I had an idea last night, after watching The Happening for the second time: I'd like to create a metric that I could use to measure the badness of bad movies, so that I could not only figure out what the worst major-studio movies are, but also say in what way they're bad. At the very least, my metric would include acting, dialogue, story conception, story execution, and suspension of disbelief. Each of these categories seem like they could also be broken down further; for example, acting can be bad because there's no sense of a mind in the character, because emotions are poorly expressed, because a particular actor doesn't suit a character, etc. Dialogue can be overly dramatic, or can overstate the obvious, can fail to distinguish between characters, etc.

I'm not a student of films, and I don't have an abundent interest in discussing them (which is why I'll probably never do anything with this), but the idea came to me, as I said, after watching The Happening for the second time last night. Anne and I went to see it on Friday, after I saw that the movie had at that point earned a 12% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and that even the positive reviews said things like, "this is not as unmitigated a disaster as Shyamalan's last movie, Lady in the Water" (and frankly I'm surprised that it's possible to get worse than The Happening, so now I want to see it that one too) and "neither great nor a total waste of time and money." (It's also not excellent, good, decent, or tolerable. It's just not a total waste of time and money. By the way, I disagree.) Oh hey, it's now up to 19% positive, woot!

So knowing fully what we were getting into, Anne and I went to see the matinee showing a week after the movie opened. I don't have a television, and I don't read articles on culture, so I was barely aware that this movie existed. I think I'd seen posters in the theater. I'd tired to skip the bits of plot summary in the reviews that I read, but I hadn't really managed because I already knew what the movie was about. So we sat through the opening credits, which played over a rapid shot of clouds as mournful violin music played. The opening scene: Central Park, jogger with dog, densely packed athletic people running very close to one another. Then we saw two women on a park bench reading what appeared to be two hardcover copies of the same book, and the first line of dialogue in unloaded: "Where am I again?" At first the viewer thinks she's asking where she is physically, but then the other woman explains, "You're at the part where [scene from a spy thriller novel]." "Oh."

I'll begin by noting that what these two characters just did is ridiculous. Never in my life have I seen someone forget where they are in a book, ask someone else, and get an answer. First, why would the asker think that the other person knows? Second, why would the other person know? Was she looking over her friend's shoulder while continuing to read herself? Third, this exchange doesn't make any more sense in retrospect; once I saw the rest of the movie, this scene is still offensively bad: even though we soon see that people who are affected by the happening of the movie's title sometimes engage in disorderly speech, these first lines of dialogue still don't make any sense, because the first speaker, when told where she was in the book, said "Oh," which indicates that she wasn't being affected, she was actually asking the extremely improbable question.

Now I'll move on to the acting: the woman who asks where she is in the book she's reading has an altogether innapropraite dreamy tone of voice. She sounds more like she's feigning ignorance to pull one over on her friend, as though she can reliably expect her to belive that she doesn't know where she is in the book. The scene would make a lot more sense if she then laughed and said, "You really fall for it every time, don't you!" Indeed, she spoke with a big, dumb smile on her face, which apparently wasn't feigned innocence; my only other interpretation was that she's retarted and also autistic, and thus unable to properly express emotions with her face, and her sister has taken her to the park to get her outdoors. But if that were the case, wouldn't her sister be reading to her? No, the scene really appears to be intended as straight-forward, exactly what it is.

"You can do both: you can make it meaningful on a personal level. Also, enchant the world with the writing. I do both." -M. Night Shyamalan

Now, I would assume that Shyamalan put a lot of work into this first dialogue exchange, seeing as he's a writer director with pretensions to Hitchcock, and it's the introduction to his themes and concept. Why did he write these lines? Was he indicating that we the viewers ought to ask where we are in this world, or ought to think metaphorically about where the characters are? Was he setting the audience on edge, so that the didn't interpret everything to be the way it first appears? Was he riffing off of Hamlet's "Who's there?" If any of these were the case, then he should have made a movie that followed up on these ideas, but he didn't. He made a meaningless piece of trash.

As the movie went on, I very quickly felt a sense of awe while watching it. It failed on so many levels that it could be used in film school as an example of bad direction, bad acting, bad script writing, bad premise, bad execution. It truly felt like I was watching something so awful that it was significant, a straightforward offering that was so devoid of merit that people should take note. I was watching a happening, all right. I was watching what ought to be a career-ender for everyone involved. The studio that produced this movie should have reason to question the purpose of their lives, if this was the culmination of a year of their time. Everybody who sees it should feel a little more free, because they know that if they were to produce a movie of their own, it couldn't possibly be this bad.

Let's suppose there's a Ministry of Complaints where people can go to declare what they aren't happy with and would like redressed. I've been drinking a lot of coffee and I took tomorrow off work to make a four day weekend, so actually I'm feeling pretty good right now, but generally if I was called to the Ministry (perhaps by a telepathigram sent directly to my consciousness, "Dear Mr. Green, please report to the Ministry of Complaints to unload your grievances"), I would come in and sit down in their fancy padded wooden chair, look into the eyes of the universal entity who was serving in the Ministry that day, and say, "I don't feel like this is the right life for me."

The entity would clear its throat and say, "How do you mean? You wish to be another person, or to live in another time period?"

"No, not like that. This existence, it isn't pleasing to me. Why am I trapped in a forward-moving timeline on a three-dimensional physical plane, bound by gravity, forced to breath air, pump blood, eat and sleep in order to live? Why do I have a body? Why is it loosing its hair? I don't like that. Why do I not know what to do with my time, and why is it that when I think I know what I want to do, I don't do it?"

"That is quite a complaint, sir," the entity would say. "Are you sure you wouldn't be satisfied if we simply issued you another human identity? You could have another body made to your specifications, and we could place you in any situation you wanted. You could have whatever kind of family you wished, live wherever and whenever you wished, possess whatever talents and abilities you choose. We could provide you with a written profile of this new person, which you could edit to your specifications, and then we could form this new life for you to inhabit. Would that suffice?"

"I think I could come around to that, but couldn't you do anything about the universe? Couldn't I, say, not exist for a certain period of time, and then pick it back up again later? Or, how about I can pick a nighttime dream that I'm having and make that my actual life?"

"These requests are outside the boundaries of our power. We control existence, but it is still this existence. However, there are many variations available to you within the world that you already know. Would you be able to content yourself with this sort of change?"

If I decided that I would like a new life, I would then be sent to the Ministry of Redress where, if I had done enough good to earn a replacement life, I could work with the Redress entity assigned to me and design my new self. I could choose to live in a big city and have enough money to use it as my playground. I could choose to be able to play saxophone as well as John Coltrane. I could even choose to be John Coltrane, and maybe not die so young.

I'm pretty sure, though, that I could use the life I already have in better ways. This is my current (and perennial) dream.

I'm still surprised when I remember I'm a secretary. I must have had a powerful subconsious horror at this fact, because I knew it in October when I first got the job, and then I pretty much forgot it until Spring came and my mind woke up like it does every year. It really feels like my self-reflection was looking the other way for about five months, overwhelmed with disgust when it saw that I was a secretary. I imagine it in a dark chamber, with a nice easy chair, a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers (my self-reflection is chill), sitting in front of a stone fireplace all day reading ewspapers about Greg. It reads the newspaper about Greg's relationship with his friends, The Bantering Tribune. "Hmm, Greg seems to be kind of an asshole to the few friends he manages to keep in touch with . . . I'll let him know about this sometime in April." It flips through the Housing Journal, which disusses Greg's sense of his environment, and shakes it's head. "Tsk, tsk, still bumbling around; will that Greg ever learn?" Then it turns to the Occupational Times, about Greg's working life; a few paragraphs in to the first article, it goes white. "My God, Greg's a . . . no, this is too horrible. I can't look any more! Why is he doing this to himself?" It doesn't read that one for several months, until it has steeled itself, and has a warm cup of chai and some painkillers ready. And here's what it sees:

It's my duty to prepare the outgoing mail every week (to the Board of Directors, the Regional Chairs, and our staff in regional offices), to answer the main office phone and direct the calls to the right people, to track dues payments in the Northeast Region locals, and to do general office work--stuffing envelopes, proofreading or writing letters, preparing agendas for the professional staff's meetings, that sort of thing. I sit at the desk where I'm writing this for about seven hours a day, with breaks for the drive to the post office and my lunch hour (actually hour and fifteen minutes, because my office has its own union and we have really cozy benefits). I use most of my energy thinking about my latest obsession. Anthropology? No, that was this time last year. World history? Sort of ended before it began, but maybe some other time. Writing? No such luck. No, my current obsession is comic books. For two months I've been doing almost nothing else with my time than reading comic books, comic books reviews, comic books histories, and so on. Why? Fucked if I know. It's fun.

So my self-reflection is starting to send me some memos every so often now, in re: employment and interests. They're very respectful memos, and the language can be a little dense and obscure at times (my self-reflection is in a phase where it writes in the language of the eighteenth century), but the message is clear enough: I'm going to die at some point, and I might want to do something with my time first.

I've come in to work today after celebrating the twenty-first birthday of one of Scott's friends from Trader Joe's. We had an absinthe, car bomb and girl drink bout at the Tin Star, while the bartender played concerts by the Pixies, Prince and the Revolution, and Roy Orbison on their gorgeous, large digital television. When I see images like a purple guitar being swung rhythmically to "When You Were Mine," I can understand a little better why people like digital televisions so well.

There were two TJ's friends, and the older of the two is a crazy man named Zeke. He's a fount of energy, waving in place and narrating odd tales even when he's not drunk. The bar stools were perhaps to restrictive for him, because he nearly fell off his several times, expressing only a moment's amazement that he didn't crack his head before jumping into another engagement with whoever's next to him. The bartender's jeep now knows the feel of Zeke's vomit--and to be clear, that's not something I give the check-plus to or anything, but there are some people who can somehow pull that off as fun, and Zeke's one of them. When the bartender came out for a smoke and saw the tire, Zeke burst at him and playfully threatened to do worse, whcih again could go either way (leaning toward shamefulness), but from the bartender's reaction, Zeke obviously has built up enough good will to pull it off as boisterousness. His body and mind leaps from one thing to the next, and though he doesn't quite shout at phantoms, he comes close.

The younger guy, Milljen, is a more laid-back affair, although without Zeke showing him up he'd hold his own. He's a slim, curly haired metal/prog guitar player and recording student at College of Santa Fe, planning to leave before he gets his degree to go full-time with a recording studio in town. His nose is a solid block of bone protruding from the middle of his eyes in a chunk, like a beak, and he can also launch into excited and jumbled stories, but unlike Zeke those stories are a little more predictable; when listening to them, you don't suddenly run into Amelia Stickney, or a gun barrel in Zeke's mouth, or an attempted discussion about Kierkegaard with a pompous Annapolis Johnny.

Eventually, after a quick stop at the Matador (which last year was pitched quite accurately as "Santa Fe's newest dive bar") we made our way to the Atomic Grill for nachos. The Atomic is the only restaurant downtown that's open past, I don't know, nine o'clock. Indeed, they're usually open past two, probably to make sure they get the entire after-bar rush, because somebody has to. There's this one waiter who's almost always there, and even though no one knows otherwise, no one thinks he's the owner. It's a tiny Brit in his thirties or forties, with constantly changing hair color and an endless string of post-punk t-shirts. He's polite, efficient, and hopelessly broken. I wish I knew what happened to him, and why he's always either working at the Atomic or wondering the liquor aisles in grocery stores. (Anne and I have both seen him in a couple of liquor aisles.) He'll listen when customers speak, and smile his broken, reserved smile, but very rarely will he reveal anything about himself. Whether it's busy or not, he mostly stays behind the counter, or quickly circling the tables (always there just when you need more water), breaking down the outdoor set-up, or pacing with a cigarette.

But I've come in to work, and now it's not last night any more. Now it's the cemented sinus, droopy eyed morning after, and I've come in to work even though I could have easily called out sick. Is that sunlight really the gray of a dusty old raincoat, or is it just me?

The discussion in this article, an opinion piece in The L.A. Times by Susan Jacoby, initially struck a chord with me (I think a ringing open G, but I don't have perfect pitch). When I read it a second time, I was somewhat less impressed, but I still think it's an important subject. It's about a growing tendency among Americans to ignore opposing points of view. The article pretty much relies on recognition to make its point, since it doesn't provide any evidence. It also comes from the mindset that everything was better in the past, and hey, isn't it a shame that it isn't so good now? Whether things were better in the past or not, I can't deny that there is a problem now. I was particularly struck by the statement that "[the] spirit of inquiry, which demands firsthand evidence and does not trivialize opposing points of view, is essential to a society's intellectual and political health." I don't see much in the media, from people in my office, or from conversations I hear around me that I would describe as the spirit of inquiry.

I find it unfortuate that Jacoby blames "[a] vast public laziness" for the shoddy reporting, the kind that at best cites the statements of opposing figures in a political argument and calls it a day, without any analysis or discussion. Of course, she's writing in a publication owned by the massive media conglomerate, the Tribune Company, so it's not surprising that she wouldn't find more fault with media entities themselves. Then again, she really does seem to believe that things were different a genearation ago. She pines for the public interest in the Watergate hearings: "I remember those weeks as a period when everyday preoccupations faded into the background and we found time, as a people, to perform our civic duty." Certainly that atmosphere of public inquiry sounds nice, and I don't ultimately doubt that more public interest could lead to a rejuvination of political discussion and better political news, but the presentation here seems to be missing the root of the problem--although I'm not sure what that is myself.

In another article, longer but better and quite worth the time, Steve Fraser writing for tomdispatch describes a different aspect of the widespread lack of interest in significant events. His focus is a second Gilded Age with our huge and growing income inequality and the cronyism seen in every cabinet department (really, every cabinet department, including Labor, HUD, and Treasury--see the first paragraph of the tomdispatcharticle) and all over Congress.

And yet, he points out, despite a similar income disparity and corrupt government, there isn't a cultural and political response anywhere near as deep or loud as there was last time around.

"Fast-forward to our second Gilded Age and the stage seems bare indeed. No great fears, no great expectations, no looming social apocalypses, no utopias or dystopias -- just a kind of flat-line sense of the end of history. Where are all the roiling insurgencies, the break-away political parties, the waves of strikes and boycotts, the infectious communal upheavals, the chronic sense of enough is enough? Where are the earnest efforts to invoke a new order which, no matter how sketchy and full of unanswered questions, now seem as minutely detailed as the blueprints for a Boeing 747 compared to 'yes we can?'"

Fraser plausibly blames the erosion of the industrial working class and the weak labor movement for the lack of fiery rhetoric, passion, and the political muscle that comes with a unified demographic. There is much more to this article, but man, reading it makes me wish I had a more significant job. How ludicrous is it that I work for a labor union, but I have no role in anything interesting like political action or even arguments with management? Instead I answer phones and process membership forms, call the payroll departments in school districts around the state when I notice that dues payments aren't totaling properly, and mostly, read blogs and news articles, or play freerice, because I don't even have much work most of the time.

Last week, I was given a bouquet on Administrative Professionals Day, and it really hit home: I'm an administrative assistant. I knew this already, but it's safe to say that the bouquet, and the statements of my office's leadership team ("we really appreciate your work, everything you do, great job guys") had the oppposite of their intended effect. What kind of Greg am I?

Scott, Anne and I spent the weekend cleaning house. We split the duties, and collectively we swept cobwebs out of corners, removed dead weeds from the yard, mopped or vacuumed the floors, scrubbed the walls, and put away the detritus that collected in the living room over the last several months. Then we started looking ahead, planning things like where we should put mail or important papers, and finding a place for the pile of CDs that's been on the floor since we moved in. We got a new little case of shelves for the living room, and reorganized things throughout the house.

We moved on then to repositioning the furniture in the living room and the bedrooms; Scott had gotten a wall mount for the television he uses as a computer monitor, which he's been planning to do since he first moved in, and we were looking for a place to install it. We considered shifting all the furniture in the living room so that the couch could be closer to the screen, but only one set-up is possible with our house's orientation of walls, windows and electrical sockets. On the other hand, we would have to rearrange everything in the master bedroom in order to get my computer desk in there instead of the living room. We shifted everything in the bedroom (bed, chest of drawers, night table, bookshelf, and plastic drawer tower) to make space. Now it looks like a room in somebody else's house, or a new room altogether.

While I moved my computer into our bedroom, Scott used his new stud-finder to find him a stud, and a good one this time, not some wimp who was afraid of committment and was only going to stay with him for a couple of months. Scott got a position on his stud, and drilled into the wall for an anxious fifteen minutes in search of it. It turns out that in our wall, there's a lot more dry-wall than stud in the hole where the wall-mount screw had to go. There was a chance that putting the television up would cause a chunk of the wall to rip right out and crumble down onto the floor. Each of us took a flashlight and looked into the hole he'd drilled, trying in vain to make sure that the stud was reliable enough. It seemed that the only way to know if the mount would hold was to test it, and so Scott put it in and pulled down hard. Everything seemed okay, so he set the television onto the mount, ready to remove it at the smallest sign of trouble. He let it go to see if the wall could hold the full weight--and it stayed! So now we have two new-looking rooms, suddenly, after months of slowly accumulating furniture.

I've recently been aching for something to help me break the tedium of my lazy job and slow life, something that would let me feel just a bit of the excitement or wonder that I felt at times while in college, and at least occasionally after I graduated. For the better part of a year, with the exception of our visit to Maryland and New York over the winter break, I've felt dull-witted and sedentary, stuck not only in time and place but also in thought. I didn't have much that made me feel anticipation, enchantment, ambition, or really any deep emotion at all. In talking to Anne about it, she identified what I was missing: a sense of novelty. I felt pretty foolish when it was revealed to be such a trivial thing. Since I have no intention of leaving my job or house, and I can't start graduate school until Anne has gotten her undergraduate degree, I thought that I had better find something else to help me feel a passion for living.

It's a small change, the rearrangement of furniture in our bedroom, but it seems like even that is enough, at least for a while, to make me feel the wonder of being around something new. Now when I turn out the lights in bed, or first walk into the room, I feel like I'm staying in someone else's house for a while and moving on soon. I wonder if it's childish of me to cherish this feeling, but I don't really care. For now, I feel more energy to write and think creatively, just by looking up from my bed and seeing a computer where there was no computer before, or by having to recall that the bookshelf is across the room. Once the novelty is gone again, I hope I can find something more lasting and deeper to sustain me.

Lately I switched my reading habits from blogs to a news aggregator called truthout. I'm a bit conflicted about this site and others like it, since they don't give any revenue to the providers of the content (usually mainstream news sources, with a healthy dose of smaller journals like Mother Jones and In These Times). I've been thinking recently about the things discussed in articles like this one by Eric Alterman; namely that the internet is a really good source for independent political commentary, but its chances of picking up the slack from newspapers is slim. Most likely the news sources of the new century will be inward-looking and local, and broken in disparate pieces which would lack the power the last century's newspapers had to put focus on particular issues.

Anyway, it's late and I don't have the energy to write much more, but I'm going to try to keep up this blog again from now on and I thought I might as well start now.

I finally drove Hoffman home today, and he is a very good car indeed. The Washington Post, however, is very, very bad. They are the opposite of Hoffman. The editor of their Outlook section, John Pomfret, needs to go, as Bob Somerby says in today's Daily Howler. Yesterday Pomfret put into print two of the most execrable opinion pieces I've ever seen, side by side under the banner "Women vs. Women" (I ask that you not click on the links to these two articles just yet). The first, by Charlotte Allen, dredges up a catalog of ugly stereotypes about women, going all the way back to the Victorian era to reference women's supposedly frequent fainting spells (and cast doubt on the theory that it was because of their tight bodices), following up with pseudo-science by linking proportional brain size directly with intelligence, and then fatuously referencing the results of a recent study to trash women's driving skills. The second piece, by Linda Hirshman, absurdly claims that the split in the female voting bloc between Clinton and Obama in the primaries is a result of women being too flighty to band together and take power. This strange conclusion relies on the impossibly disingenuous premise that the goal of feminism is to seize power rather than to achieve equality between women and men in decision making and rights.

These two articles are astoundingly disgusting (although Allen's piece has gotten the majority of criticism), and they would not have been allowed into print if they were written about any other group of people. The Post knows that it could not get away with publishing such nasty slandor if it were of blacks, Jews, Arabs, or other such groups, because the backlash against the paper would lose them both readers and respect. It is a sad commentary on the state of the mainstream media today that they can still publish pieces that call women stupid and flighty, and not make any more substantive response to their numerous A-list blogger critics (and a flood of negative reader response) than to call Allen's piece "tongue in cheek". Firedoglake shows how phony this defense is with a description of Allen's previous work, and her obvious long-term agenda of dismantling feminism.

It seems likely, instead, that Pomfret published these articles for two reasons: pushing the Overton window, and creating a controversy to get lots of links and clicks to the pieces online to shore up their dwindling income. This is why I requested above that you not click on the links to the articles themselves. You can see long block quotes from both articles at many of the other blogs I linked to, so you can see what they're like, but I don't want to reward the Post by directing even one more reader to their page. A commenter at Feministing suggests going after their advertisers, which sounds like an excellent idea to me. Regardless of what to do about these two articles, the bullshit that they exemplify are by no means limited to the Post. You can see similar assaults against women in The New York Times style section just about every weekend; the L.A. Times published an equally insulting piece about women last Friday; big pundits like Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan, and Tucker Carlson all have deplorable records when discussing (or, in Matthews' case, even talking to) women. And I probably have no need to link to anything to reference the sexism on display in all facets of the mainstream media in the coverage of the Clinton campaign, which will probably become legendary.

As Somerby says in the post I linked to above (about a related but slightly different issue), "at various times, reformations of institutions are needed—reformations which may include widespread purges." I've been thinking today about how to help bring about such a reformation of the media, and really of society (although with respect to society generally the term purge has a rather different connotation that I wouldn't wish to apply). Why is this disgusting and damaging behavior still so common in 2008, and what can be done about it?

For the last two days I've been driving around in a behemoth of a vehicle, a Jeep Commander. It looks like a miniature hummer of death. I'd never driven an SUV before; it feels compromising. I keep wondering what other drivers think of me, and I don't usually think that way. Do they think I should drive more aggressively because I'm in such a big vehicle? Are they apprehensive of me, or do they respect me more than they did when I was driving my little Corolla? Do the pedestrians get that sinking sensation I always get when I'm walking an SUV passes me?

And Jesus, it's called a Commander. Did I mention that already? As the name says, I'm not doing the commanding; I'm just following orders.

I guess you're wondering why I'm being commanded. When I went on Wednesday night to get my new Corolla, I took it for a test drive and found that the light on the instrument panel that normally turns on with the headlights was dark. I couldn't adjust it with the dial to the left of the steering wheel, which seemed instead to be linked to the overhead light. The Carmax agent Anne and I had (a very nice, affable and funny young UNM student named Andrew) said that they would fix it for us, free of cost, but they needed to send it to a Toyota dealer to do the work. In the meantime, they would give me a loaner. As I was signing paperwork, a service employee told me that the loaner they were giving us "is a bit bigger than the car you got." Yes indeed.

It's also a bit bigger than African elephants, cruise ships, major rock formations, and I'm pretty sure the moon. I'll have it until Monday, apparently, because that's when Carmax expects the necessary part to come in. Until then, I feel like a pretty big jerk, driving myself around in my ocean liner.

I got my car in November of 2004 from a private seller after being told by Geoff Hoffman that it's always possible to get a car (or a place to live), within a week if you have to, as long as you don't care about price or quality. It wasn't so long ago, but when I look back I see myself as younger in some more crucial way than age. I needed advice like that. I'd never made any purchases more significant than getting dozens of CDs at Soundgarden in a single visit. I felt like I didn't have authorization to buy a car, that only more qualified people with more authority than me could buy cars. I didn't see this simply as an issue of age, because I knew younger people who bought cars (and did other authoritative or autonomous actions, like live on their own without going to college or get non-retail jobs). I have always self-consciously identified symbols of authority or autonomy, everything from a person's bearing to the ease with which someone considers performing acts I associated with maturity (and since at times that included performing in a rock band or organizing parties, I might have had an idiosyncratic understanding of maturity).

I was awed at the prospect of buying a car. I didn't know where to begin, and even once I started looking at listings in the newspaper I couldn't take it seriously. It didn't feel like I could actually make an offer on a car, negotiate a deal, pay, take the car away with me, and own it, so looking at listings seemed like play-acting. Geoff's advice was pretty important to me, then, because I had identified him as someone with the autonomy I lacked. I perhaps took other suggestions of his more seriously than he intended, because I also looked for a car with manual transmission and no automatic features after he said that's what he looked for. He's one of those people who have had experience with worst-case scenarios, so it didn't seem so ridiculous to him to think of what would happen if power windows broke during a rain storm, when the windows were all the way down.

I started out looking for Hondas, because at the time I had more experience with Hondas than with any other type of car, but Geoff steered me toward a Toyota. He said that if I was going to get a Japanese car, guys drove Toyotas and girls drove Hondas. I knew at the time how absurd such a statement was, but I was a little more willing to go along with it than I might otherwise have been because my ex-girlfriend had two Hondas and made a rather big deal about her affection for them. Nevertheless, the first car I test-drove ended up being a Subaru Outback. It belonged to a professor of music at the College of Santa Fe, where it was parked until he could get rid of it. I hadn't ever gone onto their campus, and I still felt very insecure about following directions to unfamiliar locations. I also had no idea how to assess the value of the car, and it had been several years since I'd driven a stick-shift, so I asked Geoff to go with me. I think he found it amusing that I thought of him sometimes like an older brother, and so he came along. He even drove when we took the car onto the street to see how it ran, and afterwards he said in a jokingly firm voice that I should buy the car. I thought it would be odd for me to drive a Subaru Outback, but thought I'd probably get it. I asked the owner if I could have some time to decide.

I eventually lost that car to bad cell phone reception on campus; the next time I was able to receive one of the owner's calls, he had sold the car to someone else because he hadn't heard from me in several days. The next one I found that was within my price range was a 1997 Corolla; the owner said I could come by and look at it at his house west of the Paseo, an area I had also never been. I'm pretty sure Geoff drove me to see it again; if so, he may have proven himself to be less assertive than I would have thought, because I never did find out why the Corolla had a hood that was a different color from the rest of the car. It was also probably worth less than the $2500 it was being offered for (and which I eventually paid, with money generously provided by my parents). When I went to pick up and buy the car later I got a ride with Febbie Steve, who came in with me to the guy's kitchen and started leafing through his New Mexican, asked for a glass of water, and asked a few questions about the guy's daughter, who had been the driver of the car.

I reacquainted myself with a manual transmission when driving home from the house, stalling frequently at stop signs and red lights; Febbie Steve was long gone by the time I even got out of the community. For weeks afterward, I stalled epicly. When Geoff and I were headed downtown one night, I stalled in front of a police car and Geoff joked, "well, that's not suspicious." I only really picked up the skill of getting into first gear after the first snowfall that year, because it just so happened that the mixture of caution and skittishness I felt moving around on the snowy streets produced just the right ratio of pushing down on the gas and letting up on the clutch. After that, I just imagined that I was driving on snow and I started getting better at getting into gear.

It would be difficult to number the memories I have associated with that car. I sat in the driver's seat the morning after Senior Prank, having slept on a bed vacated by a friend who was chasing a girl, because I was drunk and sleepy; I sat quietly in the nurse's lot, my hands on my eyes, waiting for an unaccountable burning to stop (for whatever reason it was the first time I got allergies in New Mexico). I was again in the driver's seat when I made a prank call to the radio show of Cobalt Blue, the St. John's College Events Director. I pretended to be Jorge, a huge fan who just wanted to tell him to keep on doing what he was doing, while Geoff held back laughter next to me. A few weeks later, as I was getting ready to leave Santa Fe, I took the car in for a diagnostic and found out that I needed to replace some critical elements before I could drive it across the country, and so my brother Jeff (who had flown out to drive with me) and I got a hotel room and waited for the car to be fixed. When it was ready, I loaded it with everything I had brought to Santa Fe, and we drove it across desert and nothingness to Dallas and then up through the muddy plains to the now unfamiliar green of Maryland, back pretty much only because I'd fallen in love with Anne.

I had to convince my father that returning with the car, rather than selling it and taking a plane, made more sense. I had wanted to make the drive, and also knew that having a car in Maryland would be necessary to see Anne as frequently as I wanted to. Having my own car certainly made it quite a bit easier to drive the 35 miles from Ellicott City to Severna Park. Once I got there, we frequently had no place else to go after Barnes and Noble closed and we'd already sat in the Double T for as long as we could tolerate, so we just stayed in the car into the night, which had the added bonus of getting to know several officers from the Severna Park Police Department, wondering if we were both consenting adults.

The year after I'd gone back to Maryland, Anne moved in with me in my parents house and we saved up enough money to move . . . somewhere. We were commuting every day to Lanham just north of D.C., 45 minutes both ways, and on Saturday mornings we opened the synagogue that my mother worked at and served as Shabbas Goyim. At first I thought we were going to Berlin, where my brother Eric could help me find work teaching English. Then one night, sitting on a wooden bench on the fake dock at the fake harbor of the Annapolis Harbor Center Mall, I got a call from Kay, a friend and my old supervisor at the library, asking me if I'd be interested in taking her position when she left at the end of the summer.

Anne hadn't driven in several years, but she decided to relearn how in order to help me with the driving. She had stopped driving back then out of what sounded like terror. It took about half an hour to persuade her to drive past the stop sign at the end of my parent's street, and even after that she attributed a lot more importance to stalling out than was reasonable, but amazingly, after a week of lessons, she had gotten a couple hours of experience on the harried highways of Baltimore, and she felt ready to do some of the driving on the trip.

And so we loaded up the car again, which had by this point been christened Bukowski because the engine sounded so angry and bitter about everything. We drove through northern Maryland forests into the overgrown highways of Virginia, through Tennessee and over the pot holes of Arkansas, then down into dusty Oklahoma, where we hung out with Wes of St. John's Annapolis fame and St. John's Santa Fe obscurity. Then we spent a day and a night and another day and another night and then a week and then some more nights getting through Texas, and finally arrived here in Santa Fe. Somewhere in all of this, Buchowski lost half of his hubcaps, which had huge, warlike spirally grooves; the other two fell off in Santa Fe.

I write all this because now, after three and a half years, I've traded Bukowski in for a newer Corolla. I spent the last several days cleaning him out, thinking about the things I wrote about here, and focusing on the view while driving. I'm surprised by how difficult it is to let go of a car, how attached I feel to it/him (and I really have thought of it as having a personality, as is probably not surprising to anyone who's named a car). He's gone now, sold to Carmax and soon to be replaced by a 2003 Corolla that just happened to lack power locks, mirrors and windows. Its name will be Hoffman, in honor of Geoff.

When I drive to the post office everyday for my office mail-run, I listen to NPR; I'm usually driving when Fresh Air is on. Today Terry Gross was interviewing Martha Weinman Lear, the author of Where Did I Leave My Glasses, which is about normal memory problems that come with middle age. She recounted how she went to a neurologist because she was afraid her memory loss was an early sign of Alzheimer's. The doctor said it was a normal type of memory loss, that of episodic memory (based on events in one's life) rather than semantic memory (established facts about the world learned in youth). When she asked how to improve her memory, the doctor said that the biggest hindrance to remembering things is not paying attention in the first place. You aren't going to remember the name of a person you're introduced to, or the title of a movie, if you weren't paying enough attention when it was mentioned to you.

This is my predicament nearly all the time, with just about everything. I find that I am almost always attending to nothing in particular. My mind is usually focused inward, but I generally feel unsatisfied with my thoughts; they're more like the drifting that happens just before falling asleep than anything else. I'm not solving problems, or composing stories, or thinking poetically or intellectually. Instead I'm going over the few things from the recent past that I happened to be paying attention to, or (if I'm at work) thinking of how I'd rather be at home reading. I might re-imagine my part in a recent conversation, and while I'm doing it I'll picture myself talking face-to-face with a person who I was actually talking to on the phone or in email. Or maybe I'll call to mind a distant friend who I haven't contacted in a while. Sometimes my thoughts are based on things in my view, like bumper stickers or the fact that the weather predicted snow yesterday but instead it's sunny; so I must notice some things, but I don't know why it is that I notice these things and not others.

Invariably, when it occurs to me to judge my thoughts, they seem banal and uninteresting. In their place I'd probably like most of all to think of stories that I could write, but that doesn't happen naturally and I generally can't when I try. It seems to me that this is probably related to my inattentiveness, since writers very often talk about how they retain details. But then again, some writers are also described as seeming disconnected and fanciful. I tell myself there are simply different sorts of fiction writers, and that maybe I just wouldn't be the type who has an eye for detail.

Because of my inattentiveness, I'm constantly seeing things in my daily drives which I know I've seen before, but wouldn't have recalled if someone had tried to remind me of them. Things like the placement of trees, or the locations of stores; a broken trash can, a bus stop advertisement, the shape of a building. I don't notice big things, too; for example, every time I went to Fell's Point in Baltimore I would not notice the fact that there was a visible body of water unless Anne would point it out to me. If I were to make a model of the scene from memory, the harbor wouldn't be part of it; all of the buildings would be homogeneous, without distinguishing details and likely in the wrong places or just not there. The same is true of the street on which I live, and really every place I've encountered. I'm afraid that it also extends to things I read, conversations I have, pictures or movies I've seen. I have very poor recall for almost everything I've done in my life, because I just don't pay attention.

There have been many times in the past where I've lamented the fact that my attention to my immediate surroundings is so low. I often try to keep my mind focused on noticing things, but I never do it very well and whatever progress I make fades quickly, simply because I forget to try. I find it extremely difficult to keep my mind directed outward, even though when I succeed, I feel more energy from the endeavor rather than less.

The whole thing makes me wonder how other people attend to the world, since it seems like most other people have a higher level of attention than mine. I am always curious about the workings of other people's minds, although I have no idea if I'm any good at imagining them. I'm interested in how other people process the world, what thoughts they have, how their perspectives affect their intelligence, and how to imagine different levels of intelligence. I wish I could have an internal account of why people say or do certain things, one that would describe from their own perspective what the reasoning process was, or their emotional state, and even the mental structures they carry around with them which indicate what certain words or actions mean. I think my interest in these things improves my chances of someday habitually writing stories.

I wonder what capacity I, or anyone else, has for changing these basic elements of personality. More than will I ever be attentive, I wonder, can I ever be attentive?

Just now I was driving back to the office after lunch. I was living in my head, like I always do, listening to jazz on the radio and thinking about what other cars were doing so I didn't hit anything. A black pickup truck turned onto St. Michael's just before me, pulling into the left lane, while I pulled into the right. I saw cars stopped at a red light in front of me; rather than pulling up to them quickly, I kept the speed with which I'd turned so that I wouldn't have to come to a stop before the light changed. Then the black pickup switched lanes and pulled in front of me. I cursed him a little for blocking my acceleration room, ascribing a petty motive to the driver: maybe he did it because it felt like he was going faster, like passing someone on the highway. Just as I was registering his move, though, he disappeared, taking a right-hand exit to get onto St. Francis.

The cars started moving then, and I had successfully kept my speed, just driving now along the road back to work, no new thoughts. Then suddenly, it was as though the lens of my eyes expanded, and I saw the view around me. I looked at the horizon and saw that it was bordered by gorgeous blue mountains, forever in the distance. I leaned over so I could see more of the sky and saw that it was gigantic, an uninterrupted blue landscape all around me. I saw that the view around my car was long and low and had no buildings in it, almost like civilization hasn't quite taken hold here quite yet, even now after ten thousand years of city dwellers throwing up buildings and monuments and other manmade forms that chip away at the landscape. For just a few minutes, I felt once again the thrill of being in New Mexico, a land where it's possible to connect to life beyond modern confines and the day-to-day world of sleeping and eating, bills, national entertainment culture, presidential election year news, renting a cheaply designed house in a dull suburb of a dull city. For just a few minutes, I felt spiritual and imaginitive, the wonder of life, the possibilities of a free mind.

I've been trying to recapture that feeling for the last few years. I haven't had it much; New Mexico first gave it to me when I visited here during two spring vacations from Annapolis. Since then, more often than not, my mind has fallen into avoidance: I avoid remembering that I'm at work for the eight hours that I'm there, and then I avoid doing anything difficult (writing, studying an academic subject, reading German) until I go to sleep. This minor epiphany on St. Michael's, and a few other glimmers of light in the past months, have given me hope that my frozen mind might thaw soon.

It was four degrees outside this morning, colder than the walk-in freezer I remember from working at Main Street Ice Cream in Annapolis in 2002. Nevertheless, there was no moisture on the streets to freeze, despite a reported possibility of snow overnight. I think I'm going to start praying to Bob Dylan to give me snow days. He failed to give me one today, although it was less important than it might be because the office is even more quiet than normal today.

Last night they hosted a Legislative Reception, which they do every year during the single, puny New Mexico legislative session. The length of the legislative session rotates every year between thirty and sixty days. The rest of the year, the legislature meets only if called to a special session by the Governor. I can't imagine how the state government hopes to keep up with changes or impact New Mexico with sessions the length of an aphid's lifespan, but anyway, that's how they do it here.

Everybody in the office was shouting about how much stress they were under organizing everything, reserving hotel rooms, ordering food, training members in lobbying, and coordinating meetings of various organization committees, since all the board members would be in town. We invite all the members of the legislature, as well as the governor and his cabinet, the lieutenant governor, all the public education commissioners, and New Mexico's congressional representatives. I think only legislators and commissioners showed up. Everybody stood chatting in what we call the training room, eating finger food and watching the all-female mariachi band who I first saw in Tomasita's. It was about the same as a St. John's party, except without the altered states, hook-ups, aggressive dance music, indoor smoking, shouting, decorations, and senior residents watching over everything. Oh, also, the lights were brighter.

People kept telling me that I was welcome to come to the reception, as all the staff was invited as well; "You should come tonight, and bring you wife!" No one took the further step of telling me why I should go, but after I picked up Anne from school (where she was working), we stopped in and ate some barbecue sandwiches, chicken kabobs, and cookies. Everybody stood in a semicircle and slowly stopped chatting for first song by the mariachi band, who were all dressed in the same blue dress, with little guitars or violins and shifting singing duties. Then Anne and I left, without even seeing Bill Richardson, as I'd been half hoping.

We went home, and were soon joined by Adam Wilson, who I guess decided to drop by to visit Steven. Scott made pancakes, and then Adam and Steven bought a case of Tecate and made cheese hot dogs covered in bacon. I've quit smoking again, so I didn't join Adam on the porch in the solidifying cold. Adam's been coming over often since Steven moved in, and staying long after Anne and I go to bed. Having Steven live with us is, in general, like living in a part-time college dorm. We never know when we're going to be woken in the early morning by what could be either fearful shrieking or an Allanis Morrissette video on youtube, and sometimes the table is covered with empty beer cans in the morning. I hope that when Steven starts his job at Whole Foods next week, we move back to a quieter existence.

I still feel like a hostage to the seeming necessity of holding a full-time job. Maybe if Bob Dylan proves capable of providing me with snow days every so often, I can set up a sort of religious calendar around him so that I feel less monotony. May 24 would become the new Christmas, but beyond that I don't know what else to put on the calendar.

Today in the office, at least, the monotony is tempered by the feeling of relief from last night. In fact, only five people are here today, and if I were more rigorous about keeping up with my work, I'd legitimately have nothing to do. As it is, there are a few phone calls to make, and a few databases to update. I should also probably clean my desk. I'd just rather be home.

I don't know if I have nothing to say or I'm just lazy. I haven't been writing much of anything in the last months, not even emails. When I came back to work after the Christmas break, I felt demoralized with having to go in to work every day. Every day, even on weekends, I feel the same sense of waiting for the end of the day to come that I get when I'm at work. At work, I look forward to coming home; once I get home, I'm not looking forward to anything, but I'm still waiting for the end.

Today I've been reading online for hours, first blogs (reading each one on the list at Altercation in alphabetical order), then the New York Times. I haven't been reading newspapers much, although I read through them every day while on vacation. There were a couple of years when I read newspapers more than anything else, didn't feel right unless I had read the entire A section because what if I missed something? Now it doesn't seem like I'm missing something vital if I don't read a newspaper, but it still feels stimulating (witness this blog post).

While reading the internet, I also downloaded twenty albums by Miles Davis. I've planned to listen to all of his major albums since 2001, when John Polewach introduced me to a lot of his music as I learned somewhat to play jazz drums (I'd listened to him before that, but only a couple of albums). I played Cookin' last night after getting into bed, after not listening to jazz for about half a year. As with many other things, I wonder how long my interest will last, and whether or not I will ever find an abiding interest.

"Thus, the subcellular distribution of PRAK is determined by multiple factors including its own NES and NLS, docking interactions between PRAK and docking proteins, phosphorylation of PRAK, and cellular activation status. The p38 MAPKs not only regulate PRAK activity and PRAK activation-related translocation, but also dock PRAK to selected subcellular locations in resting cells."

Something's clearly not right with the world when it's nearly 70 degrees in late November. I guess I should write a letter to the National Weather Creation Bureau and find what's going on. Maybe one of the clerks took several months off and, like me after a lunch break, started working again but so slowly that an observer wouldn't see any progress, and that's why we're having September days still. With any luck, maybe the Metaphysical Congress will take up this issue and actually do something about it, instead of just stalling every piece of new legislation in the Antinomy Committee.

Somehow, November seems even more hollow when it's warm outside. The leaves have still fallen off the trees, the grass is dead, and the bushes in New Mexico have changed into skeletons, and with such warm weather this looks a lot more alarming than previous Falls. Maybe there was a nuclear holocaust, and everybody slept through it.

I agree with everything in this post about driving a car with a stick shift. I'm wondering if my readers who don't drive stick think that it makes sense, or if it just looks like bullshit to them.

I'm currently listening to the latest album by the Travis Morrisson Hellfighters, All Y'All. Although I don't like the title of the album, I am, as usual, really impressed with Travis, somewhat bashful about it as though I had a crush, and a little unsure why I don't listen to his music more. For those of you who don't know Travis, he was the leader of the Dismemberment Plan.

I'm also really pleased with a new CD by The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, which I got on a whim after seeing it reviewed in an AMG newsletter and listening to the first song. They're pretty similar to the great, seemingly unknown Comet Gain. I guess it's indie punk: really melodic and bright-sounding songs with a dark undercurrent, tight playing, good lyrics, and poppy elements. Both bands are British. Both bands come up with excellent melodies for both verse and chorus, with varying male and female lead singers, and always lots of energy even on the slower songs. They're both inventive, using all sorts of rhythms, tempos, and supporting instruments, occasional vocal harmonies, and daringly poetic lyrics. I particularly love the Comet Gain, who are reminiscent of the Fall, the Pastels, the Go Betweens, and Dexy's Midnight Runners all on the same album.

Since I got my new job, I've been reading a lot of political blogs because I usually don't have any work, but I can't read books or magazines (I think--I still haven't asked). I'm particularly fond of The Daily Howler, which aggressively presents the case that the mainstream media reports conservative or Republican issues with a free pass, while they treat Democrats and liberal causes shabbily, to the point of lying and distorting things Democrats say in order to keep pounding away with story lines like "Gore is a big liar" or "Hillary is a ruthless faker". Somehow, though, I find that no matter how much time I spend each day reading about news and politics, be it blogs, newspapers or magazines, I never seem to have a good grasp of any issue. I guess I'd have to pick one issue and read just about it for a while, rather than generalized commentary or reporting from people who have been following all sorts of stories for years. Or are there other options? With the few months I read the Economist my knowledge of the world (from basic things like geography, to complex things like the after effects of the cold war) expanded greatly, but I found that it left me no time to read anything else, and I still didn't know much about domestic issues. What do my (what, like 5?) readers suggest?

I am home on a lunch break, and for some reason I am experiencing a sense of lucidity and reawakening that I have somewhat rarely, a feeling of awareness and mental energy. It's hard to explain what it feels like, why it is that my thoughts seem to have a different tone from what I'm used to. I was just thinking about a call I made yesterday to the office of a dentist Anne and I went to early this year. I was calling to make a new appointment, and the receptionist told me that we had missed back-to-back appointments for September which I didn't know we had. He sounded pretty mad at me, and said, "You can't just not show up for an appointment. I called both of your phone numbers, and sent a postcard." I explained that we had moved and gotten new phones, and that I received none of his messages, and also didn't know we had made appointments.

I was left unsatisfied, because the receptionist didn't acknowledge anything I was saying. Just now I wanted to reach out to him somehow, with an email or a visit, and explain again that I was sorry but that I didn't think I had done anything wrong. Then somehow I got to thinking about how strange it was that I had a dentist, a person whose income depended on patients, people coming in for the service of having their teeth cleaned and examined. I am in a relationship with this woman, the dentist, that seems somehow unnatural, a result of the complicated social structure of modernity. Like pretty much everyone alive today, I have indistinct professional relationships with people who have received abstract credentials allowing them to perform well-defined services isolated from all other areas of life. I don't know the dentist as anything other than a dentist, nor her receptionist as anything other than a person who is employed by the dentist to answer a phone in her office, make appointments, and receive payments from patients.

I then thought about how strange it is that the tree in my back yard has a trunk that split early in its growth, so that it has branches and leaves growing out of two separate, equally thick parts; and sometimes the owner of my house hires people to come and cut off some of the branches on this living plant, because they happen to be growing in areas that threaten the house's roof.

What might I call thoughts like these? They seem strangely analytical, putting words to patterns of life that I usually act on without consciousness because I too am a part of the systems I'm examining.

Usually I just think about consuming, with unvocalized thoughts like "what can I eat now, because I'm hungry?" or "it's cold in here" or "maybe I can read Watchmen later today, when I get home." I've noticed in the last few days that my thoughts are usually very boring and relate only to myself, Anne, or Scott, and our immediate needs. I wonder why sometimes I seem to think in other ways, and why it's so rare.

D. H. Lawrence wrote back in 1915 about why I dread going to work: it requires that I "put on the vulgar, shallow death of an outward existence." Every morning my "soul [grinds] in uneasiness and fear" as I see that my time as a hidden being has once again passed. It doesn't seem to matter that I don't have any difficult work, and it's only slightly improved by the light amount of interaction with the public. I felt nearly as much dread going into switchboard just for the call I knew I'd get from Lois and the interaction with security. At least now I don't have to hate the fact that I can't stay home at midnight and sleep in a bed. My current job is the best I've had as far as compensation, but somehow almost the worst for this feeling of soul grinding.

It's been four years since I had to work in a service position at a store, so maybe I've forgotten feeling this way then. My memory, anyway, is that at Safeway I felt like the day was lost if I had to work for part of it, but I don't remember dread. At the Moon Café I didn't really care, but then I barely got customers, and was also mildly insane. I can't remember how I felt about going to work at Barnes and Noble, even though it was the most recent of my service jobs. I know that I feared the supervisors and book floor workers, and mostly disliked the customers rather than shrank from them in my soul. I think I enjoyed working there, but this was tied to the fact that I was young enough to feel at home in a service position, had made friends, and never had to face customers alone.

Certainly my current job isn't the worst I've had. That would be Promissor. It made me feel so awful that I would eventually have swerved my car into one of the numerous trucks on I-95 during the forty-five minute commute if I had to keep working there for just a few more months. I felt the same soul grinding that I now feel once a day, only I felt it every five minutes, between calls. Even that wasn't so bad, because I drove to and from work with Anne, and the waves of calls mostly dissipated by 9:30 p.m.

At my current job, soul nausea comes from the presence of foreign entities in the communicating offices, and to a lesser extent because of the phone. I sit at an exposed desk by the (rarely used) front door, from which I can see the finance manager sitting at his computer, and I'm only paces away from the office manager. I can hear our accountant coughing or shifting in her cubicle, one wall of which is right in front of me. The others walk by frequently to get coffee or visit each other. None of these people are antagonistic, annoying, or stupid; my problem is that we are strangers to each other, even if I come to know their personalities, hear about or even meet their families, talk with them on breaks or at meetings. I could only feel more out of place if I went to sleep here and woke up in Russia.

Moreover, the work will be cyclical, boring, sometimes uncomfortable (if I am asked to help with training sessions), and completely unconnected to my personality. Still better than switchboard, but nowhere near where I want to be. A person could only like this job if they had no desire ever to work outside of offices, even though for an office job, I'm sure it's really quite good. I was scared rather than excited when the finance manager told me that there were a lot of opportunities with this company. I just wish I could make enough money to live without working for other people. I suppose eventually I may have to write just to survive my fear that I'll never do anything with my life.

Yesterday I started a new job at the National Education Association, at their New Mexico headquarters in Santa Fe. The position is titled "Program Assistant/Receptionist"; so far I've only been trained in the receptionist duties. Oddly, it is the receptionist who makes the mail and bank run every day, and also restocks office supplies--I believe because the woman who vacated the receptionist position volunteered for those duties. She seems a lot like my mother, who feels the need to do as much work as there is to do, whether they give her more pay and respect or not, whether she likes the company or not. The former receptionist told me yesterday that she has trouble remembering to take her afternoon break, because she gets so busy, a problem which I presume I won't have no matter how busy it gets. So far the receptionist part has been boring and a little anxiety inducing, as I'll explain later.

I'm hoping I'll like the assistant position more. I'll be helping the "UniServ" who covers the northeastern and central New Mexico school districts. UniServs are the people who handle contract negotiation and conflict mediation, find (or offer, not sure yet) representation for union members who have legal trouble, lobby local governments, and other things I'm not clear on yet. My UniServ doesn't come into the office more than a few times a week, because he mainly does meetings all over the state. He hasn't come in since I started working. Eventually I'll be composing letters, proofreading, designing signs, and whatever else he needs. I'll also be maintaining a database detailing union dues by member. So far I've gotten no work on that end, because the people who are going to give it to me are, I guess, too busy.

This means that I have yet another job which, at least for now, consists of waiting for a phone to ring, and dealing with callers when it does. I wish I could have a job that didn't involve phones. Even though I've had nothing much to do so far, I already dread going to work; there's something awful about being attached to a desk with nothing to do. It's not that I hate dealing with phone calls, exactly. If they were for me, I'd feel a lot better. But the uncertainty of calls--not knowing when anyone will call, who they are, what I'm supposed to do with them--instills in me a baseline of anxiety the whole time I'm at work. When I applied for this position, the office manager seemed concerned primarily that I be able to work with frequent interruptions, which I feel okay about. I'm not upset by the interruptions as much as the anxiety. If I have nothing to do, the phone only serves as a constant reminder that I might, at any time, be required to speak professionally with strangers. I can't retreat into privacy, which is what I tend toward naturally. If I'm busy in the future, as everyone keeps telling me I will be, the phone's presence would mean that I couldn't ever get completely lost in details.

So far, I'm pretty much stuck with surfing the internet or writing emails and blogs; things which I enjoy doing, but usually for less than an hour a day. I have now had nearly every iteration of things I can do while waiting for the phone to ring (or, in the case of QAI, having babies and small children playing in the corner of my eye): first I could read and listen to music, with breaks; then I couldn't do either of those things, but could play lots of Spider Solitaire (Promissor . . . rawr!); next I was able to do just about anything, even sleep, but had to stay at the switchboard the whole time; and now I can surf the internet, but not listen to music, presumably not read a book, and certainly not sleep, but I get two breaks and an hour and fifteen minute lunch (it's a union, what do you expect?).

I miss the library, and it would be nice if I could start graduate school. This new job, at least, pays very well (by my standards, at any rate), provides excellent benefits, and has opportunities for advancement. All told, any problems I have with the job pale in comparison with that lineup. Someday, though, I will have a room without a hideous oversized phone at my elbow, and maybe even the ability to feel like myself all the time.

Last night I was sitting at my kitchen table with a plate of spaghetti that had grown cold an hour before as I'd forgotten to attend to it, and instead was watching the shadows shift as the light spread across the room. When it was cut off by the curtain, I got up and went to the window, and there was the moon looking in on me from across the yard. I greeted her, and she waved. "Do you want to come in?"

"Well, maybe for a few minutes. Why not?"

I pushed the panes open and she floated inside, coming to rest on a chair across from my spaghetti. The room became dark.

"Do you have anything for me to reflect?"

"I'm afraid I don't have anything to compare to what you're used to. My means are limited. How about this, will this do?" I took a table lamp from the living room and plugged it in on the kitchen counter.

"Maybe you could remove the shade? That's better."

"Would you like anything to eat? I have some leftover Chinese if you're interested."

"No, I'm fine, thanks. Unless you've got a pumpkin somewhere."

"Is that what you eat?"

"Yes. As a matter of fact, I'm mostly pumpkin."

"Just a second. I'll be right back." I went to the porch and chose a pumpkin I'd set aside for carving, short and with a broad face. The stars shone impassively in the space vaceted by the moon. I brought the pumpkin back and asked if it would do.

"It looks delicious. Turn away if you don't mind." When I turned back, the pumpkin was gone and the moon had taken on an orange tint in the light from the lamp bulb. It suited her features. "If you don't mind my asking," she said, "why do you keep referring to me as 'she'?"

"Aren't you? A woman, I mean? Luna, you know. I thought it meant . . . "

"It's a common misconception. I'm not really gendered, though. That kind of thing is just myth."

"Still, it seems appropriate."

"I'll admit that it's more poetic, but really I'm just mineral."

"I thought you said you were mostly pumpkin."

"Sure, but do pumpkins have genders?"

I sat pondering that, and the moon started to look a bit restless. I said that I'd understand if it was time to get going.

"Nice seeing you," it said.

"Come back anytime." Then it rose to the window and slipped through the trees to join the watchful stars.

It is that most evil hour, between four a.m. and five; the light looks yellow and uriney, and objects only come into focus when I look directly at them. Even then they look like they're being projected onto some disgusting surface by the illusion-casting lamps of the universe. There's a tingling in my scalp as though worms were crawling around in there. My eyes feel like marbles someone has thrust into a jello mould. This happens even tonight, when I woke up at 9 p.m. I suppose circadian rhythems exist.

Time at the Switchboard is refractory. It's starting to feel, when I turn off all the lights I can and lie down on the rough carpet, like I'm being observed remotely. The dim light is charged with the tension of after-hours; it feels like no one is supposed to be here, ever; it feels like I am taking refuge from a war.

This morning I woke twice: first at 3:45 a.m. from a dream in which Jeff and his friend Rob, and George Wendt, brought pizza to the switchboard, and then to a phone call. I did not get back to sleep. I heard someone unlock one of the doors, and two people talking back and forth for at least twenty minutes, a chatty woman and an inquisitive man, the noise floating above me on the floor preventing me from drifting and sinking into the carpet and through the floor into sleep. I find that when I try to get to sleep and am interrupted, I float down; when there is nothing interrupting me but I still can't lose consciousness, I float up; and when I fall to sleep I am not there to float.

Eric made a website: highqualitytime.blogspot.com. It will not take long to view.

I quite like Santa Fe in fall, although I can't describe it too well because I don't get out much. It hasn't got the elaborate changing colors of Maryland, but leaves still fall, and brown seed pods, and the wind still blows them around, making a delightful whispering swish. The sunlight becomes more noticably slanted, as though it were filtered through water, casting an ambient glow rather than the shocking search-light quality it has in springtime, or the beating waves of light and heat in the summer. I could do without the chamisa, though; it's mostly done blooming now, I guess, because my eyes no longer feel like they're being squeezed with a hot lead vise, but I've still got a useless cough and raspy lungs. The rainy season is mostly over now, but the air often feels like a storm has just passed through and cleared things up. There is a lingering summer heat wave, noticable but thankfullly not overwhelming. At night I wish the mountains would cease their vigil so they could step down into the flat southern part of town, maybe huddle around a campfire and roast the remaining tourists, sparks simmering and flickering in the black around them, and tell me stories that would explain everything I always wanted to know.

I've been reading Iliads, comparing them with the Greek often, wondering why I care so much but trying still, uselessly, to catch a bit of meaning with some tweezers, draw it through the air and snap it out of the book like stubborn sinew clinging to bone, and maybe pin it to my wall like a trophy. I'd make a little plaque commemorating myself: Greg finally got it. Anne's starting school in just two days now, because there was a last minute opening in the Fall Freshman class. I think I'll go through the seminar with her, at least, and perhaps that way finally get away from the lingering feeling that I missed everything, maybe understood broadly some of the philosophy and learned to read Greek passably along with a translation, and French reasonably well, understood most of the math and some of the science, and fell down like a bitch in the ring with religion and literature. Why am I afraid that I didn't understand the Greek plays? Why do I still think that attempting to understand is the right approach?

The mousepad at Switchboard has a blown-up picture of the tower section of Weigel Hall. It was probably created to appeal to nostalgic ex-students, but I wonder if the person who created it was a disillusioned Johnny who wanted to take out his wrath like Godzilla. My mouse crushes.

I can see very starkly now, pretty much for the first time, the difference between "modern novels" and earlier fiction. I don't know why something like this should have taken so long, and it's realizations of that sort which make me question my own intelligence. Why didn't I understand this before now? It doesn't seem difficult or uncommon. It seems like many people are interested in and understand things like this in high school, and here I am at 24 still stuck on things that really aren't very interesting. Am I wrong?

I'm trying to figure out what I meant by "things like this" above. The most simple interpretation is that I mean developments in art. The understanding that there is a qualitative difference between, say, sixties pop songs and punk rock, or between European fashion and American. On another level, I think I mean a level of cognition that would also comprehend the second meanings of politicians, or the fake world of advertising. Behold my inferiority complex: I actually often think that my capacity to understand is lower than aware high school students.

Polewach has (jokingly?) declared the pointlessness of reading 19th century novels (his language is that it's irrelevant, with the joke perhaps being that he doesn't think any literature is relevant). Much reading of old fiction juxtaposed with new is leading me toward the same conclusion that novels, even when they're interesting, are pointless. I probably arrive at this conclusion from a very different angle because, well, I never really know what John's saying or why.

I used to think that I read fiction for reasons beyond entertainment. I'm not really sure what I thought those reasons were, because I've never been a deep thinker. Really I usually read (I'm thinking of high school and into college here) because I was solitary and impressionable, I liked stories, and I believed that reading "important books" was necessary for someone who wanted to be "intelligent". I found reading enjoyable even when I didn't even follow the story, let alone any other meaning of the text, because I responded to the different rhythems and and dictions, and it gave me a vague but often stirring feeling of being somewhere else, as another person, much like in dreams. When I think about why fiction might be worthwhile, I fall back on the following very common postulates: 1. Fiction might help me understand life, or appreciate it better (recognize patterns, experience people and events more critically, appreciate the weight of decisions before making them). 2. Through stories, writers are able to examine and communicate ideas, even complex ones, in a way more immediate and accessible than standard argument.

I look at these postulates now and recognize them as belonging very much to the 19th century. I don't really know how thought about literature has developed since then, if it has. I see also that these postulates are very rarely true, at least for me. I mostly read for entertainment, historical curiosity, and the excitement I get from seeing a writer's abilities. Additionally, I recognize that the better writers tend to consciously examine social conditions and human psychology; but honestly I don't know that I get much out of it when they do. So why do I read fiction instead of quilt, or bet on horses? Dunno. Moreover, why do I stubbornly still think I ought to read, say, Fielding or even, as I did early this year, everything by Flaubert? Dunno.

This is the new face of St. John's College: stone-faced, chill, perhaps taken aback by what he's looking at but trying not to show it. And what is he looking at? I believe it to be a male strip-tease. Notice the excited interest of the dude in the plaid shirt, and the big smile on the girl's face. I believe the strip-tease artist is Mr. Grenke.

I have a new desktop computer. The monitor is huge and black-bordered, the tower is futuristic grey, the mouse is bulbous, the speakers are small and powerful-looking, and the keyboard is soft and fluffy. Now I can finally download music again, and . . . play World of Warcraft, and . . . yes, I said it. And also . . . that's about it, really.

I have been trying to structure my time better, since I get depressed when I don't plan. Pants get tossed all over my sentences, food grime builds up on my words, and I have to pay more per letter. If I could only manage to sleep at work, my collar would slide off. My tea is cooling before I can drink it, and my stomach is probably too floppy anyway, but later I have Lyly and Pullman. Too bad my dry wall is bleeding.

I dreamt that I decided to go home in the middle of a shift, so I took the switchboard radio, the sleeping bag and the pillow, went home and made a sandwich. Jeff was playing computer, and Anne chatted with me while I ate. We were watching a movie when the radio crackled, "226 to base." I walked over resentfully, pressed the transmit button and said, "go ahead," expecting something non-essential like a radio check.

I waited a few seconds, and then heard the voice again, sounding breathy and pained. "Lack of life signs."

I was astounded, and certain that I should never have left the switchboard. They would see that I wasn't there, and whatever happened might be blamed on me. I pressed the button again, feeling chill. "For who? A student, or what?"

"No." A long pause. "Anaya." Anaya is another security guard who, in the dream, was this guard's partner.

"My God, do you need me to call an ambulance?"

"No . . . I'll take care of it . . . Arnand . . . Arnand, noooooooooooooooooo!"

I ran to my car and sped to campus. When I arrived, I saw a huge crowd gathering, hushed and unsure how to act. I overheard a few groups saying things like "did you know him?" "are we supposed to be standing, or is this okay?" and "I guess classes are ccancelled." Meanwhile, I was dodging through the seated groups trying to get back into the building before anyone realized that I hadn't been there. I had forgetten the radio, the sleeping bag and the pillow at home; I thought I would have to call Jeff and ask him to bring them to me. I heard the voice of Chris Nelson, the college president in Annapolis, saying "As you know, we're here for a solemn event."

Then I woke up on the floor at Switchboard.

Geschichte des Altertums is so long that it has an introductory volume of 250 pages, entitled "Introduction. Elements of Anthropology." For the most part, I've read only this volume, and dipped occasionally into the first book proper, which relates the history and culture of ancient Egypt and Babylon. Meyer wrote at the end of the 19th century, at which point it seemed that Anthropology had barely gone beyond comparing ancient summary works, like Herodotus and Strabo, with each other and with what was found in the same areas in the modern age.

Meyer sure hates shamans. He abruptly concludes his chapter on the primitive belief in magic by saying that traditional conceptions, on which the shamans' power is based, hold back and suppress everything from the formation of self-reflection to the development of medical science, and in general the achievements which raise the human condition from barbarism to culture.

I'm at switchboard now, haltingly reading German, then switching to Manuscript Found in Saragossa, then drinking some coffee and playing some Alchemy. I've brought my stuffed owl, Zaditor, to keep me company. For the most part I've been listening to Schubert and Chopin. I've been unable to sleep while at work. Anneis probably right to think that I complain about this job too much. If I manage to use my time well, this job will be a blessing.

I only work at the library for two more hours. I start at the switchboard tonight at midnight, and stay until 8 a.m. I don't know what to do with the two hours here. I just finished work on my last project, and wrote an explanation of it for whoever takes it up. I could look at the shelf for books to weed from the collection, or read College & Research Libraries News.

I don't want to leave.

I've been reading one of the first universal histories through interlibrary loan, Geschicte des Altertums by Eduard Meyer. It's in German, so I've been stumbling through it; and with all five volumes, it's several thousand pages, so maybe even the hundred I've scanned aren't representative; but so far, it seems like nothing more than a gigantic review of all the historical writings before him. It's like an endless special edition of the Times Literary Supplement discussing only history books, perhaps designed to teach scholars how to waste their time. But who knows, maybe he throws in a little synthesis every hundred pages.

New beds comin' in soon. Ayup. Heard about it from that nice man down the mattress store. Why, he even gave me a free sheep. Don't know what I'll do with that'un. Maybe make a sweater. What I hear, though, I hear thurze a queen-sized bed a-comin' round the house next week. Even got a working shower now, not just a bathtub anymore, nope. Working wireless internet connection too. It's like a real residence now. Don't know how we'll pay for it though. Might have to take two jobs; switchboard looks like a real stinker, so it may be that I keep the library job 'swell. Ayup. Lot of hours, that.

I've just checked out about 10 albums of music by Chopin, after browsing the introduction to a collection of Chopin waltzes in score. Here I go again.

Someone just checked out a book of essays by Leo Strauss with his picutre on the cover. I had never seen the man before. He looked very uncomfortable in front of the camera, and had an expression even more blank than is common for portraits. Perhaps, while that picture was being taken, he was wishing that no one would ever look at his face and he could live behind his name alone, perpetually unseen and mysterious.

I guess I've decided to take the job. I'm not very happy about it. I have three meetings on Monday to try to get tuition remission for Anne to take the undergraduate program. First I meet with financial aid, then the assistant dean, and finally the director of the graduate program (for those of you who know him, Mr. Venkatesh). We still don't know if Anne's even gotten in.

Laura told me that I can come back to the library if there's an opening in the evenings and weekends supervisor position; the switchboard supervisor (Kyle) told me that if there was an opening for the daytime operator, I could definitely switch if I wanted to; and the human resources officer (Lois) told me that she hasn't done any interviews yet for the position I applied to in Admissions. Because of all this, I at least have some options.

I haven't told Laura yet; in fact, my last words to her on the subject were that I'd decided to stay at the library through the summer unless I got a salaried position. I guess the offer to start me at the midpoint salary was enough.

It looks like I'll be studying Zen this summer. Jess had suggested it to me a while ago, and then I saw D. T. Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism on a "what are you reading this summer?" library display and thought it would be a good idea to focus my mind while locked up alone in Peterson all night.

I have a meeting today with Lois in Human Resources to discuss a job I've been offered: overnight operator of the St. John's Switchboard. The hourly pay would be smaller, but the paychecks would be larger. I'd have benefits, including vacation and, in two years, I could do the E.C. program for free. That's where the advantages end. I would be leaving a job I actually enjoy, which has got to be pretty rare. I'd also be working at a schedule opposite to Anne's no matter how we worked it, because her job doesn't have much opportunity for overnight work.

Laura told me I could come back to the library if I took the job and the library supervisor position opened up again. Or I could stay at the library until I'm offered a salaried position. I don't know yet what to do.

My meeting with Lois is in less than ten minutes. None of the questions I'm asking her would be hugely helpful in the decision, but I'm going to ask for more time to decide.

I'm thinking of taking some courses at UNM as part of their non-degree program. I got the idea first from Molly Padgett, who is otherwise not a warehouse of ideas. It seems that I may know what to go to grad school for, and it's something I would never have thought of: Anthropology, probably either Biological Anth. or Archaeology. It seems I'm fascinated by the reconstruction of human history and origins. It seems I might want to check this out with some courses.

This started, as my interests normally do, with regression. I was reading Arthur Toynbee's A Study of History when I realized that he wasn't ever going to slow down and tell me what that history was, so I looked for supplementary books. The library isn't very expansive in this field, for obvious reasons (hint St. John's doesn't study history and wants to suppress it hint), but I was able to find a reasonably thorough history of world civilizations. It was written in the early 70's, before some important dating techniques were discovered, but it would do. The first chapter was on prehistory; it contained mostly idle speculation about the mesolithic, and some moderately more informed speculation about the origin of agriculture. Since this is a period I know very little about, and it seemed that, whether or not this book thought so, it would give important insight into the origins of civilizations, I looked in the bibliography for that chapter. The library had a few of the books listed there, and the most general looked like Back of History, by William Howells.

Now Howells, as I was later to learn, was primarily a physical anthropoligst, specializing in prehumanity. And so he devoted more than half of the book to the question of human origins. Now, this book was written in 1953, practically at the beginning of our understanding of human origins. The "Piltdown Man" had only recently been revealed to be a hoax. There was still a different name (indeed multiple names) for each specimen of what is now called Homo Erectus that had been found (e.g. "Java Man", "Sinanthropus", "Pithecanthropus Erectus"). The !Kung San, who were described rather uncritically, were still referred to as Bushmen. Every stone tool was still assumed to be a weapon.

Despite all of this, the book made me realize that there's a hell of a lot I don't know about human evolution and prehistory. So I got a book by Richard Leakey; then one by DonaldJohanson, who discovered Lucy; then a 25-year-old collection of Scientific American Articles; then finally I received the interlibrary loan I'd requested, an up-to-date standard introductory textbook to Anthropology, Patterns in Prehistory.

Perhaps, since I've been studying these things for less than a month, I should wait to say that I might go to grad school for them. But I am certainly looking into non-degree classes at UNM in Anthropology, regardless.

I may have just discovered an essential element of poetry through reading, of all people, Sylvia Plath. I never understood before when people said things like, "poetry's medium is pure language". Now I do, I think. If the purpose of art is to generate feelings, then poetry does this not with ideas or stories or sounds or images, although it may use these insofar as language is connected with them; but it is the language itself that generates the feelings.

I'm taking a second allergy test next Tuesday, since I failed the last one (I was blocking histamine). This means that I can't take allergy medication until then. For a while I doubted that the Clarinex was doing anything; now I know that it was. My eyes feel like a mob hitman is smothering them to death against the inside of my skull. My head is almost too heavy to keep aloft. At least I can still take my nasel spray; without that I'd probably qualify for disability payments.

I slept through Kay's knitting club today, stayed in the bath while Eric called me three times, and haven't done anything at work that was work-related other than find a couple of internet sources for the fact that Horned toads have black eyes. When I go home, I'll have some food, watch some episodse of Homicide, and read some Kurt Vonnegut. (I don't know what I'll eat; maybe chicken. On Friday, I received all seven seasons of Homicide on DVD, having ordered it from Borders with a 30% discount. I started reading Kurt Vonnegut novels when I heard that he died.) This is my day. I just thought I'd blog.

Shortly after I arrived at the library today, I was talking to Laura about how she sets up a spread sheet. "I can freeze this line, if I want, so that it stays on top even when I scroll. So I go to View . . . and then I click . . . ngggggg!" I looked over to see her face suddenly constricted into a look of shock and anger; her index finger had shot up like an attack dog, pointing just past the monitor.

"What is it?"

"Rain! And snow!"

Just then, the whole library rang with a pounding noise from the roof.

"And now hail! This has been happening every day this week, just as I have to ride home"

I looked out the window, where Laura's finger was still pointing rigidly in anger, and saw large streaks of every kind of condensation coming down at once onto the shivering pinyons, the skeletal branches of the newly-budding poplars, and the small juniper shrubs. Within seconds, everyone in the library ran over to press their faces against the windows in glee and wonder. Eight people ran over in a line and, like water from a faucet reaching the bottom of the sink, hit the wall and spread into a new line. Tutors and students stood together and gawked at the sight of the clouds descending to the earth like a mad swarm of bees.

As much as I would appreciate having employer-provided health insurance, vacation time, sick leave, and pay raises, I have to love my job. I am officially allowed to spend as long as I want, while on my shift, browsing through Library Journal and reading about new book releases; and if there's anything that looks interesting to me, I can point it out to the library director, who more likely than not will buy it. So not only do I get to browse and shop for books for free, I get paid to do it. I wish everyone had this job.

Maybe there's something to this whole waking up before noon thing people are always talking about.

Rain, rain, rain, the house is bombarded and the new bikes look like barricades. I don't believe there's anything outside the door except rain. Someone put up a backdrop so that it looks like there are wet dead leaves, droopy budding plants, and Cary Grant approaching the house, smiling and waving. Wait a minute, that is Cary Grant. What does he want?

In the last week, I was offered a job at Borders. This is the first job offer (which, indeed, resulted from the frist interview) I have ever gotten at Borders. I applied in Ellicott City, Annapolis, Los Angeles, Pasadena, and once previously in Santa Fe. They used to have the most annoying paper application of any retail store, two pages front and back with a request that the applicant list and describe employment and account for periods of inactivity over the last five years. I filled out that application maybe eight times, over the course of six years. I still have hand cramps from filling out that application. I never got a call.

Some time around last year they changed to an electronic, internet-based application, which requests even more information (professional AND personal references, area of college focus, reasons for leaving previous positions) and then had a personality test to see if the applicant is a leader, friendly, talkative, enjoys large groups, likes going out or staying in, enjoyed high school or thought about dropping out, likes filling out personality tests, likes lime with restaurant water . . . for thirty-five web pages. Five questions on each page. Filling it out eats up more time than the verbal portion of the S.A.T.s I did the electronic application in November to maybe get a Christmas season job while I wasn't at the library. I called them twice to ask if they were hiring, and went to the info desk to see if I could speak with a manager about my application. No response.

All I wanted was to be a bookseller. Most people might think that three years of supermarket, restaurant and cafe work, a job at a library, a four-year degree from a prestigious book-filled school, might make my application stand out.

I applied one more time last month, finally got an interview which went well, set up a second interview which also went well, and was hired . . . to work in the cafe.

I would have taken it, because I could use the money, and cafe workers still get a store discount; maybe if I stayed there for a few months, I could even be a book seller. Actually, I did take it, but two days ago I called back and turned them down. The other library supervisor quit, and once spring break is over, I will have thirty hours and five work days a week at the library and so I likely couldn't work out a good schedule at Borders. It could have been so beautiful.