Part-time life

As I seem to be facing mounting criticism for only working a part-time job, I applied to a part-time job with a local non-profit. Drafting the cover letter took some time, however, as I always end up feeling like a patent medicine salesman writing these things. So, there goes another version of myself out into the ether, awaiting judgment.

I have been reading Borges’ Universal History of Infamy and enjoying it immensely. I would highly recommend this collection of stories. It has given me several ideas for my Estep project. I also bought a comic book version of Moby Dick over the weekend and read it with great relish. Now, I have only read about 100 pages of the original. But this comic version is quite brilliant as it includes Melvillean digressions on how the nature of whales and how whale blubber is “harvested.” So, very smart, actually.

cb2 catalog

For a real hoot, please check out the most recent CB2 catalog [please note the Internet version seems to be a bit cleaned up; the paper version will fill you with riotous laughter and happy glee beams] where you will find some of the most bizarre and incomprehensible catalog copy. Reproduced below, you will find a letter that I sent to the company via email:

Yes, I was looking through the most recent CB2 catalog and was astounded by the incomprehensible copy written for many of the items. My favorite happens to be the description for the channel storage (p. 47), “Dark wood grain laminate shelving flaunts a 1″ slit down the back to simultaneously reveal a hint of wall, conceal a mess of media cords. Bookcase has 5 fixed shelves. Media cart sides two doors with clean 1″ top reveals that open to one adjustable shelf each.” I was distracted by someone writing “a mess of cords,” which is a weirdly idiomatic expression. But I didn’t even know which product this referred to. Then the third sentence is simply confusing. There is strange and bizarre verbiage like this every where in the catalog: “angled wider seat” (not Wide angled seat) (15) and “slat mat stained matte black” (43). What gives with the strange copy? Was this intentional? This really makes me not want to buy these products because I don’t understand what they really are.

This kind of writing reminds me of a beloved Kikkoman soy sauce advert. I can only assume that someone wrote out the copy in a foreign language then had it translated by a non-english speaker. Our current hypothesis is Italian. What do you think?

scrapbook stupidity

I’ve been working on a scrapbook for our trip to Europe last summer. Well, it’s actually more of a scrapbox, as you can see in this picture. Normally, I enjoy doing things like this. I would spend hours making mix tape covers in high school. But this project has been troublesome from the get go. I have fought with paper, with glue, with the photoprinter (also seen in the picture), with layouts, with fingerprints, with every aspect of planning, design, and execution. Yet I labour on.

One annoying thing also associated with this project occurred yesterday when we tried to take some paper back to Paper Source. I purged my receipts last week and no longer had the proper documentation to prove that I bought two miscellaneous packs of paper roughly a month ago. The return policy at the store clearly states that if you don’t have a receipt that they can look up your purchase history in the computer. What they don’t tell you is that asking the clerk to do so will elicit the kind of response usually reserved for suspicious panhandlers, con men, and presidents. Basically, they treated my like a criminal mastermind, trying to engineer some masterstroke of chicanery in which I defraud the Paper Source company of $12.00. Needless to say, I was in no mood to cackle like an evil genius afterwards, but did maintain enough composure to buy more paper and clutch my receipt as I left the store.

starting work

I was called today and informed that I had passed my drug test. Well, that’s one exam in the past six months or so that I didn’t fail! That means that I will begin my new job at the Evanston public library in two days. Back to the grind! The last two weeks have been pretty enjoyable. I spend my days reading and working on my Estep project. The mantle in our living room is finally up, just needs a few final touches added to it. With the weather finally breaking into warmth, things are looking up. I suppose these reflections are appropriate for today. I didn’t like today’s prompt in the Writer’s Book of Days, so I got out my Tarot deck and pulled a card and looked it up in my Tarot book. The card that I pulled was the five of cups, seen above (though I don’t have a Rider-Waite deck, so the image on mine is a bit different). But the point is that the figure is consumed with grief because it is fixated on the three empty cups and isn’t aware of the two full ones behind it. So, I was planning on using this image/description as my writing prompt, but haven’t gotten around to it, as luck would have it.