A few notes to the gentle customer from the perspective of a person who recently began working retail again after a good stretch of deskjobdom:

Somethng to consider: For the most part, it is difficult to do anything well if you feel like someone is watching you with a microscope and/or encroaching on your personal space. If I am wrapping a stack of books in attractive glossy green paper, it makes me nervous if the new owner of the books hovers with her chin inches from my shoulder, breathing in quick pfffs, almost gasping as I apply the tape, and then leans over to her friend and says in a stage whisper, "I wish they would use the clear scotch tape when gift wrapping." I might look up and smile, nod and send my eyes half-mast, as if to say, "It is really ridiculous we do not have the clear scotch tape," when really the the bad ass who lives in my brain is screaming, "What the fuck!? When was the last time you got a gift and closely examined the tape? Do you think people say, 'Damn I love this ipod, but I really wish you had used the clear tape to wrap it--that translucent scotch stuff is ugly as hell." (Oh yes, I do hope they put me on wrapping duty through out the Christmas season). Wrapping a present with someone watching you is just like trying to touch type with someone watching you, that is, it fucks you up. Sure, there are tons of people who can deliver no matter how closely they feel you watching. You know Michael Jordan, hard to argue that he was not good in the clutch situation. Eminem made it happen at the end of 8 MIle, which was for the most part based on his true life experiences (you've got to wonder more about the whole Brittany Murphy in the warehouse scenario). Anyhow, I do not claim to be the Michael Jordan of present wrapping, but I'm pretty fucking good. No rips, make a nice bow, no wrinkles. I wrapped one of those puffy Ugly Dolls with regular paper, no box, it looked halfway decent. Lillian, my stack of books customer, fended off the wrapping induced panic attack, thanked me, left, and yet, I knew our paths would cross again in the near future.

Another thing to consider: Let's say your name is Lillian and you're the kind of woman who likes to torment the new sales girl who is wrapping your present amidst the Saturday evening rush--customers appear to be throwing the books off the shelves, the safe key has wandered off, a little boy wearing a Giants jersey is busily picking his nose and is poised to smear it across the bottom row of the staff favorites. So upon arriving home, you, Lillian realize you have misplaced your credit card. "That inept wrapping paper bitch!" you think. "No clear tape. And is it too much to ask for hospital corners on a stack of books?!"
The missing credit card MUST be at the bookstore still, any other possibility is, well, impossible. You call the bookstore and that curly-haired wrapping wench, who smelled of cigarettes and had a bra strap showing by the by, answers. You deliver a monolgue along the lines of, "I have lost my credit card at your store. It is right there. Look down. You should see it. I am in hysterics. Is it there? I know it is. Are you looking for it? It's there." The distressed salesgirl who is working the register for the second time in her bookstore career has a line of customers accumulating assures you that she IS LOOKING, but she does not see the card, but she will certaily call you if she finds anything, but she's really quite busy, and no it was not her who checked you out, she just wrapped the present, so no it is not in her pocket, but LIllian I will call you back either way, I promise, and I will do some thorough looking. And then, Lilian, you call the store back three more times in twenty minutes. You tell the salesgirl you recognize her voice. You reiterate that you are in hysterics and that you might just cancel the credit card. You ask the salesgirls if she has told everyone what has happened. The salesgirls, who is fairly soft-spoken seems to be losing her patience. Why Lillian, do you continue to call?! I loooked under every dust bunny I could find for your VISA. I botched many a transaction because half of the time I was punching the keys, I was scanning the floors for the glimmer of plastic. Lillian you sounded very upset, but I gave my all on the wrapping, I gave my all on the credit card looking, I was polite to you on the phone, even after call four when you had no new information to report. If you call again, I will be forced to call you every ten minutes to announce that I have not found the credit card, but I have a few leads, some hearsay evidence, and I will scotch tape your house with the translucent tape, not the pretty clear kind, and it will probably take me a while to do that, so I prefer we avoid that course altogether.

ahhh...you knew I would bitch once I started working. A few final words, just in case: If you are the person who called in and asked me to find you a pocket-sized Tao Te Ching...I found three different options for you after repeatedly violating the Eastern Religion section of the store , yelling fuck as a stack of Bhagavad Gitas came crashing down on my head. I felt quite gratified having found three copies of the Tao Te Ching in a size utterly appropriate for a pocket. And I felt very much like I wanted to come to your house and go John Goodman Lebowski steez on your car (Do you see what happens Larry? Do you see what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass?) when I discovered you had hung up. Why didn't you wait for me? Granted, I could have taken down your number...if you're reading this call me. I have something I want to tell you....

Last week I started a writing class at Berkeley Extension, Writing Short Stories from Life Experiences. Some might argue that class title is the unspoken sub-header for every writing class.

According to Flannery O’Connor, “Anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make much out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged into it.”

Yeah, we wonder why so many great writers hit the bottle hard. How else can you reconcile knowingly removing yourself from your life experiences, striving to become a filter for experience rather than a participant. Does that make sense? I’ve been having this discussion with a few of my friends who are artists. Everyone knows that you draw inspiration from your own life to create—your reality fuels your art. But if you are conscious of reality being your artistic fuel, are you really present? Doing the authentic l-i-v-i-n thang?

My buddy who makes movies says sometimes he doesn’t like to bring his camera with him when he travels, or at least doesn’t like to have it out all the time. It makes you not present in one sense, and wholly present in another: If you’re constantly searching for compelling compositions, there’s a barrier between you and the experience you’re having. Physically, in that the people around you are reacting to the camera, so you might say the moments the camera captures are not “authentic.” And mentally as how can you be fully engaged in a conversation you’re having, in a meal you’re eating, etc., if the whole time you’re trying to figure out how you will frame it later. At the same time, you have to be present on some level if you want to capture anything. So the art forces you to engage, while simultaneously building a barrier. Yeah, these thought threads about art’s impact on the authentic experience, probably about as interesting as the “I heard this piece on NPR” stories that I am so fond of telling. I blame the pot…

Ok, so despite the self-deprecating comment, I really do think this idea of translating your experiences, recreating them in new mediums raises some interesting issues about being fully present in your day-to-day life. So many people have told me that the writer’s life is lonely and miserable in many ways: Writing is a solitary activity, probably best done during the hours most people utilize for sleeping and/or socializing. I mean, the Russian writers had the advantage of living in a shitty climate—dark all of the time, sitting by a typewriter in a damp room with no windows, sipping vodka from a mug, that’s when the brilliance happens. How many socially well-adjusted writers do you know? Perhaps that’s not a fair question. I mean, how many well-adjusted people do you kn

This weekend I went to two thirtieth birthday parties. It seems the revelation of thirty years of life either sends you into a state of calm submission, or a frenzy of panic. I’m 25, and at both of these parties people kept on telling me 1. I’m so young—have nothing to worry about and 2. You don’t know shit about shit until you’re 30. Fair enough. I have no illusions about the vast quantity of life-learning/shit getting together I need to handle before there’s some clarity.

Maybe I drank too much Knob Creek last night. This party was in Half Moon Bay, and at around 10:30 we all stumbled down to the beach, and sat around a bonfire for hours. Around midnight a crew went back up to the house to retrieve the keg and some wine. Armed with two buck chuck (sadly three buck now!) and roasted marshmallows, I told the girl, woman, sitting next to me who I had just met, my life story—at the time this seemed appropriate. Passing the bottle back and forth, our chatting moved from the mild California climate and wine country, to career aspirations, to our shared yearning for a thriving vegetable garden right out back and means for making our own jam, to love being a bitch, to both of us espousing the benefits of therapy, something essential for everyone really, after all, we’re all fucking crazy (bottle’s done), I am no exception—no wink necessary. And then we both ask, but how long does therapy go on? When do you know you’re done? Is that the sort of thing you know?

*Shortly after this therapy bonding moment, my new friend suggested I watch a DVD….a brilliant little piece called The Secret. I fear I had no appropriate reactions at my disposal due to the aforementioned bottle. It went something like this: The Secret. Humph. Like you’re talking about The Secret, Oprah’s new pet? Hmmmm. I really have to pee. I’m not a judgmental bitch, I don’t think, but The Secret? (I didn’t say it like that, I don’t think.)

I woke up this morning a little hun gover, cursing my bed for being so damned comfortable—the soft, plush pillows, the warm, too-many-threads-to-count-sheets—sabotage I tell you. The minutes tick by, and the coffee is still not made. Even the prospect of my morning fistful of chocolate covered raisins doesn’t seem to rally me. And oh, this spring forward business, yeah I feel like they kind of sprung that on me. Where did my fucking hour go?! It’s like when they sneak off with degrees Farenheit with little or no warning. Sadists.

I just finished reading Old School (Tobias Wolff—and if you have not read “Bullet in the Brain,” I suggest you do because I will certainly harass you about it, bringing it up as much as, if not more, than my current mission in life: to sample that gem of a burrito in the Lower Haight with the plantains). The narrator in Old School has some writer’s block, some anxiety about putting the words down on the page. Maybe his bed was too comfortable. He starts typing out Hemingway stories so his fingers will know what it feels like to string together words like that. I have heard of people doing this, sort of like practicing one of Allen Iverson’s dribbling sequences until it becomes natural to you?

Oh shit. I fear it’s time for some authentic life experience.

I have never/I have always:

I have never wanted to be an astronaut. Earth has always seemed a strange enough place to me, and human beings seem to wreak havoc on the new environments they enter. I am sure that the equilibrium on Mars is doing just fine without our influence. I can’t imagine how it would be possible to maintain satisfying relationships with people if you are an astronaut. I am sure the training is intense and you have to go to space for long periods of time to get anything accomplished (I think at least a month or two). I would have considered space camp as a child—though those advertisements with the smiling kid strapped into that machine that twirls them round and round always looked pretty intimidating to me. When I went to college and struggled in the astronomy classes everyone had told me were really throw-aways for football players, I considered it further confirmation that I should keep my explorations grounded on this planet. Besides, I have a feeling it is too late in life for me to launch a career as an astronaut (he he, launch career, I wonder how many times astronauts make that joke).
I have never known an astronaut. Honestly, the closest I have come is watching Apollo 13, and I really don’t think that counts, and I found it rather boring—Tom Hanks has failed me ever since Big—please, please don’t bring up Sleepless in Seattle. For the love of God. That movie was all well and good until they made You’ve Got Mail. Here’s an interesting question: Can an egregious sequel actually taint the fantastic original work that inspired it? Last night Ros and I were discussing Dirty Dancing (I was saying that I had not watched the movie in at least three years, and felt this was a significant problem. She, of course, agreed). But then, when I mentioned that I was channel surfing the other night, and came across Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, she got red in the face and said, “Please don’t mention Havana Nights around me.” Fair enough. There are so many examples that come to mind in this vein (Godfather III, Major League II, etc.). Note: I do not put Dirty Dancing and Major League in the same camp as Godfather, and for the sake of this argument it is necessary to mention that Godfather II might very well be the greatest movie sequel of all time.
So how I got on to the sequels debate from thinking about astronauts is a mystery to me. Moving on…
I have never eaten monkey brains. I have never ridden on a motorcycle. I have never had sex in an elevator, though I am not opposed to the idea. I have never scored a goal in a soccer game—I don’t think. Perhaps in a three on three match with a few of my friends, but never in a formal setting. I have never taken heroin. I have never traveled to Asia, though I want to very much, especially Japan and India, and don’t I sound like a kindergartener by talking about Japan and India like they are these small places that you can just go to (ie. much more reasonable to mention specific locations/cities in these countries, but that’s not what’s going on right now).
I have always liked chocolate, though when I was growing up, I was pretty chubby, so it was hard to get my hands on it whenever I wanted it. I figured encountering a Snickers bar was comparable to hitting the jackpot at a slot machine. The only time of year that I really had full access to as much candy as I wanted was Halloween—though I found those miniature sizes frustrating—does this make me utterly American. The bigger is better mindset is so ingrained in me that I am dissatisfied with miniatures? One of the keys to Halloween’s success was that I went trick-or-treating with my friends in their neighborhoods. There was not a whole lot going on in my neighborhood other than big houses. My friend Chelsea, for example, she lived in a real neighborhood where all of the kids congregated on snow days, played kick the can until it got dark in the summer, and formed covert groups to go spy on the haunted house where weird old Mr. Jenkins lived with his mutt Sparky and a collection of shotguns. That’s a neighborhood. People have Fourth of July parties. There’s a boy next door who could potentially sneak into your bedroom through a window.
I have always loved the smell of gasoline. More so when I was younger, but I think saying you like the smell of gasoline carries less stigma when you are a child. I have also always loved the smell of permanent markers, even more so than the Mr. Sketch brand.
I have never worked construction, but in this period of being “between jobs,” I have spent a fair amount of time observing the workers who are somehow manipulating the roof across the street. I am still having a difficult time pinning down their vision, but I suspect I would enjoy construction work because you have something concrete to look at and hold up as finished at the end of the day.
I have always been terrible at origami. I am impatient in many ways when making art. Like I said earlier, I like to have something concrete to hold in my hands, but I want it fairly quickly. But yes, in true contradictory form, I am a slow worker. Or rather, I should be a slow worker because I tend to get sloppy when I try to produce quickly.
Chess has always held this magical feeling for me, like there is something there beyond the pieces, as if through building a chess set you could conjure something, a spirit, a life-force. I almost beat Mikey Teijtel—I was as surprised as he was. I went to the GT school, but was very quiet. I assumed everyone was more intelligent than me. There was this girl Dana Chu, very strange. Everyone else was running around the playground playing soccer or tag, Dana and I strolled around like two crotchety old men, talking about life and relationships. Dana always said I would make a great therapist. No one else has ever told me this, and I think it was a gross misjudgment on the part of her fifth-grade self.
I always liked playing four square though. Here are the rules of four square as I remember them, and you must also keep in mind that the King position has the right to make rules. But the basics. Four people, four squares. The king position, the top left corner, is most powerful, followed by the queen to his left, then the Jack, below her, and then I can’t remember what the fourth, lowest position is called. I want to say asshole, but 1. I don’t think all of the kids I played four square with in fourth grade would have been ok with being relegated to the asshole position and 2. oddly enough, college drinking games have clouded my memory, and yet in some ways, are some of my clearest memories.
So the power descends clockwise in four square. The king serves. In a classic four-square game, you play with a red rubber playground ball—slightly underflated, textured with little squares, makes a satisfying hollow weeeeeeeeeiiiiiirrrrrhhh noise if you punch it hard enough. The red ball can bounce only once in your square before you must do something with it, ie. tap it into someone else’s square. You can’t catch the ball. If it bounces in your square and then flies out of the court, you’re fucked, and if it bounces in your square and then bounces again before you do anything with it, you’re also fucked. So then there are some special techniques and depending on who’s running the kingdom, things can get pretty interesting. You’ve got cherry bombs, waterfalls, bobbles. A cherry bomb is smacking the ball as hard as you can so there’s no way the person who’s square receives the initial bounce will be able to return it to the court within the rules. The waterfall is a type of serve; you drop the ball up from very high so it does a single, low bounce that can be difficult to reach if you’re not anticipating the maneuver. And then there are bus stops, everyone races to get one foot into the center of the court, and corner stops, everyone races to get one foot to the corner of their square. Whoever is last in either scenario loses. I was quite good at four square, and I don’t generally say I’m good at much of anything, as far as I’m aware, particularly when I’m describing myself at that stage of life.
I was pretty manipulative when it came to trading lunch items. Like I said, I was chubby, Hostess didn’t know about the insides of my brown bag, but I knew about its absence. Maybe I was so good at trading lunches because I had more at stake than the other kids. The best arrangement I ever had, which went on for about four months in fifth grade, was with my good friend Lyddie Fitz. Lyddie was skinny and quite a talented soccer player. Her older brother Brian was a genius and he used to construct complicated scavenger hunts for us when I would sleep over. Every night after dinner, Lyddie’s mother would make caramel sauce from scratch and serve it over real coffee ice cream (not fro yo, like at my house). Everyday for lunch, Lyddie’s mother packed her saltines, slices of cheddar cheese, and slices of pepperoni. I managed to trade her my reduced-fat graham crackers everyday for her savory saltine delights. I can’t remember what ended the trading relationship. Perhaps that was around the time I decided I would lose weight. Maybe Lydia’s mother asked her if she was getting sick of the pepperoni (I certainly wasn’t) and Lyddie said, “No, I trade it to Sook everyday at lunch.”
Lyddie’s mother had such a kind face. Dark strawberry blonde hair she held back with tortoise shell headbands, and thick, chunky-stitched sweaters. Usually something cream-colored. Lyddie’s father and mother met at Princeton and I wonder if Lydia ended up at Princeton. Their house had this rustic, French country feel.
Chelsea’s family had something entirely different going on. I could totally see Chelsea’s mother having an affair with her tennis instructor, or something along those lines. But Chelsea always had the best Nintendo games. There were occasional sleepovers where we decided we would beat Super Mario 3, or else not sleep. It seemed such a virtuous and bold ambition at the time.

it's not that i think my life's interesting, but is suspect my perception is.

i went to ikea with my mother the other day. it's like a whole other world over there. all of the furnishings have these weird
(swedish?) porn star names: the pax stordal? sultan hasselback? tindra ljuv? i think little gnomes live in those model spaces they have set up...they hide in the dresser drawers and sneak out at night, all-hopped up on those mini meatballs and fat-free vanilla yogurt (they don't bother with cones, they simply stand beneath the dispenser open-mouthed while one of their friends turns the valve unleashing frozen, swirled crack . then they run through the store chanting, "come on over, the pax stordal is warm!"). i purchased the billy-god save us-a fine book shelf, neutral wood color, relatively simple assembly procedure. unfortunately there were some complications in the execution of said assembly procedure, but, my billy is, nonetheless, functional. i can't feel settled in a place without my books on display:

"I have my books and my poetry to protect me."

-Simon and Garfunkel

i had my books stacked in these haphazard piles all over the living room when i was in L.A. i could never just scan the titles, run my fingers on their spines. it made me anxious (welcome to my ocd lair). i finally got these dark shelves at the salvation army. they were coated in a pollen-like orange dust that got all over my car. but once i got started filling the shelves, it was so satisfying, picking through the piles, reading the back covers, touching the varying textures of all the pages. but i soon realized that many of my books were missing. it's strange. i don't own many movies, but there are definitely films that are very important to me. i am just fine with not owning all of them, although i would not complain if a certain mover and shaker returned MY copy of resivoir dogs and any given sunday. but with books it's different: i feel the need to own the texts that really speak to me. i like to reread my favorite passages when ever i want. look at their covers and think about the different places i curled up to read them. i'm afraid that if i don't have them i will forget, or the click they caused in my brain that left me different will be lost. sometimes it feels like there's a possibility that the prose will evaporate if i don't have a concrete version of it in my possession. can you imagine if you had read lolita and then woke up one day and it was as if the entire book had never existed? the probability of a human being producing words that beautiful is infintesimal. the sentences happen in a given moment. the proper sequence of nuerons fire and BAM! it's like mathematics in a way. when you finally solve the word equation. i like to think about everything that brought nabokov to the moment when he was capable of writing:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

i imagine that he had to sleep afterward, spent. i imagine he was exhausted before he even wrote the words, because he had to write through all of the bullshit and throw it away until he could get to this. i wonder if he knew something amazing had just happened.

there's not really anything that floors me as much as words (ok, other than certain people), so i like to have my books.

I kept having these pointless revelations today--I still count them as revelations nonetheless. First, in a flash of brilliance, I realized that the female ass must have gone long underappreciated back in the day, before women started sporting pants. Think about it, how's a person supposed to fully evaluate a backside when the host body is wearing a hoop skirt (or something of the like). Luckily, the likes of Sir Mix-A-Lot and 2 Live Crew had the benefit of bearing witness to the daisy dukes' resurgence to rump-hugging fame. I firmly believe that the early 90's were huge for the butt. Boobs. Everyone loves them. Always have, always will...but the bum, now there's an acquired taste. I'm biased. What I lack in breastisis seems to have been transported to my arse. Definitely inherited a backside that has full-blown potential for what my family affectionately calls "shelf toosh." I think that's pretty self-explanatory. Anyhow, I don't think I would enjoy wearing a hoop skirt--so I'm glad we got that cleared up today.

Pointless Revelation #2: This was quite disconcerting, yet enlightening. The Tazo tea "Refresh" that my roommate/Starbuck's employee supplies in bountiful quantities does not contain caffeine...What the fuck!? You don't call tea "Refresh" without putting some caffeine in the mix.

Appropriate Decaffinated Tea Names:

Sleep
Passoutface
Chill
Lazy Bastard

Inappropriate Decaffeinated Tea Names:

Manic
Wake Up Bitch
Hot Damn! This Tea's a Real Kick in the Pants
Refresh!

If I'm not drinking tea with caffeine in it, it means I want to go to sleep. No wonder I haven't figured out my life yet. I'm too damn tired because Starbucks is trying to provide decaffinated refreshment--not gonna happen for this gal. All this time, I've been trying to avoid too much coffee by integrating some healthful tea leaves into the routine...but the tea was supposed to be the productivity juice--no dice, I'm going back to Mountain Dew. Who's coming with me?

By the by, who are these people who drink decaffeinated Coke? It's still on the market so I know one of you is throwing down regularly. This just in, I advertently found the following article headline on the UK's Peak Performance athlete resource website as I was digging up more info. on this troubling decaffeinated Coke phenomenon:

Coca-cola: Many athletes use Coca-Cola as a sports drink, but does exercise really go better with Coke?

hehe.

Hmmm, think these pointless revelations may be indicative of troubling neuron firing blips in brain, Must find regular employment. I blame Tazo!

One more thing, if you're having trouble sleeping, you should give Thera-Flu Cough and Cold a whirl. Nursing a cold for the past few days and I drank it down without knowing the full consequences--for a minute I thought my roommate had shot me in the ass with a tranquilizer dart.