1. immediately upon arrival had to clean up some goopy diarrhea-esque dog shit from the front step
2. it smelled awful even after i cleaned it (FUCK YOU DOGS OF LAWRENCEVILLE AND YOUR STUPID NEGLECTFUL OWNERS!!!!!!!!!!) so i dumped some baking soda on it
3. my boss’ driver, a mild-mannered middle-aged xtian lady, saw the baking soda and said, “geez! it looks like somebody spilled a bag of cocaine on your front step!”
4. while i was at lunch with nate we spotted a tough guy wearing a sleeveless neon green shirt. i said, “whoa, look at that guy!” and he totally heard me! we had a good laugh over that but i felt bad too.
5. a client, a very charming old-ish lady who’s really being put through the wringer, came to my desk and said, “can you type a letter for me?” i said sure. she said, “dear creditors: [her name] is tired of dealing with you. she has a cough, nausea, and upset stomach. please don’t bother her anymore.” she asked me to read it back and said, “better put in diarrhea, too.” then, with a flourish, she lit up a cigarette and i had to ask her politely not to smoke in the office.
6. she came back from her smoke break clutching a gigantic (like 3′ tall) teddy bear (guess where that came from). upon her request, i put it in an empty seat in the conference room, much to everyone’s delight.
7. a certain crazy store-owner whose name i will not mention was yelling, to no one in particular, “do you like baby dolls? do you like baby dolls?” i’m pretty sure she was talking to someone walking by, but the early-20’s law clerk dude answered, in the most scared and uncertain voice ever, “yes?”
so, it was a slow week at work, as my boss was at trial. luckily, one of my friends just started working here so we had lots of fun just goofing off on the clock. we came up with the idea to google “bad tattoos” and giggle at the skin carnage all over the internet.
here are the best tattoos i’ve come across in those long, lonely hours; and i humbly share them with you, dear readers.
and, the most bizarrely genius one of them all:
i want to be this person’s friend. and eat a tofu pup with them. the end.
warning! the following post is not amanda safe! it features graphic depictions of a certain lovable curmudgeon that you’d rather just imagine. if you are amanda, please redirect your energies to something that you wanna see, like this!
anyway. at work, we’re trying to authenticate a jackson pollock painting. the law clerk, m., made some comment about how anyone could make a splatter-y painting. “let’s see you do it,” said my boss. at first we thought he was kidding, but he went on and on about it (this was on wednesday). “next monday, [ocean] will bring in her camera and a drop cloth, and i’ll bring in some housepaints. m. will bring in a canvas, and he’ll paint us a pollock!”
so, monday came, M. and i brought in the requested items. we did a normal day’s work and then at about 4:15, my boss said, “[ocean], didn’t you bring any beer in today?” “uh, no.” “M. needs some beer! All artists need beer!” So M. went to the bar down the street to buy a 6-pack. then he changed into his painting clothes. i took a picture of him sitting at his computer to show his law-school classmates about how hard he’s working this summer:
while M. was setting up in the backyard, about one beer into this process, i noticed that he hadn’t closed the front door proplerly & it had blown open (everyone does that! grr!) and i complained to my boss briefly. “he’s already drunk,” sniffed my boss.
and then M. got set everything up in the backyard and everyone shuffled out to watch him paint.
“you should haul in a psychiatrist to analyze what M’s REALLY saying,” i said.
“i was a psychology major,” said my boss. he stared at the splatters for a long time. “he has an aversion to military service,” he concluded.
also, another attorney came by to pick up some paper and was barely able to conceal his disgust with all of us for being so unprofessional and wasting company time! ha!
everyone’s gone home and i’m still in the office. they all left over an hour ago. i was going to use the internet time after work today to search for a better-paying job, but i just can’t.
Filed under: destroy that tape loop, ne'er-do-wells, pittsburgh, wingnuts, work
…and any advice would be appreciated. it’s irrelevant whether you’re a friend or just a stranger who’s stumbled across this blog. i realize it’s not the kind of situation most people would have dealt with, but you never know.
so, for those of you who don’t know, i work at a small, eccentric law firm. i was out of the office buying candy for my boss (as he’s a do-whatever-the-hell-i-want senior citizen, he subsists largely on boxes of good & plenty). when i came back, the office felt strangely tense, and i heard my boss say to the law clerk, “ask [ocean] what she thinks! she’ll know what to do?”
so i went into the conference room and asked what was up. “tim _______ called. he’s thinking of committing suicide. i think it’s a great idea!” he said, casually. tim is this client of ours. with his twin brother, we’ve represented them in their father’s estate.
tim is in his late 30’s, mentally ill, physically ill, on disability, very few social skillz, no known friends, no known lovers, no hobbies. both of his parents, who cared for him his whole life, are dead. he has nobody except his twin brother, who he argues with endlessly. he hears voices. he thinks everyone is out to get him. he’s been institutionalized countless times, to no avail.
so, tim is coming in next week to chat about suicide with my boss, who seems to think the whole thing is rather amusing. he’s got a pretty caustic sense of humor, so i don’t know if he’s just saying that behind closed doors. (adding to the complicatedness of this situation, one of our other clients DID kill himself 2 weeks ago–the son of one of my boss’ close friends. i was the one who had to break the news to him.) i don’t know if he will be more sympathetic when this client is actually in the office. i sure hope so.
but somehow i feel like this is gonna fall on me, because i’m the only one in the office with a shred of fucking empathy. how do i convince this man not to kill himself? is that even a good idea, if he truly feels like he has nothing to live for? i have talked people out of killing themselves before, but they were people i loved deeply, who had other stuff going for them. i don’t love this man, although i do find him mildly amusing & endearing in a strange way. but seriously, seriously, what do i do?
Filed under: destroy that tape loop, ne'er-do-wells, pittsburgh, wingnuts, work
okay, before i forget, i want to start this off with the funniest personal ad i’ve seen in a while. it was culled from “out”, not the glossy mag but the pittsburgh gay bar rag. i actually tore it out & tried to scan it in but it, being newsprint, scanned terribly so i’ll just have to re-type:
“preferred tall, blue-eyed, dark-haired, but open, submissive, accomodating white males seeking erotic discipline relationship. and, keyboard players seeking unique lounge act. call (412) xxx-xxxx”
if that’s up anyone’s particular alley, call me and i will supply the number! ha ha ha. people are so strange and interesting sometimes.
anyway. this weekend was weird. after a month or two or a year of manic activity i flipped the calendar to august, nothing written down save sheena’s birthday and “check on garlic” (i have garlic drying in my kitchen). so, i celebrated by sleeping a lot. in a slow motion daze all weekend, which i haven’t snapped out of yet.
ray & i went to the needle exchange in oakland (no, he’s not an IV drug user, he needs syringes for a medical purpose) and it was a really strange and unexpected experience. i’ve been to a lot of odd places in my life but never a needle exchange. there was a man working there with the strangest hair i’ve ever seen–a pregnant junkie asked him if it was “a clown toupee” but he grabbed it and pulled on it hard. “nope! it’s my hair!” he said, cheerfully.
when we approached the building ray said that it looked scary and spooky. i thought he was being silly. but while i was waiting around for ray i asked a worker if they had a bathroom. “we do, but you’re not going to like it,” she warned me. she then led me to a solitary confinement cell. “sorry,” she said, “this used to be a juvenile hall….” it’s weird, considering all the thousands of hours i’ve spent doing solidarity work with prisoners, i’ve never been inside a real jail cell. i couldn’t go into this one. i touched the door handle and shuddered. “i’ll just hold it,” i told her.
i spent the rest of the waiting around time looking at the cinderblocks and feeling the weight of all the lives ruined in this building. i am not sensitive to ghosts but i felt them. i felt all the tears shed and all the misery. nothing could bring me back to my safe present–not book ‘em, not dinner, not a warm bath, not hot buttsex. i strained some muscles at the front of my thigh during the latter and i think some harsh memories were stored there because after that i was just completely dead to the world, just mired in this deep deep sadness that had nothing to do with my present reality.
today at work, my boss asked the young law clerk if he’d found our former client, who we haven’t heard from in a year or so. “i thought he was dead!” young law clerk said. “i have no reason to believe he is dead,” (note: he has been insisting this man is dead for about 2 months) my boss replied. “he’s just….morose. like [ocean] gets sometimes. or like how i get sometimes. he’s morose. he doesn’t want to talk to anyone. we just have to find him, that’s all. he’s out there, somewhere.”
it’s gray out, my empty p.o. box is making me bite my nails, i already hate what i brought for lunch today and i haven’t even eaten it, i need a change. i got to work an hour early today so i could take positive steps to change my life; using the computer and printer for resumes and applications.
in work news, at job #1 we have a new guy who i initially thought might be okay, but he pisses on the toilet seat! totally not okay, ever, if you’re not a quadriplegic or something. also, he revealed yesterday that he’s anti-choice. i think he is going to be the straw breaking the camel’s back when it comes to this job–there are many things going on here that are far worse than working with a douche-y law student, but i think that it’s going to finally be my impetus to leave. i’ve been at this job for 18 months! that’s the longest i’ve held a job since 2000.
in other work news, i am 90% positive that i work with an ex-gay at job #2! i had long since suspected that he was an ex-gay, since he is very gay-acting but mentions his wife frequently. but on saturday i was eavesdropping on a conversation he was having on the phone. he chatted with this client long after he was done giving her the survey, like literally 20 minutes after. i could only hear his side of the conversation, but at one point it went like this, “no……no, i’m married……yeah…….yes, i did that a long time ago, and it cost me, um, a very good friendship, and hurt a lot of feelings, but it just wasn’t me…….i don’t want to be around those people, but unfortunately i have to interact with them when i’m out in the world……..yeah, that behavior is offensive to me.” !!!!!!!!!!!!! i was flabbergasted. totally shocked! i did not think that young-ish, educated people were ex-gays.
incidentally, i am terrified that people think that my boyfriend & i are ex-gays, just because we both look and act fairly gay, yet we’re together. when people learn that he’s trans, it all makes sense, but he passes extremely well and 95% of people–even other trans people–have absolutely no fucking clue. although we are pretty fucking cute and happy and most ex-gay couples are pretty mismatched and miserable. probably nobody thinks that we’re ex-gays and i am just being paranoid, but it’s cause to fret nonetheless.
lately i swing wildly between being madly in love with this city and wanting to grow old here & wanting to leave immediately. i’d say it’s 75% in the first category and 25% in the second.
i am craving garlic today. freshly-chopped and sizzling in a cast iron skillet. just the smell and the sight more than actually eating it. it’s weird.
last night i dreamnt that aaron cometbus came to the zine reading i’m doing on friday and hit on me. he said, “i have to go to this lame-ass hardcore show, but the whole time i’ll be wishing that you were telling me your sweet weird little stories.”
i handed him my zine and said, “you can read this at the hardcore show; it’ll be like i’m there.”
he said, “why don’t you come to the hardcore show with me and then afterwards we can hump each other?”
i said, “let’s cut out the middleman and hump each other now!” so we walked to his house. he lived on negley ave. in pittsburgh and i felt awkward because i was wearing some sort of thing under my clothes that made me look like a big, muscley guy. i woke up feeling kinda crushy, which is weird, because i’ve never had a crush on aaron cometbus before, although i do love his zine.
hi, blog! it’s been a long time. mainly because i am very uninspired by, and bored with, the internet lately. also i am working myself to death. i just worked 22 days in a row and had one day off (spent with my sweet sweet boyfriend, riding our bikes all over pittsburgh and looking at dino bones at the natural history museum and running into nice people and eating cinnamon buns and cooking) and now i’m looking at 17 more days of work before i go to new york. sigh. maybe i’ll get one or two days off thrown in there but i am stressed out & see no end in sight unless i get fired from one of my jobs.
my 27th birthday was one of the best ones i’ve ever had, but i can’t think of an accurate summary.
this morning i got to work and my boss’ wife was struggling to open the door with the wrong key and was yelling a lot. my boss turned to me, when she wasn’t paying attention, and calmly said, “she’s a loon.” after i had opened the door with the correct key, and she stomped in, ranting and raving, he said, “she can’t seem to figure out how to correctly turn a key in a lock. other than that, she’s a fairly good woman. not a very good woman, but a fairly good one.”
one of my best friends is in the hospital and i have a bad feeling about it. i really hope i’m wrong.
cleveland was super-fun. i’ll write more about it when i have the pictures up. for now, i will say it was all about one really good drag show, one really bad drag show, giggling with leah, huge trees, huge meals, telling stories, etc. leah had to go build a set for the play she was in on saturday so i took the bus downtown by myself, read zines at the public library and then walked around in the sunshine, thinking about how much i love exploring new cities & how little i get to do that.
yesterday i came home. the on-board bus bathroom was smeared with shit and there were two men talking loudly about their stupid lives (“my boss, he’s, uh, how do you say, a real weirdo. he likes watching his wife have sex….with other WOMEN!”). i mostly sewed & listened to music & looked out the window & thought about all the lives i could be living. i wonder about you, ohio.
book ‘em was really fun. there was a noted lack of domestic violence, just a whole bunch of new guys who were all really funny and nice. one tall awkward one said to me, with tears in his eyes, “thank you for doing this. it means so much; you don’t even know,” and it was really poignant and sweet and a reminder of why i do this; because i was really starting to doubt my commitment to the cause.
also another guy asked if i was a “goth chick” (while i was wearing bright colors & no makeup) & generally antagonized me (in a flirty way, not in a vicious way) until he found out that i’ve been doing this for 8 years. then he got really nice and friendly and when he left he yelled, “ocean! you a baaaaaaad mamma jamma!” and we slapped fives.
also, there were a whole bunch of earnest young anarchists upstairs listening to a talk about the uprising in bolivia. one of the cons was like, “is that an AA meeting up there?” and amanda said no and explained what it was. later, at the end of the talk, everyone clapped, and the same guy said, “oh, somebody musta earned a chip!” oh, bookem.
[scene: ocean, t. {a fellow 26-year-old. he's a lawyer though, not a secretary like me}, and my boss discuss finding a defendant who's gone awol. this defendant is the same age as ocean and t., which is relevant.]
boss: she’s not in the phone book.
ocean: i don’t think it’s all that weird for someone our age to not be in the phone book, cuz most people our age don’t have land lines. now i have TRIED to get a landline SO HARD, but neither house i’ve lived in has a verizon box, and verizon wants to charge me hundreds of dollars to install one! [facetiously] i think they should be thrilled that someone in the 18-35 age group actually WANTS a land line, and just give me the damn thing!
boss: [semi-facetiously] there you go, complaining about everything again [note: i rarely complain about things in my boss' presence]
me: well, don’t you think it’s stupid that a dying industry is rejecting customers?
boss: [thinks about it] you’d better watch out, or else they’ll renounce your citizenship! you’ll have to go up north, to canada.
========================
also, i am really tired of my current haircut, but i can’t think of a better one. i can think of about ten that would look good if i didn’t have glasses but would look shitty with my big old honking frames. incidentally, i am really fucking tired of glasses, but i think that getting contacts is one of those things i will always talk about and never actually do.
i would just like to announce that, thanks to the magic of the wordpress stats tracker, i have learned that people have found this site by googling the following things: “dancing naked on a bar”, “gayz”, “kastoory” (the name of one of my BFF’s back in new york, probably googling herself. hey girl!), “the future frightens me”, “tape loops for therapy”, “‘hugz for free’ shirt” and “gayz feet video.” wow!
i would also like to announce that literally every street in pittsburgh that i ride my bike down is covered in broken glass. like, literally every one. i’ve covered a decent amount of ground this week–bloomfield, garfield, squirrel hill, oakland and of course good old lawrenceville–and everywhere i go i navigate my tires delicately over a constellation of broken glass. it’s really pretty, but also really nerve-wracking, cuz i really don’t feel like replacing my tires again. i just replaced the back one last spring! and that’s silly to replace them so soon.
i would also like to announce that yesterday, while miserably sitting at a cubicle at job #2 calling people who don’t want to talk to me, i had the revelation that the reason why both my jobs are sucking so hard lately is because it’s the universe kicking my ass & reminding me not to get complacent in my current life. i really loved my primary job for a long time, but now it SUCKS. partially cuz i’m really overworked now [....as i type a blog on company time....] and not really getting any more $$, and partially because my boss is going senile, and partially because i am an aries and the universe punishes us if we EVER, for a second, let ourselves get complacent or rut-like or (gawd forbid) BORING. i don’t think my life is boring, but it’s certainly less exciting than it used to be. i am certainly challenging myself less & i think it is time to make an escape plan. not necessarily from this city, but definitely from this job.
