Pimpgnosis

I’m supposed to teach tomorrow.

I haven’t signed a contract.

Without a contract, I can’t get a parking pass.

I don’t have keys to the rooms I’ve been assigned.  Nor, for that matter, do I even have a key to the department (it had to be re-keyed recently, due to theft of the master).  This is kind of a problem for someone who teaches in the evening, when most buildings on campus are locked.

The rooms I’ve been assigned (2 rooms, both for the same class, a lecture+lab type situation) are not in the same building.   In a small favor, the powers that be at least put my in two different buildings that are next door to each other.  However, in my experience, this type of situation does tend to encourage students who think they can wander away unnoticed during the break.

They can’t, of course.  Wander away unnoticed, I mean.  I never ceases to amaze me that it apparently amazes them that I actually pay attention to who’s in class and who isn’t.

It goes without saying that there is no secretarial help available to do such routine things as, say, make copies of my syllabus.

I gather, though intuition, that one of the professors in the department has recently gone AWOL.  This professor was supposed to take over teaching a class for someone else, who decided that they’d rather spend the semester ANZAC’ing than respond in a mature manner to a curriculum fight he lost.  This is a problem for many reasons, not the least of which is that it may materially impair the ability of the department to offer a class which it promised, quite explicitly, to a number of students who need it for graduation.

I have a feeling that there is a non-trivial chance I will receive a call tomorrow begging me to take on a second class.  For a variety of reasons I will have to decline this offer, as I have already done twice before.

Sigh.

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I recently found myself saying the following:

“Of course we’ve met before.  Don’t you remember?  You’re my cousin’s wife’s sister’s husband’s college friend’s roommate.  Plus you work out at the same gym as Da Spouse.”

He didn’t remember me.  Not even after that ever-so-clear prompting.

This occurred in the brewpub that now occupies what once was a downtown clothier, at an alumni happy-hour.   While the gentleman to whom I spoke was not actually an aerospace engineer, he does work in Rancho.

I also recently was lucky enough to overhear the following, said in public, before an audience to whom the speaker was pitching quite expensive services of a quite personal nature:

“My wife — a stone BD post-op with a long-term disorder — is Japanese-Brazilian.  And it was really important to us to have a child with an ethnically similar background, since I’m Icelandic.  So we wrote a letter to the universe to find someone who would give us that gift.  When we found a gay Indonesian/South-African guy, we knew our prayers had been answered.”

It’s moments like these, really, that make my undergraduate education absofuckinglutely worth every penny my parents spent.

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Part of what amuses me about my current job is a living the dream of sitting in committee meetings devising strategic plans and action items.

No really.  It amuses me.  Really.

Why, you might ask?

Because I get to see in action things I had heretofore only read about in dry academic articles.  Such as, for instance, Weber’s description of bureaucracy.   Two brief pages, and he nailed my world.  All the things that’ve been written on the subject since then are merely footnotes.

But that’s just the first bit of amusement.  The rest lies in the little things.  Like in applying certain insights from “politics as a vocation” when one is sitting in a committee meeting with 9 other people, 7 of whom are there because they are paid to be, directly or no.  And the remaining two  of whom are there for reasons that are unclear.  But since Weber posited only two choices — money, or zealotry — the lack of clarity may shortly be resolved.  Especially since real zealotry is rare, and usually pretty obvious.

Or, in getting called into a meeting with a legislative staffer who may or may not have Asperger’s, but who definitely wouldn’t meet one’s eyes.  And who stated flat out that a certain research report made him “sad, especially on my 10 year wedding anniversary.”  [what does one _say_ to such a statement?  Honestly?  Like I should apologize for my research findings, that I'm sorry they hurt your feelings?  Really?]

Gor, it reminds me of my parents’ point that the Building changed with term limits, and not for the better, what with every jenny-come-lately appointing their campaign manager to be her legislative consultant.  And so with all these fresh-faced nobodies knowing jack-all about legislation, having to rely upon lobbyists to write the language, and permanent civil service to explain the issues — just as they did two years ago with the previous staffer who warmed that particular chair — and all so that we can make sure someone whose sole job it is to write legislation doesn’t force us to do stupid shit.

Such as, just as a “for instance,” the legislation that led to the particular report that led to this particular meeting.

Because nothing is so circular as bureaucracy.

Now where is that TPS report?

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So, let’s see.  In the Republication primary we have, in rough order of likelihood of being nominated for the preznitcy:

1.) A Mormon.  Not just a Mormon, but a Mormon who spent his life buying companies, bending them over, raping the shit out of them, and then leaving them for bankruptcy.   Oh, and did I mention he was a Mormon?  Not that that matters — I mean, I don’t take it personally at all that he is a paid-up member of an institution that has spent the last decade trying by every means possible to destroy my family.  It doesn’t mean one whit to me that he’s a Mormon — what I object to is the vulture capitalism.  Fucking Mormon.

2.) A Bircher.  Which means, quite specifically, that he is not just a racist, but a man that published newsletters advocating the kind of anti-Semitism that slides quickly into apparently serious discussions of the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Illuminati, the gold standard, and flouridation.

3.) A frothy mixture of cum, fecal matter, and hard-core Catholicism.  Who — oh, right! — campaigned actively, in a state that recently legalized gay marriage, basically on the position that felons are preferable to gay men as parents.  No really, that’s pretty much the sum total of his stated policy commitments at the moment.

4.) A bobble-headed amphibian who so far as I can tell is only in it to amp up his speaking fees, the better to keep his plasticine 3rd wife in Tiffany trinkets until such time as he needs to trade her in for a newer, younger model.   A bobble-headed amphibian who so likes the sound of his own voice that he will say pretty much anything to get airtime.  A bobble-headed amphibian who, so far as he has any religious principles at all, is a practicing Catholic.

5.) Another fucking Mormon.   Best known as the last Republican on the planet willing to work for the current president.  For which he was promptly called out as a race-traitor, and so resigned.  Because he learned Orville Faubus’s lesson real quick.

So, let’s see, that leaves us with a line-up of two Mormons, two Catholics, and one Bircher.  Given that we’re talking about the Republican Party here, my money’s on the Bircher.

God help us all.

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I say “how high?”

I am — or was — responsible for the delivery of a document to my (ahem) not-quite-employer (NQE) on the last day of the year just previous.

That day happened to fall on a Saturday.  Which is sort of beside the point, except when you consider the nature of my NQE, and specifically the fact that they happen to employ legions of people whose specific job it is to consider just such eventualities.  But I digress.

This document had to undergo, quite literally, 6 layers of review.  Not including proof-reading and formatting.   And given that some of those layers of review involved multiple requests for changes and edits, we are well into the double-digits in terms of how many times I had to change the document.

Which is why it should not be a surprise that when the time came for the final signature, it came at 11:00 a.m. on the day before the day that the document was due.

That was not, however, the end of my adventure.   The final signature came with (I wish I were joking) one final request for an edit (one which inserted something I knew to be a grammatical error, but who am I to judge?).  That taken care of, I had to make copies (in triplicate!), deliver one set of copies internally, and then hike across town to my NQE and deliver another set of copies.

Well, seven copies, since we’re being technical here.

Actually, seven copies of three different documents.  So, 21 documents.  Which I checked, and re-checked, to make sure that I had everything properly collated.

Sadly, it turns out on this particular day, my NQE was locked up tighter than my grandmother’s pocketbook.

Happily, one of the bennies of being bright, white, and upper-middle class is that you can, without too much trouble, talk yourself into locked buildings.

Sadly, that doesn’t change the fact that damn near no-one was in their office that day.  Everyone had done the Sactown thing and gotten the fuck out of dodge for the holiday.  All except for one fellow, who suggested that I simply slip my document under the doors of those slated to receive them.

Happily, I could do this for three of my recipients.  Because, as it turns out, not all members of my NQE are created equal, and one measure by which you can tell is the width of the space underneath their doors.  Plush carpet = no space for slipping of documents.  This is a problem when you actually have three documents to slip under the door, two of which are spiral-bound.

Most happily, the three to whom I could deliver the document are (fingers crossed) the ones I most needed to worry about.

The rest I hope to sweet talk first thing Tuesday morning.

I leave it entirely to the reader to determine, according to whatever metrics they choose, whether to laugh, cry, or be left utterly indifferent at the vision of yours truly reduced to the expediency of shoving spiral-bound documents under locked doors as a condition of meeting a deadline that everyone — including, most specifically, my immediate manager — acknowledges to be essentially arbitrary.

I leave it to fate to determine whether or not that deadline is, in fact, arbitrary.  Since, as readers of this blog may or may not be aware, a gentleman I shall henceforth refer to as Grima Wormtongue is busily looking for any slim thread of an excuse to destroy my professional reputation.

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…consisted of cashing in my accumulated Amex rewards points for a set of 8 Riedel tumblers, plus 4 white wine stemmed glasses.

Because (a) what the fuck else am I going to do with my reward points?, (b) they were “20% off!” — which is to say, still grossly overpriced, especially considering the annual fee I pay to be in the rewards programs, and (c) actually I’ve always wanted to own some Riedels.

There.  I said it.  Yes, I’ve always wanted to own some Riedels.

Just because I’ve read Kapital, and understand “commodity fetishism,” doesn’t mean I’m not vulnerable to the blandishments of the capitalist system.

And just because I know somebody who’s a wine critic, and just because, yes, I’ve broken a glass (okay, two. Whatever) at the house of somebody who owns something like 5 full sets of glassware specifically dedicated to different varietals, and just because I might or might not enjoy their company, and just because I might or might not respect them as, you know, people, doesn’t mean that I don’t totally covet their glassware.

Totally.  Covet.

And when the blandishments of the capitalist  system involve the promise of an even more effective mechanism for getting totally shit-faced while relishing one’s class position, it’s hard not to say “Yes, barkeep.  Pour me another of that there poison.”

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a.) The gorgeous cinematography.

b.) Two words: shoulder pads.

c.) The sexy synthesizer music.

d.) Edward James Olmos makes an origami unicorn.

e.) The fact that when the sexy synthesizer music comes on, the subtitles say “sexy synthesizer music.”

f.) The throwaway references to hundertwasserhaus and William Blake.

g.) The whole thing is a mash note to a young, gorgeous, Harrison Ford.

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I went to a party this evening.  It was the usual East Sac nightmare.

A nice company-built one-story craftsman, surely intended for some foreman at the cannery.  Currently inhabited by a liberal evangelical from the East Bay and a tennis coach from Placerville.

It was crowded.  A math teacher from St. Hope with a clip-on tie was blocking access to the baked brie.  Four sandwich girls were blocking access to the brownies.  The only person of color was Asian, and so far as I could tell he never said a blessed word.

The Placervilleian brought her parents.   It is always a little odd to drink hard liquor with foothill gentry.  They’re on the wrong side of almost every political question I care about, of course.  But they’re always so bloody polite when I introduce my husband.  It’s discombobulating, to say the least.  Especially when they foist their _clearly_ bottom-shelf wine on you (bottled in Nevada City is never a good sign, no more so than when the vineyard in question is in Amador County).

I can’t decide if my favorite conversation was the one about gunnery range practice.  As in, what targets were favored, whether handguns or shotguns, and what hand position to use (vertical or, a la gangsta, horizontal).

For the record, it was the evangelicals, not the foothill gentry, who were trading tips about how to wield handguns.

Alternatively, there was the conversation with the delightfully drunk straight guy, who told me more than once how he wouldn’t want to sit on the bottle of tequila out of which he was pouring me shots.

He seemed…rather emphatic about this.

I had forgotten how totally bizarre it is to flirt with drunk straight guys.  Especially bizarre when they are fondling glass phalluses of booze so realistically penis-like that they basically have to circumsize the thing in order to access the liquor.

But consider the context: every woman at this party (except the host) was in heels.  Sometimes even in knee-high leather boots.  Every woman was wearing makeup.  Every woman, perforce, looked old.  And jaded.  Especially the Placervilleian tennis coach. Much like I imagine Susan Pevensy to look, actually.

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Day 1.

So I went to a meeting with my union.

It was a disaster.  From start to finish.  Minute 0 to minute…let’s see: 60X24X2 = 2880?

Yeah.  All the way through to minute 2880.

It started, predictably, by flying into LAX.

And then not actually leaving the airport.

Silly me, I thought that staying at the “Westin LAX” meant staying in, I don’t know, Westminster at least.  Just like, say, staying at the Marriot Downtown Sacramento means that you’re actually sleeping in Rancho Fucking Cordova.

Silly me.

It turns out that staying at the Westin LAX means, quite precisely, that you might as well be sleeping on the goddamn runway.

So.  Set the scene: I get out of the complimentary hotel shuttle.  In front of the de rigeur fountain and porte cochere.

Porte cochere is such an empty term.  Especially when trying to describe the asphalt wasteland of dramatic water features, multi-colored lighting, perfunctory rain shelter, and blaring “adult contemporary” music that confronted me when I alighted (alit?) from the panel truck that took me all of 1 mile from the terminal to the hotel.

Sadly, the porte cochere was simply an appetizer to the main course of horrors that awaited.

I checked in, walked toward the escalator, and had to fight my way through a crowd of ever-so-clearly desparate-looking middle-aged people, dressed in the kind of polyester blend “designer label” outfit one buys off the rack at TJ Maxx, aggressively mixing in the hotel bar.

They were not there for my union meeting.

No, no they were not.  They were there for a conference on how to make “profitable, persuasive, presentations” that pack “power and passion,” not to mention “confidence, character, and charisma,” all by teaching you the concept of “‘critical thinking’.”

“Critical thinking” was in quotes in the original sign.

When did “critical thinking” collapse into alliteration?  Do people actually pay money for this?  And when was it, precisely, that people who make their living in sales began spending their evenings drinking white wine spritzers in hotel bars, chatting up bottle blonds who probably think that the American Dream consists of leaving Redlands forever so they can live in a condo in Manhattan Beach and drive a Honda CRX? Was it always ever thus?

You perceive, perhaps, that I already had a bad attitude.

After depositing my luggage in my room, and determining that my suite, in fact, overlooked a runway, I decided to find something to eat.

Now, it is not exactly impossible to find food on West Century Boulevard at 9 o’clock on a Friday night.  However, it does require a willingness to partake in certain forms of impromptu urban street theatre. Such as one finds in a fast food restaurant, listening to a 5’2 Latina break-up with her 6’4 black boyfriend because, and I quote, “I just have to pursue my dreams, you know?”

Did I mention they were both wearing Pepperdine t-shirts?   It was as I was determining this that the shortie Snookie-wannabe turned to me and said “what’re you lookin’ at?”

I am thankful that her tall gentleman friend was better bred than her.  Among other reasons, it gave me a chance to concentrate on the other conversation going on, between three porcelain-skinned, orthodontically perfected, 22-year olds sitting in the booth next to me.  Wearing painted-on jeans like they used to sing about in country songs, and torn mesh tops like you see in the fashion mags at the check-out stand in the grocery story.  Talking about whose time-share they were going to visit next: Jenny’s family’s place in Croatia?  Or Kurt’s step-mom’s beach house in St. Bart’s?

Who are these people? Where on earth do they come from?  And what the fuck were they doing in the Subway on West Century Boulevard?

I ordered two extra chocolate-chip cookies, went back to my hotel, and went to bed.

Day 2.

After eating breakfast in the greek deli next to the Subway — after all, I was on per diem, and my union ain’t going to plump for no $14 continental breakfast, let me tell you — I went back for a whole day of workshops.

I will spare you the gory details, except for this: in the afternoon, we listened to a (quite good, actually) speech by our international president, asking us to come up with some ideas about what we want the world to look like in the future. Which is to say: If we could remake America tomorrow, how would we do it?

It has been a long time since someone asked me to dream up a utopia.  It’s been, well, since freshman year of college.

A long time.

Long enough that I am ready to recognize that my ideas then — which largely centered around competitive secondary school sports — were, shall we say, self-centered.  Shallow, perhaps. Maybe even… utterly pathetic. The kind of musings that one might expect from someone who has always been a year behind in terms of physical development, and who — of course! — assumes that this somehow translates into a utopian program for world hegemony.

I take it as a small but substantial mark of my personal character development that I have moved on, since then, to other utopian programs of world hegemony.  Programs not so centered around such…germanic ideas of physical culture.

This is a perhaps long-winded way of saying that when the international president of my union asked me, personally, to engage in day-dreaming about a better-world tomorrow, I was pleased and excited to do so.

That is, until I heard the things that my fellow union members had to say.

Let me ask you: if you could remake the world tomorrow, how would you do it?

It’s a bracing question, when you think about it.  And to be fair, some of my fellow members came up with some perfectly liberal answers: free college education, no crime, no hunger, no war, a clean environment.  The standard stuff of which policy papers are made, policy papers which the Brookings Institute has spent 50 years peddling.

Sadly, however, that was outweighed by the astonishingly narrow-minded conservatism of the rest of my working-class brethren and sistren.  Who, when they think about a better tomorrow, think in terms of some chimerical 1950′s America: a strong manufacturing sector, when “everybody has a home,” there is “no unemployment”, plus “a real meritocracy,” and “gas is $0.25/gallon”, not to mention that everything is “made in the U.S.A.”

And then there were the people who wanted to abolish the electoral college, institute a flat tax, or better yet get rid of taxation altogether.

This last left me breathless.  I belong to a public sector union, among whom are activists who wish to eliminate taxes.

Perhaps this was one of the many, many people — by far the majority — who when asked to think of a better tomorrow, spoke in one way or another about retirement.  Because that, evidently, will make the world a better place for everybody.

And this when they weren’t misspelling words: nutrician.  The massis.  nuetrality.  Illiminate. Persuit of equility.

Or suggesting that we resurrect prison work gangs.  And while we’re at it, chain up welfare recipients and make them clean up trash on the highways.

This is the vanguard of the working class in America.

God help us all.

Evening, Day II.

Once again, I fled.  I texted a friend and asked for a restaurant recommendation “within a cab-ride of LAX.”  This person — who shall remain nameless, as what occurred was no fault of his — suggested two places, one of which was a mere 5 miles away.  In need of a thorough airing-out — especially after the heavy lunch buffet — I decided to walk.

This was, in a phrase, A Big Fucking Mistake.

It turns out that while 5 miles is not that far as the crow flies, it is a different matter when that is the distance between, say, the entrance to LAX and downtown El Segundo.

They look so close on Google maps.

And yet, and yet.  Really they are separated by the kind of wasteland filmed in a thousand documentaries, the kind of desolation detailed in countless pop-sociology papers by the likes of Mike Davis.  That 5 miles, I discovered, contains not just the corporate campuses for Raytheon and Northrup-Grumman (who knew they still had offices in LA?), a county jail (we really were in Davis country), but an impressive Chevron refinery, and the Los Angeles Air Force Base (again, who knew?).

All in a mere 5 miles.  Which I walked.  Dumbass me.

What bothered me was not that I was in any real danger of being mugged. After all, in a hike of 5 miles I passed fewer than 6 people on the sidewalks, two of whom were pushing a baby buggy (!?!).  Instead it was the less-real, but nonetheless vividly imagined, danger that if I were mugged and killed, they wouldn’t find my body for years.  And even then it would be simply what was left after the coyotes and the kangaroo rats had gotten to me.

That and the fact that the utility polls were pasted with signs advertising “free jail cell phones.”

What does that even mean?

I made it to the restaurant in El Segundo — the downtown of which is quite cute, by the way.  Bought and paid for by Chevron, of course, but with ready money at a time when these things mattered architecturally.

Anyway, the restaurant.

It was fine.  Nouvelle Lebanese, as far as I could tell.  So, lots of things with lentils and peppercorns.  Plus the latest faddish focus on “seasonal” dishes — which in this case meant grilled watermelon with a balsamic reduction, and then fig cheesecake for dessert.  A decent wine list.  Acceptable coffee. And a very nice maitre’d who ordered me a cab.

$17, for the record.  That’s what my 5-mile walk saved me, at the end of the day.  For the privilege of which I got to pretend I was Philip Marlowe, replay certain scenes from Salton Sea in my head, and obsessively text Da Partner to let him know I was still alive.

It was almost enough to make me forget the fox-radio listening vanguard of the people back at the Westin.

But it didn’t really matter.

By the time the hotel pulled up at the porte-cochere I was already feeling the grumbling in my stomach.  A grumbling which was not stanched by a double dose of alka-seltzer, and so had to be remedied by that time-tested technique: tasting the communion wafer of one’s index finger and praying at the alter of the porcelain goddess.

After which I did what anyone else would’ve done after tossing one’s cookies in an 8th floor suite of an airport hotel: I went down to the open bar of the union “celebration” and proceeded to get blind drunk on free chardonnay while my president jiggled to “she’s a brick house” on the dance floor.

There are times in my life when I seriously wonder if I could ever just make this shit up and save myself the hangover.

The answer, in case you were wondering, is no.  The hangover is required.

After 6 glasses of rotgut chardonnay, it turns out that the hangover is required.

Which is sad.

Not as sad as talking up some jackass from FTB who is a true believer in…something.  Unionism.  Or the abolition of political parties. Or some 6 point-program that will eliminate corruption within the union and bring light and peace and peaches and ponies to all and sundry. Because 6-point programs are what makes the world go ’round, right?

Right?

Oh.

Really?

Really not so much?

Darn.  That’s  damn shame.  Because…and this is a tad shameful to confess, I bought my new-found friend a glass of chardonnay just on the basis of his 6-point plan.

Or maybe he bought me the glass of chardonnay, I forget which.

It doesn’t really matter, as I blacked out around that point. Embarrassing to admit, but there it is.

No, really.  I forget what happened at the hotel bar which a mere 24 hours previously had been hosting bottle blonds from Manhattan Beach chatting up tall, thin, lightly complected gentlemen who very well might have played forward on the Carson High bball team.  Or maybe just know that being tall and well-groomed and showing up at sales conferences is a good way to pick up not-too-particular white chicks.

All I remember is waking up the next morning with a pounding head, without my cell phone, and without the sweatshirt I borrowed from a fellow union member.

Thankfully my man with the 6-point plan still had both, which saved me some dough and a very embarrassing conversation.

You know, I kind of wished I had a nice wind-up for this post, but I don’t.  It’s…just a hangover.  I did confirm that no-one in my union ever wants to meet at that hotel again.  But that’s neither here nor there, given that the decision is really driven by (a) who’s got a contract, and (b) offers competitive group rates.

Here’s…maybe to hoping that I haven’t done too much damage to my reputation in the union.  Or something.

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Why is that when I go to a performance in San Francisco, I run into people I know in the audience?

This has happened on more than one occasion.

Why is that when I go to a performance in Sacramento, I only ever know people on stage?

I can’t quite figure out what this says about social networks.

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