My Animal Kingdom

321_the_call_of_the_wild.jpg Wow, some days dealing with people at the job, I feel like we’re all in Animal Kingdom. Sometimes, the dynamics are so guided by territorial and survival instincts, I have to tilt my head back and bray at the fluorescent office light on the ceiling to underline the point (only with friends, not in the middle of meetings). Recently, Co-worker A went to Boss with grievance about Co-worker B, and without going into detail on the freaking Web, Boss was clueless and Co-worker B smoothly dodged the lobbed ball-style attack. Naturally, Boss was shocked that the office wasn’t one big happy family and was rendered paralysed, until he was gently guided back to his delusion by Co-worker B.

Not that Boss is a bad person, but everyone should understand, behavior you exhibit to your peers is usually different than the one you exhibit to Boss, so how could a Boss really every fully grasp a department’s dynamics? And as for Co-worker A, I thought fighting behind the scenes would have been more effective. It reminds me of a story of one my husband’s cousins–she instructed her daughters (ages 4 and 5) to not fight, and so now, instead of fighting in front of their mom, the girls fight quietly behind closed doors. When she passes their bedroom, she can hear them grunt once in while as they punch each other.

And that, is how, I think a proper office fight should go.

Sorry to be so oblique, but you know you’re not supposed to write about jobs online. In fact, if any of my Esq. friends tell me to take this down, I will!

lou reed

images2.jpg I think one of the toughest things of working the 9-to-5 for years is that your days start to feel identical with no remarkable events to mark the passage of time, and then all of sudden, you relate to songs in a different way. Like I was listening to this Lou Reed song where the line was “one day, you wake up and see your father’s face in the mirror” and I was like OH MY GOD!!! I KNOW WHAT HE MEANS! I’m so depressed! I have to quit my job!

I mean, I didn’t quit my job, b/c I like having money and being able to pay for the mortgage, and I really can’t handle the overwhelming anxiety of being unemployed, but it doesn’t mean I don’t fantasize about it every day! Anyway, that’s all I want to say. Damn you, Lou Reed, for making me feel.

That, and my web site pics have all gone to pot. I will call Ed and see what is wrong.

harry freaking potter

images1.jpg I just finished. It was not easy. I’m in rehearsal and at work and don’t always get a seat on the subway. At home, I love my husband, but he talks to me while I write and read, so I’ve had like 3-page sitdown periods, or I’m in this world, picturing these insane showdowns, but my husband is right next to me talking about what happened to the Knicks that day.

I just want to thank all my friends who have been supportive through this journey. (Ha ha.) The book was not easy to carry on my commute and I think my left hand will have to recover from holding it open. Kudos to Nancy for resisting when I pressured her to tell me the ending. Thanks to Becca for suggesting I start reading YA books when working on my own. And who can forget Christine. When I told her “I can’t believe Snape! I don’t buy it!”, Christine looked at me completely poker-faced, like she was practicing occumenlancy (I think that’s how you spell it. Actually, I think it’s wrong) and didn’t give any of the story away, just said it’ll all tie together in the end. And it totally did. I am a very satisfied reader.

belated halloween

images.jpg When I first moved to NJ, I went trick-or-treating with my friend Jen in fifth grade, and she had this kick-*ss costume her mother made her–she was a gigantic Lipton tea bag. Like her baseball cap had a string and label attached and her entire body was covered in this rectangle, white pale bag which made her look like, you know, a gigantic bag of tea. It was awesome. I told her that I remembered going as a Korean for Halloween that year, which in addition to being redundant, is like the laziest costume you can come up with. (And if you don’t know what this means, you just don a traditional Korean outfit, and presto). That year, we had another lazy trick-or-treater in our posse–Mayumi Negishi, who went as a Japanese person in this spectacular kimono.

But peel back another layer of memory–during the school day on Halloween, I had another costume on. I had been dressed up as a movie star. In Staten Island, where I had moved from, the costume was a hit, made up of my mother’s huge sun hat, blouse, skirt, scarf, every necklace in the house, topped off with her Elton John-esque, huge clear plastic 70s sunglasses decked out in rhinestones and flowers. Dude, I thought I was hot stuff, glamorous, completely undercover in this rocking awesome, get-up, and happily went trick-or-treating with my cousins Ed and Aim…who that year were dressed as Koreans. (It’s kind of a standard standby).

In NJ, my new school, I thought I’d relive this glory in the school’s Halloween day parade. I didn’t really think about the fact that this was a much wealthier, more sophisticated school than my old one, so some of the costumes were so good I still remember them. Patrick Marquez was Pac Man–someone in his family had created a gigantic, yellow, cardboard sphere, that covered Patrick except for his legs. Inside his Pac Man globe, Patrick wore an eye mask that made his eyes like Pac Man’s eyes–mini-inverted, black Pac Men for pupils. He was so in character (he couldn’t see, but man, the attention to detail.) It’s cool, it’s cool, I tell myself. I’m still strutting my ten-year-old stuff (this must have been after the mullet perm grew out a bit) in my movie star costume. Then I saw Marissa Baumann, also dressed as a movie star, but not in a garage sale way. She literally looked like she had walked off a 1940s red carpet, in a floor-length blue gown, fur stole, elbow-length gloves, and cigarette holder. And when she asked what I was supposed to be, I noticed she had blue eye shadow and mascara on and experienced one of those inner-flower-crumpling moments. I could have said “I’m Dustin Hoffman in ‘Tootsie,'” but you know, comebacks only come to you long after you need them.

Of course, when I see the Staten Island photos, I don’t look like a movie star. More like a weird interpretation of my mom…(or seriously, I did kind of look like Dustin Hoffman.) Eh, but who cares, I looked psyched and I had fun. No lesson here. It’s good to have these moments where you’re a legend in your own mind.

recorder update

recorder2.jpg I’ve been practicing the recorder–trying to teach myself how to play it really–for this play that’s going to open December 1st, and I don’t see how there’s any possible way I can master this instrument sufficiently for the show unless I was like in jail or something and had nothing else to do. You know, like then, i’d have gobs of times to just memorize this crazy fingers that require like your ring finger to 1/2 or 3/4 cover a hole. It kind of reminds me of soduku, which I’m not very good at. I guess I’ll offer up what I can, but I don’t want to mess up the actors. They have to sing and dance to the music. I’ll get going and sound pretty good for a few measures, and then miss a fingering and this dying quail sound comes out. That would be rough if you were on stage trying to concentrate, you know? Oh dear.

another freaking school massacre

Just heard about this at lunch today, another guy went nuts and shot kids and a headmistress in a school in Finland. Why is this happening more and more? I don’t remember hearing about this kind of behavior growing up, but now there’s Columbine, Virgnia Tech, a shootout in Scotland a school in 1997, and this one. Any ideas? Any sites you can direct me to?

Here’s the Times blurb on today’s incident.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/a-deadly-school-shooting-this-time-in-finland/index.html?hp

crikey, it’s the flute

flute-790388.jpg 20159559.jpg Let’s say this much. The flute is not a sexy instrument. Jethro Tull and that one Men at Work song aside, it just isn’t. I played it from third grade till like senior in high school and I felt agnostic about it at best. Piano? I freaking loved the piano. Piano got me through adolescence big time. But I don’t want to totally slam the flute. Let me see. I think we can say it’s a nice urban instrument being portable, it’s pretty, very popular with little girls.

What brings it up is I’m rehearsing for a play right now that requires some tooting so I’m learning the recorder (um, and I don’t really understand that instrument; you like partially cover some holes for notes? ay caramba) but just took out my high school flute last night to find out what the required songs are supposed to sound like. And seeing my old trusty flute, all rusted and disturbed looking from lack of care inspired me to sing Cher’s “If I could turn back time” to my husband, b/c seriously, I was flashing back hard.

School band? Oh yeah. Marching band? No, skipped that one. The medley from “Annie”? Second flute parts that had 32-measure rests? OH YEAH. YEARS of hauling that case in my backpack (and since I still carry a backpack and have the same haircut I did from seventh grade, it’s like coming full circle). Reading music came back much easier than I thought it would. I have a better handle on reading music than say, reading Korean. And although I sounded not so bad (there were some tired strains of what I used to sound like when I used to practice), I think it is a.o.k. I never had any serious musician ambition.

I feel for my folks. They tried hard to give me a well-rounded child/coming-of-age hood complete with music lessons, which was really nice of them, but has no presence in my life right now. Except maybe it does. B/c lately, even before this play, I’ve been hankering to learn the guitar and accompany some bad lyrics I’ll make up on the spot.

sleep

images22.jpgimages7.jpg I’m obsessed with sleep. I mean, I enjoy sleeping, but I also like reading about it and thinking about it. Dunno. Something about the subject of sleep feels very meta.

Stuck in the office, bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived, I troll the Net for stories. Like I’ll go on the National Sleep Foundation’s web site, or if the Times runs some obscure piece quoting facts about the different levels of sleep or the REM phase and all that jazz, I sort of zone out and get into it. Sleep is supposedly good for your muscle aches, it’s excellent for depression, stress, losing weight, your memory. Your skin and your bloodshot eyes look much more fabulous after like eight hours of snooze. But for someone who professes great interest in the subject, I actually know very little. It’s possible I don’t retain any of the info I read because I need more sleep.

What about history of sleep? How do high school students do it? I remember not starting homework till 11 at night my junior year. What an idiot.

Here’s a piece called “Lack of Sleep Makes Kids Fatter” in Monday’s Times. The title alone is hilarious. Or maybe I think that only because I’ve been editing an article on lipids all day. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Diet-Kids-Sleep.html

perms and skiing

rr-richardmarx.jpg Did your mom ever get you to do things you never wanted to be doing–ever? When I was little, it never occurred to me I could say no, or run away from home. Mom just seemed all powerful and wise, and whenever she announced something as fact, I accepted it as fact. For instance, when we moved to New Jersey, she announced “Everyone in New Jersey knows how to ski,” thus began a crash course with my cousins on a bunny hill somewhere in Pennsylvania.

The fact that “Everyone in NJ knew how to ski” stressed me out–was I going to fit in? (We moved there when I was ten from Staten Island.) Would I make friends? So I went down that bunny hill over and over again. My only skill was stopping by throwing my body down to the ground. There was one time I was flying down the hill, headed straight to the bunny lift line. I had already thrown my body down, my one offering from my meager ski skill arsenal, but was still going pretty fast. I yelled “Get out of my way! I can’t stop! I’M A BEGINNER!” I remember approaching the fence at an odd angle, as people desperately tried to WALK away quickly (they were beginners so did not know how to ski yet) from my crash landing. After that, Mom sprung for a lesson and the teacher greeted me “Oh, so you’re the one who crashed into the fence this morning.” When I finally did start making friend in New Jersey, none of my friends knew how to ski.

But the biggest Mom move highlight is reserved for the perms she made me get. For some reason, Koreans (at least they used to in the 80s) looooooooove a good perm. My mother’s logic was that a volumnious perm helped make my gigantic, Korean noggin and pancake round face look more…petite. I have to say, having had two, and witnessing them on other Koreans, it does no such thing. In Staten Island, when I was 9, I was subjected to the Cleopatra–like the bangs and the chin-length that form, you know, that pyramid look. It was kind of awful, but I could live with it, and it even looked pretty when it grew out. The perm Mom forced me into getting when I was 10 right before I moved to New Jersey was not as kind. It also had bangs, and a layer cut close to the sides of my head, plus length in the back. It was like Richard Marx’s hair (pic attached) on a girl. My childhood friend Alex says she remembers me entering the class with my windbreaker hood on, which I refused to take down for the entire day.

And for that, my mom deserves a big shout-out. Thanks Mom.

The only other kid with a perm that year was Patrick Marque, a phillipino kid with a medium-size head. He also had the close to the sides of the head, long in the back mullet look. We had the same hair, but he looked much better than I did.

Harry POtter Mania

images6.jpg I started reading the Harry Potters last month and am up to the fourth title, and I love them. I’m obsessed. I’m going to see if I can go as Hermonie or Harry Potter for Halloween. When I check them out of the library, the security guard laughs at me, me being a grown woman and all reading the YA book, but I DON’T CARE. I pooh-poohed the series as not for me when the books first came out like seven years ago. The world went gaga for them and I was oblivious. Now whenever someone ticks me off I tell them “20 points from Griffendor” which means nothing (and sounds really weird when said aloud.) The plot is incredible, and as the writing and story and character development just get better with each book.

This kind of reminds me when I got into the show “24” after it was on the air for five years. I would like pop into my office mail room and start yelling “My name is Jack Bauer and I’m a Federal agent! You’re going to have to trust me!” and they all just stared at me blankly. I mean, they’re fans too, but they’ve already dealt with the ups and downs of like season 2 which was made in like 2002 (I’m not including any spoilers b/c Nancy is just starting to watch them).