Don't Stab Me Bro

From an unnamed production office for an undisclosed television show in an address-withheld building in LA where the elevators are shockingly slow...

Today, for a brief and glorious moment, my office mates and I left the building to go across the street.  One of my office mates, M, had a friend who was shooting an episode of NCIS-CSI-L+O: LA (none of us really knew or asked) and he told M that M should come to set and get some of the catered lunch.  Because on set catered food is usually real tasty, M told our other office mate B that he should come, and because I don't like anything good or free and delicious to happen without me, I invited myself along, too.  I pretended to give them an out if they wanted to go alone, but I think that as I put my lunch of leftovers back in the fridge it was clear that I was getting me some set food.

So we headed across the street, stealthily avoiding a (noble but annoying) Greenpeace volunteer on the way, and were trying to figure out where exactly M's friend was in the throng of extras and crew people and general outdoor shoot chaos.  As we stood scanning the crowd, a super grungy, brown-toothed homeless man came running at us.  He was wearing a filthy trench coat and a beanie in pretty hot L.A. summer weather, and he was shaking a giant cup at us yelling for a quarter.  I felt terrified.  I was sure that I was about to get all kinds of cut up right there on Wilshire Blvd., and that when I finally got out of the hospital and managed enough strength to return to work my immediate boss would say something like, "You know, you guys never checked in with me before you went across the street to get stabbed or whatever it was you were doing."

But the homeless guy ran right past me and grabbed M.  Not that either of the men that I was with attempted to shield me with their body or throw a block of any  kind when it looked as though the crazy might have been coming right towards me in my pastel cardigan.  (They have, accordingly, been added to the growing list of people who would be of no use to me in a bar fight.)  Anyway, the insane homeless man was holding and shaking M.  Oh.  Right.  Because he was M's friend, and he was just playing a homeless guy for money.  On TV.  He introduced himself all around, and I had met him before, but forgave him for forgetting because I was feeling generous of spirit after that whole threat of imminent shanking passed.  Then he ran back to where he was taping because I guess that some people get a job and then commit to doing it/well even, and we all decided to go back to our office.  Not sated, but also not stabbed.  A fair draw.

Serendipity

From an unnamed university in the greater San Francisco Bay Area...

My day began with a 3+ hour training session run by the central admissions office. As longtime readers know, I hate the central admissions office. Graduate admissions is a constant battle between the department and the university proper and the university always seems to win, because they were here before me and they'll be here long after I leave (please please please let that time be soon). Suffice it to say, I was not looking forward to this training.

But lo and behold, it was actually good. Interactive, informative, dare I say: enjoyable. I LEARNED things. Things I didn't know before! I can't tell you how rare that is for training sessions like this. In the ~4 years I've been working in higher education administration, I've attended several institutionalized trainings, which usually go like this.

Pick up your packet.
Grab coffee and muffin.
Spill coffee (okay that might just be me).
Read the things in your packet while you wait for the speaker to begin.
Doze off/space out/doodle while the speaker reiterates everything you just read in the packet.
Q&A, in which people ask extremely specific questions that apply only to their jobs/situations. Speaker answers a minimum of 2 follow-up questions before suggesting that the questioner contact him/her personally.
Sneak out before the thing is over because you can't take another second.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did leave this training early, but mostly because I was anxious about getting things done in the office, and not because I was bored out of my skull. Progress!

Meeting with admissions people from departments all over campus was first depressing, then gratifying. If I was not the youngest person in the room, I was easily the second-youngest, and most of the people were old, short, overweight and poorly dressed. Not kidding. Dudes had long hair, women were wearing tennis shoes and homemade shawls. It was not a pretty sight. Good god, let me get out of here before I become one of them, I said to myself.

But then the commiserating started. As I texted to my friend M, we have many differences, but one key similarity: we all hate the applicants. We complained about dumb applicants, bitchy applicants, applicants who need to have things reconfirmed four or five times. International applicants, non-California residents, reapplicants....we all hate them all. It was life-affirming. So enjoyable was the work-related commiseration, I was almost tempted to tell these people about this blog, but then remembered that for the sake of keeping my job until I finally fulfill my dream of becoming of a trophy wife and living out my days in my Infinity Pool, I need to prevent my place of employment from knowing my true feelings.

The joy of commiseration was so great, I really want to extend to you all (both?). Would you like to anonymously guest-post-bitch about your jobs? It's fun, I swear.

Art Imitating Life/Pants

From an unnamed production office for an undisclosed television show in an address-withheld building in LA where the elevators are shockingly slow...

 As I've shared before, I not only torture myself at my every day job, but also drive around Hollywood during moments that I can sneak away from my desk and audition for various inane commercials.  Today I tried out for a spot for a communications company where my lines were hilarious guesses at what DSL- which they were cleverly knocking- might actually stand for.  I thought about suggesting what I'd always heard it stood for, but that's less about the internet and more about, say, Angelina Jolie.  Well, I guess there's a reason people look her up on the internet...

Anyway, I had to dress "business casual" for my audition this morning, which meant that I, along with every other girl there who looked creepily like me as we were all auditioning for the same part, wore a bold-colored blouse with buttons and a ruffle of some sort tucked into either slacks or a pencil skirt.  Seriously.  Every girl in that room.

The audition went regular/fine/who can tell?, but the miserable part was going to my real office and actual desk job afterward, because I was embarrassingly overdressed.  Quality of office wear and height of success have an inverse relationship in entertainment, so who wants to suggest that there so unimportant that they've got to dress up in the kind of trousers and high heels I was rocking all day?  No one.  But I bet at my pretend office in the commercial, where everyone dresses up and dresses well, no one would tell me to go to hell or to blow them as my two office mates just did, and who wants to work somewhere where you never get that kind of love?  Again, I'd say, the answer is no one.  Or at least not me.  Or at least not me unless someone offered me any kind of other job doing anything at all anywhere in the world.

Time Flies

From an unnamed production office for an undisclosed television show in an address-withheld building in LA where the elevators are shockingly slow...

I went away to the East Coast this past weekend, and after I flew overnight on Thursday (sleeping for 2 hours of a 4 hour flight to Chicago, pinching myself into consciousness for a 2 hour layover, and then dozing on a 2 hour flight to Boston) I went to lunch in Providence on Friday and stayed up until 2:30 p.m. and then napped to the Kourtney and Khloe and their ridiculous shenanigans (although I do think that Scott is real-life Patrick Bateman and no one is taking it seriously enough) after which I saw 2 plays and then stayed out late for drinks and then repeated that the next day when I saw 3 plays and had even more drinks and didn't go to bed until 4 in the morning, but didn't get to sleep it off because the day after that I got up early to hang out with a 3-year-old and 1-year-old who are the cutest of buttons, but children nonetheless and then this morning I got up at 3:45 a.m. Providence time- which was 12:45 a.m. L.A. time- and L.A. was where I was headed to go directly to my office which was particularly horrifying because after I'd been up for 2 hours, I saw on Facebook that one of my office mates hadn't even gone to bed for the night and I knew that I was so effed that I couldn't concentrate on work all day and wasn't even sure I could post more than a single sentence on the blog, and for those keeping track: I didn't.

You've Got a Frenemy in Me

From an unnamed university in the greater San Francisco Bay Area...

Be forewarned: this post has nothing to do with my job. I'm still way too over it to discuss it.

I've been listening to a This American Life about frenemies; stories of the friends you hate to love, love to hate, and for one reason or another, just can't quit (even if you wish you knew how). There's stories about women who became frenemies after dating the same dude, sister frenemies, and even the invention of the word "frenemy" which apparently can be attributed all the way back to the Bhagavad Gita.

When talking about portmanteaus like frenemy, Ira Glass consulted a woman from the Oxford English Dictionary who shares my disdain for people who believe that they've "invented" words simply by combining two other ones. Por ejemplo, "linner." It's like brunch, but I'm sure you can figure out which two meals it's between. A girl in my junior high thought that her family invented the word, and she thought it was actually a good word. But that's not my favorite example. My favorite example is much more recent and ridiculous. I'm talking about how Sarah Palin recently likened herself to Shakespeare in defense of using the word "refudiate."

If she'd only used it once, I'd cut her slack; who amongst us hasn't been thinking of two words to use and instead of choosing one, creates a new hybrid? Remember on Mean Girls when LiLo's character starts to say "great" and then decides to say "cool" and it comes out "grool"? We've all been there. But then Palin also used "refudiate" on her Twitter feed and could not attribute such an action to tongue-tiedness, and decided to call upon W's infamous "misunderestimate" and Obama's nonsensical "wee-wee'd up" and claim that she's just participating in word creation in the great tradition of the Bard.

But of course, the Prez was just using seriously dorky (and in my opinion, totally non-presidential) slang to describe people with ants in their pants (way more presidential), and we all know what mastery of the English language Bush II possessed. And in fairness to my old 7th grade English classmate, she was 12 at the time. But I still remember thinking she sucked, not only for believing she invented a word that is clearly not difficult to invent, but also being proud of it. "It's like, between lunch and dinner!!" If I had had my shit together at the time, I would have said something like "wow, that's really lad. That's like, between lame and sad." But because I wanted to be invited to her birthday party, I laughed. And frenemyship had begun.

Assignment: Asinine

From an unnamed production office for an undisclosed television show in an address-withheld building in LA where the elevators are shockingly slow...

Remiss indeed, S.  For my part, I've definitely not been extra liking my job, but I've almost reached a point where I'm not extra hating it either.  I'm sort of extra busy at it, but also extra apathetic.

See, recently the higher ups at our show have been worried about our ratings/competition/continuing relevancy, which has meant a whole lot of ideas/policies/procedures that we are all told are super important for a week until they are either forgotten about or ignored to death by the writing staff, and then abandoned.  For my nervous-disposition part, I do frantic research for every new task our staff is given as I imagine our meetings turning into- I almost said that one serious drama where Holland Taylor is the law school professor, and then I remembered that in fact it's "Legally Blonde"- a classroom where we will all learn our lessons in preparedness by the harsh hand of the Socratic method.  I worry about each new assignment or requested contribution all the way until the meeting where our presentations are due, and the big bosses ask if everyone thought about what they were supposed to think about, and are satisfied with a room full people silently nodding.  Sigh.  All that time I wasted when I could have been coming up with clever Facebook statuses.  But now at least I've learned my lesson: Waste my time blogging and complaining about my job rather than waste my time doing it.  That's the stuff of Aesop, friends. 

Not My Job

From an unnamed university in the greater San Francisco Bay Area...

Well K and I have been quite remiss in posting these past two days. It's either because we've been extra-loving our jobs or extra-hating them. You decide. (Hint: it's always extra-hating.) I don't feel like getting into why my job's been lame lately, so instead I will regale you with things I've found online that I like a lot. It's like Follow Friday except it's Wednesday night and we're not Twitter.

Why isn't Joshua Jackson my boyfriend yet? I'll see you all at Pacey-Con 2011.

Which do you prefer: early Ian McEwan or late Ian McEwan? Defend your choice. (Ahem-hem)

Sweet Valley High in the future: Liz is living in some kind of dystopian Sex and the City; Jessica's still whoring it up.

If I could learn to dance like Janelle Monae, I wouldn't need any of y'all.

Finally, a classic.