Thothmuffin
Don't get any crumbs on the scale of judgement.
Monday, July 26, 2004
Please rewrite this to be grammatically correct: Phones is scary
The group is a seedpod of a well-recognized organization that spans several states, and which will charge me money if I decide to attend more than one or two meetings. The woman who runs the group is a perfect example of western friendliness and hospitality--the meetings are in her house, and she went easily from talking about her experiences as a published writer to making jokes about nasty critiquers to apologizing for little boys screaming and wreaking havoc in the background.
I felt as though I were having a little problem communicating at some points, though. Let me demonstrate by sharing a Mean Dialogue, which portends a dialogue that, although of necessity fictionalized to some degree, should give you a good picture of the average tone of the discussion.
Writers Group Lady: So what sort of things do you write?
Thothmuffin: Well, I just graduated, and I wrote literary short fiction in college. I really miss the workshop environment of my fiction classes, and I wanted something like that for a genre fantasy novel project I'm starting.
WGL: Wow, lit fic. You probably won't get anything like a professor's commentary in this group, I mean, nobody's going to insist that every single sentence is perfectly crafted or throw you out the door if you use a cliche.
TM: *remembers thesis advisor with a little twitch* Oh, no, that's just fine. I don't expect...
WGL: *contemplative* And we don't get a lot of short stories or literary stuff, but every once in a while people bring stuff they wrote as a break from a novel, so we're not opposed to that sort of thing or anything.
TM: *hastening to correct misunderstanding* Well, as I said, if I brought something after my first visit, it would be early chapters of my genre novel.
WGL: Sounds great! We really could use some more literary stuff in the group.
TM: *defeated* Guess I'll stop by at the next meeting, then.
So we'll see if this enthusiasm for writers groups lasts another week and a half, and then we'll see what the group makeup and/or dynamic is like, and then I'll decide if I'm brave enough to bring something. And rich enough to pay the $35 annual membership fee.
In other news, I applied for a job today where I had to take a proofreading test in person. It was a pretty easy one, testing me on minor grammar points and spelling. I was a little insulted by the fact that no one bothered to proofread the test's instructions, and made mistakes like using "where" instead of "were." Guess they need someone pretty badly. Two other people came in to apply in the 45 minutes that I was there, and there were a few applications already in the box, which is an amazing amount of competition for a admin asst./editor job for a company that writes and conducts telephone surveys. Job market recovery my ankh.
Drawing
Now, I'm a craptastic drawer. I'll be the first to admit it. But there's something a little purgative about drawing, no matter how bad I am at it. And the less I try to draw things that look like real things, the better it comes out, because a bunch of crappy scribbles can sometimes still be o-k at conveying emotional states.
My end result sort of looks like weird abstract arty-sketch, which only confirms my belief that a lot of abstract art is crap, and that the real production of art is all in the justification, whether from the viewer or the artist. When I start to try to draw realistic, it just becomes horrific. I mean, truly horrific. I think I'm missing some vital hand-eye-brain connecting path that processes what shapes actually look like and then spits them back out again.
It sort of makes me wonder about writing, though. All my friends are pretty good at writing, even if they don't do it "creatively," so I can't ask them this, but: I wonder if there are people who would never keep a blog and who scream when they have to write papers and who only read a book a year who, sometimes, get the urge to sit down and write a really, really, astronomically craptasmical poem. And then, when it's done, they sort of like it.
I guess there's something freeing about starting from absolute, base zero. Writing is my art and my skill; when I write, all I can see is how flawed my work is, how it struggles in the shadows cast by others' work and my own towering standards. But, once I accept that my visual art is godawful and that I probably hit my artistic peak at 5, the shadows are lifted and all I see is light, like pinprick stars gleaming through a black cloth. So my gallery isn't opening any time soon, but I'll keep dallying with my creative crudities, thankful for the slightest glimmer they can afford me.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Opera Parisienne
Last night I was a member of the Opera Parisienne. My friends and I went to watch an opera, which was being performed in a large, rectangular conference hall. The layout was dinner-theater style, with round tables set up haphazardly across the room. One corner of the room was dominated by the two large main stages, which stood at right angles to each other and faced out towards the crowd. We hardly had time to marvel before the lights came up. The lights washed the stage with brilliance, but curiously enough, also illuminated peripheral stages we had not noticed before, and delineated bright spots about the floor, in sharp contrast to dark islands of the tables.
I tried to pay attention to the play's intricate exposition; a duke's son was shipwrecked on an isle, and needs must return to Paris. Paris was happening on the main stage, and involved a great deal of banking and nobility. As I watched I fell into the play and was swept along into the lights--physically, for my chair began to swing in wild careening arcs, tracing a mad path between lighted spots of empty floor. I was puzzled at first, but that feeling soon gave way to pure joy at the movement, which in turn ceded to a more calculated urge to prolong that joy. These spotlights were obviously set up for later scenes, but what harm if I populated them now?
At that thought, I tumbled eagerly from my chair. I met the floor and crawled among the crowds, now timid of the lights as I realized the spots of brilliance were already occupied. Actors, my mind said at first, but later I realized: Parisians.
I was skilled at not interrupting the performances of the Parisians, and they rewarded me. One dropped a large plumed hat upon my head, and another draped my shoulders with a slim velvet robe in the most improbable color.
I could no longer hide from the lights; my feathered hat attracted attention, and when I was fixed at last by a great follow-spot, my plume casting ribbed shadows across the floor, I had no choice but to pretend I was a part of the chorus. My mad dash to my seat had happened to intersect with a climactic number, which had spread from the main stage all throughout the floor. In the midst of so many casual singers, I experienced a lovely feeling of camaraderie, as well as fleeting gratitude that the chorus was so many, and that my poor voice could not be clearly heard. I was less and less aware of the nature of Paris's dark islands, which once had held reality for me, my friends and fellow spectators all but forgotten.
I escorted a lovely young Parisian woman with a tower of curls from the latest chorus scene; she smiled very prettily and thanked me for my kindness. As we walked the Rue, we saw three huge masses of velvet and ostrich plumes parting the crowd like a bold, powerful armada; the Cardinal and two lesser clergymen. The cardinal turned to look in my direction, but not at me; I saw that he wore a high white wig and his face was powdered and painted ridiculously with a mole: a vain man, who had killed a duke and exiled his son.
Our part was cast into darkness as some higher action took the attention on stage, and I found to my surprise that I had returned quite accidentally to my table. My pretty companion had melted away into the crowds. The friends I had come with were excited by my costume and ecstatic to be connected to my entry into Paris, and begged me to sit with them and enjoy the rest of the opera.
I could not. They dismayed me, these shadowy voices calling from the darkness that was not Paris. I turned and fled from them, back into the light, any light I could find.
The first spot illuminated was a burlesque barbershop, an entr'acte designed to populate the operatic world with maids, churls, prostitutes, crazies, and other notable Paris denizens. I laughed with the Paris crowd as I watched the barber, a swarthy man with a huge moustache, transform a raucous maid into a high-born lady, all with grease and powder. She was still lewd and outrageous, but her new hair made it all the more entertaining. I watched as the barber's assistant inflated an absurd hat with bellows, and saw the ballooning as a symbol of proletarian coming-to-power. This is the Paris that would rise, not that of Dukes and Cardinals.
Suddenly a wax-seller accosted me, taking in my clerkly form and seeing me as a ripe sort to buy his sealing wax. I found myself in my first speaking role, answering his questions gamely as he demonstrated his wax and tried to wheedle a sale from me. He was projecting, and it struck me that we were the only isle of light at present, or at least the brightest one, and that people were watching. My answers came out as faint lisps; I had something in my mouth, and could not enunciate or project. I had been chewing gum, I realized with horror; gum at the Opera Parisienne!
Still, I did well; I never caused the wax-seller to falter, and all proceeded convincingly until, at last, the light about us dimmed. I could sight my lady acquaintance over the whirl of the Paris crowd; her wig and lace and paint seemed very real to me, realer than I could imagine. Her vividness decided me: I would spit out my gum and join Paris, a Parisian.
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Mystery Flavor
Anyway, what's in bubble gum?
Monday, July 19, 2004
We'll call you...
Despair is better than hope because it involves less anticipation, with the same chance of good things happening.
Thursday, July 01, 2004
My interview goes to the dogs
So I’m installed in the conference room with a glass of water, and people begin to pay court. Or work their psychological torture on the interviewee. Hard to tell with these people. They're all so friendly, it makes me suspicious.
After saying hi to two more women in capris and flip-flops who wander past the conference room door, I make the wise decision to take off my suit jacket. Soon after, a bearded, middle-aged man wearing an “In-N-Out” t-shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals strolls up, asks me if I’m interviewing, and genially wishes me luck before retreating into his office. I answer his questions with polite affirmatives, but he loops through the room too quickly and elliptically for me to get his name, rise, or shake his hand and demonstrate the remarkable fact my appendages have actually warmed to a temperature that might suggest I am not part of the Legions of the Undead.
Later, after the interview, I will realize that this man was the president of the company.
I wait a few more minutes and a young looking fellow wanders in, blinks at me, and then says, “You look familiar. Did we go to school together?”
I would swear to you that I’d never met this man before in my life, but I’d comfortably do the same for most people I don’t see on a regular basis every week, so that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Of course, my own selective memory for faces has to be weighed against the fact people my age in this town use “Did we go to high school together?” like other people use “Hi, how are you?” So I told him the name of my high school and it turns out in this case he’s an alum, too, although that doesn’t make him look any more familiar.
By this point I have something else to focus on, however, because he's plopped himself down next to me and thwapped his legal pad on the table. He’s my age, but maybe I’m going to be interviewed by the entire team—the company has a Chihuahua, remember, anything's possible. I don’t think about it too hard because I’m so excited that I finally get to demonstrate my warmhand. So I shake, we introduce ourselves, and then he asks, “Uh. . .so is this your first day?”
Glad to see someone else has no idea what’s going on here.
I tell him I’m just interviewing and he becomes befuddled and wanders off to ask the In-N-Out guy (the president, remember) where his meeting is and what’s going on with me. Young guy picks up a young woman on the way, who seems to be wearing long black pajama bottoms and a surfing-themed t-shirt. After they all get the meeting sorted out, she pops her head into the conference room and whispers conspiratorially “Good luck with your interview!”
You mean it hasn’t started yet?
At last the two men in charge of interviewing me show up. By now I’ve descended into a sort of fatalist, absurdist haze and am no longer nervous. Or am so nervous my scale of nerves can no longer register it. Besides introducing myself after the interviewer had already said my name, getting embarrassed, and then having the guy reassure me it was ok (yes, everyone in this company is inhumanly nice), the greetings went pretty well.
(Astute readers will notice that the muffin has hit the nadir of its experience here.)
But once they actually started asking questions, it went much better. Highlights included:
1) The interviewers joking about how their office is “eating, constantly eating,” which immediately put me in mind of my college chem dept and their remarkable feasts.
2) One of the interviewers getting a giddy, happy grin on his face when I told them I wanted to write a fantasy novel. (Hey, they asked me where I wanted to be in five years.)
3) The interviewers nodding sagely when I mentioned anime.
4) People who actually care that I have skill in Japanese.
5) People who actually care that I might know something about chemistry.
So we laughed, no one cried, and I managed not to make any ridiculous faces or inappropriate jokes or further name blunders. I think it went pretty well for my first interview...but I guess we’ll know in two weeks, when they start contacting people for second interviews.
I wonder how much the Chihuahua gets paid?
