My Crazy (Vicarious) Life

You think accountants are all soggy-cardboard men with pale faces and nasal voices. Maybe that's true everywhere else except Sole Survivor. The accountants here include a short, young, outspoken Hispanic woman with wild curly hair; a tall, outspoken blond woman who wears tight jeans and pink shirts with with her lacy white bra peeking out, and who has enormous tattoos covering her upper arms; and the aforementioned Hot Guy Who Walks Past My Desk All the Time. The Chief Financial Officer is a guy with a Dickies bag and sunglasses, and it wouldn't surprise me if he skateboards to work every morning. My self-esteem is greatly suffering since it now appears that I can add accountants to the ever-growing list of occupations that are cooler than I am.

This morning, Cool Blond Woman comes over to my desk to stamp some checks she's sending out, and we start chatting about how I'm going back to Chicago in a week. She mentions that she ran away from home when she was seventeen, and I seize upon this and claw the story out of her. CBW tells me how she was this wild child when she was in high school--"smokin', drinkin', skippin' school, havin' sex, gettin' into punk rock"--and her parents started to crack down on her and gave her a ten o'clock curfew. One night, she was out with a friend, and it was coming on one AM. She and her friend didn't know how to return home and face their parents, and the idea struck them: what if they just didn't go home at all?

So she stayed away for like three days, and then did it again, and again, until she ended up moving in with this older guy and panhandling on the streets for money. I asked her if she's glad it happened, like if it made her a "fuller" person (shut up, I'm not good at thinking up adjectives on the spot) and she was like, "Oh yeahhh! Oh yeah, I'm so glad I did it."

By this time, another woman, a designer for the company whom I like because she knows who Tom Wolfe is, had stopped by. She began talking about how she'd randomly moved to Hawaii with $200 in her pocket when she was nineteen, and illegally started working as a bartender. She said that she ran into some old guy on the beach and he asked her if he could take pictures of her, and she was like...."uh, sure!" because she was really desperate for money. Thankfully, pictures just ended up being of her and his grandkid sitting in chairs--clothed, I assume.

As I said to them, all of this is so interesting for me to hear because "I'm just a dorky college student who likes to read." I sort of wish I'd done something, anything when I was in high school. I wish I could do something wild now, while I'm still young. But at the same time, I must acknowledge that I'm content just sitting behind a desk, typing away on my weblog. I'm content in the moment, but it's contentment by default. It's the lowest level of contentment possible. The contentment of security, the security of sloth. I want to do something, anything, that will terrify me but that I won't regret. What can I do? Can you safely be wild? I don't know this first thing about this, but I don't think it's something you can teach.

It's True

My dog, Austin, has a tree in our front yard that I have dubbed his "pee-tree." At several points during the day, he runs up to me and paws at me anxiously until I open the front door and let him gallop down the lawn and to his special spot. Then he sniffs around to see what other dogs have stopped by in his absence. Finally, he pees all over the tree trunk, and happily runs back into the house.

I used to get annoyed, until I realized something that sparked my empathy. Austin and his pee-tree are exactly analogous to me and my email account.

This is a newspaper article linking criminal activity, and other detrimental activity, with diet.

I believe that this article is onto something. Personally, my mood is greatly dependent upon what I'm eating. I never thought this could be the case, but when I actually observed the patterns between my feelings--both physical and emotional--and my diet, it was a revelation. For you skeptics, I'd advise you to keep a journal for a week, listing everything you eat and everything you feel. I think you'll be surprised.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Resumés

I am intimidated by paper, especially when I'm surrounded by stacks of it, each sheet printed with chipper-sounding descriptions of strangers and lists of their impressive-sounding qualifications. That's right, Sole Survivor is hiring, and my job as a receptionist is to shuffle through and sort the resumés with which the company has been deluged.

The drudgery quotient is high, but more than that, doing this has firmed my conviction that I will never, ever be hired, for anything. These people all sound great to me. With so many applicants clamouring for interviews, or even acknowledgment of their respective existences, one misspelled word can jeopardize your chances forever. In one of the resumés I looked over, my boss had already highlighted where someone had described herself as "up beat." But at least that made her stand out. Everyone else seems to meld together into a big lump of desperation (except the guy who listed two out of his four "awards" as 1. a blue ribbon in the m.e.c.h.a. salsa festival and 2. first place in the Elvis Karaoke contest. I am not joking. I'm sure Sole Survivor is always looking for elvis impersonators who can make mean pico de gallo.). Not that trying to stand out by looking cutesy and clever helps at all, either (e.g., stating, "I am reliable, creative, and housebroken.")--it just makes my boss roll her eyes. So what to do?

Probably due to the economy's untimely siesta, people are desperate to find work. I've had to serve as the filter for all the creepy ones who blatantly ignore the "NO CALLS PLEASE" printed in Sole Survivor's want ad and persistently ring me up five times a day. Once, some guy came in, and when I said that he could just send his resumé to the email address specified, please, because I'd been instructed not to let anyone through to the marketing manager, he said snippily, "Well, I guess I'll just have to find some other way then," and walked out.

The kicker was today when a guy came in and asked for the customer service representative. I asked if he had an appointment and he said he did, so I sent him to her office. Five minutes later the marketing manager came up and told me not to send anyone back there anymore without calling, because this guy was, quote, "stalking her for an interview." Not the way to go about your job search--she tossed his resumé after he left.

In other news, I had an interesting weekend, an account of which I will post when I recover from this very discouraging day.

Alert!

Further information about Danielle the previous receptionist. Francis the IT guy came by the desk and said, "So, I heard you tried out for American Idol."
Thinking he was joking, I responded, "Uh, yeah--and I was on the Worst of the Worst show last night."
He looked aghast. "No you weren't!!" (Smirksmirksmirksmirksmirk....)
I told him I was joking, and he was like, "Oh, Suzanne told me that you tried out."
I said, "Are you sure it wasn't the previous Danielle?" and he said, "Oh, yeah, maybe."
Here's the DL: She has an okay voice, and has been taking (smirk) opera-singing lessons for years. But apparently, when she auditioned the judges let her sing for about three seconds before telling her to leave. Poor, poor Danielle.

Introverts: An Exposé.

I am an introvert. This, I have long known. I am also, at times, extremely shy. This may come as a surprise to some readers who from this weblog perceive me as sharp, witty, engaging, a fire ready to enflame the social community at large. No, seriously, I'm not the Esther Extrovert you think I am. The reason I like this receptionist job is that I spend the majority of my time slunched behind a desk, happily typing away on a computer, and/or reading heavy books.

The author of the article says, Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion.

I'm not sure if this is true. I personally find it incredibly difficult to understand extroversion. The author claims that extroverts "wilt or fade when alone." How can you wilt or fade when you're alone? Don't you have some sort of self-identity? Is this even true? My sister seems to be the extrovert to end all extroverts, but even she holes herself up in her room for hours with a book or a pen. She definitely does not "wilt or fade," but she doesn't pretend not to be home when people call her, either, like I do. I mean...uh...just kidding.

Furthermore, even I can rip myself out of my nerd-world and interact with normaltons. And when I'm in my best moods, I'm very friendly, and I enjoy making small talk and joking around with strangers, and my coworkers. When I'm isolated all the time--like the majority of my first year at college--I get incredibly depressed.

Plus, I get energized when I'm around people I'm close to, and feel really comfortable with. Maybe the key is that it's much more difficult for introverts--or this introvert, at least--to identify with other people, and as a result, they expend much more energy trying to find a foothold. But when they're at a point when they identify greatly with a person, and it doesn't take as much of an expension of energy, it's not as tiring. Maybe all social interaction is just based on identification with others. Also, if I seem to avoid people it's because I'm afraid they're about to tell me what to do, and I HATE that. I hate other people deciding how I'm going to spend my time.

Finally, you have to make a distinction between shyness and introversion, which the author mentions but which I think many people have trouble with. I think my shyness was caused, in great part, by my depression, and it mostly abated when I started taking medication. Perhaps that's why it's easier now for me to make small talk, and I don't try to avoid human interaction altogether like I did when I was depressed. Then, even talking to someone on the phone for five minutes drained me for hours. Now I actually enjoy phone conversations, at times. The bottom line is, it's difficult to untangle social orientation from shyness from things like depression. But MAINLY, I want to shout out to all my pals that if I ever decline an invitation or end a phone call for some shady reason, it's most likely because I've over-interacted and need to recharge. I still love ya. I LOVE MY FRIENDS in the correct doses.

There are many, many important issues that in this about which I could ponder, upon which I could expound, regarding which I could contribute my thoughts to the vast multi-player ping-pong game of ideas that is the internet. But mainly, I just keep thinking about the hot guy that keeps walking across the lobby, right in front of my desk, multiple times a day. DAMN, he's fine. I can't tell how old he is, but probably too old for me. Maybe thirty-something. I wonder if he notices that whenever he walks by I stop typing, and he drags my eyes along his path. Damn. Damn. I must get past this.

Last night, I dreamt that my sister turned into a foot-long pair of scissors with an orange handle. Then I dreamt that I got attacked by a two-foot tall scary boar-like creature that my mom described (in my dream) as a disabled 59-year-old man, my dad described as a...scary boar-like creature, and I described as all the villains in Roald Dahl books gone wrong. And then I dreamt that I blogged about it.

Note to Wayward Googlers: You know, if you're googling something, and you want to see if my page (or any page) houses the information you seek, you should click the "Cached" link underneath the description on the Google results page.
This is better than directly clicking on the link for two reasons.
A) It directs you to a Google cached page rather than the actual page on the web. This means that your funky search terms won't show up in my referrer log and I won't think you're weird.
B) Google highlights the search terms where they appear in the page, making for easy scrolling and finding.
It's not that I don't want you wayward googlers to stumble upon my page. It's just that you never come back, and I can no longer take the pain.

Note: I know nothing about computers, or hacking, and this has all been inferred on my part by my many years as a stalkerista. If any of it is wrong, I'm going to be so embarrassed.

The New Coolest Link Ever. A list of easy, strange science projects that will revive your inner child. I think my favorite is the Twang Optic Nerve. The people who work here are going to start wondering soon why I keep yawning and rubbing my hands together. I told you I was bored.

It's Starting.

Okay, so for awhile, I was like--all I have to do is answer phones and surf the internet all day? This job rules!! But now eight straight hours of forced internet-viewing are started to get to me. My eyes are are glazing over. My right leg is jiggling uncontrollably. I'm running out of sites to visit, so I sit here blankly and start typing things like "www.danielle.com" into the address bar. Gulp.

So, I'm receptionisting at Sole Survivor Corporation in Oxnard for the next two weeks. Apparently, the previous receptionist, who was here for a year, was also named Danielle. And the receptionist before that, who was here for a year and a half, was named Danielle, too. At least ten people have informed me of this fact as if it represents some mysterious cosmic coincidence. But I am curious, and a little annoyed (how dare these girls have my name!), so since I've been here I've done a little detective work and have managed to glean some information about the mysterious pre-me's.

The list of names and extensions has not been updated yet, and so I've discovered that the previous Danielle was named Danielle Navarro. I picture in my mind a cross-looking girl with big hairy eyebrows and fat rolls. On Friday, I had a little chat with the Fed-Ex guy, who, of course, took it upon himself to tell me, hey, the old receptionist was Danielle, too!
"Man, she used to talk to me all the time, like all, 'I hate this job! I can wait to get out of here!' And she was looking for other jobs while she was still here. And when she quit, one day she just didn't show up!"
"That's so messed up!" I replied, aghast.
"I know! Or, actually, she like just said one day that she was quitting. She gave, like, her one-day's notice instead of two-weeks notice."
"So she hated this job?" I ask, interested.
"Yeah, she hated it. I see how she felt, though. I hate my job, too! I work all the time, but I really want to quit and become an Air Force pilot....[chatter chatter chatter]"

Interesting. So she's a bitch, too!

Then today, two of the women here each brought an eleven year old daughter to work because of President's day. They're both little terrors, but I paid them each a dollar to help me with some menial drudgework (pasting pieces of cloth on big white boards, to be specific) and they were all, "WOW!!"
Anyway, when they came in, they were like, "Your name is Danielle! The girl before you and the girl before her were named Danielle too!!"
"Yes, I know," I said. "We're actually the same person. Don't we look alike?"
"No!!! The Danielle before you had big poofy hair..."
"...and she'd wear shirts down to here [insert indication of lower chest] and really short skirts...."
"..and she thought she was, like, all that!!" (can't...stop...smirking...)
"AND, she was, like, really really FAT!"
"But the Danielle before that was this black girl, and she was really nice"

Hmm. I don't like the sound of this Danielle Navarro person. But the other one sounds okay. Further investigation is necessary.

Bored like I am? Check out My Creepy Valentine, a collection of disturbing cards from times long past. You know the kind: scary-looking children that all look like dummies, accompanied by scary-looking cats and colored in scary ways. Gallery 2 is even better than Gallery 1. Trust me. This is among my favorites.

Argh, I'm trying to finish an essay on why, exactly, I want to study in Athens next year, and I feel like someone has been forcibly rubbing my eyes in a damp sock. I have seven hours until it's due, but I want to be done NOW. And I have like a paragraph left, and it's just not flowing. Someone please explain to me in concise, engaging terms why I want to go to Athens, and please do not mention My Big Fat Greek Wedding in said explanation. Thank you. This incoherent, un-engaging message was brought to you by five hours of sleep and wracked nerves.

Hmm.

I'm suspicious that someone other than myself has been checking my email. But right now, I'm more flattered than upset. Thanks for caring!

Please, I'm so bored.

Update your weblogs!!

P.S. I'm thinking about taking the plunge, taking the next step, jumping in head first...and getting my own domain. It would most likely be quandarical.com, but hubbards-cupboard.net is also available. Hmm. Hmm. Which would you rather see? Talk to me.

Oh My God.

Okay, so I've been stuffing envelopes, right? And most of them have "peel & seel" seals that you...peel off and seal. But there's a huge stack of them that are the standard lick & seal, and all of the important people are sitting in a meeting right next door with huge glass windows where they can look out at me, and I don't want to be sitting here dragging my tongue across these huge envelopes one after another while my supervisors watch and laugh because they all know the secret trick to sealing huge envelopes without looking like a loser. Help me.

The Triumphant Return Part II

Sorry I haven't been posting, but my parents' crappy computers won't let me publish. But here I am!, writing from the receptionist's desk of Sole Survivor/Gramicci corporation, where I am doing exciting temp work like stuffing envelopes and gazing at the yellow walls. It's an interesting office building, enormous, painted with bright colors and decorated with clothing samples and statues of stick-figure guys with stick-up hair. They also have huge boards with past advertisements on them, and my favorite is a picture of a guy on wearing a purple shirt, the kind of indian-pattern-striped Gecko-type shorts that Todd Griffiths used to wear in the second grade, and rollerblades. He's in mid-leap over a car, and the driver's all, "Wha...?" The huge caption on the top says, "HE MADE IT WITH 783 STITCHES IN HIS CROTCH." Referring, of course, to his indian-pattern-striped Gecko-type shorts. But they don't make those shorts anymore. They disappeared with rollerblades, I guess.

Yesterday, I took phone orders for Neighborhood Flowers. A dozen AAA ultra-long stem Colombian roses were going for $89.98, plus $14.95 shipping. It was funny to listen to guys get all flustered and stuttery when I asked them what message they wanted to put on the card. "Uhh....you think of something. Just...'Happy Valentine's Day. Love always.' Or something like that," they'd say. Rarely, they'd have something specific in mind: "Wait until next year. Love, Bryan;" or "Please forgive me. Dave." I'm never, ever going to meet these people, but I felt like I'd gotten a glimpse into the most intimate parts of their inner selves. I know it seems like the person taking your order at the other end of the phone doesn't really exist, but I do and I did think about the callers after they hung up. Some of them, I'm still thinking about.

My favorite callers were two black guys who were on the phone together, trying to figure out what to get for the one's girlfriend. The guy kept asking me what I thought she'd like, which colors she'd like, whether she'd like it on Valentine's Day or the day before. "I'm taking your word on this!!" he kept saying, and then his friend asked, "So, what is your husband getting you for Valentine's Day?"
"...I'm actually not married," I responded, and they both went, "Woooohooo!"
At the end of the call, the guy who placed the order said, "Well, Danielle, you've been real helpful. You go ahead and buy yourself half a dozen flowers from me." "Be careful!" I said, "I have your credit card number!" They were great. But by the end of the day I was drained. Dealing with so many people's love lives was exhausting...I can hardly deal with mine without needing to sleep for a couple of days afterwards. And I don't even have one.

Some woman who writes for our local paper is requesting that parents write in about kids who do really well academically, but tend to do things like accidentally flood the bathroom, or set the kitchen on fire. She calls it, "'Oops!' syndrome." My mom wants her to write about me. Just because I've lost my wallet three times in the past eight months, have to keep the back door of my car unlocked because I leave the keys in the ignition so often, and have forgotten about the rice I'm cooking on the stove so many times that my roommates are about to ban me from the kitchen.

My mom just mentioned an old friend of hers who died when I was around seven. She was the no-nonsense, stiff-upper-lip type who raised her children under the looming shadow of her disapproval ("but she was loving, she loved her people!" my mom just insisted). Once she was telling my mom about one of her son's friends, who was so messy that he had a little trail following him every where he went, who started dropping stuff as soon as he entered the front door. She got all worked up about this indecency. "He....he might as well be dead!" she said.

I suppose if she herself had to die, it's a good thing she did before she got to know me too well.

What do they got, a lotta sand?
We got a hot crustacean band!!

The Little Mermaid is such a good movie. Man, it's such a good movie. I hadn't watched the whole thing through since I was eleven or so, but I got a craving for it when I was in Chicago and my roommate Burcu downloaded "Kiss the Girl" and played it over and over. Watching it was number one on my list of things to do when I returned to California. And I did, I watched it. It was so good.

One weird thing I noticed was that instead of remembering lines and scenes, I remembered sound effects and the tones of the character's voices. I could tell, for example, that Scuttle was about to blow sand and shit out of the snarfblatt not because the scene was unfolding in my head as it did onscreen, but because I could tell that the gross splatty sound was coming up soon. Pull out a movie you watched a lot as a kid, especially a Disney movie, and try it. I tried it with Aladdin and it was the same deal. Pretty cool.

So, anyway, I was gonna compare the Hans Christian Anderson version with the movie, which I read once and vaguely remember, but once I pulled it up on the internet I got bored after the first paragraph. But here's the link in case you want to read it yourself and do your own comparison, like, just for fun. But if you're not into that sort of thing, open this and listen till you get to Act IV, which is probably the funniest thing I've ever heard on This American Life, and guest-stars Ariel to boot. Well, not exactly "guest-stars," but...just listen to it.

How can it be so bad, but so good?

The Tard Blog. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.
 


Postscript: The Tard Blog is sponsored by a guy named Tucker Max, who apparently graduated from my school. He wrote this about the U of C's collective attractiveness (or complete and utter lack thereof).

I personally think there are a lot of good-looking people at my school, but, hey, that attitude won't win me geek-fame in the inboxes of the snickering, quivery pointdexters who assure themselves he's not writing about them. Anyway, whenever I counter a complaint about the chicks or dudes at my school with, "I think there are a lot of hot people here," I get a response of, "Um, well, the administration is all about making the college more fun, and that attracts more good-looking people, naturally. But when *I* was a first-year, man, [and this was actually said to me] I was all, these are like the type of people I used to make fun of in high school." This was said by a guy with a nasally valley-girl voice, medium-quality perfume (yes), and a gelled crust of hair with bangs that stuck straight up. Which made him about as attractive to me as bunny-puke, but whatever. So, Tucker Max is all about winning the arrogant points with his website, which he does quite well, but if you get annoyed after surfing around it for awhile you can always click the little X like I did. At least he brought us the Tard Blog.

I'm all squitchy with joy right now. I was about to post a stern lecture on how changes are afoot here at Hubbard's Cupboard, and that I'm really cracking down on those whose pages I link to--i.e., that to have your blog placed on my privileged link-list, you must have updated within, let's say, a month and a half. But most of y'all have started updating, and I'm just so proud of my little flock! Furthermore, I have introduced several more members of Danielle's Blog Club: Jose (my roommate!), Ezra (our treasured stowaway!), Lucas (an American-Puerto-Rican in Spain!), and Andrew (the bestfriend's genius boyfriend!). Welcome, boys.

So, that pretty much covers my entire audience. Hey, maybe we should all just link to each other, and form a little webring, called "Readers of Hubbard's Cupboard.". It'd be like....incestuous blogging, but not.

I Like Graffiti

As the southbound Pacific Surfliner train nears Los Angeles Union Station (or as the northbound train leaves the station behind), it passes a vast concrete sewer whose walls are covered with graffiti. My guess is that gang members sneak down there at night and spraypaint their gang names anywhere there's free space. I always look out the window and try to read as many of the names as I can. For some reason, they're mesmerizing to me. They're so interesting and creative. Of course graffiti's wrong, folks. But if other people want to decorate the walls of the sewer like this, I say, well, it provides an interesting diversion on a long train ride to wherever I'm going.

On the way to San Diego, I got out my notebook and wrote down as many of the legible names as I could. Here are some of my favorites.
Trick                     Bigman
Jump                    Toxik
Slice                     Seal
Boost                   Dash
Wizard                 Gas
Lego                     Alone
Rolex                   Kween
Probe                   Dark
Smokey               Blaze
Denim                 Killforpower
Proof                   Reckless
Punch                   Blinx
Mind                     Ask
Prime                   Envy
Now                     Cash
Skitos                   Spair
Vega                     Mist
Skape                   Koala