felt restless and wasn’t sure quite what to do with myself. This has been happening a lot recently. I played some piano, and came up with a complete song skeleton. It’s been so long since I’ve come up with something so structurally complete, I feel like it would be a shame to let it go without trying to put some words onto it, but holy hell does even trying to create that way push all of my vulnerability buttons. Even to myself. Even in a song that I can promise myself I won’t show to anybody else. There’s like nowhere to go from that point, nowhere useful, so I’m going to work on the song this weekend and see what I can do with those feelings. As I said, a nutritionally balanced song appearing from the aether like that is too good an opportunity to throw away without even trying.
After that, I tried to watch a little of The Master, which I’ve been watching slowly in 20 minute chunks, but I couldn’t keep my attention on the movie (I’ve been obsessed with a Zynga game called Sevens) and in the end a new PT Anderson movie is too good to waste on half-attention, so I called it a night and went to bed…
…and then was up for another three hours watching Bar Rescue and Kitchen Nightmares. My tastes in reality TV can be strange even to myself, but I love these business rescue shows a lot because, like Hoarders or Intervention, the setting may be a bar or restaurant (or house or addiction clinic), but what the real subject matter is is human insecurity, brokenness, and fear. Paraphrasing Tolstoy, every well run kitchen is similar, but every dysfunctional kitchen is dysfunctional in its own particular way. Add in the fact that many restaurants are family businesses, and the potential for drama is potent and raw. All that being said, if I was going to be watching garbage TV, I’d rather watch new garbage TV and I need to give myself permission to be a little shittier and accept that some nights I’m not going to be up for Matt’s Auto-didactic Finishing School for Promising Boys and just blow off some steam.