better than nice

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So for about three months, I lived in Bemidji. Oh wait—I just realized that with the way my mind works, you might be missing some details that would explain why I’m here.

I had a really primo writing gig until a couple months ago, at which point I was laid off. It seems weird to get ‘laid off’ from a creative job—shouldn’t I be pursuing a writing career because I was laid off from my ‘real job?’

But whatever ‘angel investor’ this company was waiting for never came, and they ‘let go’ around thirty of their forty-five employees. Sure glad they ‘let’ us ‘go.’ Nice of them to not force us to…keep working.

Anyway, because of my principled and long-held opposition to the banking industry, I didn’t have—what is it you call money that you haven’t already spent?—oh right, savings. Actually, that’s more because I usually have any ‘extra money’ tied up in weed.

I have an amazing network of friends who have bailed out my ass on many occasions, and thanks to them I’ve bought some time, but the reality is, I haven’t found work, and I’m gonna have to move.

Thankfully, The Girlfriend was willing to take me in. Oh right—I haven’t explained that either. I get a ‘friend request’ on Facebook a few weeks ago from a woman, and I accept. After which I get the following message: “You are now friends with Kara.” Cool. Not sure I know who Kara is, but…cool. A new friend.

Short version—apparently we really ‘clicked’ at a mutual friend’s party six-and-a-half years ago, and she found me on Facebook. I say ‘apparently’ because I don’t remember the party as clearly as she does, in that I don’t remember the party. But apparently, six-and-a-half years ago, I had some game—or she entered a convent six-and-a-half years ago and just got out.

Here’s the beauty part—she gets my sense of humor. Now I’ve dated people with a sense of humor, and they get my jokes, but there always was that one moment where I would say something snarky, and they would look at me like they were watching C-SPAN, and I’d be thinking, “You seriously don’t see why that’s funny? With the thing, and the deal, and that other thing? I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME!”

So this one, this mysterious Kara person, laughs at the same shit I do! She gets my references! Oh yeah, and she’s really smart, and sweet and sexy—but my point is, she gets my references!

There were a few red flags that concerned me. I don’t mean the whole moving-in-together-after-only-knowing-each-other-for-four-weeks-and-one-(apparently)-memorable-night-six-and-a-half years ago—I’m talking about other stuff.

She had two cats. She’s not exactly the Crazy Cat Lady, but she’s only about one cat shy. Talks to her cats in complete sentences? Check. Refrigerator covered with cat-themed magnets? Check. Living room a minefield of cat toys and other cat-related things for me to trip over? Check.

I’m also a little concerned about something she told me when we first started talking about serious relationship-y things. Around week two, she told me she has “issues with men.” I thought this was troublesome, mostly because, demographically, I’ve always identified myself as being a part of that particular group. But so far, I guess, she hasn’t noticed that I’m a man. Damn—that doesn’t sound good at all. What I mean is—never mind.

Besides, with me questioning my career choices, carrying around anxiety disorder, depression and OCD, meeting someone with issues about only one thing is…downright refreshing.

I really do believe in things like romance, and destiny, and kismet, and I may have stumbled into all of those things here. Which brings me back to the concept of ‘here.’

Which for a few months was Bemidji, Minnesota, from the Ojibwe word meaning ‘fours hours from the nearest real city.” Please don’t get me wrong. Though I consider myself an urban guy, I can appreciate small-town charms. The leisurely pace, the friendly neighbors, the WHO AM I KIDDING WHERE ARE THE MUSEUMS, AND THE THEATERS? I WANT TO BE ABLE TO GET THAI FOOD AT ONE IN THE MORNING WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE BARS ARE CLOSED ON SUNDAY GODDAMMIT?!

I didn’t want to judge the place too quickly, so I did a bit of research online. Hey, they’ve got a college here. Let’s see if the campus groups give me a little big-city diversity. There’s gotta at least be a GLBT group—what? Muslim student union? Nope. Hillel for my young Jewish brothers and sisters? Uh…no. There are however, two Christian athletic fellowships and, I’m told, a vibrant Young Republicans group.

Here’s an example of how aggressively bland this part of the country can seem. People in the region refer to a concept known as ‘Minnesota nice.’ It’s never really defined, but it’s culturally midway between the ‘love ya, babe’s of L.A. and the ‘fuck you’s of New York. Born of repressed Nordic stock, and forged by a (let’s be real here, people) uninhabitable climate, ‘Minnesota nice’ is really more ‘Minnesota polite,’ or ‘Minnesota don’t cause a fuss.’ Well…here in Bemidji, there is a café CALLED ‘Minnesota Nice!” Across the street from a secondhand store called ‘Twice But Nice’!

On the plus side, I immediately became one of the edgiest people in town, and I might already be the most famous bisexual Jew in the history of Bemidji.

My urban prejudice notwithstanding, it is lovely there. A beautiful lake, cute little downtown, and I discovered a terrific Italian bistro. I wouldn’t have picked as a relocation destination, but I got a little peace of mind, maybe found a little clarity, and got some writing done. Besides, there was someone there who seemed to want to provide my broken-down middle-aged ass with some nurture. And that has been better than nice.

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mark my words

Ever since I read my first book (‘Green Eggs and Ham’), I have been in love with words for their own sake. Sure, you can make some cool things out whole bunches of words, but some words are great all by themselves. ‘Effluvium.’ ‘Nexus.’ ‘Philology.’ Hell, ‘philology’ is just plain fun to say. Try it. Say ‘philology’ out loud three or four times (best to do this when you’re alone, as opposed to, say, while taking public transit).

I recently discovered a fascinating website called LanguageLog. Of course by ‘fascinating,’ I mean ‘interesting to people who find arcane observations about the minutiae of language interesting,’ but really, isn’t that all of us?  No? Anyway, from this site I learned that there’s an actual term for a misspoken phrase that still makes sense, like ‘old-timer’s disease’ instead of ‘Alzheimer’s.’ It’s called an ‘eggcorn.’

My favorite new word (new to me, and actually fairly new as a word) is ‘snowclone.’ While it sounds like something created by a villain in a Bond flick (“With my army of snowclones, world domination will be mine!”), the term was coined by a linguist to describe what you might call ‘fill-in-the-blank’ clichés, like ‘X is the new Y,’ or that was ‘the mother of all _____s,’ or ‘the ______ from Hell.’ (I try to make my column entertaining AND educational. You’re welcome.)

I wonder about clichés. What about the first guy who said ‘one hand washes the other’? Was he pissed when everybody started saying it? Or did his friends just look at him funny, like “Well, duh! That’s how hand-washing works!” And some clichés don’t make much sense. Before it became a cliché, did people need to be constantly reminded to look before they leapt?

Sometimes clichés aren’t all they’re cracked up to be (see what I did there? I used a cliché to describe clichés!) Like when you want to point out that two things are dissimilar—they’re like ‘apples and oranges.’ Not very effective, since apples and oranges are both fruit. Shouldn’t it be ‘that’s like apples and…trucks’? And there’s always a flipside to clichés—you could say that ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,’ but you could also argue that ‘what doesn’t kill us weakens us so that it’s easier to kill us in the future.’ Granted, that’s not as effective as an affirmation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about words lately, which I’ve found is much less labor-intensive than actually writing words. Let alone the whole ‘stringing words together into sentences’ deal. And then the sentences have to somehow connect to each other? Oy.

There are, to be sure, pros and cons about being a freelance writer. On the plus side, I work when I’m inspired to work, not because it’s…Monday. In the minus column, I only get paid when I’ve actually done something, as opposed to getting paid because it’s…Friday.

I read once that to be a successful freelancer, one should treat every day as if one had a regular job. Get up at a certain time, put in your eight hours, etc. Because the myth of freelancing is that you ‘make your own hours,’ when in reality, you have to work with the exact same hours everyone else does. It’s not like you get special ‘freelance hours’ that are eighty minutes long, or freelance days with extra hours in them.

The magic phrase is ‘be your own boss.’ Great idea in theory, but the problem I face is that I’m a shitty boss. Combine that with the fact that I’m kind of a crappy worker, and productivity can really suffer.

For instance, as my boss, I tend to let myself start work around eleven-ish, and I don’t even notice that for most of my first hour on the job, I’m using my work computer to surf the web. Now in my defense, those Scrabble tiles won’t move themselves. But still, you’d think a good boss would at least wander by my desk occasionally to keep me focused. Also, even though I appreciate a laid-back workplace, I’m not sure it’s a great idea to have a boss that lets me smoke pot at work.

I think I’m gonna find a business supply store, buy myself a time clock and attach it to my desk, just to get that tangible feeling of “Now it’s time to start working.” I’ll trick myself into being productive. Maybe I’ll pick up some partitions and turn my desk into a cubicle (I was actually curious where one would buy a cubicle, and I found out there is a company in Dallas called Cubiclemart, which may win the award for most soulless business name in history).

One big difference between a freelance career and a real job is that, in a real job, once you have the gig, you just keep showing up, whereas I have to keep getting rehired every time I finish something. The truth is, I’m not too worried. I’m starting a new assignment tomorrow, so I’ll probably take the rest of today off. Besides, I heard somewhere that not working is the new work.

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it’s all about the chair

My Muse, sometimes, is like my first girlfriend after we broke up—yeah, I could call her, we might even get together, but nothing much is gonna come of it. You try to think of topics, as a writer, that haven’t been done to death. There aren’t any.

We have reached a point in civilization where everything has now officially been covered. Oh, and mocked. And there have also been pieces commenting about the mocking. It’s all been done. Move along, nothin’ to write here.

If you’re not a writer, and instead, say, actually make things people use, you probably don’t have much empathy for the whole ‘writer’s block’ thing. I think that’s the case with most stories about the ‘struggling artist.’ I’m pretty sure the reason the film of ‘A Chorus Line’ wasn’t a huge box-office hit is that,  for the typical American worker, the notion that ‘it’s really hard to dance in a show’ didn’t really resonate.

After trying for days to start a new comedy piece (weird term–“I think I’ll just have a piece of comedy, thanks”), I finally had a breakthrough. I now know the reason why I haven’t been able to write lately. It’s my chair. It doesn’t roll. Damned stupid, non-rolling, stationary chair.

I think a writer’s credibility goes up a notch with the rolling chair. There’s something profoundly powerful about…not having to get up. Since I live in a small studio apartment, I could conceivably spend an entire day sitting on my ass. That, my friends, is living the dream. If I feel a need for some exercise…well, I can read about exercise on the internet.

Having a rolling chair says a lot about a man. It implies, “He’s so busy he can’t take the time to stand.” It says. “He must have a lot of visitors, what with him needing a chair turns around like that.” It says, “That’s kinda sad that he needs to pretend he works in an office.”

So today, to procure said chair, I entered the Swedish labyrinth known as Ikea. I realize that, to use the math of the far right, that means I’m a socialist. After all, I’m shopping at a Swedish store, Sweden has socialized medicine, therefore I want to pull the plug on your grandparents.

Ikea actually frightens me. First of all, Ikea stores are too freaking big–I shouldn’t need a map after I’m already at my destination! Just because you’re a Swedish company, doesn’t mean your store needs to be the size of Sweden. If I’m getting two things, say, a rolling chair and a skillet, and I’ve found one of the two items, I shouldn’t need to consult a GPS device to locate the other.Here’s an idea–split up into multiple stores, each specializing in something. It’s called a mall, and the concept works.

Secondly, It’s all just a little too…efficient, don’t you think? You know who else was efficient, don’t you? The Third Reich. Seriously, is that an Ikea catalog, or Aryan Monthly? Everything in a nice, flat box? Lemme tell you something, Mister…Swedish guy. REAL LIFE doesn’t come in a nice flat box! And ya know what else, Sven? Oh, never mind, imaginary Swedish person.

Now, the idea of low prices because you build the shit yourself is fine, but why stop there? Why not have a store that’s just a pile of wood and particle board, with another big pile of random screws and bolts? And no cashiers—just boxes of money at the entrance out of which you make change. Imagine the savings! I wonder if Swedish grocery stores follow the same model. Shoppers wandering through aircraft-hangar sized warehouses, picking their own bananas, milking cows… “Honey, don’t forget we’re having lamb chops tonight—bring your mallet and your cleaver.”

I guess I’m just willing to spend a little more in order to arrive home with the actual thing I bought, and not a box representing that thing. Also, I am, mechanically speaking, a numbnuts. My stepdad wouldn’t let me go into our own garage after he watched me try to hammer two boards together.

In those high school aptitude tests, I would score 99th percentile on everything except what they called ‘spatial relationships.’ They would show a diagram of a bunch of pulleys and gears, and the question would be something like, “If pulley A turns counterclockwise, which direction would gear C turn?” And I would stare at the page as if trying to decode the Rosetta Stone, thinking, ‘who could possibly figure that out?’ I remember scoring right around the 43rd percentile on ‘spatial relationships,’ which is only slightly better than Bobo the Circus Orangutan would have ranked.

My one attempt at assembling an Ikea item was a desk, which took me three and a half hours, an hour of which was spent looking for more instructions than the half-page of sketches included in the box. When I was done, it looked like a desk, but I had four random pieces left over. I was afraid to use the desk, because I was worried at least one of those pieces was the piece responsible for actually supporting any kind of weight. I mostly put really light things on it, like postage stamps, and my keys.

So, I have a chair now, and it has wheels. Okay, I actually have some cushions, some metal thingies, a couple of plastic dealies, and some wheels. But I vow, someday, somehow, I will take those cushions, most of the metal thingies, at least one of the plastic dealies, and the wheels, and I will make me a chair. And then–yes then,  I will be able to write.

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