To My Underpants

Alright, Underpants, I'm warning you! You tricked me into thinking your luck had kicked in by causing there to be two delicious chocolate cupcakes waiting at the lunch place for Deb and me, but when we went to eat them, they were overbaked! And then I bit my lip and was bleeding.

I shouldn't get so angry. Perhaps you are doing your best, Underpants. When I put you on this morning, I noticed there was a slight tear in the seam of the elastic band because I am such a cow. I know that must be really difficult to cope with, so I'm not mad. And I still have faith that you'll come through eventually. You have 10 good hours left before I strip you off, crawl into bed, and evaluate my day. Hopefully we can put this all behind us.

I meant this to be whimsical, but I started bitching again, sorry...

C'mon, Lucky Spiderman Underpants! Do your stuff!

Today I am wearing my Lucky Spiderman Underpants, my favorite article of clothing upon which I have just bestowed the honor of capital letters. When I wear my Lucky Spiderman Underpants (not to be confused with Lousiana State University) everything goes well all day! Today, they are failing me.

First, I had trouble getting out of bed, which, to be fair, is not the fault of the LSU because I was not wearing them at the time. Then I stepped on my cat's tail, which I suppose we will also not blame on the shortcomings of the LSU because neither my cat nor I were wearing them then either.

But since dressing: 1) I ripped a page in my book because I turned it too strongly (I don't know my own power) and 2) we had another morale-boosting impromptu meeting with my boss, this time about how "certain people" have been telling him some of us "abuse" our break and lunch privileges. First of all, certain people is so obviously this one guy, and you could tell because 1) he looked awkward when this was being said and 2) he has no social skills and he knows it.

Ok, maybe it's not that one guy, that's not really fair to assume. (Lots of unfairness and misappropriation of blame today, have you noticed?)

The point is, we all hate our jobs. We all hate the way things are handled around here. Morale is at an all-time low, and now we're being hounded about a problem that isn't real. Fine, maybe I take 30-minute breaks instead of 20 sometimes. Maybe one day I'll go to lunch at 1 and the next day at 1:15. Am I the fucking Productivity Anti-Christ? Am I missing crucial 2:15 impromptu meetings where other pressing matters like this are discussed? I submit that I am not.

I also submit that the biggest hit to my productivity in the past 6 months has been due to me hating my job. When I'm in a good mood, I'll put on a podcast and WHOOSH I just cataloged the entire library. Today, I am in a shitty mood, as I usually am at work these days. Today, it is more like WHOOSH I just cataloged another negative emotion for my psychological archive, drew an inspirational post-it, wrote in my blog, called my mom to bitch about things to her, wrote an e-mail to my librarian friend to share the frustration, and maybe got around to some work by accident.

Why is it so difficult for management to realize their employees are people, and people work best when they're allowed to do things their way and not treated like naughty children?

Now if you'll excuse me, my Lucky Spiderman Underpants and I are 3 minutes late for lunch, and I would hate to be one of the reasons this library system is falling apart at the seams.

Grade A Large Bitchfest

Ugh, and I totally just got this e-mail from FreshDirect who said they'd indeed be delivering my groceries today after work, but that they're out of my eggs, so they can't bring me 6 eggs.

Jesus first of all, who runs out of eggs, and secondly, I don't care what kind of fucking eggs they are, just send me another kind like it makes a damn difference if the things are brown or white or beige or whatever. If you look at the abundance of hot dogs and frozen pizzas in my order, you know I'm not a gourmet chef so what do you think I'm doing with these things? Grade A. Large. Now I have to stop for eggs on the way home.

One might argue that I've gone 5 months without having eggs in the house, so I should just take the hit like a man, but I want french toast and nobody can stop me.

On my last.nerve

1, 2, 3, I officially hate Last.fm. It's probably the most inaccurate, inelegant folksonomy website ever. I bitched about it before, but I'm bitching about it again.

First of all, whenever I play my Finnish boyfriend's station, it always plays the same 10 songs each time, and they're not even things he listens to. And then today I tried to play the 'Shibuya-kei' tag station to hear some neat stuff, but not a single track it played out of about 15 was from the genre, so I figure "Fine, maybe people just don't know what that means because I really don't either" so I went to the 'Japanese' tag station because it's easier to know when things are Japanese.

So after 25 tracks of Alice Coletrane, Lou Reed, the Godfather soundtrack, Swedish electronica, and Irish folk music (all of which I skipped except for this one France Gall song) I got really annoyed, and then 2Pac came on, I closed the site in one of my little huffs.

I was looking at their joblist the other day to see if anything sounded interesting and within my skill set. Then I noticed they're British, and I'm not moving there. But honestly, what is this staff doing all day?

My recommendations are all things I hate and it WON'T LET UP with that horrid Michelle Branch MORE LIKE MICHELLE BRANSHEE!

Anyway, I don't know what's wrong with it, it wasn't like this a few weeks ago when I found it. Last.fm gets tons of attention in Web 2.0 blogs and discussions, but it exemplifies all the horrible qualities the folksonomy naysayers complain about. What really needs to happen here is the tagging structure and recommendation scheme need to be brought to the fore. On a site like LibraryThing, all the tags are right there, and it's always perfectly clear why something is suggested for you even if the suggestion sucks. Things are always "similarly tagged" and/or "most popular". With Last.fm, it's never clear.

When playing a tag station like 'shibuya-kei,' what you're hearing is clearly not songs or artists tagged as such. My theory is that you're hearing songs and artists that people who use the tag 'shibuya-kei' also listen to, but since nobody listens to just one genre of music, you're getting crap from Boris (who likes shibuya-kei and hip-hop), Francine (shibuya-kei and electronica), Gretel (shibuya-kei and mariachi), and Hortensia (shibuya-kei and rainforest sounds.) Meanwhile, I'm Scott (shibuya-kei and yé-yé), submitting my own unrelated music to this motley collection.

This works on Amazon. "People who bought this item also bought..." It doesn't work here. I don't know enough about this stuff to suggest why. I should be based on similar tags, not the habits of other people. More popular tags need to have less influence, too. The tag "female vocalists" should not have the same similarity weight as the tag "1960's Peruvian witch doctor chants in Hebrew cantorial modes." The former will tell me that since I like Judy Garland, I must like Kelly Osborne. The latter will bring up stuff that's truly related.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there because I don't know how their algorithms work. But straight up logic should tell these people "If you click a station and see 9 pictures of popular Japanese artists appear, the station should be playing these artists."

Basically, I think Web 2.0 folksonomy sites need more librarians on their staff, and it just so happens that I'm on the market for a job at a forward-looking company with good benefits and no threat of being laid-off in a year, neither of which I have at my current job. And I guess it wouldn't be SO bad moving to England and living a fabulous European lifestyle, I can make sacrifices. Any takers?

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Nothing in the world is grosser than crusty, dried-out rubber bands. They almost make me not want to be a librarian anymore, not that I need a lot of help in that department these days.

Morale is low here in the trenches. We lost two of our men this weekend, and nobody's sure who will be next. We sit in fear over our keyboards, shifty eyes peering left and right always expecting more managerial treachery to leap from the shrubbery. Twitching at every innocent sound, we pray to someday be free from our post to return to the happy life we once knew, the life our fallen comrades will never remember.

Ok, enough. Friday we were called into a meeting. Apparently management (all 4 or 5 layers of it) has tried everything it can to cut corners and adjust next year's budget to work with our ever diminishing funds. So, layoffs. Fine. Layoffs happen; it's the unfortunate side-effect of working in this industry. They told us at the meeting that technical services was to lose a certain number of people, and two of them were from monograph cataloging. (That's my division.) They apologized, tried to justify it, and answered questions, one of which was "If you've cut all the corners you could, what happens next year when the budget is cut again? Won't there be more layoffs?" The answer to that was in Non-Committal Managerese, but it translates to English as "Nice knowin' ya!"

Then they sent is back to our offices. "Hey, you might be fired in a couple hours! Ok, back to work! Have fun! Chop chop!" Clearly we were not going to get any work done because we had to form a circle and start bitching.

Now, I like my boss. I like his boss. I like her boss. But this has to be on the list of Top 10 Ways NOT To Handle Lay-Offs. I'm not sure who planned it. Nobody would tell us who was being let go, and they all knew. Nobody's happy right now.

I'm not supposed to bitch about work on here because I signed some sort of bullshit privacy thing that said I wouldn't. But before this happened, we already felt like were being dicked around by outside forces, outside forces being a term which here means "by people who are not my boss or his boss or her boss." The division's been shrinking for years, nobody communicates with anybody, we're given conflicting information about how to conduct ourselves here, and people are making decisions that affect our jobs without consulting us catalogers when we're the ones in the thick of it. Maybe my boss or his boss or her boss are a part of the trouble, but I get the impression that we're all in the same boat here and that the bullshit is trickling down from a higher level.

And now this. At it's early stages, low morale leads to minor water-cooler grumbling. As it increases, productivity is affected. After Friday, we've officially passed that to the point where low morale is bound to lead to massive disloyalty. Why stick around here when my job could be gone in a year? I'm not moving up since there's no career ladder to climb. I'm not learning anything since I've been relegated to do copy cataloging of backlog for the past two months, a phrase which here means "a tedious, repetitive, non-morale-boosting task usually performed by paraprofessionals and sometimes students." The pay is barely enough to keep me in clean socks and a Spartan living space. We'll continue to be dicked around, a phrase which here means "treated unkindly and humiliated, as though hit in the face with a dick." So what exactly is the draw?

If they see this entry, I'll probably get fired or something. Today my answer is "Feh!" While unemployment is not the most appealing state of being, I can't seem to let rest the fact that when I found out I was not laid off, a part of me was honestly disappointed. After all, to the well-organized mind, a lay-off is but the next great adventure.

A Chorus of Tiny Violins

Part I : Introduction

Oy! Have you ever had one of those mornings where you're thinking about how to blog it and the phrase that keeps coming up is "as if that weren't enough"? I have experienced a string of crappy things so long I could knit a sweater for every impoverished child on earth and still have enough left to hang myself.

It started out lovely, I got up at 7:00 no problem, no grogginess. (I was having a dream about being in a movie with Laurence Fishburne called Laurence Wishburne, in which the man played himself as a bumbling genie who always granted the opposite of what you wished for. Yes, even my dreams are filled with stupid puns, which is why I was so happy to wake up and escape the lameness.) I showered. Oh right then my house keys were gone, my milk was spoiled, I spilled tea on my couch, I stubbed my little toe, and I couldn't find the Blacula DVD anywhere to return to Netflix. So now I was in a crappy mood, but the cheerful song in my head and the discovery of my house keys (under the fridge, I blame the cat) kept me optimistic. I got out of the house with time to spare.

Oh, but then. I stepped in a slush puddle, I had an unsavory run-in with a man on the street (more on that later), Idiot Boy was working the machine at Starbucks and forgot me and screwed up my order as usual, and then the 6 train wasn't even running and it took the girl on the loudspeaker 25 minutes to inform us of such, so we all had to take the smelly ol' bus that stops every 2 blocks and was crowded full of disgruntled people. The only saving grace of the morning is that I got to read about 50 pages of my novel while I waited for MTA to get its act together.

Part II : The Run-In

So let me tell you about this run-in. A year ago before I lived here, I visited New York over Christmas and New Year's. I was walking by myself down Christopher St. on a pleasant afternoon when this skinny hoodlum guy told me I had a sexy walk, to which I replied awkwardly "Oh... yeah ok... thanks." He then said he lived nearby, implying that he wanted me to come up so we could have what would probably be the worst sex ever. I declined, obviously, and he was kind enough to just leave, but what really stuck in my mind was that bizarre "sexy walk" comment, which I never thought I'd hear again because who says that?

Well, apparently more people than I think because it happened again this morning. I'm walking along, and this guy passes me and then calls back to me, and I thought I had dropped something. He looked decent enough, clean, but he had a quality similar to that hoodlum of Christmas past. He held an ice scraper. And the way he spoke to me: "I like the way you walk" didn't immediately remind me of the other time because I didn't think he was coming on to me. I thought he was making fun of me, but he looked sincere enough, so I said "Oh... yeah ok... thanks." He asked why I was in such a hurry (I walk fast) so I lied and said I was late for work. (It was 8:30, I was totally on time.) He asked if lived in the neighborhood, and I was thinking "No, idiot, I just like to walk around the Upper East Side before work to catch the sites and did you not just hear me tell you I was late?" but I said yeah and figured ok that's it. I walked on.

But then, ick, he's all "Wait, one quick question!" so I took a breath to control the roundhouse kick to the face I felt stirring and he said "So when do I get to see you again?" and that's when it all dawned on me. Sexy walk! Shit! First of all, see me again? We haven't seen each other in the first place. This is not a date. This is a creepy encounter on the sidewalk. I was afraid if I opened my mouth I'd say "As if, you're gross and skeezy and have a disquieting goatee" and then he'd bludgeon me with his ice scraper, so I went with "Oh... um....uh... what?" instead.

"Not gonna happen?" he Nancy Drewed.
"No," I confirmed and started to walk away.
"Wait, one more question." Jesus Christ.
I turned around. "What???" He tried to take my arm, I backed away, and he said "Don't be afraid of me. You dating anyone?"
Now I'm backing away. "I'm not afraid of you, and yeah, I'm seeing someone. Goodbye." But he wasn't done.
"You ever been with a black man before?" At this point I could have rushed him and knocked his teeth out. We were about 10 feet apart at this point, and he's shouting this at me with people walking by. It was probably the trashiest exchange my UES neighbors had heard in their charmed lives.
"No!" It was as much an answer to his question as a command to shut his face and not follow me.
"Wanna try it?" Are you deficient??? What about my demeanor and body language suggests that I might want to give you a shot? So I turned and walked away and said with my back to him "I really don't!"

I would say that ruined my morning, but my morning sucked to begin with. In conclusion, if this ever happens again, I'm paralyzing myself and getting a wheelchair. Sexy walk my ass, what the hell is wrong with people?

Open Letter to an Artistic Failure

Dear Hack Composer Who Can't Get Published:

PLEASE stop sending your music to my library. I'm so serious.

I spent the better part of my morning cataloging this binder filled with your outlandishly stupid songs that's been sitting in a box for 7 years. It came with a Christmas CD that I understand you've sent as a gift to numerous politicians including the President, the governor of New York, and the mayor of Los Angeles, though I don't quite get why you had to send 25 copies of form letters these politicians' secretaries sent you as thank yous for you "generous gift" which they're "sure will bring much holiday cheer". I see the Clintons sent you a nice card wishing you a Happy Holidays and thanking you for your "correspondence", though it is odd they made no mention of the CD. Perhaps they were waiting to review you in the New Yorker.

But probably not.

A word of advice to you and the countless other unpublished composers who send their music as "gifts": 1) Find a new way to disseminate your music, and 2) Don't send copies that you made yourself on Finale if you don't know how to make it so that all the lyrics and notes don't run together. (For the non-musicians out there, it's the equivalent of being done in crayon on notebook paper with the finges still attached.)

The only thing more striking than the mediocrity of your songs (that consist of non-modulating melodies and 3 chords) is your dubious command of the English language. I know ESL classes are expensive, but if you are going to write songs in English, understand that we prefer not to have three syllables on one note. Also, "candy" is not a synonym for "sweet" so describing a canary as "so candy" implies that it is edible, not charming.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Career,
~TH~

P.S. I mean it.