job

I spent almost no time in the last three months thinking about my job; last week, my preparations were entirely sartorial. I wore my suit pants and a button down blue shirt today. Each of the five associates starting today wore this uniform. To this I added the $25 canoe shoes that I bought in a frenzy last week - immediately after the purchase I called Sonia and described the shoes as "canoe shapes with jiaozi-like crenellations," and then complained that I knew nothing about buying shoes and that God punishes the weak - but I discovered to my horror that they squeak, so while taking a tour of the offices, I affected a conspicuous limp so that my squeak would go unnoticed. The day was spent in orientation meetings where I gleaned such information as We no longer carry Diet Dr. Pepper in the lunch room soda fountain because we could never get the carbonation right, Follow these forty-five mandatory yet unmemorable steps to save a file to your remote desktop, and Best practice is to put your computer on standby when undocking. Unparseable information causes my contacts to dry, so I spent a lot of time today blinking. I met my officemate and decided I really liked him; the first thing he showed me this morning was his Excel spreadsheet compiling different commute times for different combinations of bike/Caltrain/BART; calculations included ten minutes for changing clothes, 22 minutes for biking downtown (stoplights inclusive), and the proportion of train time to "lost time," defined as time spent walking from bike rack to station when reading or Blackberrying was not possible. There was a lunch with my officemate and two associates. We talked about Malcolm Gladwell and my contribution to the conversation was either to say conversation-deadening grim things ("9/11 was conducted with box cutters, not explosives," yikes, or "Don't you think Malcolm Gladwell is making it all up?" whoops) or to speak too quietly so that even the person immediately to my right had to smile and say, several times, "Excuse me?" I ordered a salad for fear of getting too fat (remember what the witch wanted of Hansel and Gretel) but by mid-afternoon was ravenously hungry, and then weighed the relative merits of eating my office-wide phone directory and preserving my reputation as a person who did not eat office handouts, the latter winning by a nose. I suddenly remembered thoughts I had during my summer associateship - e.g., looking out the window at trees and imagining them broccoli, me giant - and the unicorn clip art I had printed and posted next to my monitor to remind myself that God was mysterious and wonderful, it all came rushing back to me. I stayed late because I wrote my address incorrectly four times, not exaggerating, on one particular form and had to print and recycle, print and recycle, print and recycle, print. I drove home chatting with beloved S, who listened to me whine and then unrelatedly referred to herself as "little retarded S" and "a freak" (speculating about what her colleagues must think of her), and at home I discovered that Richard, Aimee and Mom had bought me a double-double from In-n-Out burger, Dad wanted to take a photograph of my first paycheck, and Boo could not wait to wriggle over to me and push his body against my legs as a demand to be loved. This too I noticed in 2007, how the contrast between a scary professional new work environment and the warmth of friends and family makes me appreciate so much more the love that I have. Reena identified this emotion as the one to exploit to get me to pay for her Quiznos subs. Tomorrow I have to go back to work, but I have run out of clothes.