I just quit my job.

I was hired at a “medical research” company for a particular project to last 6-8 weeks.  Last week was #10, and we finished the main part, with an additional 2 weeks to do the second phase.

After that?  I heard we are all going to get laid off.  No, I heard there are a few short projects for some people.  No, I heard there is work for English-speakers year round this year.  No, I heard they are going to make us into cat food.

Whatever.  In the last 10 steps to work on Wednesday the notion of finishing the project then quitting had just concreted in my mind like a massive belch relieving a churning stomach.  I was going to wave my hand to disperse the air and walk away.

The first phase was calling doctors and CEOs, who are notoriously challenging and whose secretaries in the US are frequently difficult/dreadful/bulldogs.  The second phase was calling business owners, and the expectation was that it would be a piece of cake.  They were collectively a piece of something alright, but it ain’t cake, ya dig?

These people were disgusting.  Truly just jerks.  When did it become acceptable behaviour to hang up on people?  Do their mothers know they behave this way?  I don’t want to go on and on about it…but seriously…fuck these people.  (Speaking of mothers, sorry Ma, I know you hate it when I swear, but sometimes it’s warranted, you know?)

It is a rare thing for me that I feel the desire to do harm unto others, either verbally or by flying over there to smack some manners into these ass-mongers, but I found myself wanting to call them back, not to magnanimously remind them that this was uncivilized behaviour, but to tell them off.  And that just ain’t me.

I sat at my desk and felt a weight on my chest, sickly constriction, bone-bending disgust.  I could barely muster the energy to call another one.  And when I did, it was another craptastic wheelbarrow-full of chumpholery.  Repeat.

Everyone feels down sometimes at work and I had slogged through a bunch of those low points before, but it was suddenly more than I was willing to bear.  (Actually it was a graph of an exponential equation.  The x-axis is time, and the y-axis is soul-drainage.  It was already an upward slope, but all of a sudden that shit took off.)

So maybe I am a wimp who couldn’t stick it out.  Couldn’t finish what he started.

Or maybe I am courageous enough to leave something once it passes a threshold of suckiness, despite the inner obligation-voices telling me I should stay, obey the comfort of a reliable paycheck, don’t hope for more.

I have too much love for my beautiful soul to mistreat it like that.

When I look at the blank faces of rush hour commuters, their road rage as they go to and from jobs they don’t love or even like, or I hear the universal small-talk of hating one’s job, it feels like disappointment.

Disappointment that this is all life is.

This disappointment doesn’t occur on playgrounds.  Or at junior high school dances.  Or at graduation ceremonies as valedictorians spout clichés about finishing one chapter and beginning another, or lighting candles to light the future, or any of that shit.

When does that enthusiasm and optimism die?  Is it inevitable?  Is it as universal as I feared, sitting on a train full of people who didn’t even think about interacting with each other?

Back at the job, I will miss are the people.  I won’t be there for the last week, as everyone winds down together, and says goodbye with awareness and pacing.  I said goodbye as I was walking out the door, basically.  Literally in several cases.  There are some people I didn’t even say goodbye to.

But tomorrow I will go to class, run an errand, then fucking go home.  Make dinner for K.  Go to the gym.  Go to bed relaxed.  Not annoy anyone.  Read.  Did I mention actually SEE my girlfriend?  Have a conversation with her that doesn’t consist of “hello, how was work, good, me too, good night.”

After quitting, I came home and starting making a surprise dinner for K.  I stood in the bathroom window, pinning the cutting board against the windowsill so I could watch for her to get home, so I could call her as she was coming up the stairs and ask “what do you want to have for dinner…together?  Surprise!” as she was opening the door.  But it turns out, not wanting to spend another night here alone, she had gone to her parent’s house to have dinner there.

While inconvenient for my attempts at a surprise, that really underlined that I made the right choice.  I have no idea if I will be able to find anything better or if I will regret walking out of the giant fart-container that was the call center, but come on home, babe, I’m here again.

Well hello my friend.

Another Midnight post...uh oh.  But I kinda think I should put something else on here to move any mention of prostitutes further down the page (my girlfriend's mom reads this blog, man).  Of course, by discussing that I have immediately defeated the purpose...too bad my honestly clause of the night prevents any usage of the backspace key.

Oh and I was thinking, on the theme of the word "arguement" coming to be customarily more combative than it presumably used to be, I'd say the same goes for "provoke." That word brings to mind (for me at least) images of bullies on the playground, world leaders, and maybe idiots at the zoo (a perfectly natural grouping), but nothing, for example, thought-provoking.  That phrase now seems innocent to me.  Or at least I would like to present that arguement.

At work we finished the main Saai Project (saai - Dutch for boring, though the online dictionary I just checked defines it with the synonyms "anodyne, jejune, prosy" so now I just need an English-English translator) and the company took us all out to celebrate.  I was expecting a trip to a bar, and was having the customary pre-bar discussion with myself of "wear something nice and get it smoke-stanky, or just go with a tired old T-shirt?" when they announced that we were going to play lazer tag.

To be honest I was sceptical at first, but it turned out to be a funilicious.  I am guessing the open bar helped things (actually I am only required to say that, as usual the conversations were awesome while sober, and only good as drunkenness increased).

It was fun to lurk behind barrels and peek around corners, both of which activities are generally considered strange at bars.

When you got shot the vest thingy would encourage you "don't give up, don't give up, don't give up!" which just seemd so darn kind of them.  Reminds me of Mitch Hedberg discussing the encouragement he gets when he opens a package and reads "try again" under the lid.  (Is making offhand referrences not a good idea in blogs?  Did I mention it's midnight?  Why did I capitalize midnight the first time?  That shit ain't no title.)

Other than that...awesome weather today, well above freezing.  The Belgians were out bicycling en masse and sidewalks were bustling.  We went to Leuven and had a delicious dinner followed by banana and lychee beignets with some other interesting ingredients I cannot quite recall at the moment but I think included sesame seeds.

Oh, and one other happening, but that deserves more than an offhand mention, so I'll post it later, unless I can't sleep...but that shouldn't be a problem.

Sweet lychee dreams to you all.

Man, I ate a lot of food today, or, where are the prostitutes? or, warning.

Are my blogs boring as all hell?  “Today I rode a bicycle home from work and it was cold.” Yeah.

Not sure what else to write.  I want to interview prostitutes.  Is that more interesting?  It is for me.  I want to know how they feel about it.  Do they ever enjoy themselves?  Are they friends with each other?  Do they have to work in a different region of the country from where they live?  How long do they do that work for and how are they different after their first two weeks?  Do they view other customers in line at the grocery store differently than they did before?

But right now I’m just full of great Thai food.  One of K’s friends is rather impressively sick of Belgium so in order to change her life is moving to Austria.  Not exactly a complete paradigm shift, but still impressive that she’s doing something instead of just bitching about it (maybe more about that later, if I am not overcome by chicken satay lethargy).

So to farewell her a bunch of us met up at a fancy-pants Thai restaurant in Brussels that has a Michelin star.  Sounds embarrassing to be a one-star restaurant, but, tremendously counter-intuitively, getting a star from a tire-company means you’re hot shit.

So we ate beef and chicken and calamari and scallops and oysters and probably pork and there were massive prawns.  Meat lurked or strutted in most things, but they brought K some specially made vegetarian spring rolls, which scored them big points in my book.

This place was kinda nutty.  They had their own brand of cloth napkins, toothpicks, and even the bottles of beer had a special Blue Elephant label on them.  Que chic, eh?

We went in there before noon, and here I am at 22:49 still feeling full and burping well-seasoned red curry.

Now, this blog makes no sense, and while waiting to see if I would post it I just typed up another one that is way worse.  I’ll post that one first, so an innocent visitor like yourself will see this relatively harmless one first and allow me to warn you that the big one below is a rambling stream of consciousness and really not worth your time, I just feel like I haven’t posted much on here lately and want to use up a few more of google’s infinite memory bits.  Why do I feel like tomorrow morning  I am going to regret posting these?

Yikes, don't read this one unless you are really bored.

I was lying in bed just now, full of that Thai food from the last post (the one with the red curry burps) and was thinking about regrets.  Or maybe Disney.  Or maybe large automobiles, I don’t remember, but however it came about, I remembered driving through Africa this summer with K and our friend Lisa.

K and I disagree on some things, but demographically we are pretty darn similar.  We have interesting conversations of course, but we share enough assumptions that there are a number of areas we don’t really wander into.

At work I have conversations with M (look at me, being all circumspect and shit) who was a cop in Detroit before serving in Afghanistan for a year.  A conversation about gun ownership or US foreign policy is more interesting with him than with…I dunno…a mirror.  (You get the point.  It’s late, okay?)

It seems clear to me that one of the fundamental problems with the US and the world today is that we are unable to have actual productive and respectful discussions with each other.  I doubt I would be able to be in a room with Sarah Palin for more than 20 seconds without having an aneurism or breaking something.

The word “argument” immediately brings to mind shouting and airborne spittle, instead of exchange of opinions.  Saying something like “one could make an argument that Top Gun is the most homoerotic movie of all time” sounds almost out-dated in it’s use of the word to refer to simply an interesting notion, not adrenaline-based emotion.  (I am wilfully ignoring the awareness that anything touching on homoeroticism will inevitably rile up certain folks cuz I’m being optimistic like that.)

Shit I am off track.  The point was that it is good and right and necessary to talk to people with different fundamental ideas than oneself.  That’s what I meant to say, and it’s late enough that I just don’t feel like editing, okay?  Fair warning.  (Albeit too late.)

One of these different-assumptions-people for me is Lisa (from way back in Africa and the beginning of this mess) who wholeheartedly embraces a certain zone of Christianity and its associate edicts.  Not to simplify her entire belief system into a single demographic label (because that is what pissed me off in the first place) but in a blog already long enough that I don’t actually expect anyone to read it, it serves the purpose.

During those hours and hours of driving across Botswana we could have been talking about any number of interesting topics, but instead we just sort of zoned out most of the time, then the frustrations and irritations of having spent days of low blood-sugar in an automobile with the same people further limited discourse so that when the topic of Disney came up one evening, I had zero energy or enthusiasm for expressing my opinions, and I didn’t particularly care about the 1% representation of them.  I just wanted to enjoy the sunset and keep a watch for mosquitoes on my ankles.

Lying in bed just now I was thinking about Disney, it’s portrayals of yellow-jacket-shaped females (are they generally wearing Victorian intestine-crushing corsets below their relatively voluminous bosoms and insanely large Maybelline eyes?) or its reliance on tired racial stereotypes (that stuff about all the “Arab-looking” guys in Aladdin are the villains and the Tyler-Perry-esque one dimensionality of black people) or the possible links between Disney/ABC (www.disneyabctv.com) and the military-industrial complex (way too big of a topic to mention off-handedly, but in a couple minutes of googling I show $14,598,158 in contracts since 2000 between Disney and the Department of Defence & Homeland Security at http://www.usaspending.gov/) but now I realize there are a million-and-one term papers about each of these things, and it really isn’t the point.

Not that I have a point.  It’s 23:37 and I have been typing this up for the better part of an hour on top of the dirty laundry hamper in the bathroom to avoid disturbing K, who has a cold and is having trouble sleeping tonight, and the only seat available is the Porcelain Throne and my thighs are cold and sore and when I stretch my back it sounds like chewing gravel and I really don’t remember what I thought might be worth getting out of bed for, and like I said I don’t feel like editing or worrying about coherency, because my true purpose is to make myself tired enough to sleep and you just had the bad luck to stumble into my midnight stream of consciousness.

So yeah.  I wish I had had better conversations with Lisa, and I suspect Disney is a massive modern octopus of corporations with tentacles in unsavoury things (Gasp, right?  Who’d a-thunk it?) and they could do a better job of not perpetuating our culture’s bullshit and I think, judging by the ache in my upper thighs, that I am ready for bed.

Damn, and I didn’t even get to the part about my other coworker and race identity.  But I don’t have the energy for the disclaimers so maybe we’ll talk about it some other time.

Man I love Thai food.  Man I love food.  Did I mention I am trying to plan a trip to Thailand and radically alter my life again?

Good night.

So much behind, so much ahead

I turned 18 in the Bahamas.  And it was even better than it sounds. 

I had been nominated by my high school English and science teachers to a scholarship program which sent students to research projects around the world.  In one of the application essays I mentioned my interest in marine biology, and so my luck at being chosen was doubled when they sent me to the frickin Bahamas (another option was an archeological dig…in Fresno).

Andros is the largest island, and has virtually no tourism.  It’s mostly mangrove swamps and jungle.  The flora and fauna defied belief, and the cultural experience of a town that technically qualified as utter poverty and was filled with the most amazing amounts of happiness, hospitality, and just plain positive energy was absolutely invaluable for shaping my opinions of life on this planet, human nature, and the relative importance of material possessions, “status,” and (what word to use?) gratitude-love-appreciation-joy-amistad.

(The only culture shock I felt was when I came back and found myself in the Atlanta airport.  I sat on a mass-produced chair trying not to cry on my mass-produced sandwich while busy busy businesspeople didn’t notice my existence.)

For 16 days I swam in the Caribbean, sampled the chemical content of deep freshwater caverns, played with tarantula and scorpions, tried taking a shower in an afternoon rainstorm, watched heat lighting in the clouds every night, and listened to a local witch-woman talk about voodoo, translated by our professor-guide because we couldn’t understand her thick Bahamian accent, even before the interference of two massive goiters distending her throat, developed after she prescribed herself an herb to counteract a neighber’s curse that blocked her iodine absorption (like two ripe mangoes stuck in her throat).

During the day I swam with ridiculously beautiful tropical fish, and at night ate whichever one of them the neighbour happened to catch that day.  I flirted with the guileless intensity of an adolescent.  Sitting on the outdoor furnite near Molly, the tan Teaching Assistant who I was sure (for 16 days) was the loveliest thing on Earth.  The Aerosmith song “Don’t Want to Miss A Thing” will remind me of that time for the rest of my life.

We all promised to stay in touch, and of course we didn’t.  None of them will read this.  And now I discover I have forgotten two of their names.

Just a few years later I would think back on my days in the Bahamas with nostalgia and sweetness.  And a stab of fear.  That I had already had the best single experience of my life.  That I had lived my best adventure.  That I had already seen my most beautiful new horizon. 

I was very happy with my life.  Satisfied even.  But the idea that I had passed my zenith…

A couple years later I quit my job and left with a backpack for Europe.  Now I can look back to that nervous me and smile reassuringly.  Don’t worry, littler me, that was fucking amazing, but it ain’t nearly over yet.

I still hadn’t practiced archery outside a 15^th century castle called “Kiek in the coq” that still has cannon balls from 1577 embedded in it.  I hadn’t hitchhiked in the Scottish highlands.  Ridden a camel into the Sahara for 3 days.  Built a birdhouse in Belgium (damn right that belongs in this list!)  Hugged orphans in Zambia.  Hung off the back of a moving chicken bus in Guatemala.

Now I feel a vast mountain of experience standing between now and my days in Santa Cruz.  I packed a bag and left some baggage, trailing bits and pieces gradually for two years.

And again I am happy with my life.  Satisfied even.  But the idea that I have passed my zenith…not this time.

There is so very frickin much more to life than just travelling, but since this blog has already gone long and travelling bits are quicker validated, I may just mention that I have not yet…what?  (Something something) elephants in India.  (Something something) temple in Thailand.  (Something something) in the South China Sea.

As you can tell my thoughts are currently tending rather dramatically southeast…but whether my steps lead to Papua New Guinea or around my corner of Belgium, I have lost the fear that the best of life is over.  I must have left it by the side of some road somewhere…

Man, being a productive member of society sure cuts into my reading time.

That was the realization I had as I put my immensely engaging book back into my bag on the train after having read about 2 pages.  The book is 1139 pages long.  I sneak a few minutes in to see what happened after they crashed on the shores of Nazi-occupied Norway during the 3 stops between where I take Dutch classes and where I work.

I am enjoying these days though, each step of the day taken individually and enjoyed for itself, without thinking about all the other things I am not doing with my time.  One of those not-done things is blogging, so before I warm up the rice and beans from last night’s burrito-themed dinner party (God I love guacamole) I’m going to throw some crud up here I’ve encountered lately.

I’ll pick…class.  I am studying Dutch, and one of my favourite things about it is how much the language makes sense.  I love English, and am tremendously glad that birth circumstance made me a native speaker (did you know there are roughly as many words in English as in the next three largest language combined?  [according to my TESOL course, at least]).  It is beautifully flexible, and richly textured…and makes no sense.

The pure quantity of inexplicable exceptions and random bits and pieces would frustrate the hell out of me if I was learning it.  Like the word “up” which shows up(1) in a ridiculous number of places.  You can look me up(2) in the phone book, though I might hang up(3) on you afterwards, if you can put up(4) with that.  Be written up(5) for a rules violation.  Hook up(6,7) a stereo or with that cutie in math class.  Things are looking up(8) and throwing up(9) and calling up(10), hurrying up(11) and beefing up(12) then easing up(13) before backing up(14) and getting up(15) and blowing up(16) and waking up(17) and standing up(18) and showing up(19) and breaking up(20) being brought up(21) dressing up(22) and ending up(23) filled up(24) before giving up(25) and growing up(26).  All before your computer can boot up(27).

Dutch has some of that, with bits of words kind of flitting around, but generally far more logically and consistently.  And there is no chance for accidentally saying something is logicaler or consitenter.  In English you are big or bigger, cold or colder, fat or fatter, but more excited, more enthusiastic, and more irritated.  One might guess that short words take “-er” and long ones “more” but that explanation would be more fun if it was more fit to explain the phenomenon.

In linguistics classes in college I remembers studying something called the “Maximal Onset Principle” which basically says that a consonant in a word prefers to go at the beginning of a syllable, instead of the end.  This explains why a popular word breaks into syllables the way it does.  It is “po-pu-lar” and not “pop-ul-ar” like one might think.  That second p wants to be in front of a vowel if it can.

This phenomenon is cute and fun and cross-linguistic and basically irrelevant.

But not in Dutch!  In Dutch, they have long vowels and short vowels.  So “bos” is a forest, and “boos” is angry.  In order to not tell everyone that you are a forest today because way too many politicians in your homeland are soulless bastards (there are some benefits to being so busy, such as missing out on some of the actions of the Republican congress) you have to pay attention to the vowel length.

I don’t want to make this waaaay too long (English has long vowels sometimes too?) and it is all I can do to not go on a sizeable rant about defunding Planned Parenthood (seriously guys, what the fuck?!), but basically that Maximal Onset Principle comes into play in Dutch with the long vowels by grabbing consonants, particularly in plural forms.

(Note: a syllable that ends in a vowel is considered “open” which makes the vowel “long.”  Ending with a consonant conversely, is “closed” and makes the vowel “short.”)

For example, “zon” is the sun, “zoon” is a son.  You generally pluralize a noun by adding “-en” but if you have two sons you have twee “zonen” not twee “*zoonen” because the Maximal Onset Principle takes that “n” and pulls it into the second syllable, leaving the first syllable open, and thus long, so the second “o” would be redundant.

So then if you have two suns in the sky it would be twee “zonnen” because that second “n” is necessary to keep the vowel closed, and therefore short.

(I wish I knew how to make "two suns" a hyperlink, but since I'm html incompetent, here's what I would have linked it to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/20/two-suns-twin-stars_n_811864.html?ref=fb&src=sp)

The point is that Dutch understands itself better than English.  To have a linguistic theorem like the Maximal Onset Principle overtly reflected in the orthography of the language is impressive.  We don’t need to go into English spelling, right?  (Ask me about “ghoti”some other time.)

Did any of that make any sense?  I would love to clarify it…but I gotta go to bed, got class and work and whatnot tomorrow.

Oh, and if you live in the US, go get screened for cervical cancer before the Senate has a chance to be as asinine as the House.

A fine day for another multi-lingual argument over which country has the hottest women.

Movement is oddly effortless when it is raining.  Riding home from the train station I suspect the warmer air of improving the functionality of my chain and gears, and I wish I could bottle some velocity for tomorrow morning’s cold arduous trudge.  But this is not another blog about bicycling in the rain.  It’s an entry into my long-overdue virtual diary that you can read if you want.

Dutch class today was fine.  Good.  Normal.  I don’t really remember it, it was so long ago. Oh yeah, I remember, it was an impressive show of patience by my teacher as she tried to do a “word slide” exercise.  We each got little squares of paper with a verb in the infinitive on top and an incomplete sentence below.  The exercise is that someone reads their sentence, which is completed by the infinitive verb on someone else’s card, who then reads their sentence, which is completed by someone else’s infinitive, and so forth.

It’s a great idea which normally works well, but today my little cohort was just not up to it.  Long pauses before someone would grudgingly give the infinitive form of the verb, when the whole purpose of the exercise is the present perfect.  I could not believe my teacher didn’t throw anyone out the window.  I expected to show my imperfect skills to the Belgian police when I told them “My teacher has just defenestrated the Albanian.”

Work was good.  I got a kebab with the Italians and a Polish guy and we told football hooligan stories and alcohol stories and they argued about whether Polish or Italian women are hotter and ended up agreeing that Russians were the best.

And even the work part of work was good.  I chatted up some secretaries and nurses, and no one hung up on me all day (although one of my favorite things is calling hanger-uppers back and saying so nicely that pure honeyed niceness oozes out of their phone onto their clenched little chins “Hi, I’m sorry, I think we got disconnected there.  Sorry about that.  I was just calling to see if…” and listening to them squirm their way out of being called out for jerkish behaviour.  Plus my pleasant amiability is contagious, and I reckon they actually go away a smidge happier, so hopefully it is one small point for the Positive Feelings of the world.  I have not been tempted to call back and tell anyone off in days and days.  I am the spirit of equanimity, reaching out across VOIP lines to a bored and irritable nurse in Indiana.  You’re welcome Sherrie-Christie-Janet-Sheila-Kelly.

I was also entertaining myself terribly with a fax or two.  I have sent about 468 faxes, and have heard back from precisely 0 of them, so have logically concluded they are an utter waste of time and paper.  I am okay with the former, but in order to assuage my guilt at the latter I’ve started altering my form letter a bit more.  I think I addressed it to “The Musketeers of Oncology at” such and such hospital, and can’t remember what all else I put in there, but it tickled me a bit, I confess.

But the best part of the day was the wee Dutch girl, who for some reason is calling Thailand, despite not speaking any Thai.  She sits on the other side of the room, but her voice carries overhead as she asks doctor after nurse after doctor after nurse about their ultrasouuuuund.  I noticed the progress of their accents infiltrating her own speech, and I think her frustration opened the floodgates, so she carries that last vowel for a good ¾ of a second, with a nice little melodic fluctuation.  Periodically she’ll say things like “no, no I’m not pregnant, I want to talk to you about your ultrasouuuuund.  You are nurse?”  Another impressive display of patience.

Now I’m going to bed.

Actually, here's a totally unrelated picture from last weekend in Gent.  Now I'm going to bed.