The Old Man Inside

I kind of have a soft spot for Lindsay Lohan. I realize this is strange.

a) Compared to her...cronies (jeez. I am old), she's actually fairly talented. Think she hasn't done anything since The Parent Trap? Check out Mean Girls. She's surprisingly good. And, all evidence to the contrary, she just seems nice. And she can sing!

b) Considering her parents, I think she's turned out about as well as anyone could have hoped.

That said though, isn't there ANY real adult in her...posse...that can get a handle on her? I guess they say she's uncontrollable, but three DUIs?!? Unlike a lot of the rest of that U-23 set, she has a bona fide career in front of her if she wants it. At least take away the car keys!

Anyway, that's my I'm-40-years-old rant of the week.

Also, the Wonder Years appears to be on some channel called 'Ion' and I just cried because Kevin's math teacher died. Awesome.

Role Play

One thing I really like about playing baseball is how there are so many different ways to add value to the game (haha, "add value", I've gone corporate). In the field, different positions require some different skills. Left fielders and catchers are barely even playing the same game. You soccer nuts can argue with me all you like, but I really have to think that a rock star defender could be a pretty good forward. Like rugby to some extent, the position diversity in baseball allows a wider variety of athletes to play the game. Offensively, I suppose it's less differentiated since any hitter can end up in any situation, but the leadoff hitter (woo! leadoff hitters!) and the cleanup hitter really do have different jobs to do. No one really expects me to clear the bases with a double (though I have...once), but no one expects the clean up hitter to get five pitches deep into the count and then collect a bunch of scratch hits and walks. It's one big reason the best teams don't always have the best players. What they do have, is people who are the best at responding to situations and doing their job for the moment.

Just like in baseball, I think we all have our roles at home too. Which is why I'm incredibly angry that I have a spider bite. I explained to the cat that one of the big reasons I have one creature is so that I won't have any other creatures. (The other reasons are love and decoration). I thought we had a deal: I supply her with food (wet and dry), treats, water, a clean sandbox, and all the love she can handle, and she kills all bug-type invaders, endures the occasional picking up, and tries not to go too nuts on the furniture. We may have to renegotiate our terms.

Oh Yeah

Correction from my last post:

There actually was one interviewer who did remember me, and I have to admit I didn't recognize him at first. Touche.

And, AND I forgot perhaps the weirdest quirk. Our bathroom stalls have two rolls of toilet paper. Guards against outages, I like it. But when a new roll is installed, it's held together with a sticker that says "Please help us reduce waste -- use other roll." I've been thinking about this for...it'll be a month on Wednesday...and I can't figure out how in the world finishing one roll before starting the other would reduce waste. Does toilet paper go bad and have to be thrown out? Do people subconsciously use more toilet paper when they're pulling from the bigger of two rolls? It's a mystery.

The Office

We have no official dress code at work. That fact, combined with the differing prior work experiences of the approximately 1,000 employees makes for a pretty wide spectrum of clothing visible from my cube. This week alone, I have seen people walk down the hall with:

-a trucker hat
-a faded, melon-colored tank top that should have gone in the Goodwill pile circa 1992
-patent leather dress shoes
-an absolutely enormous hickey (on a guy, so I guess the turtleneck was out...also, it's summer)

The haircuts are surprisingly conservative, though. Even among the design people...Good old corporate America.

Getting used to a new work environment makes me feel like I'm in some sort of giant psychological experiment. For instance, my office apparently doesn't staple. It took me nearly a week to find a stapler and when I did, it was hidden on such a high shelf in the supply room that I had to ask the guy in the trucker hat to get it down. Now, it's sitting on my desk, unopened, because it's ridiculously sealed and I don't yet want to go into the mailroom and ask for a butcher knife. But I love staples and hate paper clips so I'll eventually give in, I guess.

Also, the people in my cube cluster only sometimes greet each other when they arrive and leave. Other times, they just stand up and walk out with no fanfare. I don't consider myself big on small talk, but even I find this pretty weird. Whenever *I* leave, I awkwardly say, "um...goodnight" like you're supposed to.

Oh yeah, and all eleven of the people who interviewed me must interview a whole lot of people, because it was only a month between even my earliest interviews and my start date, and all of them pass me in the halls without even the vaguest glimmer of recognition. I readily admit, I'm not good with faces, but this makes me think that they hire basically everyone they interview.

I did get a paycheck though! They say money can't make you happy, and I suspect that's true in the long term, but it falls flat on its face in the short term...

Does This Make Up For The Fact That I Can't Talk? No.

I'm one of those people who is very rarely sick and honestly, I'm really bad at it. I have no idea when to slow down or what the consequences of my actions will be. Hey, yelling a lot when you already have a sore throat will cause laryngitis?? No kidding. And it was my second week of work and we were doing all this training so I would have had to feel pretty amazingly crappy to skip it. And as I mentioned, I have very little ability to judge that.

Thus, I've had very little in the way of vocal power for ten days now. I was sick last week and then apparently not very nice to my voice while playing in a baseball tournament over the weekend. Even living alone doesn't really help. I talk to the cat, I have to remind myself not to sing even though there's pretty much only one pitch at which I can make any noise at all, I feel the need to test my voice every five minutes just to see if it's better, I'm my own worst enemy here! And now I sound like a combination of a smoker, a phone-sex operator, and Peter Brady in the Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes episode. You just never know what's going to come out at any given time.

Anyway though, it turns out I'm a talker. Which I guess I knew, but jeez, you wouldn't believe how hard it is for me to shut up for a while. And what a different person I am without a voice. I'm like one of those too-nice, slightly awkward people that always makes me feel like a performing bear.

So here's hoping tomorrow is the day...