Monday, November 06, 2006

Make love to the camera obscura
Doing a blog is a lot like signaling on a one-way road in the middle of the night, with no other cars around. Annoying blinker blinking, and for no other reason, you discover, than this is what you’ve always done, right hand turn and into the drive. Music blogs at least receive complimentary merchandise or tickets to a show. But outside of your own edification, doing a blog doesn’t really hook you up all that much. Mostly, it will serve as a record of how you have lived, day by day. And that’s scary. Your own memory at least gives you the liberty of forgetting. But writing things down offers you the virtue of permanence, indelibly chiseling things out and putting them down, for good (or bad—there are at least a handful of people who have totally alienated me over things that I’ve written about them. Although I guess that makes sense, because there’s no way to gingerly talk about someone’s mental state and their DSM situation without them getting really mad at you, even if you were only joking around. Sorry, dudes: I was totally kidding).

It is some other day in Information Systems, and I am clacking on the keyboard. There really is no other way of describing this sound than clacking. Alternately, I guess it could be interpreted as the sound of a crystal meth fueled hamster losing control of its limbs on the desktop, and I could support that analogy given that that’s the way I feel sometimes, in a coffee-addled state. But it would still broil down to clacking. And it’s nice that blogging is basically indiscernible from what I usually do all day, entering information into a computer. I could be writing the great American manifesto over here and it appears more or less like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And that’s good. The weird part about my job is that I have no idea what all of this is tied to, and what difference any of this makes. The work I do is never checked, and nobody ever says a word about what I'm doing, casting an occasional glance in my direction when I stray from the site and peruse the Brooklyn Vegan. But that is it. Although, maybe it’s the whole 1984 aspect I always overlook, thinking I’m being overlooked. My last job had some rigorous monitoring system in place, and the same could be true of here. Some nerd could be upstairs right now, looking over my figurative shoulders. I don’t really know.

The whole upshot to what I do all day is that it requires virtually no thought process on my part. I have read that while viewing television your brain activity is one step reduced from sleeping, and sitting before a computer monitor all day must be one step beyond that, entering a state of all-consuming brain dead-ness. I have come to refer to this as the Time and Space Bathtub, as it is at once flowing and yet contained, although rarely very cleansing. Sometimes I find myself on the outer bounds of consciousness, ruminating on some theory before being called back by the voice of a coworker. “Don’t talk to him,” I hear someone saying today, “He won’t listen to you.” And it’s true. I won’t. I am far off, in the bathtub, the events of the past few days and weeks coalescing in there and floating to the top of my consciousness like a dream. I feel a tap on my shoulder and come to. It is my coworker Joy, her face itself appearing to me dreamlike and large. “Hey, sleepy: it’s time to go,” she tells me. Oh, ok: it is time to leave now.

Outside it is a jet-black night. I am going to the gym and it makes me feel domestic. We have come from our jobs, and have come to the strip mall plaza to work off a few calories lifting weights and riding the stationary bike. I am hustling in when I see Kristen, the girl from the temp agency who got me my job. “Oh, hey, what’s up?” I ask her, as she holds the door open for me. There’s nothing atypical about her, nothing divergent in her persona that I can put my finger on, and it makes me feel vaguely uneasy. She’s probably really upset that she’s missing Dancing With The Stars right now. “—Hey, Ryan,” she says to me, “How’s the job going?” The real answer might be something along the lines of the monotony is wearing me down, and I feel suicidal and grim, but I leave out the whole time and space continuum, giving her the straightforward answer. “It’s going well,” I tell her. “Everyone I work with seems pretty cool.” I’m startled to find myself saying this, and wonder simultaneously, even as the words are issued from my lips, who I might be referring to, but she seems to like it anyway. “Well that’s really great, because they like you too,” she says. “They called and said you were doing a really great job.” I almost cannot believe, and have to clarify. “Wait, the job I’m working at now called and said this?” She reassures me, telling me once more. “Yeah, they said you were a really great addition to their office. They seem to really like you over there.” She smiles at me and then disappears into the gymnasium, where a small gathering of people are gently hitting a volleyball over a net, leaving me dumbfounded.

I seem to be particularly locked in, for better or worse. It’s nothing to really situate your future on, and it doesn’t come with a sweet benefits package. But the voyeurs are really into it. And that’s something, at least.