Thursday, April 27, 2006

Shufflememe me!

I’m not much of a meme-er, but today I am really grinding my gears - I slept poorly and woke up in a panic when I realized the alarm had somehow been switched (eh, Zach?) from loud NPR to a very quiet wooshing breeze sound; then the baby woke up before I got a chance to stretch the kinks out of my back (yes, they’re back on tour, the Kinks appearing live at Daniel’s spine, L2 - L4), we were out of anything reasonably breakfasty for breakfast, I rode a bus to work that was full of entirely entertaining travelling companions but wound up actually surrounded by smelly guys who sighed and yawned incessantly all over me, and I just discovered that the pillow that I’d found soaking up all the ink from a red pen left open on the desk at home somehow stained the cuffs of the shirt I’m now wearing… and now I’m bored, people, just goddamn bored.  So I dragged out my results of a meme I did a few weeks ago, prompted by Reecie - a meme that Lynn just posted as well. 

Reading Lynn’s post about it, it was so nice to see that I had a buddy in the iPod-shuffle-meme/ignored-for-admin-professional-day thing that I decided to share my results with the whole world, of which a shamefully small percentage will actually see this.  but anyway.  What you do is set the ‘pod to shuffle, ask a series of pre-determined questions, and, magic-8-ball style, it’ll kick back your fortune.  Oh don’t snicker.  It’s just as accurate as those folded paper things you made in grade school.  You didn’t make these in grade school?  That makes one of us a nerd.  And the way my day is going, I can guess which one it is.

ANYWAY.  Here’s the questions, and my faithful pod’s responses thereto:

How does the world see you? Bugs (phish) (oh good, an exoskeletal parasite.  I was afraid this would be depressing.)
Will I have a happy life? Panacea (greyboy)(makes me think that every little thing’s gonna be all right, except I have that song and it didn’t come up for this question.  maybe they meant “pangea,” which actually makes even less sense.)
What do my friends really think of me? La Marea (manu chao) ("the tide") (so they think of me as alternately waxing and waning on a twice-daily schedule, raising all ships but waiting for no man.  Apparently my friends start drinking early.)
Do people secretly lust for me? The Prisoner (gil scott-heron) (this is a depressing song and it strongly suggests that the main emotion being sent my way is more like pity than lust.  I guess I can see how that would be true.)
How can I make myself happy? Love Tractor (widespread panic) (what I need is professional-grade diesel-powered industrial machinery that literally drags love across the rutted surface of the planet.  This was not my original plan, but if the ‘pod says so, so it must be.)
What should I do with my life? Sexual Healing (ben harper) (this is too shameful to even make fun of)
Will I ever have kids? Gully Low Blues (louis armstrong) (a sad song for a man who adopted the world’s greatest boy.  I’ll need to chew on this one for a while.)
Good advice for me: Con Poco Coco (chucho valdez)("with a little coconut")(So the advice is, add some tropical flavor - your nut is huge and rock-hard and covered with tough fibrous hairs.  Yeah, I can see that.)
How will I be remembered? Touch You (golden palominos) ("Your memory is made up of light / It takes up residence and shines out / Like a photograph of fire / Like the light of my own body in the dark / Like something you almost remember” - I don’t know if I merit this kind of recollection)
My signature song? Green Chimneys (stanton moore)(this is rather dissonant hipster jazz, and not a song I particularly like.  Then again, I’m not crazy about my signature either.)
What do I think my current theme song is? Lead Me On (Kelly Joe Phelps) (a powerfully evocative song about a man seeking his place in the world.  I hadn’t thought of it as my theme, but now that it comes up, it rather makes sense)
What does everyone else think my current theme song is? I’m Sorry (zony mash) (instrumental hipster jazz fusion.  I’m sure folk think I’m pretty sorry so I guess this makes sense too.)
What song will play at my funeral? New Kind of Neighborhood (jonathan richman)(lots priced to sell!  adjacent to parkland!  quiet at night! (except for those pesky zombies!))
What type of woman do I like? Git Morgn (margot leverett and the klezmer mountain boys) (traditional ethnic sounds reborn through a bluegrass-jam band mentality - the kind of woman who’ll enjoy mazoh brie with cayenne, marmalade and local honey.  sure, I can buy into this one.)
What will my day be like? Insurance Fraud #2 (mountain goats)(this was true for that day a few weeks back when I did this first, but hell, it’s probably still true. “I won’t be cashing in that policy/till I find out what it is you’re trying to do to me” - a great song about a man facing some tricky ethical questions.  Story of my goddamn life.)

Hope you had a good time playing along.  I’d better get back to work now before I find a meme that will have me taking the bus back home to see what I’ve got in my recycling container or something.  In theory, I am an administrative professional, after all.  Maybe I should administer some professionalism at some point today. 

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

An Impertinent Little White that Would Do Well Laid Down for Proper Aging

Today I will spend most of the day on a site visit, imposing my will on the good people of a small hardworking legal support center.  However, even as I labor in those thankless trenches, interviewing MIS managers and LRS managers and other acronymical entities, I will be keeping in mind this special new status I enjoy beginning today, as a person whose age is divisible by both six and by seven.  In honor whereof, I offer you this pome of maturity:

A POME OF MATURITY

42 has come upon me
with the cunning of a mudslide
hear it rumble on the hillside
gives no quarter now it’s drawn me
Yet I sense a denser present
as I parry, braise and dandle
find more ends to burn my candle
living out beyond the legend
Roles untried now second nature
stepping up with single mission
strategist becomes tactician
if I bet I’d lay a wager
Less of all but get more from it
worlds evolving and expanding
came in steep but aced the landing
I can fake it if you hum it
Now is now the time, it’s true
to make the most of every minute
leave it if there’s nothing in it
turns out now I’m 42.

You may now return to more important activities.  And have a happy Daniel day. 

Sunday, April 23, 2006

My Year as a Stalker

I took malicious self-denigratory pride in my hortocidal ways.  That is to say, I kill plants and have chosen not to be ashamed of it.  I don’t do it on purpose but it happens most every time I try to keep one alive.  I did have a spider plant in college, but since then, I have left a trail of drowned, desiccated, burned-out or under-exposed plants in my wake – a trail that lies empty and sere through the landscape of gardeners and keepers-of-houseplants who seem to constitute most of the human race.  Not me, though.  I kill plants. 

Anyway, that’s what I said till last year when I got a birthday present that seemed designed to challenge this perceived incapacity to foster plant life: for my birthday a very dear friend sent me a kit for growing bamboo at my desk.  Bamboo is a grass, a sturdy monocot that, once in place, is famously hard to remove – but this particular fistful of stalks had an especially tough challenge to overcome, and I felt fear in my heart for their precious young lives as I gazed over my present.  It was a very thoughtful gift, but damn if it didn’t put me in a tough spot.  I would have to try to keep a plant alive now.  Not just for my sake or the plant’s, either – this time it was a symbol of a friendship I valued deeply, and that meant the game was on for real this time.  Project Genesis was underway. 

The pack consisted of a little plastic planter, a packer of gel crystals, and five segments of bamboo stalk.  Each one shone with naive toughness and was green as a rainforest; they looked utterly foreign under the buzzing lights at my workstation, but I was not going to let my friend down – nor the plants, nor myself.  Those bastardsuckers were going to thrive for me, goddamnit. 

I tore open the packet of crystals and dumped them into the planter, and arranged within them the five stalks upright in a little ring in the middle.  The crystals looked like ground glass and only filed a few inches of the three-inch-tall planter, but once I added water they swole up significantly and within a few hours they’d overflowed onto my desk. Clearly I was already dabbling in strange and mysterious powers.  The stalks that had been teetering in a paltry layer of pseudosoil were now wedged in nicely and gave every impression of vitality, each striving vertically from the waterlogged crystals below to the fluorescent fixtures above.  I was sustaining life.  Just like God. 

Within a fortnight my illusions of godlike generative capacities were ratcheted somewhat back, as I noticed that two stalks weren’t really pulling their weight, thrive-wise.  They had developed yellow spots on their leaves, which turned shortly mostly yellow with black spots.  I was outraged – I had done my part to provide them with occasionally refreshed hydration and plenty of overhead lighting and paperwork and keyboarding, yet 40% of my desktop bamboo thicket was failing.  Out of curiosity I plucked the underperforming specimens from the planter and saw that they were blotched, puckered and rotting down where the crystals covered them.  Root development was inconsequential.  For the health of those remaining, I had to cull the deadwood.  It felt sadly familiar as I threw them away. 

At least I had three stalks left, I consoled myself, but after a few more months two of them had also succumbed to the creeping rot that seemed destined to wipe me out in triumphant reiteration of my horticultural incompetence.  I extracted them too from the planter and dropped them unceremoniously into the trash.  Only one stalk still remained standing, and it was leaning now pretty badly – but otherwise, actually, it looked okay.  It had a bunch of new leaves in an approximately verdant hue and it looked like it wanted to send off a branch or a shoot or whatever it’s called.  Gingerly I pulled it from the cup of crystals to check it below the plimsol line, and found a complex root structure dangling pale and delicate before me.  This one was doing great.  I just needed to give it a new home with a little more support. 

The original planter had been generously proportioned to hold a little five-stalk bamboo forest.  Now that I’d lost 80% of the crop, there was too much room and the sole survivor couldn’t get the support it needed.  What I needed was a cup, and, to my shock and delight, I had one.  It held roses – five or six tiny ones, stuck in tired green polyfoam, where they’d been for about 18 months as a dried-out throwaway office gift from a meeting on a long-past valentine’s day.  Though they had a permanent place on my desk, I didn’t even see them in front of me anymore.  They’d long since stopped being flowers to me, and had turned into a sort of hole where reality didn’t quite reach.  But I could dump those little bundles of crispy petals and that dusty faded foam frog, and fill the now-empty plastic cup with rubbery hydrocrystals and a single proud piece of undefeated bamboo, and have a truly living thing standing at my desk to greet me everyday. 

So that’s what I did, and that’s what I have – even now, today.  Chlorophyll has stained the once-clear crystals green, and maybe the new leaves are coming in a little pale, but they’re still shining with pure vital energy.  I didn’t think I had it in me, but after a full solid year and all the setbacks we’ve overcome, I guess I can finally admit that I do.  Talk about a gift that keeps on giving. 

When I told Pea about this essay she suggested that it might make little curly lines come out of her head, as if she were an animated figure being exposed to something odorous or surprising.  I can’t worry about that.  My priority is keeping that plant alive and if she can’t be part of the solution, she’s part of the problem.  Not that there’s any problem but she’d be part of it if there were one.  Just to spite me, she would.  She’s such a troublemaker.