Month: March 2012

On Working

BettyLeave a comment

I had dinner with my boss’s wife and their preteen daughter tonight at a fancy club, of which my boss is a member. There’s a gym there and separate “grills” for men and women -built like an old Tuscan building with a sprawling dining room that overlooks a man-made lake with geyser-like fountain, kind of a shittier version of Lake Geneva, though on a sunny afternoon the view from the dining room is quite nice. They did everything they could to make the patrons forget that they were actually dining in the middle of a bland business park, less than two miles away from the airport, and instead created the illusion, with the tall windows, marbled hallways and crawling vines that they were in some sort of opulent yet rustic escape, a Bavarian king’s winter hunting palace. The whole place is very strange. The patrons are mostly white – a tense mixture of old, new and corporate money, and old. My boss once said he felt like a newborn baby when he hung out at the club because everyone else had one foot in the coffin. Well, he didn’t use those words exactly – I’m pretty sure the expression he used was even funnier, or it was the deadpan way he delivered it because I had burst out laughing and for a minute thought, “Hey, this man I work for is pretty damn funny.”

And he is. I think I’ve got a good sense of humor, but that sense stiffens when I’m in “professional assistant mode,” (which, sadly, really isn’t very professional or helpful at all). In front of my boss, whatever I say in the way of humor usually falls down flat. There are plenty of other people at the office who think I’m funny, and I guess that’s good enough – but in front of my boss I’m too much of a nervous, stuttering mess. I leave the jokes at the door along with my brain and put all my energy into not forgetting anything he says, though I usually do anyway, because if memory serves, the brain is where memories are stored. All that forgetting makes him pissed, which makes me less funny.

For the most part, I think I’ve written this before, I like my job. There are mornings I wake up, glare at my work phone (from which my two alarms ring) and think, “I think it’s time to enroll in a master’s program. Any master’s program, with classes that begin after 10AM,” and certain evenings, when I drag my feet out of work at 6PM, my body exhausted not because I’ve done anything particularly physical, but because I’ve been sitting and staring at the computer so long that my body doesn’t seem to know how to straighten up and move any other way. These are usually the days I drive past a homeless person sitting near the freeway entrance with a sign that says, “Please help me, I’m hungry,” but what I read is, “Be glad you have a job, you ungrateful wretch.”

On particularly taxing mornings I am heartless enough to roll my eyes and think, “Well, at least you can sleep in.”

I don’t know what it is, but lately, I’ve been losing it. And I know what I’m overdue for is an attitude adjustment. My parents are sensing my unease, and my mom has taken to coaxing me with her usual spiel, of “once you make a decision, stick to it.” She is, of course, referring to my casual mentioning some months ago that I enjoyed my job and could see myself staying here for a while. I left it deliberately vague then, because I am nothing if not self-aware, but after the holidays and CES, I had thought, stupidly, that the “taxing” part of the job was over and that everything after that would be cake. So one evening, I announced to my parents that I planned to work at the company for at least another year.

They were overjoyed, low are their expectations for me, and said they supported me in whatever path I chose, but that they were very happy I had decided to extend my current status as a productive, tax-paying, salary-earning member of society.

“If you decide to go back to school after you put your time in, we’ll fully support you then, but please work as long as possible. Who knows? You may grow to like it more and stay even longer!”

My father half-joked (other half entirely hopeful) about my climbing the corporate ladder, but I pictured the tree outside my bedroom window and thought of how much I preferred to climb that instead.

But of course the taxing part of any job is never over, just as the taxing part of life – for the long haul – is never over. In elementary school I braced myself for math tests and spelling bees (which I secretly enjoyed because I read a lot and knew some big words, until I lost to a girl who read more and knew bigger words. Then I hated the damn bee). In middle school I dreaded math tests and puberty, though it sort of hit me like a mild cold – something that made you uncomfortable, but wasn’t so harmful as to prevent you from having friends (with similar symptoms) and being, for the most part, an upbeat human being. In high school there were too many honors and AP classes and the godforsaken SAT’s on top of that AND the million clubs I joined when really, all I wanted to do was play badminton. And even then I didn’t think seriously about being a writer – because in high school, you think very seriously about other things, but becoming a writer is not one of them. But almost every day, I wrote something. Somewhere. Either online, or in my diary, or in a long letter to a friend. 

Any job, if you are seeking to turn it into a career, must be viewed as a marathon – Forrest Gump cross-country style – and not a sprint. It was stupid of me to promise what, at this point, I’m not sure I can deliver. I have a terrible record of commitment – to schools, to jobs (though to my credit I have never been fired, expelled or suspended and almost every job I’ve left – the ones I’ve bothered to list on my resume – have left their doors open to me in case I should change my mind one day. Imagined future epiphany: Oh my God, I did want to assist that funny man and get gas for him and lunches for forgetful executives forever and ever until the end of my days! I think not. No, I’ve come to recognize that my marathon is based on another road.

But when it comes to people, I stay. I have no problem committing my ears to their stories, their stories to paper. Some, I stay in their lives because I refuse to let them forget me. There is Jane, whom I met during my first week and liked immensely and who then promptly moved to Chicago. And more than a handful of others I’ve come to know and like and, when I get the chance, pepper them with questions about their lives outside of work because not only is it fascinating, it is sustaining.

At the Company, it is a rare bird who does not like the people. A young coworker once caught me on a bad day and in an effort to cheer me up, wrote a me a kind message telling me to look on the bright side, that we were surrounded by great people and that he had recently been offered a better paying position at a better job, but which he rejected because he couldn’t bear to leave the people. It was honestly a terrible day at work, but the fact that this young man took the time to write me the note cheered me immensely, and renewed my faith in myself. That is what the best kind of coworker can do for you.

I don’t believe everyone likes their work – I for one, do not mind the work, but I do not love it. I said I did in the beginning but that was me making the noises of a newborn – everything is new and fresh and you haven’t developed a sense of yourself in this new world. But then you grow a brain (the one you inevitably leave outside your boss’s office) and realize, “Hey, I don’t like the work, and perhaps I do not have to. Not as much as I think I need to. What I do like are my coworkers. I like almost every single one of them, even my boss when he is angry with me, even the strange, stoic product guy with the bad haircut who drives a rape van; even the loud, brash, borderline misogynist Chief of this or that because he is a good story and, more generously, misunderstood.”

And that’s why I stay. For the time being, anyway.

The Fool

BettyLeave a comment

When she was sixteen, Suzy’s mother came into her room one afternoon with a glass jar filled with fresh cut roses.

“Where do you want these?” her mother asked.

Suzy sat at her desk writing one thing or other – perhaps a school assignment or letter, but years later, when she looked back on that moment, she recalled very clearly the two distinct feelings she felt before and after her mother brought the roses. Of these, she would never fully revisit the first.

Suzy surveyed her room, wondering where she ought to put the roses. It didn’t happen very often, this offer to have fresh flowers in her room. Suzy’s mother had a green thumb, but she showered most of her attention on her orchids, her favorite type of bloom, and left the roses to the gardener’s shears.

Roses could essentially protect themselves, what with the thorns and all. And while educated pruning could ensure the most beautiful and stout blooms, it appeared that they grew and bloomed regardless of the care they received. There were certain breeds that were smooth stemmed, Suzy noticed, but they were different from the thornier roses. They seemed weaker, needing more wiring or perhaps a trellis to snake around for additional support. But Suzy’s mother had only one of those bushes and the blooms upon it were often the first to wilt.

Orchids were a different sort of flower, her mother once told her. They were like cats – paradoxically high and low maintenance. When you administered the right kind of care, they could be left alone for a long time. Though they required special bark instead of soil and thin green sticks to prop up their stems and a certain temperature to thrive, her mother’s orchids could bloom and bloom for weeks if not months with only light watering in between. It was a different kind of maintenance, but the result were stunning, exotic plants that all of her mother’s guests oohed and aahed over whenever her parents had dinner parties. Suzy noticed no one ever cooed over the roses. When an orchid began to show the slightest signs of tiring, her mother would whisk it off into the greenhouse and nurse it back to health until it was ready to show off its pristine blooms once more. If the roses began to wilt, she simply cut them off the bush.

But still, roses were beautiful in their own way and Suzy’s mother had a soft spot for them. She half-heartedly grew a dozen rose bushes in the planter in the side yard, where they kept their garbage cans. The soil there wasn’t really suited for much else. There had been a time before when orchids were a luxury, bought only on special occasions or received as a birthday gift. They were, as nursery hierarchies go, exotic blooms that could command exorbitant prices, but those were the early days, before her husband’s business stabilized and began to do quite well. By the time Suzy was a teenager, Suzy’s mother had loosened her flora budget so that almost every month a few new orchid plants would appear. The roses and indeed the other plants in their yard became the gardeners’ ward and the orchids, both in the house and in the greenhouse, Suzy’s mother’s sole focus.

And hardily, the roses bloomed for no one but whomever happened to take out the trash on Thursday evenings, though usually this happened at sundown and you couldn’t see them anyway. 

Except for this day. It was Sunday and the gardeners would come tomorrow, but Suzy’s mother took it upon herself to prune the roses. She waited patiently as Suzy considered a place to set the roses. Suzy tapped the pen to her head, her wrist on her knee. Suzy’s room was neat as a pin. She liked it that way, though for some reason new friends visiting for the first time were always taken aback, as though from Suzy’s person they had expected a less tidy room. There were plenty of open surfaces upon which to place the jar of roses but where would the roses look best? Suzy imagined someone coming in to snap a photo of her at work, bent over her diary or a letter she was writing, the roses sitting wanly on her bookshelf – but it was too dim there. Perhaps next to her desk lamp? It cast a warm glow on Suzy’s workspace and there was an old tin can in which she held her pens which would go nicely with the glass jar the roses stood in, as it was an old peanut butter jar with the label washed off. There. The lamp. The pens. The glass jar of roses.

“Put them here, mom,” Suzy said, tapping the space on her desk.

Her mother set them down and, like the photographer Suzy imagined, smiled and said, “Well isn’t that a pretty picture.”

The bouquet changed the entire landscape of her desk, making her feel feminine and artistic and smart, in the British sense of the word. Virginia Woolf probably kept roses on her desk.

Suzy leaned over and smelled the roses, taking a deep inhale of the largest bloom. Compared to the rest it didn’t smell like much, but that didn’t matter – it was so pretty to look at. 

But she admired the way one of the roses was apparently in full bloom. It did not have as vivid of coloring as the other roses, but it certainly took center stage in that its massive petals threatened to cover the other buds entirely.

“I like this one,” Suzy said, fingering one of the velvety light orange petals.

Her mother was silent and Suzy, expecting a murmur of agreement, looked up.

Her mother had a strange expression on her face, one which, as Suzy grew older, would come to adopt as her own when she found someone’s taste questioning. Truly it was a matter of taste, which bloom mother and daughter found attractive, but Suzy’s mother wanted her daughter know:

“That rose looks like a fool.”

The Fool. 

 Suzy was taken aback. The rose, a fool? What had it done but bloomed beautifully for all to enjoy?

Her mother sighed, wondering if it was too early in her daughter’s life to impart one of the most important lessons a woman needed to learn, though it seemed that few did. She hadn’t even thought of her now apparent distaste for roses in this stage of bloom when she clipped it and only brought it up now because Suzy’s attraction to it brought it to her attention. There was a small but dangerous fire to be stamped out – a young woman’s identity was at stake.

“For one thing,” her mother said, “It is an inelegant bloom. Roses can be quite elegant, but not at this stage.”

Suzy acknowledged that the rose had probably bloomed to maximum diameter and was on the verge of wilting, but it surprised to hear her mother say this about a poor flower nearing the end of its short life.

 “Then why did you bring it in here with the rest?” Suzy asked, “Why didn’t you throw it away?”

Suzy’s mother searched for the right words. If she was absolutely honest she would have said that how the rose bloomed was no different from when a whore spread her legs for clients. There was no mystery, nothing secret to anticipate or unwrap. It had opened its very last petal to reveal all of itself so that even the fattest fly could trample around, freely spreading disease and God knows what else.

But Suzy was sixteen – a young, naive sixteen penning young, naive sixteen year-old thoughts in loopy cursive.

Instead Suzy’s mother replied, “It’s so open-faced,” then added, “There’s no mystery.”

She paused, wondering if Suzy understood what she meant. Were mother and daughter on the same wavelength?

“But aren’t your orchids the same way?” Suzy asked, “Aren’t they all open-faced too?”

Jester?

Suzy’s mother couldn’t help but be a little offended. They were, mother and daughter, still worlds apart in experience, and rightly so – but this would be, at the very least, a lesson in art. Suzy’s mother left the room briefly and returned with an orchid plant whose petal edges showed decline, but was still regal in bearing.

“Suzy,” her mother said, “Look at the rose and look at the orchid.”

Suzy did. From her seat at the desk, she looked down at the rose and up at the orchid, the blooms of which were suspended in a prim row, like pretty virginal sisters who had hung themselves from a slender green stem.

“They are both open faced blooms,” her mother conceded, “but isn’t the rose more inviting? If it was a person, would it not be more approachable?”

“Isn’t that a good thing, mother?”

“Yes and no,” and then Suzy’s mother turned to look at Suzy’s confused expression. As she did, she felt a mild panic, as though all this talk of roses and orchids wasn’t getting the important message across. That as a young woman, as any woman at any age, for that matter, Suzy had to keep something of herself for herself.

Her young daughter was on the brink of a long bloom, more rose than orchid. And there was nothing wrong with that. Suzy was and had always been that kind of girl – open and approachable, friendly, chatty, giddy. Though she did have her quiet moments, such as the one her mother had walked in on, with Suzy bent over a piece of writing. What did roses write about?

Suzy’s mother realized she had no idea. But she knew then that if her daughter was a rose, she wished her thorns – big fat thorns found on the hardiest of rose bushes. The rose bushes that during winter, still stood straight albeit barren, in three feet of snow. They wouldn’t always bloom, but you could tell, a mile away, that it was a rose bush and that sometime in the spring, the color would return and the petals would be soft and open and inviting, but the thorns would still be there.

Mother and daughter looked at one other, each searching the other’s face until finally Suzy’s confusion melted away and her mother’s very mild panic subsided.

And that was all. Suzy’s mother kissed Suzy on the forehead and left her daughter to her work, whatever it was. But Suzy was not quite ready to return to the thought her mother had interrupted minutes ago – what had she been writing? It no longer seemed important. She pursed her lips and furrowed her brow, her features suddenly feeling very heavy. Slowly, she turned the jar so that the fool faced the wall, then thought better of it. She plucked the fool out.

It was a ridiculous sized bloom, nearly the same span as her long-fingered hands. The stem was incongruously thin and quite useless – pliable, without a thorn in sight. Suzy held it like she would a pen, but it flopped to and fro, and Suzy felt almost irritated by it. It had bloomed itself to a point where it could not even hold up its own head. Finally, with a quick, sharp pinch, she snapped the stem in two, causing a few velvety light orange petals dropped to her desk. It was not indifference she felt but the strange subtle force of an unspoken vow – the kind young girls make to themselves when they are about to become young women – that provoked her next actions. She reached underneath her desk for the trash bin and putting her pen down for a moment, swept the fool away.

Because Some People Do it Better: John Steinbeck

BettyLeave a comment

Apparently I am having a long bout of writer’s block, also known as laziness. But I’ll leave you with this for the weekend…though perhaps not the whole weekend. The sky looks as though it’ll start sobbing any moment due to god knows what (in my dreams the clouds wring their fluffy palms and wail, “That Betty, why isn’t she writing?” and burst into tears) and a good rain sometimes, makes me feel like a diligent writer.

Any who, the following is a letter from John Steinbeck to his son Thom, who wrote to his father from boarding school confessing that he had fallen desperately in love with a girl there. It is, in the poorly populated genre of letters from fathers to sons, one of the sweetest things I have ever read.

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

Duty

BettyLeave a comment

Behind me, men and women dressed in variations of cocktail attire sip on glasses of red and white wine. They talk excitedly (the women’s voices more animated than the men’s) against the live quartet, which plays a strange selection of classical music I associate with Shakespeare’s time.

I am sitting in a tiny alcove at the Ritz Carlton Dana Point where the hotel has set up a not very high-end version of a business center. There’s an outdated HP Deskjet in front of me, and an even older Lenovo computer and keyboard upon which I write this out. To my right, an off white hotel landline, the kind that normally hangs in the bathrooms in Las Vegas, right next to the toilet, in case you croak on the john.

I hadn’t planned on being here. On Thursday nights, I plan for yoga or some other exercise class. If I’m tired, I drive home slowly (to the frustration of other drivers), and have a simple dinner with my parents and then take a walk. If I’m really tired, I eat dinner, then stare at a blank blog post. But this afternoon my boss decided it would be a good idea if I went with him to an awards ceremony.

“If you’re busy, get someone else,” he said. But what do you say to that. “Oh yeah, I’m going to be busy. I was going to exercise.”

So I shook my head and said, “No no, busy? Pah. I’ll be there.”

So here I am, dressed in my not even very professional work clothes, hiding in the “business” alcove while women in sparkly tops and heavy perfume swish around behind me. The men look more or less the same, though some of them wear tuxedos that look so crisp it’s a bit too obvious that this is their first time at a function like this. Look at me. The executive assistant doing her own peculiar brand of sneering.

There are hobnobbers and then there are hobnobbers. Corporate climbers. Brown-nosers. Ass-kissers. Whatever you want to call them. You can spot them a mile away, but not before you hear them. They greet you a little too warmly. Shake your hands a little too firmly, as though willing you to remember their grip and their steely, semi-desperate stares.

At dinner later, I will meet a 50 year old female photographer, hired by the company putting on the event to take photos of all the honorees. She will have a hard look about her face, though maybe it’s because she’s tired of doing these events.

“Thirty years,” she’ll tell me, “I’ve been a photographer for thirty years, and before, I liked it. I worked for builders and took photos of houses and condos in progress, and it was fine. I went to shitty middle of nowhere places like Perris and Temecula and Fresno, but it was calming. I made little road trips out of it and memorized where all the In n’ Outs were, and when I got to where I was going, the houses would just be there and I would just photograph them and then head on out. There wasn’t no fuss.”

“What happened?”

She will scoff, as though it were obvious, but not unkindly, “Well the economy went to shit and all those builders stopped building, which is how I got roped into gigs like these. These corporate circus shows.”

She will talk a little too loudly and you will be grateful to be sat at a table in the corner, right next to the speakers so that the “corporate ring master” at the podium will drown her out somewhat, at least to the people at the surrounding tables.

She’ll tell you stories about the brown-nosers she’s met, because she’s done the circuit for almost a decade now, and which CEO’s are the real deal and which are full of corporate “baloney sawdust bullshit,” though more often than not the latter are hardly ever CEOs but people on the brink who for some reason, just can never quite make it to the top.

She’ll nod her head not too furtively towards the chairman of this or that and say, “Like him. That guy is SUCH a phony.” You will think that perhaps Salinger based Holden Caulfield on this wiry, rather mannish woman sitting next to you who rather than eat her steak and shrimp pushes them around the plate, an errant corral.

“My boss is very genuine,” you say, and she will nod in agreement, and you can tell she means it. 

“I know him,” she’ll say, “I’ve met him a couple of times and I can tell you, he doesn’t do that bullshit. I know who’s an ass kisser and I know your boss gets his ass kissed plenty and he doesn’t need to do none of that himself. He’s the real deal.”

You will look at your boss then, though you can’t see his face too clearly. He’ll be sitting at one of the head tables, dressed smartly in his tuxedo, which although pressed, is hardly new. He wears it well. His forehead will be a bit shiny from the warmth of the room, or all the bodies trying to introduce themselves to him and his wife will be standing next to him with the tired smile she puts on at events like this. He shakes hands with a tall gentleman and laughs, then turns slightly and his attention is quickly devoured by another shorter, rounder gentleman. He laughs again – a real, hearty laugh, from the belly. Or is it? You won’t be able to tell, but then again, does it matter? He’s doing his job. You’re doing yours. You turn back to the photographer, who hasn’t eaten any of the meat.

“He is the real deal,” you repeat, but she doesn’t hear you. She’ll be getting ready to stand up and has already lifted her heavy camera and hung it around her neck.

“Ugh,” she’ll say, “Save one of the desserts for me. I’m off to photograph some phonies.”