Too Fey to Be Gay

I broke down and went back to the cafe this morning. I've been pretty good about eating my own yogurt and granola and brewing my own coffee, but today I walked into the break foom and it looked so...filthy. Really, I don't think anyone sweeps up in there. The break room is on the second floor of our circa-1906 building in what was once the vault: there's a massise cast-iron door, the walls are brick, and the floor is cracked, uneven concrete. We used to call it the dungeon and keep the old credit card receipts up there.

Smart move, relocating the kitchen and break room to a vault. It's always dirty, not so much because it's a vault, but because it's a break room. The only clean company break rooms I ever saw were at the editorial offices of Martha Stewart Magazine, and I'm sure even those got kinda hairy at times. (Those were the best break rooms ever, actually. They were constantly stocked with bottles of Evian, cans of Diet Coke, packages of instant oatmeal, and pretzel rods.) But otherwise, people never clean up after themselves. There's always puddles of water on the floor and counter, dirty dishes in the sink, wet but clean dishes in the cupboard. And the garbage can is overflowing with paper towles, which people use like they are going out of style.

So I opted out of preparing my morning repast in the break room/vault. I had enough cash to get an incompetently-made latte at the cafe. The fey-boy with the barettes in his hair was manning the counter solo, and he always very kindly screws up my order. But this morning he did not, and he even made a heart design in the foam of my latte.

I don't get this guy. He looks 18 or 19, but I figure he may be a year or two older. He's soft spoken and pretty ditzy, with no hustle at all. He'd drive me nuts if I worked with him. He reminds me of the freaky people in high school who were not the cool freaky people--the Lolapalloza crowd, let's call them--but the very dorky freaky people. Lifelong Weird Al fans. I think, mostly on account of the barettes, that this kid is gay (probably that all of the other barristas are lesbians only solidifies this in my mind). But it's almost like he's too little boy to be gay...and not put-upon fey, little boy act, but totally genuine. I just don't get it. Dating him would be like dating a semi-grown boy-man.

Mary Magdalnes at the Christian Bookstore

Mr. Bir Toujour was watching "The Passion of Christ" (or is it "The Passion of the Christ"?) last night. I was skeptical after all of the bullshit hyp that surrounded the movie's release, churches buying blocks of tickets and conservative parents taking their young children to see ol' Jebus get flagellated. But Mr. Bir Toujour was curious about the film.

I watched some of the opening scenes while I ate a dish of cookies 'n' cream ice cream. There was a lot of fog, blue light, and panic/running/panting involved. It all looked like a bad recreation of Lothlorien to me. After a mere few minutes, I gave up and retreated to the bedroom to read Henry James' "Daisy Miller."

But I could still hear the movie going on, its melodramatic Aramaic spiels and cinematic score blaring on and on (try listening to a movie without watching it sometime; it's a pretty depressing exercise). When I first got wind of Mel Gibson's "Passion" project, I was in the Gibson corner. "All right," I thought: he was sticking to his guns and producing the thing very much without the blessing to the Hollywood establishment. And in a practically dead language! It sounded very cinema verite to me because of that. I imagined a real Jesus instead of a movie Jesus, who tends to resemble those airbrushed, Aryan soft-focus Jesus images on church programs and children's bible storybooks.

The movie is a wash, I think, though I'm not qualified to post such judgement as I only actually saw about three minutes of the thing. It's basically an overblown cinematic version of a passion play.

Besides, Gibson is full of shit. "The Passion" had way more merchandise tie-ins than the last "Shrek" installment. I know this because my friend Bryan and I went to a Christian bookstore once. It was just as the sun began to set, as we spotted some young girls in skimpy clothing loitering in the Christian bookstore's strip mall parking lot. "Whoa, check it out!" said Bryan. "Whores!"

I'd heard about prostitutes scoring dates on Santa Rosa Avenue, but I never saw any; I'd always figured they were the most bottom-rung prostitutes available--crack whores, basically, because Santa Rosa Avenue is one of the grossest places ever. But these girls were pretty and fashionably dressed. And it was so early. They strutted around half-heartedly in their platform sandals and kept checking their cell phones.

"Do you think they always hang out here?" I asked Bryan. "Is this their turf--the Christian bookstore parking lot?"

We decided to go into the store to kill some time and see where the girl were once we came out. I just read in Newsweek that Christian bookstores are taking a hit badly because so many larger-chain places like Barnes & Noble have eaten up their market by featuring Christian books. I guess that stinks for Christian stores, but from what I saw at the place with Bryan, so what? Man, it was depressing. For a bookstore, they sure didn't have many books. There were bookmarks, Christan comic action figures (including Bibleman), acid-washed denim Bible covers, lots of sloganeering sweatshirts, and a shitload of "VeggieTales" merchandise. I even saw fashionable purses with tiny "Jesus" emblems embroidered between the handles.

I don't get it. I think that being a good Christian comes down to what you do, not what you buy. You can wear a million WWJD charms, but if you're a shallow, narrow-minded person, it's all for shit. I tried to think of it from the Christian bookstore side as wearing a t-shirt with your favorite bands's logo. Like how I wear my Ramones t-shirt on special days when I need a lift. Being a Ramones fan is part of who I am; I almost feel like it's part of my beliefs system: support good, simple music that makes the world a better place by railing against what's bad about it while rejoycing in the good. But on days when I don't wear my Ramones shirt, I'm still the same person; I'm still a Ramones fan. I don't need to go to the Hot Topic store to solidify my devotion to the Ramones lifestyle. So I don't see how buying a Jesus purse makes you a better Christian, just as putting a yellow ribbon magent on your car does not make you more supportive of our soldiers in Iraq. It's all just stuff.

The books at the bookstore are interesting, too. Lots of pro-Bush titles, like "A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush." I think that being a good Christian (or Jew or Muslim, for that matter) means staying on top of current events so that you can make your own judgements about how your faith is relevant to them. But it also means understanding what your faith is about in the first place, which is what academic texts are for. I saw none at the Christian bookstore.

I did, however, see lots of "Passion" merchandise. There was a lavish coffee table book, a "Passion" bookmark, and--best of all--a "Passion" nail. For $15, you, too, can buy a Mel Gibson-approved pewter nail on a cheap black leather thong. That $15 will rack in the royalties AND make sure you never forget that Jesus dies on a cross to forgive your sins.

Bryan bought me some presents at the bookstore: an "I (heart) Jesus" toothbrush cup, some "Jesus Loves Me" stickers, and a package of "D.O.G." (Depend on God) gumballs. Then we went back to my car and saw the young hookers at the other end of the parking lot. "Let's go talk to them," said Bryan, but he was kind of joking. I wanted to ask them if that was their turf, if they usually picked up johns in the Christian bookstore parking lot. I wonder what it's like to be a young prostitute. I wonder if they think that the commercialization of religion is as much of a crock as I do, or if they think of religion at all. I wouldn't if I were them.

Sunday Afternoon at Casper's

In the middle of grocery shopping today, I realized I had to eat a hot dog *right* at that moment. Hot dogs are my favorite kind of junk food ever. I love them even more than boxed macaroni & cheese, unless the macaroni & cheese has cut-up hot dogs stirred into it.

I think it's a hormonal/menses thing, though, today's urge for the hot dog; all day long I've been craving salty, fatty, carb-high food (and the day is still fairly young). Once I got home and put the groceries away, I walked several blocks away to Casper's on San Pablo Avenue, which would quell my hot dog yearnings.

Casper's is a small Bay Area franchise of hot dog restaurants. For year I'd walk or drive by the Casper's that was so close to our house and peer inside the windows to see huge, lonely-looking woman staffing the place solo, one or two customers sitting at the counter with their paper-wrapped hot dogs. It painted a sort of post-Cold War update on Hopper's "Nighthawks" vignette.

I finally checked it out myself a few months ago--it's pretty amazing I held out so long, given this ridiculous attachment to hot dogs. But the place always scared me, so lost in time and desolate it seemed. The interior is stark, with little stools affixed to the floor along about a dozen almost perenially empty tables. The staff--all women, all inching slowly from middle age to a haggard upper-middle age--wear orange and yellow polyerster Casper's smocks. The place visually reeks of '70s.

On my way to Casper's today I passed a father at a payphone with two young kids. His little girl clutched a tin of Asian butter cookies whose handles had allowed its double use as a purse. The boy was pulling on his father's flannel sleeve. I used to see families like that in Ohio all of the time; I think of them as classic semi-trashy families, Real American People.

Once I arrived, Casper's was fairly empty as always--they do get a fair amount of foot traffic, though, regulars who get take-out as opposed to enjoying the orange, pink, and yellow vinyl stools for the experience of dining in. Two ladies were behind the counter. They have a system, I've noticed, if there are two ladies behind the counter: one takes the orders and prepares the hot dogs, the other gets drinks and rings up the sale. I got a Kraut Dog with mustard and ketchup (the relish there is not my favorite, and "everything" dogs come with pulpy slices of tomato and thick, overly piquant slabs of raw onion). The lady rining up sales asked me if I'd like chips or a cookie, and I politely told her no.

Casper's ladies may ber haggard, but they are kind. I looked over to the side counter andsaw a third Casper's lady on what I assumed was her lunch break. Several Casper's ladies are large, but she is quite possibly the largest and oldest; perhaps the younger large lady is her daughter. She sat pushing bright orange BBQ potato chips into her mouth in steady slow motion. What is the life of a Casper's lady like? They take hot dogs out of packages and place them in the steamer, fill up neon plasic souvenier cups with gallons of Pepsi, artfully dodge the antiquated, gentle but persistent sexual harassment of leathery, nicotine-stained elderly regular customers, and slice raw onions too thickly. They are lifers. What will happen to Casper's once they are gone?

It's rare to see young kids in Casper's, though I am perhaps just not there at the right time to catch them; there are middle and high schools not far away, and an after-school crowd of kids craving cheap, harmful food could easily congregate there. But Taco Bell is not far, either, and it's far more attractive to mainstream, TV-fed kids.

Shortly after I sat down at the largest table in the place, the father I'd seen by the payphone came in with his kids. The little boy kept on insisting that he wanted a "puppy dog," not a Casper Junior. I got one of those free classified ad circulars from a rack and began flipping through the pages, browsing over services--stereo installation, trash removal, computer repair--that I'd never use.

The family sat at the table across from me. The kids both had neon souveneir cups filled with soda--probably enough sugar in there to bake a cake, I thought. The little boy was very excited about his hot dog. "The best part of a hot dog is the cheese," he said. "All hot dogs with everything should come with cheese."

The father looked up at me. He had glasses in thick brown frames and a mesh-and-foam trucker hat not unlike those that my fiancee and many of my male friends wear. I realized that he was just a hipster like me, only with a family. All true hipsters are pretty trashy, after all. Today, for instnace, I am wearing a fraying long-sleeved thermal shirt with a navy t-shirt over it, baggy baby blue cords, and dirty pink Pumas. I also have not washed my hair in nearly a week, hoping that the residual hair goop will help easy me into a new hairstyle (it's not working, by the way; I look like a greasy dyke). Maybe someday if Mr. Bir Toujour and I have kids he'll be a cool dad and take them to a fading-glory hot dog chain on Sunday Afternoon and buy them tons of soda and a puppy dog with everything, including cheese. All of us at Casper's share the same attraction to its happy melancholy...as well as its hot dogs.

Open House, Open Hell

It's a beautiful Saturday and I'm stuck at work, half-assedly manning our company's open house for wholesale buyers. Nobody's here; there's like a 3:1 ratio of company staff to open house guests.

I hate boring parties. Imagine how many of these types of events you'd have to suffer through if you were important or famous--all of the agonizing small talk, the mediocre hours d'oeurves, the glasses of red or white wine. How come there's never beer at these things, huh? Maybe some day I'll host an open house with a keg. For now, I can hide upstairs in my office desk area and dick off on my blog. It's even better than having an emergency book. (Always travel with an emergency book or magazine. I like to keep one in my handbag for waiting rooms and long checkout lines at the grocery store.)

This is all in conjunction with the NASFT (The National Association for the Specialty Food Trade) Fancy Food Show in San Francisco this weekend. Our company is one of the five billion exhibitors there. I got to see the Fancy Food show poised for action yesterday when some co-workers and I went on a three-hour errand to drop off 24 gallons of milk at the convention center where that show is held. Said 5 billion exhibitors were still in the midst of setting up but had gone back to their hotel rooms for the day, and the massive, multi-floor show room was eerily vacant, save for teamsters zipping around in forklifts.

I can only imagine what the show will be like once it's going full-force: one throbbing, swollen, pulsing gland of pure, cut-throat commerce. Deals made, deals broken. Thousands of pounds of salty snacks, day-glo candy, freeze-dried conveniences, and hopped-up novelty spirits passing through lips and into bloated bellies. Sales reps on the prowl, crouching behind their booths like hunters zeroing the cross-hairs of their guns in on browsing buyers. Vipers ready to strike. Permanently fixed toothy white smiles and constant chains of handshakes.

I suck at that kind of stuff. I'm a natural-born anti-mingler. I like to do work that's less about dealing and more about real work--moving stuff around, preparing gallons of pasta sauce, that sort of thing

Busted!

At Least I Tried

This new job is way too cushy. Some days I'm fine with dicking around on the internet, but on other days I can't hack it. Yesterday was such a day.

Inactivity and no sense of purpose are the worst things for me ever. I get very little direction form my manager--I think because he has no idea what I should be doing--and the feedback I receive from the work I ditribute for approval is sporadic at best. Yesterday I was at the end of my rope, feeling excluded from my department and loathed by everyone in the upper management. I already felt like that all through my public school education, and I don't much want to relive it.

I went home in a desperate and vile mood, determined to go on a run and pound my insecurieties and frustrations out on the pavement. I hadn't been out running at night in at least six months, and I'd forgotten how...*dark* it was. Blind spots, shapeless shadows, blinding headlights, and uneven sudewalks lurked at every turn. I got so upset that I decided to throw my Walkman down on the sidewalk and smash it in a million little pieces, but maturity prevailed. I decided it was better for me to walk than run at that moment.

At least I tried. And that's what I need to do here--try harder, bug people more. Maybe I'll inadvertently ruffle a few feathers and piss a few folks off, but at least I'll have tired to be of value. After all, they didn't hire me to do nothing.

May the Force Be with eBay

I walked into the computer/sewing/drumming/general creativity room this afternoon to find Mr. Bir Toujour squatting on the floor, surrounded by Star Wars toys. He looked up at me and smiled and his eyes crinkled. "I want to see if any of these are selling for a lot of money on eBay," he said.

Like most boys (and girls) of his (and my) generation, Mr. Bir Toujour grew up fixated on the Star Wars trilogy. He had many of the Star Wars action figures and playsets that Kenner sold in his youth, but--as happy boys are wont to do--he played with them to death in his high desert backyard, which I imagine to be not unlike that of Luke Skywalker's native Tatooine. What original-issue Kenner Star Wars toys he has today are far from mint condition, which is as it should be.

During the mid-90s theatrical release of Gerorge Lucas' CGI-fests--the new, adulterated editions of Star Wars Episodes IV-VI--Kenner (via Tonka) began to sell a new, amped-up line of Star Wars figurines. Mr. Bir Toujour, who was in college by then, began to collect these pumped-up action figures. He now has a pretty decent collection, all still encased in their original packages. They live in a big cardboard box labeled with the warning "JOE'S STAR WARS STUFF DON'T TOUCH!!!"

After reading a graphic novel about a young and greedy comic book collector, Mr. Bir Toujour apparently became inspired to make some cold, hard eBay cash off of his Lucasfilm collectables. So he spread his collection all over the floor to assess what he had and didn't have. He was in the thick of it when I stuck my head in the door and yelled "Christ, it's dinner time already!" (spaghetti and meatballs, and yes, it was delicous).

After dinner and just beginning to feel several glasses of cheap Chianti (it's not spaghetti and meatballs without cheap Chianti!), I came into the creativity room to wade through the Star Wars figures over to this here computer. But of course I became distracted by the toys all over the floor--how could you not?

The reissues of the Star Wars figures are, to be blunt, just *wrong*. The original Kenner figures loosely resembled their cinematic counterparts, albeit in a miniature animatronic sense. But these newer things! Princess Leia, with her square jaws and mannish hands, looks like a drag queen. Luke looks calm and wise, quite unlike his youthful and wussy film self. Worst of all, they gave C-3PO *pecs*. Look, the thing is a droid. Droid's don't go on steroids.

I can understand Mr. Bir Toujour's attration to collecting these things, though. Unopened toys hold fragments of our youth, still perfect and fresh and unplayed with. For a kid, nothing compares to the thrill and possibility of an unopened toy...waiting for *you*. Vintage toys still in their original packaging are frozen pulses from the past, as vivid and concrete as they can be.

When I lived in New York, there was a 5-and-Dime store that I liked to go to for about 100 different reasons. It was in the small Hudon Valley town of Rhinebeck, right on the main drag. The window displays, then wood floors, the discount greeting cards--it all smelled, breathed, and exuded oldness. Well over half of their merchandise was new, but I have no idea where they dredged it up: bright red polyester knee socks, lunch lady hair nets, aluminum egg-poaching sets, candy necklaces, bright pink plastic watering cans embossed with 70s daisies...companies still make these things?

But the store also had merchandise that was bona-fide old. I'm not sure where they got it--perhaps back in the day they simply overordered by mistake and are still selling off backstock that's over a quarter-century old--mostly nylons, sewing patterns, bobby pins, and the like. All of the prices were marked in black grease pencil.

One day I went in there and stumbled across a blister pack of cheap plastic dollhouse furniture. The wording on the box says "Lil' House-Keeper Furniture", and the clear plastic encases a dining room set with a china cabinet and yellow place settings for two.

But it was the photos on the side of the box that got me: pictured were additional furniture sets to collect, two of which--a living room ensemble and a bedroom suite--I had had as a little girl. Fragements of those sets might still dwell in a box somewhere in my parents' basement, but for all intensve purposes they are long gone.

I had a holy moment in that store the day I found the dining room set. I can only compare it to meeting a really amazing boy for the first time. It made me high for the next day and a half. What's really funny is that, as a child, I was never very attached to those sister plastic furniture sets. That didn't matter. I still have that dining room set, and it's still in its original packaging. It hangs on the wall very close to this desk, along with seven other cheap plastic packages of toys. I'm pathetic. I guess if a $3.95 investment as an adult can make me so happy, so be it.

The Mullefication of Lefty

Welcome to the new and improved Sneezy & Tacky! We're so happy to have you here. Please note the sleeker layout and newly discovered ability to post challenging, innovative images online. Also please note that I am now Lefty, and no longer go by my old name. That's because I realized I was writing some cathartic but unkind things about my workplace, which I wish no harm upon. Not like I expect someone I work with to stumble across this blog and become offended and fire me...though anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection could view this blog...

Anyway, it's not like Lefty is a dumb made-up name, because I am left-handed and very proud of it. In high school, my friend Kelly started calling me Lefty, and I began to call her Brown (just as I am left-handed, she is really brown). To this day, a bunch of folks over in England that I've never met know me only as Lefty.

Mr. Bir Toujour also has a history behind his name, but it's not that exciting.

Most people that I make up names for don't know about it. Here are some of my favorite made-up names.
1. Retail Ron
2. Jimmy Knivel
3. Stubby Chunkers
4. Stinky Mc Poojeans
5. Annie Ronis

Mr. Bir Toujour is a very gifted maker-upper of names, some muscle that he flexes on his blog of fist-shaking at the white-collar world: http://morninghater.blogspot.com.

There are no photos of yours truly on this blog, and I plan to keep it that way. But for now, in your mental picture of the nerd presently molesting her home keyboard, paint in a mullet. A fledgling mullet.

Several months ago--late this summer, actually--I got what I felt to be a very stylish, very short haircut. Think Maggie O'Connel in the earlier seasons of 'Northern Exposure.' That haircut grew, and now it's a somewhat formless mop-top of a thing. Were I to grease it down properly (i.e. not wash it for weeks upon weeks) I'd make a great hipster guy, but as it is now, the profile of my hair changes daily; some days it's flatter (thanks to using a hair dryer), some days it's fluffier (air-drying, limited use of styling product). Some days it looks like an unkempt version of my mother's haircut (days when I don't wet my hair down after getting out of bed).

It's getting pretty long in the back. Today, after returning from a very wonderful pre-MLK Day hike to the summit of Mt. Diablo, I took a shower and treated my wet locks with small dabs of Clairol Herbal Essences Styling Gel and some expensive, creamy-opaque whitish stuff that costs $7 for 2 ounces. I swept the whole works back, and after an hour or so of air-drying I looked in the mirror and saw...Patrick Swayze!

Well, more like a modified Patrick Swayze. This is okay with me, as I don't plan on leaving the house tonight. I recall seeing many such unisex hairstyles in the in the magazines at the hair salon that my mother took me to when I was growing up: Hair Dimensions. The 80s retro look is in now, so I could ride out the Swayze-mullet for a few weeks. In fact, I must, as my next hair appointment (a few blocks away at a salon called Chroma, not at Hair Dimensions) is not until February, and I have vowed not to hack my hair apart impulsively, which I used to do often.

So imagine a younger, smoother-skinned Patrick Swayze-ette behind the grand curtain of Sneezy & Tacky. It's a mini-mullet, but a mullet no less.

Lefty's Domestic Bliss
making the world better one image at a time

Men Are Triangles, Women Are Circles

Yesterday I noticed the signs on the restroom doors next to the cafe in the building where I work. The Women's room sign is one of those international stick figure woman symbols on a circle, while the Men's room is an international stick figure man symbol on a triangle.

Is there a message here? Does this mean men are pointy and women are...round? How abstract. Geez, why not go whole hog and make it a stick and a dot?

Yesterday I wrote my music column. This may be gladdening news for all seven of the people who read my music column, but writing the thing was like pulling teeth. Ouch! Some weeks you got it, some weeks you don't.

Style, Grammar, and Moral Conviction

Today, for the first time in years, I felt stupid because I didn't graduate from college. It's a bad bad feeling.

I only went to university for three or four quarters (that's a year and a third, approximately, to those of you who went to universities that adhere to what I presume is the more common semester system). That I can't remember exactly how many quarters I attened should be indicitave of my level of committment to my failed education at Ohio State University. Eventually, however, I did graduate from a highly respected and competetive cooking school, and I very strongly feel that it was one of the best life choices I've made.

Even so, the school does not make the woman. I have plenty of peers who went to college and, today, have very little in tems of career skills to show for it...whereas I can at least cook pretty well.I've always been proud of myself for realizing early on that college is a sham: lots of stupid people graduate from expensive universities, and lots of smart people never even attend one. If I am ever a parent, I will encourage my kids to seek a trade--be electricians or something tangible and honest like that. Electricians have to be pretty smart, right?

So I learned many useful things in cooking school, but I did lose out on formalized intellectualism. And I kind of like that stuff. Typically I get my fill of critical snobbery from browsing through reference books, an enriching habit I (and my good friend Bryan, http://www.benlid.blogspot.com) was able to pursue greatly at a former job: shelving assloads of hefty nonfiction books at a library full of homeless people.

I often run across words that I don't know the meaning of. This happens aurally as well, because I listen to a lot of NPR and hear words I can't quite define out of context. So there are words I don't know how to spell, words I don't know how to say, and words I don't know how to use--e.g. "aurally."

Let's blame this on my refusal to study SAT vocabulary words. When else in life do you encounter new vocabulary words--and I mean real words, not silly, invented media words like "blog" and "crunk." How do people with huge vocabularies get huge vocabularies? Are they born that way? Have they spent secret lifetimes thumbing through dictionaries every time they encountered a word of question?

I like dictionaries, and I've been known open them looking for one word only to put the book down fifteen minutes later because some entry like "retort" (as in a noun, as in a glass vessel used to distill things, probably familiar to you from "M*A*S*H") had a cool illustration that was next to an even cooler, totally different entry for some other word. And so on.

But I don't study dictionaries, and I don't plan on it. The reason all of this is on my mind at 11pm is not actually my limited vocabulary, but my limited command of grammar.

As stated in a previous entry or two, my new job calls for me to exhibit a strong command of style and language. Normally I feel I have those things--I'm a writer, for christ's sake, and I've had shit published in books and everything. But I've also had the benefit of an editor and a proffreader in the past, and they in turn had established formats and styles to adhere to.

At this new job, *I'm* not only the writer--I'm the editor and proofreader, sort of. What I write needs to be approved before it goes out to the public, but said approval audience isn't always the most rapt of my scribblings. They are Presidents and Principals of the Company, not copy editors. Plus there is no style sheet at this company, which means that any two figures of authority can tell me to do two very different things.

So I decided to develop a style sheet. Since there's about 8 years' worth of company products and literature to consider in formulating this sheet, I decided to distribute a very informal multiple-choice questionnaire to my co-wokers, asking them stuff like "Yes or no: do we capitalize fresh confections?" Or "Would you hypenate '5-Ounce Bittersweet Bar'?" I wanted to see what I'm up against.

A can of worms! I am up against an open can of worms! The hypen thing is going to be especially ugly, I can tell. Someone was pointing out to me that it should not be an option to not use one, because "5-Ounce Bittersweet Bar" is not correct without it. "You know that, right?" he said. "You can look it up in a book."

Well, yeah, but half of this comany's signage is totally devoid of hypens. So how did it get that way? Whose stylistic choice was that? Commas are going to be another big mess, too. I don't even want to get into it now.

I guess what I need to do is take charge and stick to my guns. The problem is that I have no sound style rules to fall back on; when I write a certain way, I do it not because I know something is correct--it's because I'm pretty sure it's correct. I assume when they hired a girl with no marketing experience or English degree, they suspected this...but then, these are the same people who sold millions of dollars of chocolate for 8 years with no style sheet. I'm a terrible typist, a fair speller, and I can't be my own editor. Fuck. Maybe I'll call in sick tomottow.

The Disgruntled Customer Cafe

There's a cafe in the building where I work. This makes it handy, as far as fancy coffee drinks in the morning and the occasional muffin or scone. I've had plenty of lattes, americanos, and pastries from there, in fact.

But a few months ago I swore off the cafe. I'd had one too many discouraging experinces with greasy grilled cheese sandwiches, bad jazz blaring over the speakers, and long, long lines that terminate with one frazzled, semi-competent barrista.

Over here on my company's end, complaining about the cafe (its food AND service) is quite the pastime.
It's a topic everyone can relate to, and there's an endless supply of Bad Cafe Experiences.

"I was in there and saw the barrista wiping the rim of a cocoa mug off with the same filthy rag they'd just wiped the counter down with."

"Yesterday I had to wait an hour for my salad--and I'd even phoned it in as a take-out order."

"This guys was asking if they had cinnamon, and the barrista said no, but they did have cocoa powder. Are these things interchangeable now?"

The somewhat pathetic thing is that we continue to visit the cafe. Sometimes I lapse back into good faith and give the cafe another chance, like I did this morning. Everyone likes the idea of a latte in the morning, right? Well, *I *do, and I try to reserve the habit as a special treat for times when I arrive at work really early. Foamy, milky coffee drinks are good for writers. So this morning I decided to give the cafe the benefit of the doubt and get myself a little working writer's breakfast.

There was, amazingly, no line at the counter. Understand that this cafe has the worst feng shui *ever*--there's no clear place for a line to form, so when there's a throng of mocha-thirsty stroller moms, they all hang out in this inpenetrable blob. Walking in to the absence of stroller moms was encouraging.

I ordered a medium latte and a muffin to go. The barrista, a somewhat fey and dim boy who's ultimatel good-natured, rang up my order. The total seemed low, but the total fluxuates depending on what the staff discount happens to be that day (the cafe management can't seem to make up their mind about it.) Plus I'm a decent tipper, so sometimes the barristas give me a pretty good kick back.

In the middle of processing my change, the barrista announced that he'd forgotten to clock in. Then he handed me my drink--with no muffin, mind you--and immediately helped the next dude in line, so it would have been rude at that point to interrupt them. I considered grabbing a muffin myself, but it occured to me that the barrista never rang it up. Once he'd finished the next transaction, I asked the barrista this.

"Oh, no," he said casually, and then returned to swabbing the counter with a sodden towel.

I'll probably visit the cafe again--after a few weeks, I'll forgive them for their incompetence, and their fancy coffee drinks are acceptable enough to semi-justify it. But there's a larger function of the cafe: it's a harmless thing for everyone to gripe about. It's the common ground of all employees here, our own "what do you think of this weather?" We may sometimes be disgruntled about how things function at our company, but we'll always share the joy of knowing we're not as badly off as the cafe.

Curbside Stereo

It's Monday morning, after 9am and I'm still the only one here. Kick ass! That means I can write in my blog guilt-free for a good ten minutes or so...I think I had a dream, by the way, that I got fired for unapproved Internet activity. Apparently it did not deter much.

I got a new stereo about four or five months ago. This left me with my old stereo, a thing I'd had since my freshman year of college. It was too old to sell--more effort that it would be worth--but it still worked just fine.

So I brought it to work with me, as our factory is in a shady neighborhood of sorts. Right before leaving, I put the stereo and its speakers out on the curb. The next morning, I pulled into our parking lot. Gone.

I like the idea of getting rid of my crap by leaving it on the sidewalk. It's trashy, but I have definetly been known to be on the receiving end, so it's good to spread the love.

Car vs. Pedestrian on San Pablo

Yesterday I was driving to work in the grey drizzle. Most of my morning drive is composed of creeping down San Pablo Avenue, a boulevard that stretches from Richmond all the way to Oakland and is lined with (depending on your coordinates) with auto shops, liquor stores, boutiques, ethnic restaurants, thrift stores, and prostitutes. I don't mind San Pablo Avenue itslef; it's driving on it that gets my goat. True, I'd rather be stuck in San Pablo traffic than highway gridlock, but there's an abundance of stoplights, bus stops, crosswalks, and freight trucks unloading in traffic lanes with their hazard lighs flashing.

You have to be extra careful for pedestrians and bike riders on San Pablo, because they can be dumb. There's a five-block stretch where people traverse the street wherever they damn well please, no matter how many cars are moving along or at what speeds these cars travel. I think they *want* to get hit. I think they either have a death wish, or they want to get their bones broken so they can sue you. These people piss me off, but I don't want to hurt anyone...and I don't want to get sued.

I try to be a defensive driver, looking out for bikers dressed all in black with no helmets and no blinky things on their bies when they ride at night in the rain. Looking out for mothers with strollers ambling across the street and for homeless dudes pushing rusty shopping carts full of overstuffed castoff plastic shopping bags. And for busses, which lumber up and down San Pablo at all hours, tying up the flow of traffic with their frequent stops.

I'm all for riding busses (even though I myself do not), so I try to be patient with them. But this one day I was driving along and the bus in front of me pulled over to the stop, forcing me to shift lanes so I could pass it. The bus lingered there for some time without any passengers boarding or disembarking, and I wondered what was up.

Suddenly this kid, dressed in a black hooded sweatshirt with a black backpack, sprints into the street. I was not moving fast, but I didn't want to stop--"I'm a moving car, goddamn it," I thought to myself. "This time, the kid will stop. *I* won't, but the kid will. Fuck this shit. I don't run into oncoming traffic, so other people have to learn no to."

This kid was not ready to learn. He did not slow down, did not budge from his trajectory. He ran in front of my car and I slammed on my breaks and honked my horn and yelled "use the fucking crosswalk, dipshit!", even though my windos were up and no one could hear me but me.

Once he finished crossing the street, I looked into my side view mirror and saw the kid stumbling onto the bus. That's when I realized that the bus driver had been waiting for him.

I felt bad for not thinking of this, and I felt bad for this kid who was so desperate not to miss his bus that he was willing to risk his life. Smart.

But I don't feel bad about it now. Me, I'd rathe rmiss my bus and not have any broken legs, thanks.

Touch Me I'm [sic]

It has been called to my attention that Mr. Bir Toujour's name does not really make sense. While I'm not a fan of making grammatical errors or misspellings (in any language), I must say: Oh well, too late. Just today I discovered that "volumptuous" is not a word. "Voluptuous", however, is.

My burrito dinner has ruined me; I'm tired, thirsty, and too full. I had set aside part of my dinner burrito for lunch tomorrow, but it wound up being dessert tonight (see, I could have said "desert tonight," but that would be wrong).

Somewhere in this blog I also refer (not "reefer") to a "viscous high school era" or somesuch (thank you, Brown, for pointing this out). While the majority of my high school experience did profoundly suck, I cannot say that it was sticky or glutinous; in fact, it was profoundly free of stick. Many high schoolers do have an abundance of viscocity, in terms of backseat secretions and ejections. But I didn't.

These grammer and usage issues are very much on my mind, since I'm responsible for generating all of the copy for the chocolate factory I work for. Today there was a debate about how to collectively refer to chocolate-covered coffee beans, chocolate-covered cacao nibs, and chocolate-covered ginger (please note that in the company literature I've chosen not to hyphenate chocolate covered, but since this is my blog I can do whatever I want). The chocolate-covered family of products used to be called "Panned Confections". Confectioners use these things called panning drums (machines that rotate at very high speeds) to coat candies with a shell; that's how those little chocolate-covered raisins get so glossy, smooth, and shiny.

But who the hell in the chocolate-buying public knows what a panning drum is? And "Panned Confections" makes me think of headlines like "Disgruntled Food Critic Pans Confections". WE never did come up with a better name for the Panned Family of Products. "Enrobed" is as good as we got.

Tomorrow I'm going to buy myself a good AP Style Guide, or something like it. I do have a recipe style guide, plus the third edition of William Strunk and E.B. White's "The Elements of Style". I am a fan of the Strunkian school of writing, though I surely do not adhere to it myself; I'm not detail-oriented enough. Every time I make a mistake--like using the non-word "volumptuous", as I'm sure I've done--it's because I think I'm right, that "volumptuous" is a word. Assuming and assuming. Sometimes I wonder how all of these language police know these things, and I realize it's because they studied them. The last grammar training I had was my freshman year in high school, I think. I didn't hate grammar, but I did hate to study it. Grammar is like the math of writing. 28 years old and I need to be back in ninth grade English. Grate.

Ejector Seat Reservation

Mr. Bir Toujour and I were walking down our street on an overcast New Year's Day afternoon when I noticed a beaded necklace half-buried in the grass right next to the cracked sidewalk. I picked it up and saw five very detailed cast-resin beads in the shape of monkeys, strung along on the necklace with bright yellow plastic banana-shaped beads. Each monkey was about an inch tall, and their poses varied: one hunched mischeviously under a rhodedenderon leaf; one squatted on a tortise; one sat on friendly-looking horse; one pulled at his cheeks with his fingertips in horror; two monkeys clutched each other in an almost erotic embrace, becoming one.

Well. "I wonder where this came from," I asked Mr. Bir Toujour. "It's very tacky, but kinda cool, too." I imagined an inhebriated reveler the previous evening, stubling across the sidewalks with a larger pack of partiers and snagging her--er, unique--necklace on a nearby branch or shub without registering it. I've bene drunk and lost jewelry before.

Who wore that necklace? What were they like? I would have worn a necklace like that--bright, chunky, completely without refinement--at one time, during my "artistic hippy" phase. If I had lost that necklace, I'd be sad.

"You should take it!" said Mr. Bir Toujour.

"No," I said, "I can't--that's mean. What if the person who lost it is sad and comes looking for it?" I'd be sad I were wearing that monkey necklace and lost it in the middle of a beer-drenched New Year's Eve. I considered putting the necklace back where we found it, but then I remembered the time we found a Discman on the sidewalk in the same neighborhood. "You put it back on the street," Mr. Bir Toujour reminded me, "and the next person who walked sown the sidewalk too it."

So I figured that if someone was going to take the lost necklace, it might as well be me. It's hanging on the cubicle wall over my desk. The clasp is broken (well, that accounts for why the necklace was on the ground), and I can't decide if the necklace was purchased already assembled like that or strung together by an adventurous, eccentric beader. It's mine now, a mascot for the last few remaining weeks of the Year of the Monkey.

I'm listening to Swervedriver's "Ejector Seat Reservation" right now. Last night I cut my index finger on an open Spaghetti-os can and I'm having trouble typing because the band-aid make my finger bulky.

Resolution-less

I don't think I belive in resolutions. I could say one resolution is to write more this year, but writing more is always a resolution. This blog is a means to that end, I suppose, but I don't want to say "This year I reslove to post new entries in my blog every day!" Because I won't.

But I do want to use this here thing. It's basically a replacement for my journal, which I've been criminally neglecting over the past few years; my pen can't seem to keep up with my hand. I do feel there's something in the rhythm of writing that's lost when it's typed and not drawn out in longhand...but if I'm too lazy to write in my journal in the first place, then there's a lost more lost, isn't there?

I kind of wish Sneezy & Tacky looked more bare-bones. Maybe I could find a special template called "Jenky" or "1987", one that matches the general feel of this better--I decided not to use photos, because I can't figure out how. And I don't have any links here, because I can't figure that out, either. That's what I prefer about good old-fashioned cut-and-paste projects: you fine paper, you cut it up, you glue it together. It's so tactile and singular and somehow more special, more exclusive. Like, in my paper journals I can paste ticket stubs and random emphemera like that. Here, all I have are letters and numbers blinking on a screen.

So, in a way, this is as raw as it gets. No spellcheking, no graphics, no fancy-pantsy thans and that. But I'm not writing thisa blog to share...it's all for me, for my own discipline and convenience. It's a bit anti-blog, I suppose. Maybe someday there will be a real hard copy Sneezy & Tacky...Brown? What do you think?