Currently Watching Project Runway - The Complete Third Season By Project Runway see related

Okay, Okay. If I were Lucy Ricardo then I'd have some "esplaining" to do. All I can say to the total of three people who actually read my xanga page is that I owe them all a thousand pardons for not writing an entry since February. So that having been said, I guess I have no other choice than to summarize the past eight months right now.

• In February, I went to Greensboro to visit my friends, Kathy and Seth. Greeensboro is such a cheap place to live. I guess the down side is that there are no jobs or public transportation. Made me feel nostalgic. 
• In March, my friend, Rich, flew up to visit me from Chapel Hill. He met my friend, Lauren, for the first time. I've often wondered what would happen if they both met for the first time. More often than not I imagined them getting into a fight about some band, where Lauren would be dunking Rich's head in the toilet and Rich would be franticly flailing his arms, pulling out chunks of Lauren's hair and trying to stratch her eyes out. Well, as it turned out, I suppose I was being a bit melodramtic because Lauren and Rich actually got along really well. Put two musical elitists together and they'll either really like each other or really hate each other, there won't be much in between. They're like siamese fighting fish, basically. So things went pretty well. Except at one point when we were all hanging out, Rich said something about the band Slipknot and Lauren responded by saying that if Rich actually liked Slipknot then the past five hours of us all hanging out would mean absolutly nothing beacuse no self - respecting human being with a soul or a sense of integrity or class could possibly like Slipknot. Rich started to act ... irked and before the bloodbath that I imagined happening could take place, I made some dipshit comment about liking socks, which seemed to break up any tension in the car.
• After Rich left, he passed his influenza on to me. For a week or so in April, all I could do was lie in bed and pray for death.
• For my birthday, Lauren took me to Baltimore to see Brand New. It was quite possibly the greatest show I'd ever seen in my life. Manchester Orchestra and Kevin Devine opened.  I wish that day could be my Groundhog Day, that I live over and over and over again. I was lusting after Jesse Lacey for a week. 
• April 27: Old Hag's Day/ My 24th birthday. All I could do was lie in bed and pray for death.
• May: Went with Lauren and Mike back to Baltimore to see Say Anything and Saves the Day. It was fun. Not as great as Brand New, because let's face it, that was the greatest show of all time.
• In June, I took a week off work and flew out San Francisco for a week and saw my brother. I relaxed, read harry potter, went to Amoeba Records: greatest record store on the West Coast, if not the world. The one thing about San Francisco is that my brother sort of lives in the red light district. I don't mind the stripclubs and adult toystores. What I do mind is those sleazy and slightly sexy bouncers who stand outside the clubs and try to get you to come in.
• July: Nothing happened. It was hot and humid. The seventh Harry Potter book came out.  
• September: I quit my job for about a day. My family made me feel like I was going to end up a homeless prostitute living on the street. So the next day I went into work and asked my boss if I have my job back. He said yes and then told me that people come into his office to quit all the time and that I shouldn't worry about it. I wasn't quite sure what to say.
• October: In an effort to quit smoking, I started taking this medication and since I started around halloween, I added a bunch of horror films to my netflix list. The logic being that sometimes when I have the hiccups and someone scares me they go away, so I was hoping to that the same idea might apply to smoking. The Zombie films worked but then I watched "Hostel" and "Saw." Frankly, It just made me distrurbed, paranoid and made me want to smoke more. Although, for some reason, after watching "Hostel" I have this strange desire to go backapcking through Europe. Go figure. That movie actually gave me some perspective. As unhappy as I may be with my job, apartment and romantic life (or lack there of) at least I'm being tortured by a mad Dutch buissnesman in a Slovakian Death Chamber. It's the little things in life that count most. Needless, to say I was not succesful in quitting smoking.
•  November: It's Thanksgiving. I'm in 'Bama. I have the next couple days off work. My mom moved into a new house and one of my cats ran away. My sister is eight and a half months pregnant and due any day now. Season 4 of Project Runway started. Behind me on the bed is my sister's mildly intoxcated father - in law who reading a book in his underwear. It's kind of weird. So I guess that's the jist of what's been going on the past few months.
• Happy Thanksgiving!

The Secret Life of Lawyers

If more than one owl is a parliment and a group of larks is an exaltation and multiple lions is a pride, then what do you call a group of lawyers?
I don't know but I guess that means that I get to pick a name myself...
A spectacle.
A spectacle of lawyers.

Anyway, my boss took all of us out to lunch last week and the District Chophouse. Which was kind of fun, I met some people who I think are cool. There's a lawyer named Gigi, who seems nice and then I also sat next to Gidget, who also seemed nice. Everyone else at the table was getting into these heated arguments over their cases and I had absolutly no idea what they were saying. I guess I kind of want to get to know these people more. They all seem interesting, nice and attractive. I guess I just kind of feel like my relationship with most people at work is very one dimentional--
"Hello."
"Hello."
"How are you?"
"Fine."

So I don't know if eveyone knows this, but the Department of Veterans Affairs is very understaffed. There's about five million cases and only about a hundred people to manage them. My office has so many boxes of cases that you could literally build a city out of them. One day I was at my xerox machine, copying some crappy case: injured verteran asking for compensation from the government blah blah blah. My supervisor, Keeta, comes over and asks me to help her distribute cases for the week. My day is so boring that even slightest change is really exciting for me. So Keeta and I go up to the sixth floor. As soon as the lawyers saw us, they ran back into their office and locked the door. There were two women talking and one of them pointed at Keeta and said, "Oh dear god! It's her!" When we rounded the corner, one lawyer ran screaming down the hall and threw himself out a window. Keeta handed me a case and told me to go put it one of the attorney's offices. So I did and the attorney was curled in a corner with a blanket and a pacifier, rocking back and forth mumbling to himself, "No more. Please, no more."
Keeta walked into the office ---
"Should we get him some help?" I asked.
"No," she said. "He's beyond help."
And things just got worse from that point on. One lawyer pulled out his hair. Another burst into tears. And another banging his head against the wall and cutting himself. I think it was quite possibly the most fun, I've ever had in my life.
You should have seen what they did when they found out they weren't getting any more cases. There was one very attractive lawyer who I'll call JakeRyan ( name of Molly Ringwald's crush in Sixteen Candles), who was kneeling at his desk and praying in latin. As soon as Keeta past by JakeRyan's office and he realized he wasn't getting anymore files, he leaped to his feet and opened a bottle of champagne. Soon other lawyers were filing into his office and I could have sworn that I saw them snorting coke lines.  

This past week was kind of fun. I was assigned to work upstairs with the attorney's and I liked it alot more working down in the copy room, or "the dungeon" as I call it. People talked to me and waved. They brought me muffins. It was awesome. I met this attorney who I liked. He was in his fifties and had a quiet dignity about him. All of the young lawyers are brash and arrogent, that makes it hard to talk to them sometimes, but this lawyer wasn't like that at all. His real name isn't important, but I'll call him "Socrates."   
I liked working upstairs because I had complete control over the xerox machine. If people wanted to copy something, it was just easier to ask me to make the copies for them. So while the machine was going, I'd make them talk to me. After a while, I started to feel like I was working a fast food resteurant:
"Okay, so you want six copies of this legal brief, two sided and stapled. You know, if you have a seventh copy made, it comes a free toy."
So many people came to have things copied that after a while, as a joke, I started saying, "Sure, I'll copy your deposition... in exchange for your mortal soul!"
Well, you'd be amazed how many people that actually worked on.
"You want my soul? Uh, okay. Can I write you a check?"

Five more souls and I can apply to become a demon of darkness.

I guess because my job basically revolves around xerox copiers, I forget that there are people who don't know how to operate one. Every couple of hours I took a break to stretch my legs or smoke a cigarette or get something to drink ( copying, after all,  makes you very thirsty and its important to stay hydrated). Once I came back and Socrates was standing at my machine, looking guilty. Like a kid who was afriad to tell his parents he'd just broken something ---
"Charles?" Socrates said. " I think... I think I broke your machine. I was making some copies and there was a paper jam and I couldn't get it out and I'm really, really sorry." 
"It's okay." I said. "I don't care about the machine. I'm just glad that you're alright. Go back into your office and I'll take care of this." I fixed the paper jam in about ten seconds and brought Socrates his copies. The man treated me like I was a super hero for the rest of the day.I don't know why I like to demoralize lawyers. I guess just because it's so easy and I feel so much better about myself.
Anyway, on a random note, I've been making a legitimate effort to try see as many films as I can that were nominated for Oscars. So far I've seen The Queen, Babel, Dreamgirls and The Deaprted --- all which were fanatstic, except Babel was really depressing. I have a ticket to see The Last King of Scotland in a couple hours, which I'm will also be really depressing, but I like Forest Whitaker, alot. 
 

Currently Reading Naturalist's Guide to Observing Nature By Kurt Rinehart see related

"The large male gorilla held my attention. He gave an impression of dignity and restrained power, of absolute certainty in his majestic appearence. I felt a desire to communicate with him. Never before had I had this feeling upon meeting an animal. As we watched each other across the valley, I wondered if he recognized the kinship that bound us."
~ George Schaller

So there aren't really any people at my job who are my age, or for that matter anyone I have anything in common with. Needless to say, things at my office get pretty boring and so I have to create my own entertainment. And who better to enterain me than the lawyers I work with. I've tried to communicate with them directly, but frankly I can never understand what they are saying. I will ask them a simple question like, "What did you do this weekend?" and the lawyer responds with a babbling of legalese that always leaves me saying,
"what?"

So I decided that instead of trying to communicate directly with the lawyers, it's easier to think of myself as Jane Goodall among the chimpanzees or "lawyer-panzees" in this case.
Jane Goodall always gives her chimps cool names so I did the same thing. There's "Buttons", the alpha - male/ my boss and "Gidget" his mate. "Harper" is Buttons' second in command. Then there's "Gigi", "Smokey", "Sprinkles", "Toeshoes" and "Beans." From what I've observed there appears to be no clear heirarchal order in the five ladder sub-ordinates. Here is an excerpt from my journal, which I hope to publish one day entitled, "The private life of lawyers:

December 3
I believe I have been accepted into the troop. The lawyers no longer bear their teeth or beat the ground whenever I approach them.
Sprinkles approached me today and offered me a butterfinger. Not wanting to offend him, I gratiously accepted the candy and discarded it when he wasn't looking. 
Gigi and Harper scuffled over the last box of paper clips before Buttons settled the tiff by giving half of the contents of the box to Gigi and the other half to Harper. I must say I am quite suprised by this behavior. The lawyers appear to have a primative ability to solve problems rather than create them.

December 9
My lawyers got into a brief brawl with the lawyers from a rival troop. Buttons fearlessly led his troop into battle but recieved a minor injury when two rival males  began to beat him with a legal briefing. Beans and Sprinkles came to his recue and drove the rival troop away. Gigi and Smokey carred for Buttons that evening, licking his leg. By the next morning, Buttons appeared to be back to his old self.

January 2
I approached the lawyers today who were feeding quietly in the conferance room. They were grunting quietly and grooming each other's egos. I have not been able to decipher their communications. This is something that will most likely take years and years of research to do. I also realized it is is not fair to compare my lawyers to their close realtives, the chimpanzees. Mostly because it is insulting to the chimpanzees. But my work with the lawyers is critical, in order further understand their mysterious and wicked ways.
~ Charles Haslam, PHd

Currently Watching The Girls Next Door - Season 1 By Girls Next Door see related

I know I haven't written in a couple but things have been kind of crazy. Last Monday, I started working at the Department of Veterans Affairs as a copy clerk and that's pretty much all I do is copy files. Unfortunately, due to privacy laws I can't disclose any specifics of the files I've copied but most of them are medical records, psychological evaluations and court documents: legal breifs, stuff like that. Then when I get done with a while I hand it over to the legal assistants. After that I never hear about it again.

The people at my office are nice. I don't think I have much in common with them but everyone's willing to help if have a question. I like my supervisor alot, her name is Queeda. She basically oversees all of the copy clerks. Then there's a lawyer who I work directly for. I've heard all of these horror stories about evil bosses, but the lawyer seemed really cool. Granted there's that thing where he goes home at night and eats babies, but I'm willing to overlook that. We had a meeting in his office a couple days ago: me, the legal assistants and the rest of lawyers who work for him. I was sort itexpecting it to be like an inquisition but it was more like general announcements, " There's christmas party at the Chophouse next week. Who wants to go?" Then the lawyers kicked me and the legal assistants out of the room. I guess so they go about sacrficing babies in private or whatever. There's a lawyer named Nick who I think is kind of cute but he's probably straight and I don't want to ask him out and be slapped with a sexual harrasment suit my third week on the job.

There are so many great benefits for working for the government. My work I.D. is called a "badge." "Where did I put my badge?" I'll say to myself.  They pay for my metro, to and from work. I get to choose from a wide variety of health insurence plans. If I choose to work a nine and a half a hour day then I get to take a day off every two weeks. My first day I was sworn in as a federal employee I raised my right handed, looked at the American flag and said, "I, Charles Linn Haslam, do solemnly swear, that I will defend the constitution of the United States, against all enemies foreign and domestic. So help me God." I don't know how I'm supposed to fight evil when I'm working as a copy clerk. Like maybe some super villain will come into my office and be like "here copy this" and I'll be like, "No way, Man." Then at his trial he'll be like, "I could have taken over the world if it wasn't for that pesky copy clerk. GRRR!!!"

Last week I was sort of panicking. Not because of the job itself  but I think because I was afraid of working in general. Having people depend on me.  I mean when you start a new job you don't know anything. You don't know anyone's name or where the bathroom is or where files are supposed to go. It's horrible. And last week I really wanted to quit. Granted the work is pretty easy, it's a very casual environment and everyone is really nice, but I don't really want to copy things for the rest of my life. I decided I'm going stick this job out for at least six months and treat it sort of like a college class. Then in May I guess I'll re-evaluate whether I want to stay there. I like it alot but I guess I sort of want to be doing something that is a little more varied than what I'm doing now. Like working in a private bookstore or in a Veterinarian's office. 

But in the meantime, I get to sit at my xerox machine, drunk with power as I copy file after file after file.    

Currently Listening The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me By Brand New see related

I start my job on Monday. I'm kind feeling wiggy about it. This is like my first real job. I mean had  a desk job at Guilford where I worked seven hours a week but all I did was play online snooker and brickles. Now I actually have to get shit done. The pressure for a lower level federal copy clerk is just oppressive.

Anyway, Brand New released their new album on Tuesday. It's really good but I think I like it so much just because of what I had to go through so much to get it. I Got up at eight and took the metro to Best Buy in Tenleytown. "Sorry, we don't have it." The clerk said. I kind of freaked out:
"WHAT!!!" I grabbed him by the collar of his shirt on screamed in his face, "NO MORE LIES, MOHAMMED, NO MORE LIES!!!" So then I tried FYE. they didn't have it. Then tried Border's. This guy went to look for it and came back with the CD of some band called, Brand New Labotamy. Then I tried the Barnes & Nobles in Bethesda, they didn't have it. Then I got a tip an informant that the Target in Rockville had a few copies. So I took a bus out to Rockville, except that the bus didn't go anywhere near Rockville where I needed to go. So then I took the metro to Twinbrook. By this time I got there I was rreally tired, my legs were about to buckle underneath me, I was sweating and bleeding. ( Had a run in with the nuns of St. Peter's Church. I owe them some money. The Reverend Mother was wacked out of her mind on PCP again. Sister Bernadette shanked me in the kidneys, it's not worth getting into.) So I finally found this album on the lower shelves of some obsure display case in target. It was about 3:30pm by now. I was starting to see things that there. All I kept thinking to myself was "this album better be spectacular." I finally got home and went into the bathroom to vomit blood. I felt fine after that. But it was all worth it because this album was really, really good.

Went to Thanksgiving at my high school a couple days ago which was cool. It's always sort of bittersweet to go back to high school because part of me wishes that things were that simple again and another part of me looks at all the current students who go there and thinks, "Oh my God, it must suck to still be teenager. God, am I glad to be out of this shithole." I ran into my friend Kate, who I haven't seen in long time and my friend, Scott and a couple old teachers.  It was really fun to gossip about former classmates: Who's dead, Who's in jail, Who's had abortions, Who has kids,  Who's currently working as a porn star, Who got kicked out of college and for what. I know going back to your high school is supposed be a traumatic experience but it just makes me feel really good about myself that I finished college and am not working as a prostitute...
Except for that breif time in my junior year of college, but let's never speak of that again.

I think the nicest people I've met so far in my apartment building is the Korean family ( Father, Mother, Son and Daughter) who own the grocery store in the basement. Everyone else isn't really warm or talkative but these people are really nice and they smile at me alot. It makes me feel happy because I guess I feel sort of lonely in that building sometimes. The dad taught me how to say "thank you" and "goodbye" and the mother is really nice. The teenage children are kind of like ... teenagers. 
"Yeah, it's 'Gam Sah Ham Nida. Not 'Ham Kam San Nida." The son said to me one afternoon when I was buying milk. And then the father came into the store holding  a pair of women's panties and started yelling at his son in Korean. Something about shaming the family or something like that. My Korean isn't that great. Then the mother came and saw what was happening and burst into tears, screaming "NOT AGAIN!!! NOT AGAIN!!!" over and over again. I was kind of confused so I just left. This morning when I went to buy some cigarettes, I walked in and the father said "Annyeong Haseyo?" to me, which means "Hello, are you at peace?" He was holding a shotgun and pointing it at his who bound and gagged behind the counter. I just went about my buissiness. Then when I to check out and the son  had loosened his gag and was mouthing the words, "HELP ME."  I didn't want to get involved in any family buissiness, so I just smiled and left. 
"Gam-Sah-Ham-Nida" I said. (Thank you)
"Ahn-Nyung-Hee-Ga-Seh-Yo" The father said. (Goodbye)