Inversions

So far, Becky's new job consists of sitting in a cube, reading pamphlets and the company website. The word around her office is that things will pick up significantly after the new year, but in the meantime she's way bored. Way bored and making more as a temp than I made as a salaried IT guy. Which got me to thinking:

One of the idiotic aspects of corporate capitalism is the inverse relationship between the pain associated with a given job and its corresponding salary or wage. Example: it's much harder and more painful to be a fry cook than to sit in a cube and answer e-mail, but your average fry cook is going to make half or a third as much as an executive assistant. The most egregious case I can think of is that of consultants; men (maybe there are female consultants, too, but I never saw one) with MBAs and a few executive jobs on their resumes who tool around the country charging 100 bucks an hour to "streamline" and "restructure" other people's businesses. Think of the Bobs in Office Space: they show up, they fuck around, they fire a bunch of people.

For a great insider perspective on what utter horseshit consulting in the IT industry is, see this post from Joel on Software.

Becky, being, uh, given to tension, has found the situation at the new job really confusing. "But I'm not doing anything! Aren't they going to get mad, or send me home early or something?" But that, I point out, is not how corporate America works. As a call center customer service rep, every second you're on the phone over the target time counts against you. As a grocery store shelf-stocker, you'd better be stocking shelves the whole time you're on the clock. But as you move up the food chain, less and less in terms of concrete work is expected of you. At my last corporate job we had a guy whose job was, officially, to sit around and think about the company and how it fit into the industry. And he made six figures.

The point is: here in the heart of the neo-liberal economic order (and neo-conservative political order), it's possible for educated kids from a middle-class upbringing to make a lot of money doing next to nothing. And when things are going badly at school, sometimes I think I should. All I've got to counter-balance that notion is a great love of essays and continental philosophy and a few remaining shreds of self-respect and optimism about the role of education.

Freak of the Industry

Browsing through the posts of various members of my cohort, I note that there are a few shared themes:

1. The term, she is over.
2. The free time, we do not know what to do with her.
3. The grad lab, we want it back (we've been moved to a new one, in a basement, but it's still under construction.)

Years ago, my homie "infrequent updates" Kenna warned me that I was not the type who could deal with free time. I was working in IT at the time and I thought she was nuts, but graduate school has realigned my perceptions and I am ready to admit that, yes, I loves me the structure. I conclude that we are all the freaks of the industry, giving up the possibility of real income in favor of hoarding library books and re-writing research proposals ad nauseum.

On an unrelated note, Becky has prompted me to report two things about her new job:

1. She has a hydraulic desk. It's for the ergonomicals. It goes up and down to ease typing.
2. She was there for 7.5 hours yesterday and still has no idea what her job actually is.
   

Jeff, this one's for you:

"Awright stop what you're doin', because I'm about to ruin, the image and the style that you're used to. I look funny, but yo I'm making money, see, so yo world I hope you're ready for me, so gather round. I'm the new fool in town and my sound's laid down by the Underground. I'll drink the bottle of Hennessy you got on your shelf, so just let me introduce myself..."

(Early 90s hip hop left its mark. I still know all the words to The Humpty Dance and I could probably keep up with most of the stuff from two or three Public Enemy albums. If I had to.)

My Abusive Relationship with Simone

Simone de Beauvoir knows how to bring the pain. I've taken a breather from my work on Deuxieme Sexe, but it was time to get back to it today. Everything about her intellect is overwhelming; she cites examples from psychoanalysis, Marxism, developmental biology, the literatures of several national traditions and, of course, philosophy. She writes in long, winding paragraphs and backs up every assertion with a dozen examples. It seems like she had spent about sixty years in the library of the Sorbonne before starting work on DS, but she was only in her late 30s (I think) when she wrote it.

I had lunch with my advisor yesterday and we were talking about various items of interest to European intellectual historians and he mentioned how all of the normaliens were like Beauvoir. It's the kind of education reserved for an entire prosperous nation's most elite students, something that has only happened haphazardly in the US. It's both a testament to the capacity of the human mind and a humiliating reminder of the fact that I chose to study the smartest people in history and, thus, to feel very, very dull by comparison.

My point is that Simone is very mean to me, but I know that she loves me deep down.

Thanks for all of the nice comments about Becky's newfound El Dorado of temping. She's there right now. She called at lunch and said that it was ok so far.

And with that, I'm off to listen to Turbonegro and clean the bathroom. Basically, I just pour pure bleach on everything and scrub until I'm about to be overwhelmed by the fumes.

Edit: 100th post on blogger. I hereby dedicate this post to the now-clean bathroom.

Landlord like a Sub-Woofer

Our landlord, Ron, has a voice like a slammed cadi with a thumpin' sound system. He's in the apartment below us fixing something and talking to someone and it's like a stereo with the treble all the way down and the bass all the way up, or perhaps like a movie about Santa Claus at high volumes through a thick wall. WUB WUB WUB WUB WUBWUB. That kind of thing.

Becky got a temp job. It pays well and it starts tomorrow.

Having spent the last few months worrying about Becky much more than she worried about herself, I find myself in a familiar position. It seems like most of the bad, hard things I've had to deal with in the last few years leave me so enervated that when they're over I barely have the energy to feel relieved. Still, here's me hoping that it turns out to be a good gig for her.

To our friends in Oregon: our trip up for xmas is going to be fast and short. We'll be in touch, as we'd like to see everyone who'll be around the week of xmas if we can. We're making a trip up to Portland for a night and a day if at all possible.

School (of fishes) Parliament (of owls)

Murder (of crows)...so many good group-names in biology. I bring this up because an elite cadre of history grad students are starting a semi-formal Foucault reading group next term and while outlining the readings and getting our ducks in a row earlier we realized that, with a little luck, we'll someday be referred to as the "Santa Cruz school" (of thought, of theory, of nap-taking, whatever.) Whether or not that happens, we now have a Foucault website to which we shall post when we get rolling next term.

On an unrelated note, my homie Elizabeth has a husband, and her husband does remarkable artwork. Go check it out; his comics are really neat.

Here are two unsolicited haiku:

Dearest Santa Cruz:
Please offer my wife a job
Or I'll beat your ass.

Happy holidays
I got you several hugs
Oh wait, I need those

No More Moustaches

When Becky would leave town for a few days to visit friends or family, I would traditionally shave a moustache into existence long enough to take a picture of it and put said picture on the internet (in this case, "traditional" means "I did this twice.") Becky's been up in Novato since Thursday but before she left this time she told me in no uncertain terms that I was not to fuck around with moustaches.

Becky has preternatural senses; I think it's part of being a wife. You know how moms can just find things when you're a kid? You leave your ninja turtle lunchbox up someone's butt and you can't find it and your mom is like "it's up that neighbor kid's butt! Go get it out of there!" Well, wife-powers consist of the ability to sense all and know all, even if there is no discernible way to find anything out. My point is that if I had crossed her and grown a moustache, she would have known. So I didn't.

On an unrelated note, Stephen Merritt's (of the Magnetic Fields, The 6ths, The Future Bible Heroes) bubblegum goth band The Gothic Archies have a newish album based on the Lemony Snicket series of children's books. It's fantastic. The best song on the album is "We Are The Gothic Archies," which features this priceless stanza:

"Though gothic we are archie
Though archie we are goth
No satan worshippers we
We worship Yog Sothoth."

(I also like "We are the Gothic Archies, with whom you should not mess, the apogee and zenith, of Gothic Archieness.")

And to everyone who was there last night, you know how I know you're gay? You macramed yourself a pair of jean shorts.

Fat Tire

I just returned home from a Graduate Student Association™ end-of-term fiesta on campus. My homie Kelly was the bartender. Let's just say the 2-drink limit was, uh, loosely enforced.

And now! Fun pictures!


(This is the best picture I have ever taken.)


(Pesto, IT analyst)


(An older picture of me trying to keep up with Becky's extreme cute.)

Appropriate Situationist Project

Let's keep the Situationists in mind (yes, that's a Wikipedia link. It's ok to do that on a blog, just not in an essay.) It occured to me this morning that I should put on one of my snappy sharkskin suits and go downtown, either here or in Berkeley, and panhandle for thesis topics in European intellectual history. Think I'd have any luck?

La reform, non, la chienlit, OUI!