Odd job: Holiday puppet show

Pay: $60

A fateful text alighted on my phone one Sunday morning this past November, jarring me awake with its endless buzzing. My brain streamed groggy profanities as I reached out to silence the noisy message. It was from my friend, Katie, who needed help. She and her partner had agreed to substitute for two other friends in a kids’ puppet show. But her partner had just dropped out. So she needed a sub for a sub. Was I available? I let an F-bomb loose and prepared to let Katie down nicely. Me plus puppets plus children would surely equal disaster, as puppets creep me out and I hate everything about children. As I texted her back, though, my instinct to help a friend seized control of my brain. Reflexively, my fingers wrote back that I’d be more than happy to help!! Yes. I used two exclamation marks, which legally obligated me to help.

Had I been fully awake, I might have processed more vital information in Katie’s text. Like that the puppet show was that same day. Or that it started in one hour. Um. Katie wrote back immediately—she was on her way. As I stumble-leapt-crashed out of bed, I tried to ignore the dread tightening in my chest. I’d agreed to do something I was in no way qualified for. Puppetry? For kids? Didn’t I need certification for that? Then I got another Katie text, noting that we’d get $75 for five hours of work. Hm. It’s just puppets and kids! No problem!

Minutes later, Katie’s car skidded to a stop at my place, then peeled away as soon as I hopped in. As we sped along, Katie broke it down. We were part of a Christmas street festival in a fancy Chicago neighborhood. There would be roasted nut vendors, a man in a Rudolph costume, and, of course, a Santa at which children could scream their gift needs. Katie and I would sit at the back of a stationary store in the middle of this madness, entertaining kids as their parents shopped for overpriced knickknacks. As the words “easy money” floated into my mind, Katie uttered the word “singing.” My heart stopped. And then I crapped myself. If I’m not the worst singer in the world, I’m definitely in the bottom million. Katie told me to relax. Just some fun, simple Christmas songs. We tried practicing a few. But here’s the thing. I haven’t sung children’s Christmas songs for years. Have you? Does anyone not a kid and not a caregiver to kids ever sing these songs? I ask these questions because I’m stalling, because I’m ashamed to admit that I blanked on 85% of the lyrics to “Frosty the Snowman.” I had the part about him being a happy soul, but what was before happy? A merry happy soul? Eff it. Was he alive as he could be? Maybe, but that’s a stupid lyric if you think about it. Wait, the children know something, right? What do they know? And isn’t there something about a magic hat? If it’s magical, why the hell is it just lying around? Oh shit, focus Peter, here come the thumps! Ahhhh! There are so many thumps! Why is he thumping so much?

It was a rough rehearsal. But after enough practice, we managed to get down “Frosty,” “Rudolph,” and “Jingle Bells.” “We won’t sing much,” Katie reassured me, although this time her reassurance was tinged with 15% Jesus-this-guy-doesn’t-know-effing-”Frosty?” “We’re just chitchatting with the kids,” she stressed, “singing is only a back-up plan.” I soon discovered, however, that kids don’t enjoy chitchatting with puppets. During our five-hour performance, I sang “Frosty,” “Jingle Bells,” and “Rudolph” at least 45 times. Each. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When we arrived at the stationary shop, we were greeted by its owner, a frail, silver-haired woman in her 60s with an unbelievably raspy voice. She whisked us past shelves and free-standing displays packed with holiday-themed trinkets, ornaments, cards, and toys, all in that category of stuff that you see and think, “Oh that’s nice!” But when you imagine actually owning it you think, “Nevermind, I absolutely do not want a poorly carved, wooden, three-inch-tall reindeer with a lopsided smile.” The owner ushered us into the back storage room, which inexplicably was filled with things I actually wanted to buy, none of which was displayed out front. Beautiful framed art, stacks of vintage postcards, and a life-size, black-and-white, young-heartthrob Elvis Presley cardboard cutout that faced the back room bathroom and twice that day made eye contact with me and caused me to scream in surprise. I love that Elvis cutout. As I wondered what the hell was going on in this ass-backwards store, the owner told us in her deep, scratchy voice that we had five minutes to get ready. Then she spent four of those precious minutes giving us the backstory to our show, which involved her being BFFs with the original puppeteers. Apparently, they’re incredibly talented, had done this show five years in a row, and always boost her sales with their performances. Oh, and neighborhood kids love seeing them every year. So, you know, definitely no pressure. “See you out there.” And, with a single hacking cough, she was gone.

Katie quickly removed the puppets from a duffel bag. They were the ones used in the show in previous years, both realistic-looking bears. One was small and adorable, with a scarf and a newsie cap. The other was mammoth, about five feet tall, with an almost-too-real painted rubber face. It had a beach ball inside it that gave it a huge belly when inflated. As I reached for the smaller bear, Katie thrust the ginormous one into my arms. But Katie, I protested, this one is wearing a tutu and is clearly a girl. She looked confused. I reminded her that my voice is deep and I’m technically a man. “That’s what makes it funny.” I couldn’t disagree, so I began manually inflating the beach ball as she filled me in on the puppets’ personal histories. My puppet’s name was Beartha the Bear. She made her tutu herself and is married to the svelte, be-scarfed Beary the Bear. As I left the back room carrying a puppet roughly my size, my sweaty hand tucked firmly inside its head, ready to move its mouth in a semi-believable way, I started panicking. What if I said something inappropriate or profane? I’m prone to that shit. Or what if this bear puppet was too realistic and gave kids nightmares? I’d be in those nightmares as the creepy puppeteer! Or what if I forgot the lyrics to a song and looked a fool to some 1st graders?

Actually, that last one happened an hour into the show. A 6-year-old boy who had heard our entire catalog twice requested a song. “Sure!” Katie agreed. If she had looked in my direction, she’d have seen me mouthing something like “Please, for the love of God, no, I have no idea how to sing that song, please God no.” She didn’t look over at me. Instead, she launched into a rendition of the requested song: “Good King Wenceslas.” Yep. A 6-year-old boy requested “Good King Wenceslas,” an 1850s Christmas carol described by critics in the early 1900s as “poor and commonplace to the last degree” and “ponderous moral doggerel” which, if sung correctly, “sounds ridiculous.” These are the opinions of early-1900s critics! “Doggerel” was an F-bomb to them. So Katie nailed the song while I made my puppet dance, silently and pathetically. The boy stared at Beartha the whole time, and halfway through the song he loudly asked his mother, “Why is that one not singing?” As my soul curled up and died slowly in my stomach, the mother coolly replied, “I think that puppet celebrates Hanukkah.” Oh yes. I was burned by a soccer mom.

Thankfully, save for the “Wenceslas” fiasco, the first half of the show went smoothly, except for all those times I had to tragically pair my voice, in desperate need of auto-tune, with Katie’s angelic one. The highlight of those first few hours was the infant in his stroller captivated by my bear. After a little puppet handwaving, he started giggling uncontrollably. That laugh! Pure, unbridled giggle-joy! In that moment, I caught a glimpse of how kids can be not entirely awful.

After that day, I amended my “I hate children” attitude to apply only to kids old enough to think they know something but not old enough to realize no one cares. For example, kids four and younger didn’t think the puppets were real, but they couldn’t be sure, so they sat there, rapt with wonder and disbelief, trying to apply skills of rational inquiry to something fantastical. Our puppets were their Higgs boson. The older kids were the terrible ones, a lesson I learned later in the day. It came with an hour to go, just after Katie and I witnessed Rudolph for the second time take off his costume head and disappear into the back room for a pee break. As we recovered from what is truly an innocence-shattering sight for those of any age, the riffraff sauntered into the shop. By riffraff, I mean a family consisting of one eight-ish-year-old boy, one six-ish-year-old boy, one four-ish-year-old girl, and two three-ish-year-old twin boys. Their mother spent the entirety of their stay in the store on her phone, as far from her children as possible. I can’t say I blame her for wanting the distance from her kids, but still. Parent fail. Katie and I began our spiel, asking the kids their names, how old they were, and what they wanted for Christmas. This went fine, until the eight-year-old remembered puppets are fake and his look of wonder melted into one of impish glee. Thus began the following exchange:

Boy: “That’s not real, is it?”

Me: “No, it’s a puppet.”

Katie had told me to be truthful with the older kids, since this would help gain their respect. It almost worked. He was flabbergasted by my honesty. But he soon recovered:

Boy: “Your hand makes it move.”

Me: “Yes it does.”

Boy: “That’s stupid.”

Me: “I don’t think so. I think it’s funny.”

Boy: “I think it’s stupid.”

Me: “I think you’re stupid, you shitty asshole kid.”

Boy: “What did you say?”

Me: “I said you are a shitty asshole, and I think you are going to grow up to be a horrible, depressed person, and you are probably going to kill yourself by the time you are 35.”

Okay, the last part didn’t happen. But how awesome would that have been? Instead, I ignored the boy and focused on his younger sister and twin brothers. Katie, meanwhile, was grappling with the six-year-old boy, who kept trying to rip off Beary’s hat and scarf while cackling like a James Bond villain. The eight-year-old, undeterred, shoved his hand into Beartha’s mouth. “See? It doesn’t hurt because it isn’t real!” He looked triumphant until I closed the rubber bear mouth on his fingers. He pulled his hand away, terrified, and then clearly felt humiliated and furious for getting played by Beartha. The mother kept chatting on her phone, never stopping to discipline her kids. Ten minutes later, the eight-year-old had goaded his siblings into causing as much mayhem as possible. They kept trying to rip off the puppets’ clothing, and at one point they started running around us in circles while screaming. Katie and I let this happen in a detached way. Don’t get me wrong, I considered sticking out my foot and tripping the eight-year-old into a display of holiday chocolates. But I resisted. Barely. Finally, the kid-storm subsided as the mother told them, “Come on, you’ve had enough.” Had enough? What did she mean? Did she let them torment simple puppeteers to help keep their more evil urges in check? As they left, Katie and I shared a look I’m sure tornado survivors share when the storm is over and they’re wearing those comfy fire blankets.

Finally, after the last child had gotten his fill of hugging Beartha (the last child actually hugged Beartha 15 adorable and eventually creepy times for no reason) and the shop owner realized we hadn’t helped sales at all, we were dismissed. Five hours of metal-folding-chair agony was over. I’m pretty sure five more minutes of bearing the weight of that obese bear puppet would have permanently damaged my shoulder. Katie and I packed up the puppets, and then watched the owner slowly cut us checks with clear regret. “Not as much business today as I would have liked.” Maybe that’s because no one wants to buy your wooden, creepy mini-reindeer? “I’m going to have ‘Rudolph’ stuck in my head for days.” I’m going to have “Good King Wenceslas” burned into my soul for eternity. The owner handed us our pay and turned to straighten up a display of Christmas stickers while hacking.

As Katie and I got the hell out of that store, I asked myself if it had been worth it. Katie was practically giddy about the whole thing. But I didn’t think it was actually worth the money, and not just because the store owner had dickishly only given us $60 each instead of the promised $75, something I didn’t notice until later that night. No, the money alone wasn’t enough, but I did have another ridiculous story to tell, and my once universal dislike of children had been distilled into just an intense hatred of shitty 7- to 9-year olds. All that together was certainly worth the five hours of nonstop, embarrassing public singing. And agonizing shoulder pain. Right?

______

This is the part where I usually say, “In some but not all articles, names or identifying characteristics or individual lines of dialogue have been changed to protect identities or because remembering exactly how things happened is hard. But in every case, an effort was made to maintain the integrity of these events that did indeed actually happen.” But, in this case, somebody else wrote the article. So I guess all bets are off.

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Pay: $35

I had just finished telling the children at the after-school program where I work about the toy I spent two years saving up to buy as a kid. A toy I absolutely adored and used to play with all the time. And now Doug, a scruffy-haired second grader, was raising his hand and asking the inevitable follow-up question: “What happened to it?”

“I dunno.” I answered. “It’s probably in my parents’ garage somewhere. Ya see,” and then I prepared to impart some knowledge. Something deep and meaningful. Something that would hopefully stay with them for the rest of their lives. And something that would leave me incredibly satisfied with my own teaching abilities. “Most things you buy won’t make you happy forever.”

I paused to let my illuminating wisdom disperse into the air and be understood in all its complexity, but a second later Doug was blurting out, “Well, yeah. Nothing you buy will make you happy forever.” He was right, of course. It isn’t that most purchases won’t make you happy forever. It’s that all purchases won’t make you happy forever. So there you have it. Two seconds into my attempt to impart life-changing knowledge, some seven-year-old was running intellectual circles around me. It’s possible I’m not that good a teacher.

Recently, I’ve started to look at all the things I own and think about how the things you buy won’t make you happy forever. My bookshelf is overflowing with books I will never reread and my closet is full of clothes I will never wear. Yet I hold onto them for no comprehensible reason. So this week, I did something about it. I started selling my stuff. Namely, my old DVD’s.

I set aside a dozen or so classics like “Back to the Future” and “Extras,” then sold off the rest of my films to friends and Newbury Comics.

It was a little sad parting with movies I used to enjoy, but even sadder to realize how many I owned that I never liked in the first place. To be forced to think about how I wouldn’t be so broke if I hadn’t bought so much crap I never wanted over the years.

I suppose these are good thoughts to be having. After all, remembering how frustrating it was to spend so irresponsibly before will help me to spend more responsibly in the future. And since telling the story of the time I sold 30 DVDs for $35 is pretty boring, today’s blog post is about the three movies that did the best job teaching me to spend responsibly this week. The three dumbest movie purchases of my life.

3. Hotel Rwanda. The discount DVD racks at most stores usually feature movies with premises so awful they leave you questioning the direction of humanity. They offer films starring Sinbad and straight-to-video sequels of originals you never watched.^[1] But the discount rack at Blockbuster was a little different. It was full of movies you didn’t actually want, but could absolutely talk yourself into. All under a banner crying 4-for-$20. And so you’d think, “What do I have to lose? I’ll have something fun to watch tonight, and own four solid movies going forward.” Then you’d get home and realize you didn’t actually feel like watching any of them, and the answer to the question “What do I have to lose?” is “$20 and your Saturday night.”

“Hotel Rwanda” was the poster child for these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Hotel Rwanda is bad. Well before I saw it on the discount rack, I watched it and concluded that it is either a fine movie if I’m being honest or an incredibly moving piece of art if I’m trying to come off as compassionate when talking to people I just met. But regardless of how good it is, it is a movie about the Rwandan genocide. And I probably should have taken a moment to ask myself, when will I ever get the urge to watch it a second time? When am I going to be “in the mood” for Hotel Rwanda? Will it be when a date comes over and I want something to play in the background while we make out? Will it be when I’m sick and stuck in bed all day? During movie marathons with friends? Lazy Sundays? When is the point in your life that makes you say, “Sure I could watch ‘Good Will Hunting’ or season one of ‘Arrested Development,’ but you know what I could really go for right now? Something about the mass extermination of a sect of people that I’ve already seen before.”

2. TMNT. If you’re like me, you grew up having a steady stream of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles intravenously dripped into your blood. Throwing temper tantrums begging your parents to buy you yet another action figure and singing the TV show theme song on repeat until your older sister wanted to throw you through a window. If you’re like me, you also look back on this as the happiest time in your life.

As with all objects of childhood adoration, you would occasionally be tricked into buying something just because your favorite cartoon characters’ names were on it. The worst example of this for me was the VHS of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles concert where live actors sang original songs like “Coming Out of Our Shells!”^[2] It featured awful music, horrendous acting, and an embarrassingly bad storyline where Shredder steals April’s voice and the turtles have to bring it back by playing one last awesome song. If you want to see the climax of the film, skip ahead to 1:11:00 and press play, then just stop whenever you lose the will to live.

Do you think the actors playing the turtles called their friends before or after they finished shooting to tell them that they finally got their big break?

But you probably don’t really regret these occasional hiccups of awful Ninja Turtle purchases, because, at the end of the day, it was your parents’ money.

And then you probably grew up, liked the TV show a bit less, started paying for your own stuff, and stopped buying things just because they were affiliated with the Ninja Turtles. This would be where our paths diverged. Because when I saw a movie called “TMNT,” a 2007 CGI Ninja Turtles film, there was no doubt I would buy it. Even if the back of the DVD case had exactly one review saying, “A great family adventure. Fun, fast and full of charm” by a guy named Moriarty at Ain’t It Cool News. Here’s a good rule of thumb: If a DVD has one review on it and it’s from something called “Ain’t It Cool News,” don’t buy it. Just walk away from the store and never come back.

On the plus side, the movie featured the voicework of Patrick Stewart, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Laurence Fiburne, at least two of whom have way too much of a career to stoop to being in this movie.^[3]

1. Welcome to Mooseport. But the number one movie I shouldn’t have bought is “Welcome to Mooseport.” Because unlike “TMNT,” I had seen this movie before. And unlike “Hotel Rwanda,” I didn’t like it. So why did I buy it? I have no idea. But maybe now that you know I’ve made purchasing decisions like this at various points in my life, you don’t have to wonder how I ended up so broke.

In this film (Gene Hackman’s last), Ray Romano plays an everyman who runs for mayor of the town of Mooseport against Gene Hackman who plays the former President of the United States. It is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a movie with that premise. It certainly makes sense that Gene Hackman retired after shooting. If I made this movie, I would quit acting too.

The movie is not only a weak film, but was also a sad constant reminder on my shelf that this was Gene Hackman’s last contribution to the world of cinema. This from the guy who did “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Mississippi Burning” and “Hoosiers.”^[4] And he went out on Welcome to Mooseport? That would be like if Brett Favre finished his career playing like garbage for the Minnesota Vikings. Or if the former President of the United States ended his career by running for Mayor of a small town called Mooseport. Oh my God, I never realized this film had so many layers.

_____

That toy I spent two years saving money to buy was called the Technodrome. It was the bad guys’ lair in the Ninja Turtles TV show, and I loved that thing. Kind of funny that one of the best purchases I ever made came from a love of the same entity that led to what I now call one of the worst purchases I ever made. Of course, I’m being unfair. I didn’t buy the movie because I wanted to watch it. I bought it because it reminded me of something from my childhood that made me happy.

The kids in my class no longer care too much about the Ninja Turtles. It’s a fad from a different era. They’re interested in something called Ninjago, a show about four ninjas who each have their own colors, are led by their Sensei and work together to fight an evil villain. Seriously.

The kids play with their toys and quote the TV show with the same intensity that I did when I was seven. They are unapologetically, devoutly in love with a cartoon show and its characters.

As adults, we desperately seek something that will make us feel that happy. But it’s easier when you’re a kid. When you’re a kid, you can find pure elation in a piece of plastic. When you grow up, you have to start looking for happiness in your love life and your career and boy is that harder.

So maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on myself about buying something because it reminded me of the time when buying something could make me happy.

______

Pay: $100

Both sides take a leap of faith when you reply to a Craigslist job offer. The job posters are trusting that you will show up and do the work, while you are trusting that, when you arrive, whoever posted the ad won’t tie you up and sacrifice you to their underworld god, Zotan. If you’ve ever been on either side of a Craigslist post, you know that these expectations are both optimistic.

But in this case, a company called The Bluco Center was offering $100 to draw 100mL of my blood. And while I’m not sure where exactly I draw the line on being extra cautious about accepting gigs, I know that it’s somewhere before the point where they stick a needle in my arm.

So I started investigating. Problem was, no one had heard of The Bluco Center. The Better Business Bureau said they had no record of the company.^[1] Yelp had zero reviews, and if you’ve ever been on Yelp, you know that that’s saying something. A friend told me that people also post reviews on Google+, but all that gave me for my trouble was the dirty feeling you get when you use Google+.

I was torn. On the one hand, I really wanted $100. On the other hand, this is how most kidnapping movies starring Liam Neeson start. So I gave the company a call.

“Well,” explained the secretary, “we work in a sterile, professional environment, and we use brand new needles for every patient. Everyone who works here is thoroughly trained and has an average of 6-10 years’ experience in the medical field.”

“Okay.” I said. “Is there anyone you can refer me to outside the company that attests to this being a safe and clean facility? Like the Better Business Bureau or a local medical center?”

“Um… Well, we are on Facebook.” Oh! You’ve been screened by Facebook! Well why didn’t you just say that in the first place?!

“You got anything else?”^[2]

 ________

The woman on the phone had told me that The Bluco Center was located on Main Street, right next to St. Mary’s Hospital. Now, if you’re like me, when someone tells you they’re performing medical trials right where a hospital is located, you would assume that they were in some way associated with the hospital, and not, for example, located in what appeared to be an abandoned shack that happened to be next door to the hospital.

You would be wrong.

The pavement of the parking lot looked like it had been ripped by an earthquake, and stray trash was scattered everywhere. The building’s splintered glass window was held together by scotch tape. I braced myself for the worst as I opened the oak door. If it’s a crack den, I run. If it’s a crack den, I run. I told myself.

But rather than the dirt-infested people warming themselves with trashcan fires that I anticipated, I found carpeted floors, beautiful furniture, and a plasma TV on the wall. Most impressive of all, the magazines in the waiting room were from this month. Maybe I wasn’t going to be abducted today!

I signed some forms, then was taken to a back room by a woman named Helga. I had talked to Helga on the phone and was a bit disappointed to meet her in person. With her thick German accent, and a name like Helga, I had been picturing a burly woman who could bench press a grizzly bear, eat thirty sausages and then go compete in a rowing competition in which she would undoubtedly fail the pee test after setting a world record.^[3] But this Helga was gentle and thin, with wire-framed glasses.

She led me into her office, where I took a seat. As I answered her questions, I gazed around the room, grateful that it looked like a real doctor’s office. There were boxes with gauze, fancy instruments, and a bed covered in butcher paper. While the boxes labeled “blood and stools” were mildly disconcerting, they did at least seem like something a legitimate lab might have.

“Now I just need a small sample for the centrifuge.” Helga said, as though that sentence made any sense. Did she just say centrifuge? Like what they use to train astronauts?

She pricked my finger with a needle to draw some blood, then put the blood into a strange-looking machine that I assumed was the centrifuge. She flipped a switch, and a loud whirring sound started up like a factory turbine.

“What’s your height?” She shouted over the roar of the machine.

“About 6’1”” I shouted back. I felt like we were on the floor of a factory. What the hell was happening to my blood right now.

“Weight?” She shouted.

“190!” I hollered.

She stuck a thermometer under my tongue, glanced at the output, then wrote down 34.7% on her paper. Is that my temperature? Who has a percent for a temperature?

The centrifuge spun to a stop and she checked the readings. “Ooo, you just made the cut. You have a reading of 34.”

“Good.” Thank god. I was worried my centrifuge score might be only 32 today.

“So we’ll be taking 100 ml of your blood, a bit less than they take when you donate with Red Cross. Is that okay?”

“Yeah, that’s fine. I’ve given blood before.”

“Okay. You sure? Because this can hurt.” Helga asked this question or one like it about seven times. To the point where I started to worry just how strong of a whimp vibe I give off when I meet someone.

Then a big, strong woman came in the door. Now she looked like a Helga. “Hi, my name is Persephone.” She said. Of course it is. “I’ll be drawing your blood today.”

Once she injected the needle in my arm, she looked over at me and, with a deeply maternal voice asked, “You doing okay? Does it hurt?” Then she made a wincing face like she was experiencing sympathy pain for what must be a truly torturous experience on my part.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” How much did they coddle the patients who weren’t 6’1”, 190-pound men who had given blood before?

A few minutes in, she looked over again, tilting her head as she spoke. “How ya feeling? Okay?” For Christ’s sake.

“Yeah.”

“You are doing such a good job.” This hyper-coddling environment was making me long for the time when I feared this would be a callous, unhygenic clinic.

Once we had finished and put the gauze over my arm, Helga handed me a cup of pineapple juice while Persephone clamped the blood samples.

“So I clamp here? And here?” Persephone asked Helga, as though she was still learning. This is always what you want to hear from someone who just finished injecting you with a needle: insecurity about how this all works.

“You know what?” I said. “I don’t need any juice.”

“Okay.” Helga shrugged and threw the juice into the sink. The same sink where Persephone was clamping my blood samples.

“Oh! Juicy blood!” Persephone shouted.

“Ha!” Helga laughed. “Juicy blood!”

They shared a laugh like this was the kind of thing that happened so often it was becoming an inside joke.

When we were done, they gave me my check and led me to the exit. And that was it. Aside from the restriction that I couldn’t give blood for another 56 days, I was done.

_________

I didn’t think much about the experience until 56 days later when I got a call from an unrecognized number.

“Jonathan! It’s Helga!” Helga exclaimed like we were old friends.

The name rang a bell, I just couldn’t quite… “From The Bluco Center!” Bluco Center… Bluco… “Do you know why I’m calling?”

“Well–”

“We need more blood!” She shouted. Her tone was the kind someone uses when they tell you you’re their 10,000^th customer and you just won a grand prize, despite the words sounding like dialogue from a 1970′s vampire movie.

“Um…” I thought back on the experience I had last time. The frightening parking lot and the strange machine that roared like a car engine.

“Though I should tell you we have moved.” She said. “And you may notice our phone number is different.” I’m not crazy about giving blood with someone who sounds like they’re on the run from the cops. “But don’t worry, we still pay $100.”

“I’ll be there.”

______________

1. ^[1] This information could be interpreted in one of two ways. The BBB only has files on companies that either registered with the BBB, or that people logged complaints against. If a business isn’t in the BBB database, that means it either has never generated a complaint, or that it isn’t an actual business, but rather something run out of the back of some guy’s car. Craigslist gigs often trend towards the latter. ↩
2. ^[2] To disspell any concerns my readers may have, and by that I really mean my mom who is probably having a heart attack right now as she pictures me giving blood at this clinic, I should say that at this point the secretary asked a coworker who gave me several very good, credible references, including websites ending with .gov. You know it’s official when it ends in .gov. ↩
3. ^[3] My kind of woman! ↩

In some but not all articles, names or identifying characteristics or individual lines of dialogue have been changed to protect identities or because remembering exactly how things happened is hard. But in every case, an effort was made to maintain the integrity of these events that did indeed actually happen.

Do you feel life would be easier if you didn’t have to check my site or twitter or facebook to see if I had new content up? If so, how lazy are you? Well then good news, you can sign up for some of these handy dandy mailing lists so that you’ll just get a letter in your inbox whenever I do something new:

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In order to be subscribed, you must click the confirmation link in the e-mail you will receive. If you don't see one, check your spam folder.

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Pay: $150

This is a trial.

It’s not Jack Nicholson hollering at Tom Cruise that he can’t handle the truth. It’s not Joe Pesci asking about two utes. It is boring lawyers and uncomfortable chairs and court-provided free lunches that taste like legal pads.

“You have been brought in for what is called alternative mediation,” explained an old man with gray hair who paced back and forth in the middle of the room. The job offer had come from a market research company looking for jurors. They never told me what exactly I’d be doing, but I had heard of lawyers hiring people to watch simulations of upcoming trials so they could see how jurors might react to various testimonies and evidence, and had assumed that’s what this was. But as the man in the center of the room spoke, I started to doubt myself. The way he was talking, it didn’t sound like he was describing a simulation. It sounded like we were about to adjudicate a bona fide court case.

“The defendant, Dr. Taylor, is being charged in a malpractice suit,” he explained, “and you will be asked to determine if he was negligent in a surgical operation.” I looked around the room. Was this real? Were we actually going to determine someone’s fate today?

“Now people often ask, ‘is this real?’” The man said. Yes, let’s address that, I thought. “Or they ask, ‘is this binding?’ Well, let me put it this way: Is anything really binding? I mean, any case can be appealed, and it only becomes binding when it finally reaches the Supreme Court.”^[1] He paused for a moment, then continued, “so, if there are no further questions, let’s get started.”

Wait, was that your answer? What just happened? What did we conclude? Is this real?

Then the man opened the door and let in two other old men with gray hair– the attorneys– and an even older man with no hair– the judge.

After some brief introductions, the judge began, “Your job is to determine if Dr. Taylor’s actions qualify as negligence. Now what is negligence? Negligence refers to a doctor not meeting the standard of care that would be provided by an average physician. Negligence is making mistakes the average doctor would not make. In a civil case, the prosecution does not have to convince you beyond a shadow of a doubt. They only have to convince you it is more likely than not that the defendant was negligent. Now there are two things I must tell you. One, under no circumstances are you to look things up on your smart phones about medicine or the law or the people in this room.” He repeated this every time we took a break, to the point where it became clear that jurors in 2012 look stuff up on their phones all the time. And if you’ve ever perused Yahoo! Answers, you know that this is a very dangerous development.^[2] “Two, this is real life, not Law & Order. So don’t expect everything to work the way it does on TV.”^[3] Then he motioned to the attorneys. “Counselors, you may begin.”

As though feeling the need to reemphasize the judge’s point that real trials are not as exciting as they are on TV, the prosecuting attorney launched into one of the most boring speeches I have ever heard. A 25-minute opening statement full of indecipherable medical terms and charts that in no way clarified his point.

The defense attorney practically had to be nudged awake when it was his turn to talk. If he had decided to pull a My Cousin Vinny, and just gone with an opening statement of “Everything that guy just said is bullshit,” he would have won over half the jury right there. He did not. He submitted an equally lengthy and confusing stream of babble, and by the time he was done, three jurors had hung themselves from boredom.

When we were subsequently dismissed for a 10-minute break, people fell over themselves climbing out of their chairs and evacuating the room. They stampeded to the coffee machine and started gunning down caffeine.

The case boiled down to this. Dr. Taylor’s patient had spent the last four years complaining about things like chest pains, vomiting, and dizziness while also developing lesions across her heart, causing Dr. Taylor to operate. The operation required Dr. Taylor to cut a chord whose name was quite possibly made up. I think it was the timing belt. But it may have been the crank shaft. Either way, it was definitely connected to the carburettor. The doctor cut the wrong chord, snipping the artium dextrum stroganoff. An important chord located where the timing belt should have been. The patient started hemorrhaging, a second doctor was called into the room, and the patient was patched back up. The longterm ramifications of this event on the patient’s life were never articulated. In fact, we never even met the patient.

The prosecution was arguing that a) the surgery should never have been performed, and b) Dr. Taylor should have been able to tell that what he thought was the timing belt looked different from how it should look, and therefore he should have conducted an on-the-spot test which could determine whether that was just an irregular timing belt or a different chord altogether. A test which would have revealed it was the stroganoff chord and therefore should not be cut. The defense was countering with “Nuh-uh!”

Taking the stand after break was the prosecution’s expert witness, who had apparently gone to the same charisma classes as the lawyers. Even she seemed bored with her testimony. She explained several key points: One, the patients’ symptoms did not mandate surgery. Two, the doctor was a fool to think that these lesions were cancerous. You may notice that the doctor never contended that they were. But if you think that’s going to stop a lawyer from implying that the defendant thought they were, then casting doubt on that diagnosis, then you’ve never met a lawyer.^[4] And three, any doctor worth his stethoscope would have noted that that the timing belt didn’t look right, performed the additional exam, and thus realized it was the stroganoff chord. By the time she was done, we were all rather stunned that Dr. Taylor was even allowed to be left unsupervised when feeding himself, let alone perform open-heart surgery.

Then the defense attorney got up. “Is the prosecution paying you to be here today?” He asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “I am being paid to compensate for my time away from my office and the money I would be making there.”

“And how much are you being paid?”

“$700 an hour.”

And with that, you could see the thought “well fuck that testimony” flutter across every juror’s face.

Things took a turn for the entertaining when the attorney then went on the offensive. Methodically discrediting everything the doctor did or said, asking aggressive questions, then following up with condescending and accusatory lines like, “But you would never admit that because then it would mean your testimony was a lie. Isn’t that true, doctor?”^[5]

It slowly became clear both that the doctor’s testimony was not bulletproof and that the defense lawyer was a douche.

Next up was Dr. Taylor himself. A frail, timid man who spoke as though any misstep could ruin his career.

“Can you please read from the testimony you gave in the deposition last month?” The prosecuting lawyer asked. He was almost as nasty and slightly more smug than the defense attorney.

Dr. Taylor read from the record that the lawyer handed him, reading both the plaintiff’s lines and his own. “Plaintiff: And when you saw it, how could you be certain that it was not the artium dextrum stroganoff? Dr. Taylor: It was too smooth. The artium dextrum stroganoff is coarse. Plaintiff: You’re sure? It’s not supposed to be smooth? Dr. Taylor: No, it’s coarse.”

Then the prosecuting lawyer interrupted Dr. Taylor. “And now you know that the stroganoff chord is actually what?” He asked.

“Smooth,” he conceded like a student who had been caught cheating on a test.

The lawyer’s lips curled up in a faint, unpleasant smirk. Gotcha.

Our final interview of the day was with Dr. Whitman. The defense’s expert witness there to tell us that Dr. Taylor did everything perfectly. The hemorrhaging patient on the operating table notwithstanding.

Dr. Whitman was the first person to appear in this trial with any real charisma. He spoke smoothly and articulately. He had a handsome face and soulful bedroom eyes that left you completely disarmed. I’m sorry, I got distracted, what were we talking about?

Oh yes, the testimony.

He assured us that if he had been in the defendant’s shoes, he would not have performed the secondary exam and would have cut the same chord Dr. Taylor did. It was a point the prosecution would challenge him on, asking roughly sixty different times, “So if it was you, you would have done exactly the same thing?” As the interrogation continued, Dr. Whitman started getting testy. Giving answers that started with phrases like, “Well, as I’ve already stated several times,” and, “I don’t know how else to phrase this,” while rolling his eyes and sighing heavily. You could see him mentally noting that $700-an-hour was not enough for this shit.

After a pair of fittingly dull closing statements, the old man with gray hair reappeared and told us it was time to deliberate.

We had before us Dr. Taylor who either did everything right or everything wrong, depending on who you asked. He had a patient with four years worth of symptoms and multiple lesions on her heart that either did or did not necessitate surgery. He cut a chord that he either should or shouldn’t have recognized as irregular. And it caused an unquantified amount of damage to a patient we never met. But other than that, it seemed like a pretty open-and-shut case.

We started by going around the room, taking turns giving our thoughts on the case. As people spoke, I stared at a giant mirror spanning the wall across from us. Who was watching us on the other side? What were they looking for? And hasn’t anyone come up with a more subtle system for spying on people than a two-way mirror?

“Dr. Taylor did everything he was supposed to.” Argued one woman. “He didn’t call for the additional test because all the evidence dictated that he didn’t need to.”

“This patient is going to be in pain for the rest of her life,” yelled another. “Because this doctor was incompetent! He should have ordered the second test!”

“I dunno man, it’s hard being a fuckin’ doctor. He’s just doing the best he can, ya know? I ain’t voting against him.” Said a blue collar guy who had clearly put a lot of thought into this.

“Well, I think we have to discuss what is the standard of care? I mean, this is Boston, with some of the best hospitals on the planet. So we have to compare this doctor to not just some random doctor, but to the crème-de-la-creme that is the surgeons we have at this specific hospital.” Yelled another woman who had taken it upon herself to completely redefine the term “average standard of care.”

We never did reach much of a resolution, but the old man with gray hair came back in and told us that would be okay. We just had to fill out some forms indicating the verdicts each of us would individually render and why we thought what we thought. After that, we would all receive $150 checks for our time and were free to go.

We did as we were told, then headed for the exits.

The first elevator down looked a little too full, so I waited for the next one. While I stood there, I saw a side door open and the prosecuting attorney walk out. We nodded at each other, then quietly hopped on the next elevator down.

“So am I allowed to ask you what that whole exercise was?” I said.

“They just want to see how jurors would react to various arguments, which side is more likely to win if this actually goes to trial. Should they try to settle before it does and save some money on legal fees?”

The doors opened and we headed through the lobby to the street. “I’m not really working on this case.” He said. “They just hired me for the simulation.” Then he turned down the street and disappeared into the darkness.

In hindsight, it was kind of like we were told at the beginning of the day. Our decisions weren’t really binding, but they did matter. After all, what happened on this day in this room could have resulted in one side surrendering or in their deciding to push on with newfound dedication.

And a patient suffering from a surgery gone bad either was or wasn’t going to be compensated. A surgeon either was or wasn’t going to be hit with a big penalty, one that could alter the course of his career and livelihood.

Either way, it was quite possible that what the 12 of us thought of a couple pretend lawyers making a pair of poorly articulated cases would dramatically impact two people’s lives.

I walked to an ATM across the street, deposited my check, then went on with my day as though nothing quite that important had just happened.

_____________

1. ^[1] I can think of a few people on death row who might disagree, but go ahead. ↩
2. ^[2] For example, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/07/stupid-yahoo-answers-dumb-bad-worst_n_1861634.html#slide=1476400 and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/07/stupid-yahoo-answers-dumb-bad-worst_n_1861634.html#slide=1489728 ↩
3. ^[3] This is one of those things that’s much easier to accept in the abstract than in reality. When he says something like that, you think, “Of course TV is different from real life. I know that.” Then the trial starts and you want to scream out things like, “Wait! Why is the prosecution asking questions before the defense on the defense’s witness? Why are opening statements more than two minutes?! What about the DNA evidence??!!!” While we’re on the subject of things that TV and movies have convinced us are real, I was shocked when I learned the following: 1) When you go to jail, you get more than one phone call. 2) Crawling through a ventilation shaft is borderline impossible. And 3) You don’t drown in quicksand. Sometimes the real world is disappointing. ↩
4. ^[4] How does a lawyer sleep? First he lies on his right side. Then he lies on the other. Ay-oh! Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. I love lawyer jokes. What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 100? Your honor. What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 50? Senator. Okay, I’ll stop. ↩
5. ^[5] Seriously, how are you supposed to answer that? ↩

In some but not all articles, names or identifying characteristics or individual lines of dialogue have been changed to protect identities or because remembering exactly how things happened is hard. But in every case, an effort was made to maintain the integrity of these events that did indeed actually happen.

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Dan did end up starting that blog and you can check it out at http://danferris10.tumblr.com/.

Odd Job: Moving

Pay: $60

As is so often the case with really bad ideas, this all started in a college dining hall. Winter was starting to let go of its stranglehold, and Vermont’s version of Spring (mud season) was just around the corner. My friends and I were finishing up Sodexho Catering’s surrealist interpretation of Mexican cuisine when my friend Andy’s cell phone began vibrating itself off the table.

Let’s pause here to describe Andy.

Andy stands at a towering 6’4”, was a power-forward in hockey, and has been known to routinely rip phone books in half. Clear enough picture? Good, we can proceed.

He caught the phone, interrupting its vibration-induced, suicidal plunge toward the cafeteria floor, and looked at the caller ID with surprise.

“Winston…?”

Winston was one of those people we had met at the beginning of Freshman year, when social circles were fluid and you called everyone “dude,” not because you were trying to sound like Keanu Reeves, but because you didn’t remember their name. He didn’t play an active part in our lives these days, but he was a nice enough guy. I didn’t pay attention to the conversation, until suddenly Andy was handing the phone to me.

I gave a tentative “hello?”

“Hey Dan, how would you like to make some quick money?”

I paused here and flashed quickly through all my encounters with Winston, trying to remember any evidence of activities with federally mandated minimum sentences. Drug smuggling? Human trafficking? Underground dog fighting? He seemed clean in my memory, so I answered.

“Mayyyybe?”

He went on to describe the job, which was thankfully devoid of criminal implications. His friend’s family ran a moving company, and needed an extra hand for the day. Winston wasn’t available, and Andy had a prior engagement, so I was next in line.

“Winston, have you met me?” I asked.

Let’s pause now to describe me. At the time I was 6’0 and 130 pounds. Soaking wet. The only physical activities I participated in were ultimate frisbee and racquetball, neither of which added bulk to my freakishly wiry frame. Nevertheless, he assured me I would be completely capable of performing my duties without embarrassment or harm being visited upon by person.

This was, put bluntly, bullshit.

The day of the move, I stood waiting at the predetermined meeting point. An old Taurus pulled up, and a young woman, who would be my partner for the day, hopped out.

Let’s take another descriptive interlude. My employer and coworker, Andrea, was roughly 5’5, and looked about as much like a professional mover as I did.

We sized each other up incredulously, and I ran through the many ways in which the wheels could come off the wagon with this job. I imagine we both were thinking the same thing:

“Fucking Winston…”

Despite the obvious problems with this scenario, she decided not to fire me, perhaps holding out hope that untold muscles secretly lurked beneath my hoodie. She filled me in on the drive over. Luckily, we were only moving things into the house from an already-packed truck. The truck was not gigantic, and it was parked right outside the house. For a brief period of time, I convinced myself this would be easy.

Then we got there.

I came upon the uneasy realization that this woman, who resembled the female version of Jerry Garcia, as only Vermonters can, had accidentally packed a furniture warehouse in her moving truck. And this was no lightweight, Ikea furniture either. It was all crafted out of impossibly heavy-duty wood, culled, I can only imagine, from the alien forests of Endor after a protracted conflict with the Ewoks. As my diminutive companion and I strained muscles that I did not even know existed, I began to think that this had been some kind of elaborate plot. Winston was going to pop out of the bushes with Ashton Kutcher any moment. But no cameras or game-show hosts arrived.

The feminine Jerry Garcia watched us with a very strange expression on her face. A mix of awe, consternation, silent disapproval, exasperation to the point of indifference, and just a wee bit of pride in the human race. Andrea and I carried things we should not have been able to carry. We bent the space-time continuum getting a sofa through the small door, and we slapped Isaac Newton in his ugly face in the process of getting a bed frame up a set of stairs so steep and narrow it had to have been designed for Keebler Elves.

When all was said and done, I felt like a victim in a Saw movie. The muscles in my arms were not just sore, they felt stretched. My back felt like Bruce Lee had mistaken it for his punching bag, then realized it was my back and decided to punch it some more anyway. Jerry Gar-She-a, who had just witnessed this absurd display of self-destruction masquerading as endurance, took pity and tipped us both $20. Combined with my hourly wage, this brought the grand total to $60.

Being a sophomore in college, I of course invested it wisely in a non-volatile stock with a decent yield and a dividend reinvestment plan.

Alcohol. I bought alcohol.

_______

This is the part where I usually say, “In some but not all articles, names or identifying characteristics or individual lines of dialogue have been changed to protect identities or because remembering exactly how things happened is hard. But in every case, an effort was made to maintain the integrity of these events that did indeed actually happen.” But, in this case, somebody else wrote the article. So I guess all bets are off.

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Between the cartoonish pictures, the bizarre alignment job on the title and the phrase “There is some opportunities,” it felt less like a call to civic duty and more like something a nine-year-old would design. But poor job posting or not, I still found myself at a polling station on election day, my eyes aching from the six AM start time. There was something exciting about the idea. About being a part of the process that ensured everyone a chance to vote. About being a part of what made our country great: Democracy.

On election day, I worked at a polling station in my neighborhood. Below is a running diary I kept of the day.

4:00 AM- My alarm went off, blaring a loud staticy radio station I didn’t even listen to. Fuck democracy.

6:00 AM- I arrived at the polling station and was immediately put to work by the Warden, which was the official title for the guy in charge. The second in command was called the Clerk, and everyone else was called an election inspector despite not actually inspecting anything. The government was continuing its storied tradition of being horrible at giving people titles.^[1] I started posting signs that said things like Vote Aqui and Sample Ballot. Setup had been covered pretty thoroughly in training.

“Training for first time election inspectors” was a few weeks earlier at City Hall. Fitting the stereotype, most of the people there were over 70, which of course begot the question, how old were the people in the “Returning election inspector” classes?

We were told important rules like how if someone screws up a ballot and marks, for example, two different names for one office, we have to “spoil the ballot” and give them a new one. If it happened a second time, they got a second chance. But if it happened a third time, that was it. No more ballots. The old three-strike policy.^[2]

“Sometimes,” the woman leading the session told us, “people will get upset when you tell them they can’t vote. I even had one guy have a heart attack.” She said nonchalantly. Most people laughed, but it was that kind of uneasy laugh that said, “Wait, so did he live?”^[3]

6:45- Done setting up 15 minutes early, the Warden (probably in his 40′s), wandered over to chat. He said it was nice having another young guy on the team. I looked around the room. It was like a Matlock marathon. Everyone there had probably been cashing social security checks for a decade. Almost on cue, one of the women held up the cell phone that our polling depot had been provided by the city and shouted, “How do you turn this thing on?” I walked over and turned it on, an action that was actually met with applause from the old women. “Oo, thank goodness we have Jonathan here,” said one of them. I could get used to this.

7:00- The polls opened, and we assumed our positions as the first voter walked through the door. I was given two responsibilities. One was manning the machine where people inserted ballots, instructing people on how to put them in and making sure every vote was counted. This paled in comparison to my other job which may have been the lynchpin of the whole operation: giving out “I Voted” stickers.

8:00- As the day wore on, all the workers executed their responsibilities flawlessly. But while most of them were doing important things like crossing people’s names off the voter list or fielding calls from downtown, one guy named Darren seemed pretty expendable. Once people signed in he would say, “Go right ahead” if there was a free voting booth, or “Just hold on a second” if they were all taken. He was like one of those traffic cops who waves cars through when they have a green light, then holds them up when it turns red.

“Thank God Darren’s here.” Edna, one of the older election officials, proclaimed. Which is exactly what I was thinking, only she was being sincere. “If we didn’t have him I don’t know what we’d do.” What the fuck was Darren doing?! The sentence should’ve been “Thank God everyone but Darren is here.” I would have been even more resentful, but at least Darren had brought pastries for everyone.

8:15- A voter just tried to use a voting booth, but then saw they were all taken. Where were you on that one Darren?

10:31- After his ballot went through the machine, a man looked me in the eye and said, “Thank you for volunteering.” I decided not to disillusion him by informing him that I was getting paid (with his tax dollars no less). I simply said thank you and smiled. And as I did, I actually thought to myself, “You know what? He’s right. I am what makes this country great. I mean, he didn’t say that exactly, but it was implied. You’re welcome for my service, sir. You’re welcome.”

It doesn’t take much to stroke my ego.

10:45- A woman, who I assume was recently granted citizenship, put her ballot in the machine, then proudly told me, “This is my first time.” I seriously thought I might cry.^[4]

2:30- With things at their slowest, I took a moment to vote myself, marking my ballot for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson for President.^[5]

4:36- Just before inserting her ballot, a voter gave it a quick once-over. “Oh wait,” she exclaimed. “That’s not what I meant to put.”

“We can give you a new ballot?” I proposed.

As she glanced back at the voting booth, I could see her calculating the time it would take to redo everything. “N’ah. That’s okay.” She put her ballot in the machine and marched out the door. This country’s in good hands.

4:45- Edna just came over and took about 40 “I Voted” stickers. “These are for the kids!” She told me defiantly.

“What? The kids can get stickers here.”

“Yeah, but you don’t give them any.” Edna said, then turned and walked away.

I have been accused of many things in my life, but not giving kids stickers? Who am I? Mussolini? Any kids accompanying their parents always got stickers, but I sometimes teased them a bit first. I would say something like, “Wait a second, did you really vote?” In a stern, jokey voice. Kids love that stuff. But I wasn’t actually denying anyone stickers. I’m not a monster.

5:40- Edna was out of control. She was giving out five and six stickers to every kid who came through the door. At one point, she actually walked into the booth while someone was voting to give his kid a sticker.

6:30- Having run out of stickers, Edna returned to my station to poach some more just as a family was coming through to submit their ballot. I gave both the mom and the little girl a sticker, then Edna immediately grabbed the sticker roll and gave the little girl another six. Come on.

8:00- After 14 hours, and 800-something voters, it was time to close the doors. We congratulated each other on a smooth day and started wrapping up.

8:25- The Warden printed out the results for our polling station. 600 and change for Obama, 200 and change for Romney, and six people voted for Gary Johnson. I didn’t like his chances.

8:40- With the signs down and the ballots sorted through, the only thing left to worry about was the clerk’s log book. I’m not sure exactly what was being added and subtracted but some arithmetic was required. One woman started reading off numbers while another added them together in her calculator. “1735+665” She called off.

“2400” Answered the woman with the calculator.

“Okay, now what’s 2400+64?” At this moment, something went wrong with the calculator.

“Oh shoot.”

“Well, what is it? What’s 2400+64?”

“I don’t know, the calculator’s having problems! Hold on.”

“What’s 2400+64??!”

“One second!”

I stared in total shock as two intelligent, grown adults were defeated by the math equation 2400+64. They eventually solved it, but only when they finally got the calculator working again.^[6]

9:00- Our day was over and it was time to take off. We said our goodbyes and I felt bad that I wouldn’t see these people again. I complained about Edna taking stickers, but the fact of the matter was, she was a sweetheart. And I have to concede that it actually did help to have Darren directing traffic. And maybe 2400+64 is a bit tougher than I’m giving it credit for.^[7] Everyone there was incredibly friendly, and they had all just given 15 hours to helping people in their community vote for money that they probably didn’t really need. I smiled and waved goodbye, then headed for my car. When I got in, I started the engine and turned on the news. It was 9:00 on election day and I had no idea who was winning.

_______

1. ^[1] Seriously, why do we use the same name for heads of various departments that we use for receptionists? And whose idea was it to also give this title to the Press Secretary who is neither a receptionist nor a member of the cabinet? And where did cabinet come from? Isn’t that where people store their fine china, not their chief advisors? Was it because we realized that system was ridiculous that we started calling heads of other departments czars? Does it bother anyone that that was a title borrowed from a country that was our biggest adversary for decades and had a government representing the opposite of democracy? Why don’t we just have one title for a second-in-command as opposed to using the term vice when it refers to presidents, lieutenant when it refers to governors, deputy when it refers to mayors, and, apparently, clerk at polling stations? Why is the role of Senate President less powerful than Senate Majority leader? And, most importantly, what the hell is an alderman? ↩
2. ^[2] Am I the only one who wonders how different our society would be if there were four strikes to a strikeout instead of three? Think about our three-strike system for criminal offenses which punishes crimes far more severely the third time someone commits them than the first two. There are literally people in prison for the rest of their life who would be free right now if baseball had four strikes to an out instead of three. There are other people currently on unemployment for violating their company’s three-strike policies and elementary school kids serving stern timeout punishments. I’m not saying we should have four strikes to an out or anything, because all those problems pale in comparison to the idea of baseball games being even longer. But it’s something I think about. ↩
3. ^[3] This was never answered. The world of an election inspector is a cold-hearted one. ↩
4. ^[4] When I related this story to a friend, she pointed out that the woman might just have been someone who never bothered to vote before. I thought back on the scenario and how she had no accent and a very Americanized look to her. Suddenly, I didn’t feel quite so awed by the experience. ↩
5. ^[5] If you’re curious, I also voted for right to repair, for dying with dignity, and for legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes. I forget who it was that told me this, but, apparently, when Colorado legalized medicinal marijuana, the number of Colarodoans with “glaucoma” increased 1000%. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s my new favorite statistic. ↩
6. ^[6] It was 2464. ↩
7. ^[7] It’s not. ↩

In some but not all articles, names or identifying characteristics or individual lines of dialogue have been changed to protect identities or because remembering exactly how things happened is hard. But in every case, an effort was made to maintain the integrity of these events that did indeed actually happen.

Do you feel life would be easier if you didn’t have to check my site or twitter or facebook to see if I had new content up? If so, how lazy are you? Well then good news, you can sign up for some of these handy dandy mailing lists so that you’ll just get a letter in your inbox whenever I do something new:

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If you want to see more of Peter’s work, go to http://theloweststair.wordpress.com/. Okay, enjoy:

Odd job: Pwning n00bs at MTG

Pay: At the bitter end, a net gain of $11.58

You have to understand. I was desperate. I was working from home a lot, and I couldn’t afford a desk, or anywhere to sit besides my bed. My apartment was too small for a dinner table, and a coffee table cost too much. I would often devour my meals standing over the sink or a trashcan. It was no way to live. So I began searching for supplemental income. Fate stepped in to assist me one Friday night, when a new work friend named Chris reintroduced me to a game I had played throughout high school and a bit in college. A game I had run screaming from when I realized I valued the company of normal people, an active social life, and basic hygiene more than I thought. A game that exists on the periphery of my conscious mind, peeking in every so often as it tries to lure me back. The game? Magic: The Gathering.^[1]

Magic: The Gathering (henceforth known as MTG because it makes me feel less ashamed to type its shortened name) is a trading card game whose cards are all styled to fit a dark, elaborate fantasy world theme. The cards feature such things as goblins, elves, demons, and the occasional hot sorceress. Not to get too off-topic, but I should point out that what Barbie dolls do to eff up young girls’ perception of the female body, MTG has done times one thousand to its adolescent male players.^[2] But I digress. Growing up I was hyper-competitive but not exactly able to dominate in athletic situations. When you’re so competitive that you’ve almost gotten into fistfights over games of “Rock, Paper, Scissor,” and so out of shape that it takes you 25 minutes to “run” a mile, you are smart to avoid sports. Sitting at a table and playing cards competitively was exactly High School Peter’s speed.

I grew up in southern New Hampshire, however, and no matter how good of an MTG player you are in southern NH, you ain’t going to be cashing checks because of your MTG skillz. But Chris My Work Friend showed me that in my new home of Chicago, there are several weekly tournaments with cash prizes or that at least give out tons of valuable cards that can be turned into cash. So, armed with hours and hours of research on the current best cards to play, a new, painstakingly assembled deck, and the deep, deep yearning for a place to rest my steaming hot bowls of soup when eating on my couch, I registered for the biggest Chicago MTG tournament I could find. When I invited Chris My Work Friend to join me, he narrowed his eyes and slowly stroked his carefully groomed, flaming red goatee for several moments, straightened out his shiny, perfectly ironed vest, and informed me he didn’t think a tournament was his style. I had a feeling. MTG has been around for 20 years, and the game has always been approached by players in one of two ways: either build a deck that can beat everyone else’s or hoard as many of the rarest cards as you can find. Chris My Work Friend isn’t a player, he’s a hoarder who owns no less than 10,000 MTG cards, enough to make me worry someone will find him one day crushed beneath a pile of them. Though if that happens I’m sure he’ll be wearing a creepy smile on his face.

Oh, gentle reader, if only High School Peter could have seen me that day! 30 other players– some with incredibly valuable and strong decks– filled up a storefront that had been taken over by the card shop next door. The room was dank and dimly lit with concrete walls and floors. It served nicely as its tournament area, and I’m sure would also be a terrific place for some late night serial killing. I felt a combination of nerves and glee as the first-round match-ups were announced. I took my seat on a cold metal folding chair, while dozens of players around me produced their decks and began to rapidly shuffle while trading nerd pleasantries or staring with dead eyes at their opponents. As I drew my starting hand, both my nerves and my glee vanished. It was business as usual, as though hypercompetitive, tragically under-athletic High School Peter had never stopped playing.^[3] I trounced everyone I played. I readily handled every card thrown at me. My deck cost me 20 dollars to build and was full of cards that only the most deep-thinking players could appreciate. Cards only their printing press could love. My opponents’ decks cost upwards of $500 to assemble, and yet, countless times that day, the smirks of the unwashed nerds I battled gave way to scowls of discontent as their precious cards, and by extension their fragile egos, were dashed upon the shores of my clever deck and borderline-reckless, nothing-to-lose playing style. At one point, my new desk and coffee table appeared in a daydream behind one of my opponents. They looked so real, I could’ve reached out and touched them, and then grabbed them and used them to beat my opponent senseless.

I came in first place, winning roughly 60 dollars worth of rare cards. After the tourney fee and my new deck cost, I had basically made thirty dollars for a few hours of gleeful nerd-trouncing. Not bad for a first tourney. It wouldn’t be long until I was gliding through Ikea, flitting from minimal Scandinavian desk design to minimal Scandinavian desk design. My faith in my MTG resurrection was enormous, and we all know what happens to people when something relatively minor makes their egos swell too largely. A comeuppance was brewing. I should have seen the signs. The tourneys I played over the following month were rough; I started losing more and more and slipping to the middle of the pack. My $20 deck was getting beat by others worth upwards of $1,000, all played by smelly kids who made their parents buy cards for them. Or maybe they just saved up for cards by not buying shampoo or deodorant for months. That might seem like an exaggeration, but trust me, for some reason 98% of MTG players have terrible personal hygiene. I honestly think some skip bathing because it makes them win more. I pressed on, though, pinching my nose and refusing to acknowledge a simple truth. Like every other part of our society, in MTG the more money and resources you have, the better you’re probably going to do, no matter how talented or smart the person on the other side of the table is.^[4]

Everything came to a head during a tournament one warm Saturday night last June. I was beaten soundly four times in a row, the last time by a combination professional poker dealer/professional MTG player. No, I’m not kidding, there are actually professional MTG players. You can always spot them because they are either extra loud, extra obese, or both. The ProMTGer I played noticed my 16-letter last name before we started playing, and asked if I was Greek. I foolishly said yes. He made a snide remark about his being Turkish and so you know what that means, and then he crushed me. Now, getting beat in MTG is one thing. It’s a trading card game, for eff’s sake. But when the defeat is creepily linked to the persecution of my ancestors by the ancestors of my MTG opponent, well, that takes it to a whole other level.

That night snapped me back to reality. Was it worth it? Worth sitting in sweaty, smelly card shops for hours at a time? Worth playing against sweaty, smelly opponents for hours at a time? Was the chance at a small victory, a small wad of cash, and an increasingly smaller and smaller ego boost worth the sacrifice of a warm Saturday night in June? Eff no, gentle Reader. Eff. No. So that night was the last one I spent trying to supplement my income with MTG tournament winnings. I stepped out of the card shop, and as the door behind me closed slowly on all the stank, stale air, a fresh, warm breeze blew past me. I wasn’t angry, I was relieved. I had sprinted through a world I knew so well so long ago, and, thankfully, I discovered there was no real place for me in it anymore. I sold off every valuable card I won to get myself back even, and gave all the worthless ones to a Gollum-eyed Chris My Work Friend. And though I never made it to Ikea for that desk or that coffee table, a few weeks later I remembered I had a folding card table stored under my bed the whole time. It would do the trick until my fortunes changed.

_______

1. ^[1] I was partly excited to have Peter write this because he’s a good writer, and partly because I loved Magic: The Gathering growing up. I drove my parents to the brink of financial ruin getting them to buy Magic cards for me. I loved the smell of the cards, the texture of the world they created and spending hundreds of hours with my friends battling it out. In other news, I did not get much action when I was younger. ↩
2. ^[2] This is true. Magic the Gathering appealed to us nerds 10% by presenting an escapist world full of fantasy and exciting monsters who did our bidding and 90% by 1 out of every 20 cards bringing us closer to a woman’s breast than we would get for the next five years. While some of the females on the cards had scary or intense faces, they all seemed to have banging bodies. In fact, the only thing more fantastical than mythical creatures derived from the various elements may have been the idea that in an era that must have been rife with malnourishment, every female could have a a hard waist and a C-cup or bigger. ↩
3. ^[3] While all this “I’m super unathletic” stuff may make it seem like Peter is humble, don’t buy into it. I’m 80% sure it’s his way of making me feel even worse about the fact that I lost to him at tennis. (And it’s working.) ↩
4. ^[4] Humble, Pete. Very humble. ↩

This is the part where I usually say, “In some but not all articles, names or identifying characteristics or individual lines of dialogue have been changed to protect identities or because remembering exactly how things happened is hard. But in every case, an effort was made to maintain the integrity of these events that did indeed actually happen.” But God knows what Peter did.

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Pay: $7

“I was recently laid off.” Peter Randall’s job posting explained. “A neuropsychiatrist I worked for says he has ‘super high praise’ for me and would like to write an amazing letter of recommendation… but he wants me to write it.” Peter Randall had been given the opportunity for a blank-check letter of recommendation from his boss, and rather than doing a small amount of work to capitalize on a rather significant opportunity, he decided to post a job listing, seeking a total stranger to write the letter for him. It is possible that decisions like this are part of why he was laid off.

The levels of laziness at work here were staggering. The boss felt so bad about firing Peter that he offered to write a letter of recommendation. But that task– which presumably would take one hour, max– proved too much for him, so he delegated it to his employee. His employee, whose letter of recommendation clearly shouldn’t laud him for his ability to “complete any task assigned to him,” was in charge of deciding the content of a letter which would directly impact whether or not he was hired for future work, but he also didn’t feel like doing it, so he hired me. I was tempted to ask my mom to write it just to further the cycle.

Amazingly enough, this was not even the first time I had been asked to write a letter praising someone I barely knew for someone else to sign. A year and a half ago, I was one week into my gig as manager of a movie rental store when Sam, one of our employees, came in and asked my boss for a letter of recommendation. An assignment my boss quickly dumped on me.

“What do you need the letter for?” I asked.

“For the judge.” Sam answered.

“Judge?”

“Yeah, I’m on trial, and I’m trying to put together some character references.”

The fact that Sam had a habit of showing up fifteen minutes late for his shifts without his uniform tucked in had suddenly become the second most upsetting part about his working for us.

“Just write whatever,” my boss interjected. “I’ll sign it.”

“Wait a second,” I said, feeling like there was something rather crucial being glossed over here. “What’s the crime?”

“I’d rather not say,” Sam said, eyes on the ground. That was reassuring.

“Did you do it?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, I’m guilty.” This event barely cracked the top ten of worst things I was asked to do at this job. But I digress.

At least Peter was, to the best of my knowledge, not a criminal. He sent me an e-mail with the bullet points of what I should say about him in the letter, a smattering of which I have posted below, exactly as they appeared in his original e-mail:

• “I was working at a private neuropsychiatric clinic as a medical historian (interviewed patients and gathered medical history for the neuropsychiatrist).”^[1]
• “I am not sure what work I want to do next, but I just to be armed [sic] with a good letter from this doctor. Dr. Watson says he has ‘super high praise’ for me and would like an amazing letter of recommendation for me.”^[2]
• “Responsible, diligent, honest.”^[3]
• “Stayed on task til job was finished and stayed overtime as needed.”^[4]

Peter then encouraged me to write the letter however I saw fit, saying, “You are free to do whatever you feel is best. I trust your judgement.” [sic]^[5] It was never clear how he came to blindly trust the judgment of someone he never met, only that he did.

Between the bullet points, my follow-up questions, and some totally blind guess work on the day-to-day of being a medical historian, I put together what may have been one of the best pieces of writing I had ever composed. A sterling endorsement for the services of one Peter Randall. By the time I was done, even I wanted to hire him. He came off as a thorough, creative, dedicated, and focused team-player who was incredibly proficient in an industry I only vaguely understood.

When I sent him the final version, he was blown away. “Thank you so much.” He told me. “I will recommend you to all my friends.” I smiled. Despite his clear lack of follow-through, I actually believed he would do as he said. Or, at the very least, hire me to do it for him.

________

1. ^[1] Not knowing Peter Randall was certainly the biggest obstacle to writing this letter, but not understanding what happened at a neuropsychiatric clinic was a close second. ↩
2. ^[2] I know when I really want to write something and have plenty of positive things to say, I always ask someone else to do it for me. ↩
3. ^[3] Um, ya know, aside from the part where he was in no way responsible or diligent with this assignment and took the dishonest action of getting a letter written by someone other than the person who would be claiming to have written it. ↩
4. ^[4] Should add: “Or at least until I could find someone else to do it for me.” ↩
5. ^[5] With each passing typo, I became more inclined to add a few to the cover letter, just so the doctor would actually believe it was from Peter. ↩

Pay: $3500 in profit

There is perhaps no time when I am less fun to talk to than after losing at poker.^[1] I only half-listen to my friends as they talk, and I speak with an anger that has nothing to do with our conversation, and everything to do with that damn jack of diamonds on the river.

Unfortunately for my friend Rudy, he was the guy I owed a phone call to as I drove back from a frustrating tournament finish at Rockingham Park. “Well, I’m seeing this really great girl.” I told him, my teeth gnashing in the background. “Oh, I love my job, it’s awesome” I said like I was gonna punch someone in the face. “Yeah, I can’t wait to see you when you come to town in December,” I said as though I were scheduling a colonoscopy.

When my after-school job stopped this past summer, I needed a way to fill the income void. Most people would call that a bad time to go gambling. I am not most people.

It had been a little over a year since I stopped playing poker full time. All the work and studying I put into improving my game stopped shortly thereafter.

There’s a line people say, “Every day you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.” Good players are constantly studying the game and strengthening their skills. Meanwhile, bad players, by definition, lose their money. The struggling economy^[2] makes it harder for the bad players to replenish their poker funds and forces them to play less often or stop altogether. With the strong players improving and the number of bad players dwindling, people standing still might not actually be getting worse, but their place amongst the competition is definitely dropping.

New Hampshire is the exception to this rule. Its laws represent a unique concession to people’s fears that gambling can lead to financial ruin. New Hampshire allows gambling, but places a low cap on how much people are allowed to wager.^[3]

With so little margin for profit, the people who know how to run card rooms don’t bother starting casinos in New Hampshire. Low buy-ins coupled with crummy card rooms mean the sharks don’t show up. And low buy-ins coupled with the sharks not showing up mean the bad players don’t go broke. As a result, New Hampshire may be the only state where everyday you’re not getting better, at least you’re not getting worse.

So that’s where I went to play my first tournament in quite some time. It felt good sitting back down at the tables. Squeezing the cards, shuffling the chips. I missed outthinking and outleveling opponents. Stealing pots and making thin value bets. Adjusting my play based on the situation and opposition.

As the tournament progressed, people started folding more. Afraid to risk their chips and hoping other people would get knocked out so they could have a higher finish and correspondingly make more money. So I amped up the aggression. I started raising almost every pot. Stealing hand after hand. Players started complaining. Started teasing me for being reckless. Started rolling their eyes every time I raised. “I know you don’t have anything,” they said as they folded their hands anyway. They could keep talking. I would keep raking pots. I finished first, snaring a little over a thousand dollars.

I had found my summer job.

I played six or seven times over the course of the summer, finishing with a net profit of roughly $3500. Driving to New Hampshire each weekend, I kept doing the same math equations. 3500 over seven visits equals 500 a visit. Why did I stop doing this full time again?

Of course, I knew the answer. For starters, I was riding a hot streak. I might be able to keep winning, but not at this clip. No one consistently shows a 600% return on investment for tournaments over the long haul. But second, I had changed since I stopped playing full-time. Now, I wanted to be a professional poker player the way a father of two hopes his band catches on and he becomes a rockstar. It’s fun to dream about, but if he was ever given the chance, he’d have to say no, because he’d rather spend his nights with his kids, not on the road. And I want to spend my nights with the people I care about.

The good card games run on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. These are also the days friends have birthday parties, go on camping trips and host bad-movie marathons.^[4] These are the days girls go on dates, my mom makes her famous roast beef, and the Patriots play football.

I wanted the fun of playing cards, the big paydays the can potentially come with it and none of the missing out on a social life. The only chances for that were online poker (currently shut down in this country) and the big tournaments where you could win life-changing amounts of money. Winning one of those was enough to pay the bills for a long time without having to disappear every weekend. And it was two such big tournaments that had me driving to New Hampshire last week.

A few of the tournaments I won this summer earned me entry into the Eastern Poker Tour semi-finals: Two events where if you finished in the top 10 of either one, you would gain free entry into a televised 40-person tournament. A tournament where last place earned you $300 and first place was good for a little over 20 grand.

So it was, that I found myself driving up I-93 North. With all my success this summer, I had to remind myself not to be too cocky. But I spent most of the ride picturing my first place finish.

I sat down to a table with what had now become familiar faces. I had a file on each of them. That guy is afraid to bet anything but huge hands on the river. That guy always thinks I have something and can easily be bluffed. That guy hates folding and when I have a hand I should bet the hell out of him.

Within two hours, my starting chip stack of 20,000 doubled in size. Twenty hands later, I got all my money into the pot with an 83% chance of winning the hand. If I won, I would have 80,000 chips, far more than anyone else at the table with a legit shot at a top-10 finish.

Well, anytime a poker player tells you how high a percentage shot he had at winning a hand, you can be pretty sure he ended up losing. The final card was the eight of spades, one of the 17% of cards that had the ability to end my day. And just like that I was heading back to Boston.

The next day, driving up, I didn’t feel quite so bulletproof. I started to wonder just how many more big tournaments I was going to play in in my life. I’ve been playing poker less and less, the rest of the world is getting better and better. The chances for big paydays that had been commonplace when I played online full-time were further and further between. There certainly weren’t any more on the horizon.

I sat down. 266 people in the room. A long way to go to the top 10. I took a couple big hits early and saw my stack shrink from 21k to 11k. I put my head down and kept grinding through the tournament. Trying to win back chips here and there. The day moved along. Players got eliminated. I knocked out one guy and doubled up against another. Got lucky with a garbage hand in one spot, then watched as my strong hand held up in another. The casino workers started folding up the tables as they emptied.

Then we were down to three tables and only 30 people left. Top 10 wasn’t quite so crazy anymore.

My chip stack was running low. I had to gamble if I was going to outlast 20 more players. I would wait until it was just me and very tight, cautious players in the hand, then shove all my chips into the middle, hoping they had nothing. They would fold, afraid to risk such large chunks of chips. I did it again and again. My stack grew as others continued to fall.

Down to 26 people.

I again pushed my chips into the middle, now with jack-queen. But this time, the tight, cautious guy didn’t have nothing. He had the best hand he could have in that spot: Two aces. And now I was the one with an 83% chance of losing.

If you’re not familiar with Texas Hold ‘em, what happens next is five cards come out in the middle, and you have to combine your two cards with those in the middle to make the best hand. Whoever has the stronger hand after that fifth card wins the pot. Since he was starting with a pair of aces and I only had a jack and a queen, the odds weren’t in my favor. Even if a jack or a queen came out, it would only give me one pair that would still be weaker than his aces. I would need something short of a miracle.

But this is why they call it gambling. And as you know, whenever a poker player starts telling you how unlikely something is to happen, there’s a good chance it’ll happen.

The first three cards came out. 7-9-10, leaving me one card short of a straight. If one of the next two cards was an eight or king, I was winning this thing. My chances of winning had improved from around one out of seven to around one out of three. You could feel the tension extend to the whole table. If my opponent won, there would be 25 players left and everyone would be guaranteed to make at least $200 for the day. If I won, a dangerous player would have suddenly gained a lot more chips. I may have been the only person there rooting for me.

Then came a three.

Damn. Useless. Then I had a feeling. Like this was it. I was gonna get my eight or king.

The dealer pulled the top card off the deck and flipped it over.

Jack.

No help. And then it was over.

Somehow, it didn’t feel real. It felt like maybe someone would come over and say, “Whoops, there’s been a mistake. You get to keep playing.” But they didn’t. People shook my hand and said good game.

I slid out of the casino and into my car, then started driving. I didn’t even turn on the radio. Just drove in silence, staring at the road. No top 10 finish. I didn’t know when I’d have another chance in a big tournament. Only that it would be awhile. That these were getting less frequent. That between now and then, I wouldn’t play much. That I would be getting worse as the bad players went broke and the good players got better.

______

1. ^[1] Though a close second is whenever I say, “No, seriously, I’m going to start eating healthy and getting in shape” followed by, “I know I always say that, but this time I mean it.” This is annoying when anyone says it, especially when, as is the case with me, the person saying it always spends the next few days eating right, then caves and shovels a large pizza down his gullet while making noises usually reserved for orgasms. ↩
2. ^[2] Or as Obama calls it, “The soaring economy.” ↩
3. ^[3] This gambling setup, state-run liquor stores and insisting they don’t have a sales tax while still taxing food purchases are three of the 8,000 reasons New Hampshire should be forced to stop claiming to be the state of small government and to rip the words “Live Free or Die” off their license plates. Ooo, they don’t make you wear seat belts. Such anarchists.

   And as long as we’re on the subject, here are some other states that should change their license plate slogans on grounds of inaccuracy: Arkansas claims to be the land of opportunity despite having both an education system and a level of state wealth that consistently rank at the bottom of every study. Georgia’s plates say “…On my mind,” despite never being on anyone’s mind unless they have to change planes on their Delta flight. New Jersey is called the garden state despite being a total dump. And Oregon claims to be a Pacific Wonderland despite being, ya know, Oregon. ↩

4. ^[4] My friend’s latest bad movie marathon included Theodore Rex whose imdb summary reads: “In an alternate futuristic society, a tough female police detective is paired with a talking dinosaur to find the killer of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals leading them to a mad scientist bent on creating a new Armageddon.” I love poker and all, but who says no to that? ↩

In some but not all articles, names or identifying characteristics or individual lines of dialogue have been changed either to protect identities or because I don’t remember the events perfectly. In every post I did my best to maintain the integrity of these events that did indeed actually happen.

Pay: $20

Just past Harvard Square, Massachusetts Avenue forks twice in the span of ten seconds. I have driven this stretch a thousand times. I know these forks confound my GPS. And yet, just like always, I make the wrong turn, sending me away from my destination in Cambridge and towards Somerville– a different city altogether that probably owes half its population to people who were trying to get to Cambridge and took a wrong turn somewhere along the way. As I realize my mistake, I let loose a level of violent swearing and rage that most Bostonians reserve for Republicans and Bobby Valentine.

After about ten minutes of wrong turns and shouting “Fuck everything,” I arrive at one of Harvard Campus’ many boringly-named buildings for my 1:00 research study. As I step out of my car, into the parking lot, I have a weird feeling of deja vu. I have been at this building for a research study before. I got lost and swore a lot on the way last time too.

I meet the girl administering the study, and we walk into the lobby. “Just to warn you, the elevator’s been acting crazy lately,” she explains nonchalantly as we board the elevator. “Hopefully, nothing goes wrong.”

The doors close.

As I contemplate the different possible manifestations of the phrase “The elevator’s been acting crazy lately, hopefully nothing goes wrong,” she makes mindless chit-chat.

“Are you a student?” She asks. I have had this same inane conversation before about 500 different studies at this point. They always ask if I’m a student. I don’t know if it’s because I look young (the positive interpretation) or because most college graduates aren’t free at 1:00 on a random Tuesday and so desperate for cash that they would drive forty minutes for a two-hour study that pays $20 (the more realistic interpretation).

We walk into the room, and it dawns on me that I haven’t just been in this parking lot, in this building, having this conversation before. I’ve actually done this exact study before. Eight months ago.

Before we begin, she asks a series of questions meant to gauge to what extent I am or am not depressed. The hypothesis of their study is that people who are suicidal or depressed have slower reaction times than people who are not. It is possible that Harvard has run out of things to study.

I answer the questions, barely even paying attention. No I don’t have an eating disorder. No I don’t have thoughts of suicide. Yes, I feel happy.

But somewhere along the way, I hear her ask, “Do you ever feel like you’re going nowhere in life?” And I pause for a moment.

I’ve always felt like I was going somewhere. Like I was scraping by in the moment, but someday it would all be worth it. I would become a full-time actor or poker player or writer and be my own boss. And those years waiting tables and doing shit work would be worth it. Lately, I haven’t felt that way. I’ve felt like maybe this temporary rut isn’t so temporary.

Yes. I answer.

Because this is a research study, she must keep asking the same question twenty different ways.

Have you felt like you were going nowhere in the last three months?

Over the last three months, I’ve been writing a lot less. I feel gross when I don’t write. Like workout nuts feel when they skip the gym. I’ve done this before. Been in a groove with my writing and feeling awesome. Then suddenly stopped for no apparent reason and felt miserable. You may say, well then why not just start writing again? And you are of course right and I of course agree and I have no idea why I don’t. I only know that, like the aforementioned guy who misses the gym a few times when he knows he should go, I haven’t been doing it.

Yes.

Have you felt like you were going nowhere in the last month?

Before I started this blog, I worked one job I loved 15-20 hours a week. It paid well and I got it into my head that by combining that with these odd jobs and some thrifty spending, I could survive financially, avoid the hours of a full-time job, and spend that extra time focusing on my writing. That led to some of the most stressful months of my life. Months of paying whatever bills I could then hoping I got my next paycheck before they cut off my phone service. Living off Ramen and pasta.

That led to me picking up other part-time gigs. When I met people and they asked me what I did for a living, I got used to picking whichever I thought they would be most interested to hear, because the full list was just too long. If I ever answered fully, the list would look something like this: I host trivia games at bars and restaurants, I work at an after-school program, I perform in a dinner-theater troupe, I write columns for zug.com, I play poker, I participate in market research studies, and I do random things to earn money for my blog called Odd Jobs. I really enjoy everything on that list, but it hasn’t left the time for writing that I so wanted in the first place. I want to quit one of these jobs. Scale back how many hours I work so I can focus on what matters to me. But I do this all the time too. When I work a full-time job, I wish I worked fewer hours. When I quit that job and go somewhere with fewer hours, I end up broke and wishing I worked more hours.

Yes.

Do you feel excited about the direction you are going in?

Part of why I started this site was to do new things. To get away from the boredom and repetition of the 9-to-5 world. But the research studies and the random errands aren’t fun. And they’ve started to blend together. More and more, I feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over. Hell, I have literally done this study before.

No.

Do you feel excited about where you will be five years from now?

Go fuck yourself.

After the extensive questionnaire comes a series of mindless tasks that my brain tunes out as they pass by slowly, like scenes in a boring movie. When it’s all over, she gives me a $20 bill. We both say thank you and nice meeting you. Then I leave.

As I crawl through traffic on my way home, I think about the same things I have thought about at many other points in my life. I am happy when I write, why am I not writing? I want to quit my job. I always quit my job then suddenly realize that I need a job. I am tired of always feeling like this.

I feel like I’m driving down Massachusetts Avenue. I’ve been here a thousand times before, and I always make the wrong turn.

______

EDITOR’S NOTE. NOT JUST THE BORING STUFF THAT I PUT AFTER EVERY COLUMN.

I have been working on a draft of this column for the last week and a half, and during that time, I have debated whether or not to post it. Because it feels insanely self-indulgent, boring and unimportant. But as I’ve worked on it, something funny has happened. The feelings of frustration and directionlessness have started to dissolve.

It’s possible that I feel better, in part, because writing is cathartic. But I know myself and I know that it is something else. It’s that working on this column has gotten me writing everyday again. And whether or not I’m writing has a radical impact on my mood. I am so happy when I do it. So sad when I don’t. I knew before this study that part of why I had been so unhappy and feeling so lost was because I wasn’t writing, yet, I couldn’t sit down and do it. I don’t know why. I only know that this experience– being forced to confront the fact that I felt lost combined with having something inside me that I had to get down on paper– made me start writing again. And that, in turn, has made me happy again. Focused again.

This experience and this piece have helped me to realize a couple of things about myself that I knew all along and yet didn’t know. And it is the reason I will be making several very important changes over the next couple of months. They are not all things I can talk about in this public of a forum, but I know they are the correct choices for me. And in a few months, when the dust settles, I will share them here.

One change I can share is that I’m going to be writing a lot more. I am hoping to replace my current column for zug.com with a different one that will be a better fit for my writing. I won’t say much about it, except that if you enjoy the Odd Jobs blog, I think you’re going to enjoy this too. If it does indeed launch, over the next few months, I will alternate every week between posting a column for zug and posting a column for my site. If the column does not launch then I will be posting a lot more here. Either way, it feels damn good to be writing again.

I started off debating whether or not to post this because it felt unimportant, boring, and self-indulgent. I have decided to post it because it may well be the most important column I’ve written yet. So I hope it wasn’t boring, and thank you for indulging me.

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OKAY NOW HERE’S THE STANDARD BORING STUFF