Say It Again Y'all

No work today or until after New Years, and yet so much to do. Yesterday I applied for a job which is just so, so me; you know, one of those jobs whose descriptions fall into your lap at exactly the time you want them to fall into your lap, and where you start thinking "Jeebus, maybe I can start using my powers for good instead of evil; maybe MY WHOLE LIFE UP TO THIS POINT HAS BEEN PREPARING ME FOR THE BEAUTIFULLY INEVITABLE CAREER I WILL HAVE AT THIS WONDERFUL PLACE." Which of course creates a bit of a sense of pressure, and meant I was actually having things that felt like palpitations before, while and after I applied.

No worries - I'm betting that actually has more to do with the four Pocket Coffees I ate in quick succession than a dicky heart or even any actual excitement. Anyways. There's really nothing for me to do in the interim besides apply to other interesting opportunities and keep my fingers crossed/pray - it'd be nice if you could keep yours crossed/pray for me too.

Speaking of pseudo-religion, last night I went to a lantern festival in Kensington Market to celebrate that our hemisphere has halted and gently reversed its slide into seemingly interminable darkness. I've been whining about it so much that it would be daft for me to not celebrate it, and you know what, it finally got me into the Christmas spirit. It certainly helped that my neice and nephews were there and just enchanted by the crazy sights of shadow puppets and paper lanterns and Burning Men and all the rest of it.

Hippies do manage to do an awful lot of things right and family-friendlyish festivals are one of them (intermittently). What I don't get is why they're still 'singing' tedious, whiny Lennon standards about peace when they could be really getting the audiences going with War (What is it Good For). Even those of us who are backwardly unacquainted with the Motown catalogue know that one either from Homer's naked church scene in the "The HΩmega Man" or from the Springsteen cover, and say what you will about Bruce Springsteen; only a patently insane woman would refuse to ride his face in favour of John Lennon's at its prettiest. And that's what peace is good for. Riding face.

Hippies need to learn how to reframe the debate.

They'll be my jackals when I feed

Well, it's amazing what defining yourself in the face of opposition and provocation can do. I know much more about myself than I did at this time last week, and it's not a matter of me liking it so much as knowing it's there. Those flower children going off in the sixties to 'find themselves' should have just put up with a job in advertising media analysis and cripplingly annoying conversations with their parents. Two or three times a week. In lieu of that, with whatever passed for Evangelical Christians back then. I suppose the hallucinogens were much more fun, though.

Not much to say today - my cold miraculously scarpered as though to give me a chance to think about my options and I am, furiously. In what seemed like a too-good-to-be-true coincidence, I heard about a whole new one last night that I'm so keen on I can't even write about here in case I jinx it.

Speaking of superstition, I watched the 1931 version of Dracula with Philip Glass's score last night. It wasn't scary, and Figaro had told me it was really boring, but I found it nice to watch with the score; Béla Lugosi just looks so good and the acting was all cute and stylized. Sadly (in the pathetic sense), my freakoutability kicked in while I was watching the documentary afterwards and heard the original pre-credit shot of Dr. Van Helsing saying "When you're at home in the dark under the covers and thinking about the movie you just saw, et cetera, just remember: there are such things!" And of course that goes right to the heart of what everybody like me who refuses to watch horror films is really worried about.

Perhaps it would have just given me a frisson and passed, but I glanced out the window and saw a police cruiser creeping by, slowly, as though looking for something. I wasn't afraid of the po-po trying to track down a vampire in my trashtastic neighborhood. But my brain did choose that inauspicious pre-bedtime moment to make a creepy conclusion about vampirism being an archetype explaining the root of the parasitic human evil splashed across our news media and on plain view in this neighborhood every day.

If we could look at our species objectively, I think we would think of ourselves as more cannibalistic than chimpanzees and lions who eat each other's young. So many notions of success are based directly on the misery of other people. There are so many people on crack in this neighbourhood, and worst to see for me for some reason, so many crackwhores - maybe people who started off all bright and interesting and shit, and somebody making money I can't even imagine off ruining them.

I am not a whore

UPDATE

Aw yeah! C0nstructive d1smissal, baby! Feeeeeeeeeeeeeel that!

MAIN BODY

I am so pissed, and yet not pissed at all, if I'm honest about it.

How to explain to my readers? And I don't hesitate to explain, just to explain in such a way that won't be googled by my co-workers, who (as soon as they open the email that Robin, my less big boss, sent around late last night) will be googling furiously in an effort to find out what their rights are. Or at least I will be. I'd be doing it now, except if I'm honest with myself once more, I'm not furious.

Here's the thing. I'm a rese&rcher and wr&ter for an ind&stry ma&azine about t&levision - about how great it is and why adv&rtisers should spend their hard-earned m&rketing bud&ets on that instead of on pr1nt, r@dio, 1nternet, outd0or, et cetera. As far as my girlish hopes and dreams go, I've never thought it was much of a job, but it was okay; 80% of the things I spend my day reading are nice things like the Economist or the Globe and Mail or some such, and I like writing. What I had to write about fell into two categories: trends within &ndustries (for example, right now I'm working on a little article about how the new f&lm Blo0d D1amond is making the d1amond industry go on the defensive in a huge way so as to shore up traditionally huge H0liday sales) and trends within @dvertising, specifically t&levision @dvertising, especially in terms of how great it is.

The first category is fun. The second is stupid and the perpetuation of a great lie, since there is no solid proof any t2levision c@mpaign ever increased the m@rket for anything, and quite a bit more proof in the opposite direction. That is, almost all @dvertising b&dgets across the board are absolutely sqaundered, and that the only thing that moves a product is so-called 'br@nd buzz' - a fancy (i.e. GAY) term for people trying a product, liking it, and reccommending it to their freinds.

This has been a little disheartening for me . . . leads to spontaneous prayers throughout the day along these lines:

Oh, merciful Jeebus, in your wisdom tell me why your Father allows his children here below to waste billions of dollars and a whole industry of college grads trying to map out and understand br@nd buzz when it's obvious it might have something to do with, I don't know, the fucking QUALITY and DISTRIBUTION of the product, and while there are millions of children slowly starving to death because we haven't quite figured out the importance of food distribution either?

. . . but I could live with it. The m@rketing 1ndustry, hollow shell of smelly useless bullshit though it may be, is the cornerstone of North American capitalism and it boggles the mind to think about the white-collar unemployment that would slam down on this continent if it was flushed down the shitter for the shit it was tomorrow.

What I can't live with is last night's announcement that when Batman, my big boss who I love, ret1res in a few months, the m0gazine is going to be practically decommissioned and our jobs will migrate to helping the t&levision ch@nnels prepare s@les p@ckages to convince @dvertisers to buy time.

Obviously, I can't countenance doing such a thing, because I'm not a big stupid whore. I'm praying to get sacked or that the change in out job descriptions is going to be so radical I can demand severance so I can cash in on EI. And considering the F-word is so frustrated with illegal shit work, we may leave Canada a little earlier than I was thinking. (Don't worry, Sugar, I'll be back for the wedding if we leave before.) My only real regret is that this boom fell while I've got an awful head cold and can hardly think through my options, outside of spending the next two months glued to the Guardian job board while I feverishly apply for - well, actually there's only one more PhD programme I'm applying to, so while I feverishly apply to one more PhD programme.

I need time to digest, but I don't look forward to seeing my co-workers this morning or our Christmas party this afternoon. One of them is getting married and another just had a baby.

Young man, there's no need to feel down

At the F-word's unsubtle urging (he bought me goggles for my birthday), I've started 'swimming'. Once upon a time, I knew how to swim, although I've got pretty clear memories of failing the introductory 'otter' course six or seven times when I was little. Something to do with a crippling, pathological fear, not of water, but of hammerhead sharks swimming out of the ducts on the sides and eating me. It's not fully gone. As a matter of fact it's not gone at all; I don't think I could swim alone in a pool. Luckily I go to the YMCA and the pool is always crowded with people who are more thrashy and better marbled and aged than I, so I think I'd be able to escape with my life.

Anyways, it's fun, even if I have a tendance to 'swim' with the awkard, rigid form of an offended housecat who's been chucked in against her will. That's once I scrape together the balls to actually let go of the kickboard, of course. And I thought I had a nicely working cardiovascular system but it turns out I don't so it feels like a nice workout.

That pisser I've been in has been lifting. It's miraculous what a day spent writing, working out and cooking can do. Today, I don't go to the stupid office until two, which is good because I have more writing to do. Including the fucking, fucking Christmas cards which I suppose I should just dress up as PC and call New Years' cards at this point. I don't know what the big problem is with writing Christmas cards, but every year it's a pain in my ass. Putting together the list of who to send to (which I've already done) is the worst part, although this year it's rather better. Simply because this year I have fewer 'estranged friends' - you know, the sort who said something that you interpreted as deeply insulting either about you or your mother so you stopped returning their calls, and now you're wondering if you were right to be insulted, and maybe now is the time to send them a little note that indicates at the very least you wish them more good than harm, and it'll all be fucking Christmassy and great.

And you know? I have no idea if I have fewer estranged friends because I don't take offence as easily, or because I'm better at forgetting people, or because I've actually got to a point in life where I choose friends who are pretty inoffensive. No idea at all.

You'd better watch out . . .

Feeling profoundly off game these days. There's drudge work involved in so many things and people are just not fucking jolly anymore. North American Christmases set up retarded expectations. In Europe you drink mulled wine or proper foamy eggnog with lots of alcohol and that makes you jolly, but here we're expected to get jolly on a diet of saccharine Christmas carols, garish store displays and seasonal goodwill towards all men when we spend the rest of the year punching each other in the head to get on the fucking metro first. The least, the fucking least the provincial government could do to help us get into the true spirit of Christmas is let us drink outside in December. Although I understand why it doesn't. Ontarioans have been coddled with infantile, retarded drinking laws for so long we've become infantile, retarded drunks, and any relaxation of the laws will probably result in a generation of 18-to-50-year-olds dying in a series of ever more infantile, retarded drunken mishaps.

As you can tell, the Nutcracker only went so far to put me in the mood. It was exactly like last year in terms of staging and production, which made me feel gypped: if it's such a money-spinner for the National Ballet, you'd think they could throw in a few fucking surprises here and there. Gigi's pleasant inclusive non-denominational politically correct holiday party went a little farther. Today I'm not going to work and will take care of my Christmas cards, which may have some effect. But the truth of the matter is that there are a couple of things pissing on whatever errant sparks of seasonal joy fly within me. First, it's mid-December and it's 13 degrees above zero outside. Much as I fucking hate the winter, the warm makes me very unsettled and worried about the future of the planet and of myself: it fills me with happy, Christmassy visions of parching to death in an arid, ruined landscape that used to be a thriving city. Weeeeeeee!

Second, I'm having a hard time with some sort of second adolescence. When I was a real adolescent, I was sulky and angry and awful, but far too pre-occupied with what passed for angst to come to any useful conclusions about my relationship with my parents. And now that I'm older it's hard to realize how avoiding conflict with them has created a distance between us. Because now I can feel emotionally and creatively undermined when I've accomplished - well, not so much, but obviously more than they were expecting - even though I honestly believe they have no intention of doing any undermining. I haven't been talking with them in the right way and now I'm afraid I've lost the balls to talk with them properly at all - just carry on through life running away from what I interpret as their disapprobation and never scraping together the balls to do what's really right for me. Being afraid of it is probably a good sign I'm going to deal with it soon, but you know what? For the moment, it puts me in an un-Christmassy pisser.