As I mentioned in an earlier post, employment has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been looking semi-seriously for a job for a couple months now, and the grind was getting old – until Thursday, when I got two job offers in the same day. At first, I had a hard time deciding between the two – good problem to have, I know – but, in the end I just went with the one that “felt” better in my gut. The downsides are: 1) I’m going to be working with an off-shore development team, which means I’ll be working until around 7pm most days. Not a huge problem, but it does cut into family time a little bit. 2) I’m sticking with project management, even though I swore I was going to take a break from it. I think it’ll make my transition back into the working world a little easier, though, because I’ll be doing something familiar. 3) It’s a longer commute than the other job would have been, but since I won’t start until 10am, and it’s a reverse commute, anyway, it probably won’t be a big issue. 20 – 30 minutes. Manageable. 4) I won’t be able to sit around all day and read, write, think about writing, stalk other blogs, etc. That’s the thing I’m going to miss most. But, that doesn’t come with a paycheck, so back to work I go. Who knows, maybe I’ll get some interesting material to write about, as I’ll have a whole new cast of characters to work with. I start on the 19th, so I have two weeks of freedom left. I’m going to try to make the most of them!
Author: eastbaywriter
First Lines
One of the exercises in Writing Life Stories, by Bill Roorbach, is to write down the first lines of a ton of books so you can analyze them, and look at why they work. Below are some first lines from some of my books that are within arm’s reach of my desk.
Gut Symmetries, by Jeanette Winterson.
First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.
This sentence reads to me like classic Winterson. The lack of punctuation and repetitious phrasing creates a rushing, falling forward, feeling of things growing smaller and smaller until you reach the smallest thing and inside it is something larger than everything that led up to it. The sense of spiraling motion and paradox startled and hooked me. I have yet to read this book, but after doing this exercise, it will jump high up on my list.
Typical American, by Gish Jen.
It’s an American story: Before he was a thinker, or a doer, or an engineer, much less an imagineer like his self-made-millionaire friend Grover Ding, Ralph Chang was just a small boy in China, struggling to grow up his father’s son.
While this sentence contains little drama, it tells me the story has the global theme of son-trying-to-live-up-to-dad’s-expectations. It also sets the stage for the journey of Ralph Chang, and introduces a character that seems quirky simply based on his name – Grover Ding. Hard to take seriously anyone with the surname of Ding.
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.
This simple first line instantly frames the story as a remembrance, possibly a dark remembrance based on the description of the weather. It also makes clear the narrator will experience something very significant at the age of twelve, and as a reader, I want to know what that is.
Still Alice, by Lisa Genova.
Alice sat at her desk in their bedroom distracted by the sounds of John racing through each of the rooms on the first floor.
This sentence simply sets a scene, and although I did continue to read this book and enjoyed it in the end, this first line had no big impact on me at all. I can visualize the scene, so it is effective in achieving that and introducing two main characters, but it doesn’t scream, “Keep on reading!”
The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson.
It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock.
This sentence sets the historical period of the book, while introducing a quirk the reader doesn’t expect to be associated with a figure like Napoleon. The image of Napoleon having people working around the clock to serve him fits, but the reference to chicken passion adds a unique twist and generates curiosity for the reader – at least when that reader is me.
I wrote down (or typed, to be more accurate) many more first lines than these today, but in the interest of NOT writing an overwhelming amount of information on this subject, I started with five. I’ll post more another time. What are some of your favorite first lines? Or, if you don’t have any off the top of your head, open up a couple books and jot them down – what do they do for you?
Fragments of memory
With my latest obsession of reading books by writers about how to write memoir, I’ve stumbled upon one that’s a little different than most of what I’ve been reading. Writing Life Stories, HOW TO MAKE memories into MEMOIRS, ideas into ESSAYS, and life into LITERATURE, by Bill Roorbach with Kristen Keckler, PhD offers much of the same advice as other books, but comes with a different style of writing prompts and “exercises.” When I finish the stack of books I’m reading, I’ll make a post comparing them all, but for now, I’ll comment only on the first major exercise presented in Writing Life Stories, which I now intend to repeat many times.
Excercise 1: Mapmaking
Please make a map of the earliest neighborhood you can remember living in. Include as much detail as you can. Who lived where? What were the secret places? Where were your friends? Where did the weird people live? Where were the friends of your brothers and sisters? Where were the off-limit places? Where did good things happen? Where did you get in trouble?
I’m not a very visual person, so I wasn’t sure what this exercise would do for me, but I was shocked at some of the random things that came back to me as I sketched the earliest neighborhood I remembered. First, I can hardly say I remembered the neighborhood. I was only 5, and my brain doesn’t seem to have been able to recognize space outside the main intersection our house sat on. We didn’t live there for long, so most of my memories were fragments, single moments in time. Exercise 2 is to tell a story from your map. I’m going to dive in right here, so this may not come out sounding like a story, since my mind only retained bits and pieces, a little out of context, not connected by much other than the setting.
The house we rented was across the street from a tavern. The door opened on the kitchen, where I see my grandmother making hot cereal for us for breakfast. When she asked what she should bring us to eat that morning, we’d said “Cocoa Puffs!,” thinking we’d be able to sneak one past Mom and fill our little bodies with sugar to kick off our day. She meant to indulge us, but somehow mistakenly settled on chocolate Cream of Wheat. It could’ve been worse. It could’ve been plain Cream of Wheat.
The street in front of our house is the street I learned to ride my bike on. I remember the training wheels, riding barefoot, relatives hollering encouragement as I took on this classic childhood challenge.
Running around barefoot in the grass between our house and the neighbors, I stepped on a honey bee who immediately took umbrage and stung the bottom of my small foot. I screamed my head off, paralyzed, with one foot in the air, until someone I didn’t know scooped me up and ran me to my back door to hand me off to whoever was home.
There was a kid that lived around a corner and down another street that couldn’t say the word “towel” correctly. She insisted it was “tolow,” and I never was able to convince her she was wrong.
Behind the bar across the street was a baseball diamond and a small playground. I see two kids on the teeter totter – one bigger than the other. When the older kid descended hard, the smaller kid flew over his head, right off the teeter totter, like something out of Tom & Jerry.
At a birthday party when I turned five, a little girl put our kitten in a dresser drawer because he was so little she was afraid he’d get lost. It took us a day to find him.
One day after school, I came home and gave my mother her wisdom teeth in the little plastic box the dentist provided. She looked at me with utter confusion. “What are you doing with these?,” she asked. “I took them to school for show and tell.”
When the babysitter told us in the afternoon we had to go take a nap, we dutifully went upstairs to bed. We laid around for a while, bored, not able to fall asleep, but we weren’t allowed to get up again until we’d napped. When I heard her coming up the stairs to check on us, I hung over the edge of the top bunk and whispered down to my sister, “Hurry. Close your eyes. Pretend you’re asleep.” She didn’t get it. Five minutes after we were checked on, I crawled out of bed and headed back downstairs. My sister was stuck in our room until she actually fell asleep, sometimes for a whole afternoon.
We had a small playroom at the top of the stairs, mom’s bedroom on one side, ours on the other. I see the ragged-edged holes punched through black construction paper for the Lite Brite. I feel the wobbly nausea from a long turn on the Sit-n-Spin. I remember fumbling with the nylon bands on the Loop N Loom so we could make garishly colored hot pads for every adult we knew.
My sister never flushed the toilet after she went to the bathroom. One day, my uncle, who lived with us, heard her flush, and thought it odd. She’d grabbed a handful of candy from the kitchen and was hiding in the bathroom eating it, flushing one wrapper at a time.
Las Vegas
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. That’s the party line, but some of my random trips to Sin City were in my mind lately, so I thought I’d toss a few thoughts out here. I’ve been to Vegas a number of times, for a number of different reasons. Conferences, work assignments, pleasure trips with friends, and an odd semi-family reunion with my grandparents and mother. Each experience was quite different. Don’t worry, they’re all tame stories.
At a developers’ conference, I spent more time than I like to admit actually attending the conference sessions. There are only two things I remember that weren’t work related. One, I dragged an Indian co-worker to the Star Trek casino at the Las Vegas Hilton. Sadly, the Star Trek experience is no longer, but I thought it was the best thing ever when I first visited. Who can resist the slot machines activated by hand motions or the soothing blue and purple haze that defied the standard casino assault of horrific bright white lights everywhere? My Indian friend indulged me, but being from India, Star Trek wasn’t to him what it was to me, having grown up with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Two, I went on a helicopter ride with another co-worker at night where we cruised at such a slow speed I was convinced we’d simply drop out of the sky any moment. I’m not a fan of flying in general, and the two times I have been in helicopters, I’d have tried to climb up to the ceiling if I weren’t buckled in, just to be a slight bit further from the point of impact if we crashed.
Many years ago, I went to Vegas because my grandparents and my mother and then step-dad were going to be there. My grandpa used to go to Vegas every year for a sportsman’s show. It was a business related trip, so they got to write off practically everything they did. For years, my grandparents had a big glass vase on a shelf that was full of quarters. Every quarter they got back in change from some random purchase went into the jar – it was their gambling money jar. My grandparents are thrifty. They never had much money to spare, but I think Las Vegas was my grandma’s favorite place to go. I don’t know if she actually went anywhere else outside the immediate Midwest, now that I think about it. She loved the slots. She generally stuck to the penny and nickel slots, and she was disapproving as slot machines became more modernized and you could spin by simply pressing a button. Pulling the handle was what it was all about, and she thought the buttons took the fun out of it. More than once, she won enough at the slots to practically pay for their entire trip.
It was on this trip that I found what is still my favorite casino. Slots-O-Fun. The name alone gets it points in my book. This place is a complete dive of a casino situated next to Circus Circus and across the street from The Riviera, which is where my grandparents always stayed, even as it declined and became a pretty crummy hotel. I’m a fan of most things dive-y, except, of course, hotels. Dive bars and dive diners rank high on my list, as does this dive casino. Slots-O-Fun is particularly great on weeknights because it’s not so busy and all the table games are much cheaper than anywhere else on the strip. Who can argue with quarter roulette? I spent hours and hours at a roulette table with my mother one night, and walked away a few hundred dollars ahead. Not bad for a quarter table.
A few years ago, I went with my partner to Las Vegas for a weekend, ahead of a work assignment I had for the following week. It was one of the most relaxing and enjoyable weekends I’ve had, even surrounded by the steady bombardment of screeching slot machines. We saw Love, the Cirque de Soleil show set to Beatles music, and it was amazing. I highly recommend it to anyone who is even slightly a Beatles fan. My uncle turned me into a die-hard when I was only a kid, so it was heaven to me. We rode the roller coaster at New York, New York. We went to the Fine Art Gallery at the Bellagio. We stayed until closing at a Piano Bar where we had to pay $20 apiece just to get a seat. I blew $20 more bribing the piano guy to sing Bon Jovi so I could scream it at the top of my drunken lungs. I hadn’t been dating my partner for very long yet, and she had to head back home before I did. She left me a note scribbled on tiny pieces of paper from the hotel’s notepad telling me how much fun she’d had – it was during that trip that we both stepped over the line from dating to being unable to bear time apart from each other. I still carry that note in my computer bag.
Anyone else have some Vegas stories to share?
The Guatemalan
I used to work with a girl whose family was from Peru. She’s a good friend, and although none of us still works at the marketing agency, we are all still in close touch. All includes grass-phobia girl, and some others I have yet to write about. We had a number of hazing rituals when new employees joined the company, one of which was convincing the newbie that the Peruvian was really from Guatemala (or occasionally, another Central or South American country). It drove her nuts, which just provided us with more fuel for the game. Some of us were more convincing liars than others, though. More than once, we ran a marketing campaign that targeted Hispanics, and thus required all copy to be translated to Spanish. We were too cheap to hire a real translator, and though the Peruvian speaks fluent conversational Spanish, she didn’t trust her formal or written Spanish enough to translate for us. So, she enlisted her grandmother. Another example of selling capabilities we didn’t actually have to clients if they only asked is here.
Once I was on a phone call with a software developer working on one such campaign. He was no longer a newbie – he had probably been working with us for at least a year, maybe more. On the call, he expressed his concern that not only were we taking advantage of an employee’s poor grandmother, we were having someone whose native language was Portuguese do our Spanish translations. I laughed, thinking he was just perpetuating the “Peru = Guatemala = Other Hispanic Country” joke. He didn’t laugh back. He thought the Peruvian was really from Brazil. I laughed again, still thinking he was pulling my leg, but no. He was dead serious. I corrected him and said, she really is from Peru and her grandmother really does speak real Spanish. He argued with me, and said, no, she was from Brazil. It took some cajoling, but when I found out who’d told him she was from Brazil, it all fell into place. It was the best liar we had in the company, and he’d absolutely convinced software guy that she was from Brazil. Liar guy had a way of working lies into practically every element of his work, and he always got away with it. He’s the guy who should’ve been fired long ago, but outlasted all of the rest of us. Software guy swore he would never talk to liar guy ever again when I finally convinced him Peru was really her country of origin. Miserable as that job was, I sure do miss some of the hijinks.
Typical American
As promised last Monday, here again is a bit of writing from a book I enjoyed immensely. This is a selection from the first chapter of Typical American, by Gish Jen, a wonderful novel about American immigration that is unlike any other. Her imagery is stunning, and the story itself is full of comic tragedy. Enjoy!
On the way to America, Yifeng studied. He reviewed his math, his physics, his English, struggling for long hours with his broken-backed books, and as the boat rocked and pitched he set out two main goals for himself. He was going to be first in his class, and he was not going home until he had his doctorate rolled up to hand his father. He also wrote down a list of subsidiary aims.
1. I will cultivate virtue. (A true scholar being a good scholar; as the saying went, there was no carving rotten wood.)
2. I will bring honor to the family.
What else?
3. I will do five minutes of calisthenics daily.
4. I will eat only what I like, instead of eating everything.
5. I will on no account keep eating after everyone else has stopped.
6. I will on no account have anything to do with girls.
On 7 through 10, he was stuck until he realized that number 6 about the girls was so important it counted for at least four more than itself. For girls, he knew, were what happened to even the cleverest, most diligent, most upright of scholars; the scholars kissed, got syphilis, and died without getting their degrees.
He studied in the sun, in the rain, by every shape moon. The ocean sang and spit; it threw itself on the deck. Still he studied. He studied as the Horizon developed, finally, a bit of skin – land! He studied as that skin thickened, and deformed, and resolved, shaping itself as inevitably as a fetus growing eyes, growing ears. Even when islands began to heave their brown, bristled backs up through the sea (a morning sea so shiny it seemed to have turned into light and light and light), he watched only between pages. For this was what he’d vowed as a corollary of his main aim – to study until he could see the pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge.
That splendor! That radiance! True, it wasn’t the Statue of Liberty, but still in his mind its span glowed bright, an image of freedom, of hope, and relief for the seasick. The day his boat happened into the harbor, though, he couldn’t make out the bridge until he was almost under it, what with the fog; and all there was to hear was foghorns. These honked high, low, high, low, over and over, like a demented musician playing his favorite two notes.
Diversity or lack thereof
I grew up in an area of the Midwest that had little diversity in its population. I don’t think there were any non-white residents of Sheboygan Falls when I lived there. There is a concentrated community of Asians in Sheboygan, though. When the United States fought in Vietnam, our government recruited many Hmong natives from neighboring Laos to assist in a secret part of the war being waged there. Various historical accounts debate what promises were made to the Hmong, but the general consensus was that we would assist these people at the end of the war. When we left, however, we abandoned the Hmong, who were then persecuted, victims of intended genocide by the Vietnamese and Thai. Eventually, we granted many Hmong refugee status in the United States in a feeble attempt to make up for our misdeeds.
This was a people from southeastern Asia, though, and why our government chose to settle them primarily in Wisconsin and Minnesota is absolutely beyond me. Their adjustment to life in the United States would be hard enough – why place them in a harsh and bitterly cold climate that couldn’t be more different than the tropics they came from? Large communities of Hmong were settled in cities like Sheboygan and Kenosha, but they were persecuted for their different cultural beliefs, and viewed as incapable people that were only here to live off of welfare. They were ridiculed openly, and still face discrimination today. I never personally knew any Hmong people, but they do reflect one of my earliest senses of cultural difference living in an area full of white people of mostly European descent.
The only other cultural subgroup I knew of while growing up was the Indian. There is a rich history of Native Americans in Wisconsin, and many of the towns and cities carry Native American names, such as Menominee, Winnebago, Waukesha, Kewaunee, Waupaca, Manitowoc, Ozaukee, and Oconomowoc. There are two rivers with the name Kinnickinnic, which referred to a blend of tobacco and other plants, or literally, “what is mixed” in Ojibwa. Sheboygan has Native American origins as well, though many scholars debate the correct translation of the name. These names roll off my tongue with ease, but whenever I speak them aloud to others that are unfamiliar with them, I often have to repeat myself and even spell the words for people to make sense of the sounds.
I learned at a young age I wasn’t supposed to talk about Indians. I didn’t understand why it might offend someone. There are eleven federally recognized Native American tribes still in Wisconsin, but unfortunately, people like my grandparents and great-grandparents were not far enough removed from their ancestors that they had forgotten the clashes between the white man and the Indian. Still, there has been some effort to preserve sacred burial grounds, and there have been some significant archaeological finds, too. There’s a park on the south side of Sheboygan called Indian Mound Park. It contains effigy mounds created by the Native Americans. They were burial sites, and mounds of earth were built over graves in the shapes of animals the Native Americans held sacred – deer, turtles, panthers. Effigy mounds can be found outside of Wisconsin, but the largest concentration of them is in Southern Wisconsin.
There’s also an old family homestead, owned by the Henschels, which operates a small Indian museum. Their property near the Sheboygan Marsh, once a glacial lake, is the site of Wisconsin’s oldest red ochre burial ground, and dates somewhere between 600 and 800 B.C. The ancient burial site was accidentally discovered when a farmer was plowing and his horses fell through the ground into a big hole. A number of Native Americans were positioned, seated in a circle, and buried together in what was surely an ancient ritual practice. I found I am related to the Henchels by marriage in my genealogy research. The farmer whose horses fell through the hole is the uncle of the husband of my second great-grand aunt. This family is said to have co-existed with the Indians in the mid-1850s, and their museum is full of artifacts found on their property.
Many of the people I knew in Wisconsin took all this rich history for granted. I didn’t begin to appreciate it until I had been away for more than a decade, myself. I never understood all the prejudice against anyone that wasn’t white and German or maybe Nordic, but we were never confronted with much difference, either, so like many people, I didn’t give it a lot of thought until I got older. I realized at a young age that I had a real interest in other cultures. I’d always wanted to travel, but never thought it would be possible. Almost no one I knew of in my family had ever travelled far. It was a big deal to go to out of state – most people rarely leave the immediate area, let alone travel outside the Midwest.
I did eventually figure out how to get out of the Midwest, and I’ve traveled internationally some, though not as much as I’d like. I’ve been to Thailand, Costa Rica, London, and Amsterdam. My genealogy research has set my sights on Eastern Europe. I have had a hard time digging up information on my father’s grandfather, the stowaway from Romania, before his life in the states, so I hope one day to go to the village he came from to see what I can uncover about his family. Of course, living in the Bay Area, I’m surrounded by diversity now, and that’s a good thing.
What were some of your early lessons about diversity? International travel experiences?
Great posts from around the blogosphere
I noticed on Junebug’s blog that on Sundays, she features blog posts she’s enjoyed from around the blogosphere. It seems like a great idea, so I’m going to steal it (thanks, Junebug) – not necessarily for every Sunday, but we’ll see. For this morning, though, here are some of the posts/blogs I’ve enjoyed the most over the past month:
The Wuc – The Wuc’s blog is the funniest thing I’ve read in as long as I can remember. If you’re not already reading this, do not waste another minute of your life without the sarcasm, wit, and brilliance of this hilarious blog. I recommend reading ‘About the Wuc’ and the descriptions of all the characters she writes about under ‘who the wuc is…’ before you dive into the posts. BTW, this is one of those blogs where it is absolutely worth your time to dig into the older posts. You’ll be doubled over and addicted before you know it.
jonellert – The Taming of the Ground Squirrel – This four-part story will leave you in stitches as jon describes his personal battle with an adorable ground squirrel that is tearing up his prized yard. A must-read. I’ve linked to part 4 of the series, but just follow the links back to part 1.
Bottle Caps and Broken Bits – Check out this brief bit of worldly advice. Simple, but oh, so wise.
And, finally, a few posts about the 80s, which I happen to believe trumps all in music and ridiculous fashions. This post on great 80s films took me back, as did this post on the origins of MTV.
Happy reading. I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did!
Lists
If I ever want to get anything done, I have to have a list. I actually have a list all the time, but sometimes it finds a temporary home in a stack of things to ignore. When I’m ignoring my list, my days ramble. It’s not that I don’t accomplish anything – I do (I have many obsessions, and one of them is being productive), but my life becomes reactive. That said, I never let it get too far out of hand. Often enough, I kick myself in the butt and realize it’s time to resurrect the list. When I get into list mode, I go a little overboard.
First, I rewrite the list on a new, clean sheet of paper, carrying over only the things that didn’t get done last time. Somehow this makes it seem fresh and like I will do all the things that are on the list. Sometimes I have to do this more than once, because I obsess over organizing items on the list in some way that seems sensible to me in the moment, but then I realize it’s not, or I have to add something and there’s no room in the section I created for things of that type. Sometimes I write things on the list that are already done just so I can mark them off.
I’ve been in ‘ignore list’ mode for a while, now, and I’m just on the cusp of switching back into ‘pay attention to list’ mode. I have a memoir in progress that I’ve been ignoring in order to get some perspective, and I think it’s really starting to pay off. I have more than 350 pages – and, I am starting to see I probably only need half that. When I started writing, I was writing from a list – a list of topics that represented my life. It covered mostly my growing up years, but it was a laundry list, and the resulting full story seems a bit like a big pot of spaghetti. Perhaps the biggest issue with where I left off is that my story had no ending, and I’ve come to believe that’s because it had no central theme.
So, as I get ready to resurrect my list, it will have a significantly different focus than it did the last time around. It was incredibly helpful to do a brain dump of all the things I wrote about, but now I am excited to start to sift through it, make decisions about what is important and what isn’t, and find the real story within all the writing. For those of you that have done memoir or creative non-fiction writing, what does your process look like?
Cat Power
I have a friend who is crazy for bacon. I know. Who’s not? But my friend’s obsession is extreme (most of them are, like her grass phobia) – so, my partner once took a picture of a package of bacon using my iPhone and associated that image with my friend. When she calls, I see crispy fried bacon. All good. She called today, which prompted me to remember another case of iPhone hijacking, but some back story is required.
I’ve written before about the fact that I worked for a marketing agency. The place had trouble with turnover. Someone recently did an official count of how many people were hired and left in the past couple of years. The company averages about 20 employees, but 32 people have come and gone in less than 3 years. Amazing, I know. Anyway, a few years ago, the President of our company hired a person who we were told was a whiz-bang expert at Client Service, which is sort of the holy grail function in a marketing agency, and a role that had gone unfilled for a long time. This guy was awesome, we were told. He had years and years of experience and had started and sold multiple companies, one of which turned into a pretty major player in the digital marketing space. He was going to be our savior, especially since there was a guy that worked in Client Service that all of us in Production secretly wanted to kill. Well, it wasn’t even that much of a secret, actually. This guy made our lives more miserable than a vegetarian eating liver and onions would be.
A few months in, none of us could see the whiz-bang in our new SVP. We didn’t get it. We didn’t get him. He was very Texas, and we were very San Francisco. He liked to talk, but he didn’t understand what we did and he didn’t like to do any actual work. He was very polite, and the evil and small New Yorker he inherited was meaner than Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest. Our “savior” was ineffective, forgetful, and entirely unable to exert any control over The Devil. So, we began to ignore him and go on about our frustrating work. One week a handful of us were in Las Vegas for some client that had a display at a big tech conference. Between courses at a late and luxurious dinner, the big boss checked his email and just stared at his phone – so we all followed suit. Below is the exchange we found in our inboxes, names removed for the sake of privacy:
Email 1
From: Evil New Yorker with Anger Management Issues
To: Entire Staff
Subject: Stuck in Charlotte
Sorry for the mass email, but my quick-in-quick-out has turned into a nightmare. I’m stuck spending the night in Charlotte. My brick is dead and my cell is about to croak. Supposedly flying back to NYC in the morning, so hopefully I’ll be settled by the time you all read this, but if anyone’s looking for me, now you know.
[Guatemalan], we need to cancel the [big alcohol brand] call in the morning.
-The Devil
Nothing big here, nothing to worry about. Unfortunate for The Devil, but nothing that should cause the endless staring our boss was still engaged in. BTW, “brick” is the term we used to describe the smart phones our company forced us to use due to their unwieldy size, shape, and weight.
Email 2
From: Whiz-Bang CS SVP (aka Boss of The Devil)
To: Entire Staff
Subject: Re: Stuck in Charlotte
In times like these you need a strong leader (such as myself) and:
- something warm to drink It should be brown and from the UK; not yello
- A place to stay the night (remember the guidelines!!)
- and the knowledge that I will personally help you out of this mess in any way that I can– go to JD’sBBQ and have five shiner bocks, ribs and some potatoes.Take it from me, it’s better than havng a goat’s tongue wake you up in a dirt airport.
- YOU’LL BE OK. If I can help, lend some support or whatever call me at home ((9X7X2x 3O7–1212 or cell
- I will however be in a deep ambien trans while my wife is in NYC living the cool life.
But, you an always trust in me –I’m here for you ===^..^=== (cat power !!!)
Are you confused yet? I have not modified a single bit of the email above other than to change the final few digits of the very weirdly formatted phone number. I have included it here in all its glory – spaces missing, punctuation missing, letters missing, half words, and the brilliant closing emoticon-ish image of a cat with whiskers. Eventually, our stares turned to puzzled glances at each other, and finally the big boss broke the silence. “Hahahahahahahahahaha. He must be drunk.” It was not unusual for employees to be drunk – that’s a well known activity that goes with the marketing territory. Work hard, play hard. Or, work til you think you’re going to die, then go drown yourself in whiskey. This was different, though. Drinking was a group activity, so acceptable drunkenness occurred only when you were with someone else from the company. And even then, we had standards. Crazy drunken emails were not part of the package.
The next morning, the entire company was abuzz about the email. We were obsessed with trying to figure out exactly what Whiz-Bang SVP meant by “cat power!!!” The Devil had been stuck in Charlotte – was it an obscure reference to the Carolina Panthers? One brave soul decided to ask. He said, “When you wrote “cat power!!!”, did you mean “cat power!!!” [said in the style of an innocent high school cheerleader raising a pom-pom high in the air], or did you mean “cat power!!!” [said in the style of the Incredible Hulk]?” Whiz-Bang SVP replied with something somewhere in the middle, so we were no closer to an answer. We did print out copies of the email, though, and tape them on the walls around our desks to help raise our spirits on dark days.
A few weeks later, the entire company gathered in San Francisco for some meetings. We ended one day with an exhausting scavenger hunt through Chinatown and North Beach and our significant others and friends joined us for dinner and drinks. After we’d had a few, someone convinced my partner to go talk to Whiz-Bang SVP about “cat power.” He adored my partner, so we all thought she’d have the best luck. She spoke with him for some time – probably at least 15 minutes, so we were hopeful she’d come back with an answer. All she learned was that one of the SVP’s hobbies was rescuing cats – a very particular breed of cat I can no longer remember the name of. She’d had to use every ounce of self-control she possessed to keep a straight face throughout this lengthy discussion of lost cats, and it was all for nothing. Perhaps he was trying to will the strength of these rescued cats to The Devil, stuck in an airport. We still had no clear answer, and to this day, no one really knows what “cat power!!!” meant, let alone how the Whiz-Bang SVP knew what it was like to be awoken by a licking goat in a dirt airport. He “resigned” a couple months later, so we’ll probably never know. I do, however, still have his phone number saved in my iPhone, and were he to call me, a picture of my own sleeping cat would appear on the screen.
east.bay.writer 