firmiculture

I didn't write yesterday because I was too busy doing laundry at west Bushwick's favorite laundromat/post office/internet stand/Cristina studio to get any "face time" with my computer. ("Face time" is a new phrase I learned from this week. Usage is: "Aw, man, my firm sucks! They want me to put in all this face time at the office, I haven't gotten home before 1 a.m. since 1999!") The most interesting thing about my Thursday was the following exchange:

Irritating (and apparently irritable) disembodied voice: [squealing of tires, teapots at boil, dolphin songs, and other generic whines] Oh my Friday's gonna suck! I have interviews until 3:30!

Irritating (and apparently irritable) dyspeptic dog: [gnashing of teeth, souring of stomach] [sarcastically] Oh, you poor thing. I feel so bad for you. Poor, poor baby. [puts collegial hand on a plasma patch passing for a shoulder joint]

IDV: [coldly] Why are you being sarcastic?

IDD: Because I feel absolutely no sympathy for you. You could have cancelled your interviews. I don't feel bad for you at all.

IDV: [frosty as the lofty air] Oh...kayyy....

IDD: [grumbling, looks back down to folio, wanting to stab needles in everyone's eyes]

I thought about this exchange a lot as I killed time between the 11:20 and the 1:40 running loops on the rooftop of Coles Athletic Facility. The predominant thought was "I'm going to bite down on your eyeballs like they're peeled grapes" (this is the third time in two entries I have envisioned a font of aqueous humor blossoming forth from adversarial eyes), but then I also wondered whether IDV's pissiness 1) came in response to my totally out-of-place uncollegial sarcasm or 2) was a sign that she wasn't actually buying into the whole collegiality schtick and was being a real person by responding in kind to my bad humor. I think it's the former, only because I don't want to give her an inch of credit. This is the way I would narrate what happened: IDV was getting used to congeniality, which survives only as long as everyone is blandly nice to one another. Once congeniality is challenged with, say, sarcasm, then congeniality has no choice but to reveal itself for what it is: hatred in a lamb suit, patrician affect among the upper classes.

Anyway, as I write this I get angrier and angrier and want to retreat into a New England winter, snowbound and lonesome. Because highlights from yesterday also included an interviewer giggling about transpeople and other "weird topics," and a woman with the world's fattest diamond on her left hand speaking haughtily about how she didn't want to raise spoiled children like people in a certain Manhattan neighborhood did; and today, catching the last phrases of a monologue, "...and he was telling me he has five houses on the Islands and a place in Manhattan, and he gets them renovated whenever he feels like it...and I was like, 'That sounds pretty fun!'" I don't know what the Islands are. I don't know why it's fun to renovate your mansions whenever you feel like it...is it more fun than bocce, or a rollercoaster? So many interviewers have pointed out my all non-profit resume and told me, with sympathy, that they understood what I was thinking because they all had to put food on the table too. And then I wonder what kind of food $150,000 can afford that $35,000 can't...

The verdict, after a week, is uncertain. I'm conflicted, obviously. I could say it's all part of a journey toward losing my mind/religion that started when I pitched a friend's painting into a Harlem dumpster at the beginning of February, but who knows if that's fair to say, since I've been wringing my hands about breadwinning for years. Well, anyway, it's the weekend, so I'm sipping from a tiny bottle of mezcal and waiting for respite to find me.