employment

I found a job. Hopefully now I can ward off total insanity. I actually went to two interviews today. The first was at a staffing agency. I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into, and I became anxious and depressed when I realized that this place was like any other temp agency. I was overdressed. There was an instructive video playing on a plasma TV about the agencies policies. The people in the video looked professional and clean cut, like they were going places. The people in the waiting room looked sombre and down-trodden, as is appropriate, I suppose, in this economic climate. They lowered my spirits all the more. I was reminded of my days working at the Crayola warehouse. I felt all the more ill at ease in with my tie and sport coat when an application I was given to fill out included basic addition and subtraction problems.

But as luck with have it I will have nothing to do with said staffing agency, and I'll be working instead at the Allentown Brew Works, a popular bar/restaurant. I feel relieved that the miseries of unemployment no longer weigh me down, but saddened that the principal source of relief in my life is finding a job as a bus boy.

Déjà Brew

I work at this place called Déjà Brew in southside Bethlehem. The sandwiches have names like “The Big Kahuna Burger” and “Royale with Cheese.” Everything there is really clever and makes me want quit. Today I found out that this guy with piercings and died black hair who works there comes in during my shift just to hang out – before I thought he came to help us out. A nice of a guy as he is, I find it difficult to imagine why he would want to be there if he's not getting paid. I read a lot of Hunger during my shift. I wrote down on the back of an order slip the following lines: “I was just on the point of crying with grief over still being alive.” I was just on the brink of crying imagining endless days of unemployment sprinkled with shifts at Déjà Brew, which ought to forget the faux indie bull shit and just call itself South Side Sandwich Shop. The highlight of my day was when I teased a pretty blond for getting a Reuben sandwich without sauerkraut. It's nice to know I can still be my charming old self.

morning

The mornings are always a struggle. I don't need to set an alarm, because I don't have to be anywhere. I wake up and wonder what time it is. I don't feel rested, so I hope it's still early. Eventually, I consult my cell phone. I've been in bed almost nine hours. I'm unemployed, I tell myself, so there's no sense in worrying about getting up. But I have to get up at some point. How long can I stay there? What am I supposed to do once I'm up? The inner struggle continues. I'm neither enjoying the lazy pleasure of sleeping in, nor convincing myself that I should get up and start my day.

quotidien

I went to the gym today. I felt a surge of optimism. That feeling fades, quickly. One of the trainers was helping one of the front desk girls work out. They were joking around. On the way home I saw Jessie's parents sitting out on their porch. They are fun to talk to. This, and working out, constitute the highlights of my day. If I'm lucky, later on I'll talk with a friend on the phone and smoke a cigarette on the porch.

Hunger

I've been bad about keeping up with the blog. Times are tough. But the other day I heard from a friend that some of my articles for thought catalog are linked in important places. This inspired me anew to get back into writing. I wrote a good, long piece about my post-grad misery. I expect that should be published soon enough, if it's any good.

Yesterday I started to feel like I was going crazy because there's no one around to talk to other than my parents. Finally, I got a hold of my friend Jessie who goes to Kutztown, a nearby college. I drove out there. It was strange being there in a college town with people out and about smoking cigarettes and drinking.

When I got home I started reading Hunger by Knut Hamsun. The narrator is an unemployed guy who walks around the city trying to sell articles as he loses his mind. I wondered if this was a serendipitous choice of reading – after all, I'm unemployed and it does feel like I'm losing it half of the time, and I'm starting to write articles again that probably won't make any money. Not only that, but when I went to the library I meant to get out some detective fiction by Dashel Hammet, and Hunger was there right next to the Hammet, so I took that instead. More on this later, as I continue to read the book.

post-grad

I think I'm going to start blogging again. This is my attempt to start anew. Now I'm in the post-grad malaise phase of my life. It's good fun. My relationship with my girlfriend has been gradually ending for the past 6 weeks. I couldn't explain why because it doesn't completely make sense to me. Maybe it's because some weird psychological stuff I've been going through.

Last Tuesday at work I had a severe panic attack and went to the hospital. I canceled my plans to go to France. It was my second hospital visit this summer. During the first one I was happy and on morphine. This time I was panicked and crying and on no drugs. They gave me better sleeping pills, though.

Now I'm in Bethlehem, figuring shit out as they say. I have to go back to Northampton one more time and move out all my of stuff. It makes me uneasy to be there.

Hampshire's 40th Anniversary

When I was working at the circulation desk today at the Library, a young, elementary school-aged girl asked me where the children’s books were. It’s the 40th Anniversary Weekend at Hampshire College and lots of former students are around and some of them brought their kids. The girl was articulate, well-groomed, and polite. She made me think how at her age I never brushed my hair and acted sullen and didn’t talk very much. I wonder what that says about my parents, I thought. What is with young kids these days? They’re so cultivated, or something. Maybe my kids will be that way! There’s a thought. I was going up into the stacks, anyway, so I offered to show her the small children’s section. Later she came down and politely asked if she could take a book out just for a while. I asked her if she had any collateral, like some credit cards. I think she thought that was funny. Then, since I’m a nice guy, I checked it out on my account and told her to return it by tomorrow.

I realized that if she doesn’t return it, I’m going to be in a kind of Larry David-esque situation. I’ll have to call the girl’s mother (the former Hampshire student) and insist that her daughter has a book that I’m getting fined for. The kid might lie about it. My boss will get angry with me. It could be really awkward. I really hope she just brings it back tomorrow.

i get hospitalized/painkillers

In the past few days, I've been talking with Lilly about how it would be nice to have some painkillers again, like when I was recovering from surgery last semester. I was describing to her how there is something kind of pleasant about the first 24 hours after an operation, the drug induced haze. Maybe I was thinking about painkillers because my sister broke her foot last week, and she probably got some. Also, a girl on the frisbee team, Mia, had her appendix out, and I know that for that you get get some good ones. I was walking to mod 95 with Jamie Blair to return a dish I used for baked ziti, and sure enough we saw Mia as she was about to leave. Jamie asked about her surgery, and I inquired as to whether or not she had my surgeon, Dr. Miller. Then I asked what she was planning on doing with her pills, and whether she still had them. They're still in my room, she said, I haven't been using them. I put forward the notion that if she wasn't going to use them, she might want to get rid of them somehow. She took this as me suggesting that she sell them – to which she objected. I suggested that selling them wasn't necessary, and that a donation – to me – would be perfectly acceptable. She seemed really uncomfortable, and Jamie remarked that she found the exchange to be one of the most awkward situations she'd ever witnessed.

On another note, I've been watching some good movies. I saw this Romanian film, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, about an older, alcoholic man with a serious medical problem who is turned away by hospital after hospital. Similarly, I saw a great Thai film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul called Symptoms and a Century, which takes place first in a rural Thai hospital and then a super modern hospital.

So somehow, when I flew over the handle bars riding my bike down South Street (my bike lock got caught in the front wheel) and broke my collar bone, it seemed like it was in the cards. Fortunately, a woman that turned out to be a doctor stopped and called an ambulance. I tried to be responsive with her, but I was in shock. I thought I made good small talk with the EMTs on the ride over, and I told them that they were very polite. In the ER, one of the nurses and I talked about movies (he was into Fassbinder, like me) and I told him about the films mentioned above. I also told him to watch the Werner Herzog Reads Where's Waldo video on youtube. The ER doctor was kind of cute, and I made small talk with her about I was very remorseful for not wearing a helmet and that my athletic career was over. She had to staple a cut on my head, and she showed me the staple gun. Cool, isn't it? She said. You doctors have lots of fun, I said. Ella came to pick me up and provided moral support. Then we got Lilly and when to the Route 9 dinner where I ordered eggs Benedict. I got a prescription for painkillers, and two does of morphine. Now I'm coming down on them, and I've got the itchies like mad.

Seinfeld: the book of life

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been so good at updating my blog. Perhaps I’m entering a new phase of my life, where blogging doesn’t figure as prominently.

A few weeks ago, I was at my friends’ place on Elizabeth Street. Paolo was saying how he was going to get up early the next day and drive to Hampshire to do work. Beryl said that she would join him, but wondered if he could leave a little later, like 10 or 11. He insisted that they leave by 9, to which Beryl agreed. I pointed out that I was very skeptical that Beryl would actually get up that early, and the rest of the people in the room seemed to concur with me. I was so confident in this that I bet Beryl a dollar that she would not get up. The following morning, I received a text message from Henry, one of her roommates, that said, ‘Beryl owes you a dollar.’ Sometime later, I ran into her on the bus, and demanded my dollar, knowing all the while that I wouldn’t get it. She explained to me that she didn’t in fact owe me a dollar because she had decided that she didn’t want to get up, because she hadn’t slept well. That was the whole point of the bet, I said. If outside circumstances, such as a snow storm or even the alarm failing to go off, had prevented you from going, then you would not owe me a dollar, I said. Of course, I didn’t get the dollar.

This Friday, we watched an early Seinfeld episode where Kramer proclaims that he is going to take out all of the furniture in his apartment and build ‘levels’ – like ancient Egyptians did. Jerry bets him a large sum that he won’t do it. When it comes out that he did never modify his apartment, Jerry confronts him. Kramer claims that he doesn’t owe Jerry any money, on the grounds that he decided that he “didn’t want to do it anymore,” or something to that effect. Jerry naturally finds this logic ridiculous. Those of us in the room – sadly Beryl was not one of us – who were there for the incident described above found this segment particularly amusing.

chat roulette, ect

I got up this morning and said to myself, among other things, that I would get a lot of work done today while I work my 4 ½ hour shift at the weightroom. When I got there and checked my email, I realized that I had told the students from intro to film studies (I’m a T.A) to email me their papers on Citizen Kane. I will read a few, I said to myself, and then move onto other things. Now it is nearing the end of my shift, and I have read several. I found it highly disagreeable. Two were good, one was quite good in fact, but the others were…wanting. I don’t even know what to say to these students. Can I tell them they should rewrite? Because that is what I did in one case…Well anyway, Hampshire has evaluation inflation…and I might as well stand up against that, knowing I will be resented.

In other news, I discovered chat roulette yesterday! Dinah at media services told me about it. Then I had the idea to do it last night while I was drinking and playing Chinese checkers at mod 6. It is a very disconcerting experience, and it involves seeing a lot of dicks. I wondered out loud when some theorist would write about it. It seems like something out of a Cronenberg movie from the eighties.

Somehow, I feel that this post is lacking…the things I wanted to say seemed more interesting than they do now. Whatever it was that compelled me to write regularly here seems to have dissipated…

Disarming the assholes

It’s been a while. Today at media services I worked a shift with Dinah for the first time. I knew her from office meetings, but I wasn’t sure what to expect. She seemed on the level. Dave came in and we all complained about the people who hang out in the library and don’t study and annoy us. There are a couple of regulars that are especially irritating, despite the fact that they never actually talk to us and we never talk to them…we just see them there, wasting time and fucking around. There was a guy sleeping on the couch right outside of the office. This we found especially irksome; it is not as if it is the end of the semester and the guy is just so stressed out that he needs a nap amidst all his studying. The motherfucker probably didn’t even have any books with him. I tried to wake him up first by throwing paper planes at him and then by coughing really loudly as I walked past, but to no avail.

Later on, some dude came in who, based on seeing him around school, seems kind of like an unsavory fucker/douche bag. Sometimes when these types come in I try to be particularly charming to catch them off guard and make them crack a smile or laugh a little bit, and give up their generally affected demeanor (for this guy I made a joke about the other guy sleeping on the couch, among other things). Dinah, in fact, remarked that that was the first time she saw that guy not being an asshole. Well, sometimes I like to disarm the assholes, I said.

xmas in Sweden

I spent Christmas in Sweden visiting with Katrin. I tried pickled herring and drank schnapps. It was a good time. There are a lot of H&Ms in Sweden, and sometimes I was in one store and could see another across the street. I did some sight seeing and museum-going, but it occurred to me that I’m not really cut out for this kind of culture, and going to a petting zoo, or even just a pet store with kittens, would probably be more satisfying.

I spent New Year’s with Katrin, Tobias, and Tobias’ friend Alex, at some vague association of Alex’s. All four of us were kind of outsiders at the party, which Alex pointed out was a sausage fest, there being only two or three girls, all of which had bfs there. Katrin got into a physical fight with one of the guys there and had some bruises the next day, but I apparently didn’t even notice it happening, which I thought was strange. I accidentally stopped the music, and got a lot of menacing stares. Katrin and Tobias thought it was really tense when that happened, but all the dudes were clean-cut and well-dressed, and one of them was even wearing braces, so it was difficult for them to seem intimidating. On the way home, Tobias told me that they thought I was in fact a Swede impersonating an American.

gettin' ripped at the weight room

Today at the weight room (I’m a monitor) I watched Bad Lieutenant, a gritty urban drama. Then, feeling tired, a tried to take a nap. “Too much for you,” I heard. I looked up and mumbled something. I thought, someone’s trying to be sharp with me. But then I realized that the guy was just awkward and nervous. He asked me if I could spot him on the bench press and the leg press. I told him no, on account of my recent surgery.

I tried to nap some more, but it didn’t take. I found a tennis ball and bounced it around. I thought to myself: I wonder if my eye-hand-coordination would get better if I did this for a really long time. I restarted my computer to update vista. In the background, the same guy was grunting and sometimes yelling “fuck!” as he used the leg press. Some other dude with a really long, blond beard and weird big pants was spotting him. It takes all kinds, I guess. Then a little while later the bearded guy left, so I was again asked to spot. “What kind of surgery did you have?” he said to me. I looked at him for a while. There was silence. Finally, I said, “I saw what that other guy was doing, and I can’t do it.”

feelin' good

Today I met with my two new roommates Wade and Gina in Northampton to sign the lease. They both seem like good people. Wade, by the way, is kind of a granola hipster. Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two brewing my own beer.

Afterwards I went to the Green Bean for brunch. I put my name down to get a table for me and my friends. While I waited for them to meet me I sat outside with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I looked at people walking past through my sunglasses. I was feeling good. I was feeling self-satisfied. It was kind of like being in Paris again, but the people were not dressed as well and the women were not as attractive.

Then I started to feel kind of guilty, and speculated that god was going to smote me with some new malady, like the swine flu or a thrown-out back.

wired cafe

I was at Wired café today with my old high school pals and one of them, my friend Sam who goes to Bard, remarked that people in Bethlehem are starting to look and dress more like Bard students. Yeah, I said, they’re starting to look like Hampshire students, too.

And it’s true. When I go back home, I’m supposed to feel cooler than the other people I see, except maybe my friends. We go to schools like Bard and Hampshire. We’re articulate and clever, we talk about things like Klaus Kinski and our frustrations with irony, and we wear interesting-looking glasses. We have complexes.

But the locals are catching on, and quick. It wasn’t so long ago that I could walk in the street and get harassed by middle school-aged kids. But pretty soon in Bethlehem it’ll be just like up at school, and when I’m there I’ll be busy making sure I’m out post-cooling those upstarts, drinking their coffee at Wired. What is Bethlehem coming to?

The post-cool grind at media services/arm-chair sociology

Today at media services a young, impressionable first year came in and took out Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. I can’t take Bergman seriously, especially his post-Persona cinema, it’s too metaphysical and earnest. I thought about making a remark to this fresh-faced girl, but I didn’t. I guess it’s an important movie to have seen, but I just hope that she doesn’t like it too much.
Right after this, my co-worker Abe and some other similar looking dude came in and started listening to George Benson, a much maligned smooth jazz guitarist. The whole thing is emblematic of the postmodern’s appropriation of low culture for its own purposes, usually ironic ones. Anyway, I feel as if they’re just making sure that we all know that they’re more post-cool than we are, because that girl for instance just took out a Bergman film…and even me, I’m guilty, I like some French art cinema sometimes…

A little later this girl Sarah Marshal that I actually kind of dated in my first year (I had to forget Sarah Marshal, ha ha) came in with a guy that was probably her bf. I realized that in addition to the people that come in and talk about post-cool shit like George Benson or animé, there is also this kind hipster, Sarah’s bf. He’s the kind of guy that probably has the same interests as us (I guess I ambivalently include myself in that category…), with a few important differences. These types look more earthy…they’re granola hipsters. They look more natural and less ironic in flannel, and maybe they wear boots. They definitely have a full beard, like this dude at media services.

I suppose that in my boredom at work, I start to get thoughtful, and more cynical. But if you smile and say hello, you’ll leave nothing but a good impression!

adventures at cooley dickenson hospital

I had surgery at cooley dick yesterday (turns out I had a second hernia to have repaired…). They were backed up, so I had to lie in bed for a good three hours before they got started. Despite the long wait, they still put the I.V. in first thing, and all that fluid was coming in the whole time, and I had to get up and pee constantly.

I tried to banter and make conversation with my surgeon Dr. Miller and the anesthesiologist. The latter told me about how he and my surgeon went biking in France together (this was why I couldn’t get in for the operation sooner…) when I told him that I was a French major. I asked Dr. Miller if he was ready. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. One of the nurses asked if I had taken off my underwear. ‘Why would you have him do that?’ Dr. Miller asked. I appreciated his sense of humor. In the operating room, once I was on the various drugs, they started talking about some show one of them watched on discovery channel the other day.

I woke up in a haze, still in the operating room. It seemed to me like they were still talking about the show on the discovery channel. I tried to make conversation again. Then I realized they were in the middle of cutting into me. That was weird. Eventually, I realized that they weren’t paying attention to me. Well, I guess that was for the best, I wouldn’t have wanted them to make a mistake.

thanksgiving dinner at hampshire

Well, I finally saw Antichrist last night at the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton. It was well shot. The way the forest is filmed, it seemed like it could swallow the characters up. I appreciated that, but I didn’t like how charged with meaning the film was. One can only take so much meaning before it gets to be too much. I guess it was shocking at moments, but I wasn’t especially moved to think about the thematic significance of the torture…my mind started to drift to more practical questions, like what the trial would be like if Willem Dafoe were charged with murdering his wife. Hopefully that will be in part 2.

Today Dave, Paolo, and I went to the Thanksgiving dinner at the dining hall. All those people milling about getting their food and talking, the harsh lighting, familiar faces that I don’t want to see…it provokes a mild disgust.

As we were eating, all of the sudden a wad of squash appeared in my cup of orange juice, and than on the sleeve of my sweater. I turned around, and a group of first-years were about to start a food fight at the table next to us. Dave and I, without any hesitation, stood up and reamed them out. That put an end to it. We felt good about ourselves. I rarely yell at people. It’s nice.

the daily grind

I’m sitting here, working on my resumé, because my other work bores the hell out of me and I can’t bring myself to look at another article. I certainly don’t want to start writing. I’m technically working on a thesis—a ‘Division III’ as Hampshire calls this year-long project—but both of these terms are just a euphemism for a big homework project, and homework is the worst.

At media services today motherfuckers were annoying. Sometimes I enjoy talking to customers, if they smile, or crack a joke, or something like that. A professor came in and didn’t get it that we didn’t have the film she wanted, and she started to get short with me. Then some guy came in and just walked past the desks and started collecting the microphones he had reserved. ‘Just help yourself,’ I said. I guess he didn’t get it because while I was doing something else I heard Matt tell him that we would get his things for him.

The other day I screened Claire Denis’ L’intrus. Three people showed up; one of them left twenty minutes before it finished. One of them said that she came because she had been in France for a year and wanted to hear French. That was a shame, because the movie has almost no dialogue and much of it is in Russian or Korean.

adventures in scholarship

I have found that, for the most part, scholarship is pretty dull. I’m writing a thesis about some things related to film noir. The only thing enjoyable is that I get to watch a lot of movies. The secondary literature is tiresome and makes me depressed because I have to look at so much of it. What really gets me is when some scholar starts to think that he or she is clever, and writes in the first person and invokes more than necessary people like Derrida or some other shit like that. I just looked at this article by David Wills about Breathless and its remake. (I googled the guy: he got his doctorate from the Sorbonne Nouvelle, where I can only imagine that they’re jerking off to critical theory).
He begins the article: “I am not, it seems, in the cinema. Not even in the video. This all comes at a complicated series of removes. At some point I could have said ‘I am in the cinema’ and left the ambiguity at play between the theater room and the film on the screen.” I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I know it’s annoying. Later he says, talking about the subtitles that appear in the English version: “they show the film ‘in process,’ in production if you will: in the process of being exported the film explicitly reveals its supplementary structure, its iterability, its (de)recontextualization.” It is times like these that I’m ashamed to be a student, and I just want to go to the bar and shoot billiards.