Cubicle with a View

Money is the only thing that has value. Consequently, only things that yield immediate monetary gain are important. The more immediate, the more important.

Don't worry about the long term, baby. We'll be halfway to Buenos Aires by then.

We were watching "Antiques Roadshow" tonight. How many items that were picked up for $25, $50 have come to be worth tens of thousands of dollars, now that the artistic merit of their creator has finally (many years after burial in a pauper's grave, of course) come to be fully recognized? And why is it that serious material benefit only shows up once the actual creator of the work is long gone?

It pays to be an artist, eventually, but it pays someone else. Not you.

My sisters are artists. Jessie, a concert pianist in Brooklyn, actually manages to scrape out a sparse living at it. Margie, a free spirit in Seattle? Not so much. Jessie is a brilliant musician. And Margie is just a genius: she composes, plays piano and cello beautifully, sketches, paints... and works in a pizza parlor, if she can get work.

I'm the least talented of the three of us by far. And I'm also easily the best off: I have a very comfortable middle-class job with a retirement plan and good health insurance. I guess contentment with mediocrity is more valuable than genius.

My staid government agency employer has recently become a vehicle for a handful of brilliant career climbers, rocketing through on their way to bigger and greater things, leaving decades of bureaucracy swirling in tumult like jetstream in their wake. Our new executive director has recently announced his departure for the next big thing.

He brought an entire new upper-managementourage with him, when he arrived about two years ago, and has fundamentally shaken our tired old agency structure to its roots. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But, having wrenched us off the deeply rutted old path, it seems unfair to leave the people who were contentedly trudging along it to figure out how to convert the maelstroms of change he's stirred up into a productive route forward. What do we do? Hire a batch of new, dynamic visionaries who will rile things up a bit more along the same lines, then probably follow in this guy's footsteps? Or try to forget, try to get back to the way things used to be?

Because the thing is, all the cronies he brought with him, who understand this way of doing things, are all going out with him. It's just like when the Enterprise makes unauthorized first contact with a Stone Age culture because Kirk just HAS to bone the girl in the leopardskin bikini and tosses everything they've come to believe about the universe on its ear, when suddenly the Fleet Admiral is all like "JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK YOU GET BACK TO STARBASE RIGHT NOW" and just like that, poof! they're gone.

And the Stone Age culture is all like, well, shit. Now what?

I was talking about this to my boyfriend tonight, since he also works for the same agency. He was inclined to be hopeful. He suggested that one of the old guard who had not been run off might take back over as the new executive director.

"At least he's an engineer," he said.

Were sadder words ever spoken?

Mind you, I've put in my time with soulless marketing types. When I first started working for this agency (eight years ago (TODAY!)) I looked around me at the freak show of decaying, defective career government employees. I looked at the old-timey phones with the blinking red "hold" lights. I saw the DOS-based mainframe applications. I smelled the cigarette smoke, the microwave popcorn, the Phantom Pharts in cubicle-land. And I said, "Well, you know, at least they aren't soulless marketing types."

What goes around comes around, I guess.

Of Blips and Blobs

You're doing your makeup wrong.

You might think this is not a particularly big deal, but it is. There are so many online articles about the myriad mistakes you are making: your black eyeliner makes you look older, your blush is too dark, your foundation isn't blended properly, your lipstick makes your teeth look yellow, your concealer is caking into the fine lines under your eyes, your mascara is blobby, you're overplucking your eyebrows and OH MY GOD WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO.

These articles are penned by actual Makeup Artists (because makeup is an Art, and without Art, Life is Meaningless) and they should know.

Oh, also, the solutions for these problems only cost $89.50 and are available by clicking on the link in the article.

I guess it's important to believe in your work. Certainly I like to feel that what I do matters, although of course it's all a matter of context. When you consider that the total sum of human endeavors is an imperceptible blip adrift in an infinite void thinly strewn with cosmic dust, even the noble cause of stimulating travel and tourism in Texas seems a little insignificant.

My junk-food reading habit, though, is to scroll down to the comments threads. If only there were some way to harness the incendiary force of online comments! I mean, talk about your sustainable energy source. Figuring that out is an innovation that will make me rich and powerful someday, along with the invention of the toaster you don't have to tip over on its side to get your bagel out.

People get angry about makeup. So very angry. As angry as they get about the George Zimmermann verdict or Obamacare or food stamps or light rail or Wall Street or Wal-Mart or Syria or Auburn's rather spectacular final touchdown yesterday.* And it just seems like such a vast expenditure of energy. Couldn't something useful be done with it?

Not that people shouldn't be angry about injustice or speak out against wrongs, but I'm not sure that yelling at strangers on the internet about lipstick is terribly productive. Certainly not as much so as a good cleansing regimen.

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*I might not know a football from a rhinoceros suppository - and, unlike the rhinoceros, I don't really care - but that was impressive.

Meeting Notes

We have monthly staff meetings at my new job, for our section of 6 people. We're fairly close-knit, so at first I was shocked and horrified by the amount of time allotted to each one: 3 hours, in fact, were given over to the first one I attended.

Hey, remember the panicmonger? I do, sort of. The panicmonger held staff meetings every other week. God help me! how I dreaded them. It got worse after Robbie left, because he and I used to sit next to each other, barely (or not) containing the occasional snicker or smart-ass remark, and greatly bolstering one another's courage. After he was gone, the "pointless fish meetings," as Robbie christened them (for reasons I don't have time to go into right now (but they are excellent reasons)) became much more depressing. Perhaps the worst part of all was that, in addition to hating the meetings and the lavish displays of negativity and mistrust therein, one had also to feel terribly sorry for the poor panicmonger, who, it was agonizingly obvious by this time, just had never figured out something very, very, very fundamental about how to be.

On the bright side, I hear she's pretty much given up staff meetings at this point. But I digress.

Staff meetings at the new job are not agonizing at all, for two important reasons: (1) nobody is looking to blame anybody for anything, and (2) nobody is admonishing anyone for the eight hundred thousand million billion bajillionth time to send time-off requests only via GroupWise reminder notes, NOT calendar appointments, because the panicmonger didn't want her calendar blocked, although she could simply accept an appointment and select the "not busy" option, of which I suspect she is probably unaware; but no, they have to be reminder notes, and be sure to copy your lead worker, and put the time you'll be leaving, the amount of time you'll be out, the kind of leave you're taking, and your name in the subject line, but DON'T use your whole name because it makes the subject line too long and the whole thing won't show up in the panicmonger's calendar when she mouses over it and it will confuse her, so if you have a long name just use your initials, unless you have the same initials as someone else which will also confuse her, in which case you should find some understandable but concise way to shorten your name for her convenience, oh and don't forget to log all your activities in the tracking program and send in a weekly status report and send in a monthly status report and also be sure to sign in and out of Scotland Yard.

Hey, remember Scotland Yard? I don't.

Anyway, staff meetings at the new job do run a bit long, but the reason for this is that they're extremely chatty - a luxury for which everyone is generally too busy unless they've specifically set aside some guilt-free time away from their desks. So our section director gives us an update on what's going on "upstairs" - a real update, too, intelligent and analytical and confidential and, frankly, a little gossipy - and then we take turns going around the table and talking about what we're working on, what kind of issues we've run into, what we're feeling good about, and what we find frankly so boneheaded that we need to spend ten minutes rolling our eyes and groaning in a most satisfying and convivial fashion.

And since we're all in it together, maybe in the next month or two I'll be able to convince them that these otherwise very agreeable staff meetings must be timed not to interfere with my rightful three-martini break. Because they may not snore while walking or have three heads apiece or need information carefully fed to them on a very, very, very, very tiny spoon, but they're still state employees, by God.

Some things shouldn't change.

The Gripping Hand

I honestly cannot believe my new job is in the same agency as the old one.

The bad side of this is that I have been kept too busy, so far, to be able to take regular-length breaks at regular times. And the really bad side of this is that everyone else is so normal, so healthy, so cheerful and intelligent and functional, that I am not sure what I'm going to blog about anymore.

There is no Bubbly Bitching Nonsmoker in the new place; and as of today, there isn't one in the old place either. They've been collecting dirt on her for quite a while - it takes a lot to fire a state employee - and apparently today, the scales tipped over far enough that she was escorted out of the building. By the Sheriff, of all people.

She's something special. I always felt sort of a wary affinity for her. I know she tended to bite, but she had a good sense of humor, and I was usually safe because I tended to stay out of her way. Except for the times Robbie and I were jaywalking to Dominican Joe, standing in the center turn lane, waiting for traffic to pass, and she drove up and we were blocking her way and do you know what? She did not run us over. Not even once. It really seems like that ought to count for something.

Maybe it did. Robbie has been gone for a few months now. I was still there until last Friday. Maybe my leaving was what tipped the balance!

More likely it's just an accident of timing, and the poor panicmonger, who has not yet managed to get a replacement for Robbie in, now has three vacancies to fill. It was suggested at afternoon break today (which I managed to attend by the clever expedient of working through lunch) that the Sheriff is taking a new tack, and plans to eliminate the PM simply by getting rid of everyone who reports to her. So she'd better hurry up and hire some new people, and fast.

If we see the popcorn lady from day before yesterday again, I might send her over.

The Thrill of the Chase

Isn't job hunting fun? As long as you don't have to, of course.

Wending my way along the hike-and-bike trail at lunch today, I remembered how I felt when I first walked there at midday, not quite two years ago, and how everything was new and full of promise and I wasn't worried or upset or unhappy about anything, just dizzy with elation to be out of Corpus and that miserable job. And next thing I knew, without any effort, my life was suddenly full of friends and fun, so it didn't matter that the job itself was fairly dull.

Same trail, same beautiful weather. But it's autumn now, not spring; and all my friends have moved on. I sat in Billy's spot by the water, next to the bat bridge, and watched a very tiny spider carefully negotiating the hairs on my arm for half an hour or so. I was thinking about the things that change on their own with time, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, as opposed to the matters you take into your own hands and change for yourself.

So I updated my resume today. And I applied for a job! Outside the agency! Granted, it was a listing from Monster.com, so I'll probably get bait-and-switched into interviewing for a position as an entry-level porn viewing booth attendant. Well, I've had worse jobs. I'm not looking in Corpus, anyway.

Maybe next week I'll start looking in the real job postings!