Sales department: We think marketing should only focus on activities that bring in leads immediately.

Me: But we should also do branding exercises designed to promote our company’s identity.  Some time in the future that might bring in leads too.

Sales department: (Spits on me)
-----
I.T. department: It looks like a problem with the mySQL database.

Me: Shouldn’t you have made sure it was a viable franchise before doing a sequel?

I.T. department: (Spits on me)
----
Finance department: Hooray!  We’re done with the 2003 numbers.

Me: Here’s a late invoice from our 2003 search engine optimization project.

Finance department: (Spits on me)
----
All departments: We have highly specialized skills that help us carry the company forward.  What do you do?

Me: We hire vendors to do all our work for us.  And sometimes we sit around and think of stuff that’s cool and then we send out a press release about it.

Everyone: (Spits on me)
----
Still, at the end of the day, I get to go home with T-shirts that have our company logo.

The other day I was shopping in Barnes & Noble and I asked an employee for assistance.  He was unable to help me.

Yesterday I sent an unsolicited email to Michael Chabon, asking him to contribute to a side project of mine.  A few hours later he replied and very politely declined due to his workload.

Progress: being rejected by a better class of people.

When did it first happen?  I think it happened moments after strolling into my first high school dance.  I was 14 years old.

Red and blue lights streamed across the crowd.  Beats were dropping.  Bodies were rocking.  Everyone shook it.  Everyone shaked it. 

And suddenly, without warning, I chomped down on my lower lip.  And I began to groove.

I didn’t know I was doing this.  But as near as I can tell, I did it whenever I heard music for two years.  Then, around my junior year, my date said, “Why are you dancing like that?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “You have white man’s overbite.  You look ridiculous.”

“Huh?”

She said, “You’re biting your lip while you dance.  It’s called ‘white man’s overbite.’ You think you’re in tune with the music, but you’re just biting your lip like you’re in pain or something.”

I thought about it.  I concentrated on my face.  And I realized: she was right.  I was biting down on my lip.

“Okay,” I said.  “I can deal with this.  I can unbite my lip.”

“I don’t know,” she replied.  “I think you’ve been doing it a long time.  You may not be able to stop.”

“Of course I can stop.”

And I tried.  I felt the music pulsing inside of me, moving around in my head and heart and soul like a restless animal--encouraging my face to tighten up.  But I concentrated.  I looked at the girl.  She had soft brown eyes.  A gentle, curving jaw.  A low-cut dress.  My face relaxed.  I smiled.

I had beaten it!

She said, “But now you’re just staring at me and grinning like a drunk uncle.  You’re not even dancing.”

Okay, I thought, I’ll just add a few steps back into it--

And suddenly I was chomping down hard again.  As soon as I began to move, it was like my face was sliding off my skull and my instinct was to fasten it in place using every tooth at my disposal.

So it was too late for me.

You know how your mother told you “Don’t make that face because it’ll stay like that?” You may have laughed at her.  But in regards to white man’s overbite, it’s actually true.  Once you succumb to it, it becomes hardwired into your system.

Therefore, I want to take this opportunity to reach out to my younger readers.  There are those of you in your 20s, even in your teens.  It may not be too late for you.  You can prevent this from happening. Remember: it’s only music.  When you first hear it, you may want to be consumed by it.  You may feel it trying to get inside of you.  But fight back!  You control the music.  The music doesn’t control you

And whatever you do, don’t bite down.

Because what can happen won’t be pretty.  Nowadays?  When there’s nothing to lose and there’s nothing to prove I’ll be dancing with myself.  And also because I scare people.  They point at me and say “Look!  His face is contorted in a hideous Hannibal Lector-type mask!” And someone else says “Shhhh!  If we’re lucky he really will lay down and boogie and play that funky music ‘til he dies.  Like, keel over.  In the next five minutes or so.”

Because they end up loving stuff that I hate.

1. The Atkin’s Diet is officially a cultural phenomenon.  Low carb food is quickly filling the supermarket, and even fast food places will be offering low carb versions of their food.  Everyone is convinced that if you eat a bunch of meat, you lose weight.

That makes total sense.  Why, just the other day, I was talking to my friend the lion.  He said, “Hey Greg, I’ve lost tons of weight on the Atkin’s Diet.  It’s great!  All I have to do is eat meat.  So, like, I’ve been eating antelopes and gazelles and stuff.”

I said, “Isn’t that what you ate before?  You really don’t look all that diff--”

(Glares)

“....uh...you are one skinny lion, my friend.”

2. Financial planners.  I’m not just picking on this cretin, because they all say the same thing.  In order to retire rich, you must use a tax-deferred savings account like a 401(k), and buy a house.

That’s just brilliant.  So you should save up for retirement?  And buy a house?  Here’s a thought: it takes money to do all those things.  Can everyone afford to take a slice out of their paycheck while at the same time purchasing real estate and paying a mortgage?  No?  Then I guess that means you can only retire rich if you already have money.  And, y’know, giving up lattes won’t actually get you there either. Anyone know any financial planners?  Better hide them.  Each and every one of them is first up against the wall, come the revolution.

3. The Presidential Election.  Look, every four years I look forward to following the campaigns.  But this year it’s just pathetic.  John Kerry is the frontrunner for the democratic nomination?  Obviously no one’s even interested in having a real election; they just want to get it over with and keep Bush.  The only possible bit of fun out of all of this is waiting for Kerry to completely explode at a press conference: “Will all of you please stop calling me Walter Mondale?  It’s not funny.”

Sounds gross but isn’t: goat cheese.

Meeting topic that makes me giggle: “Market penetration.”

People I don’t trust: Anyone named “Ed."*

Source of two recent awesome CD mixes: A fellow purveyor of online verbiage.**

Gender questionable act recently and thankfully avoided: Playing bridge.

Gender questionable act recently done with enthusiasm: Sending out evites for a baby shower.

Recent embarrassing book read: The sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Book about to be read so I don’t have to answer “The sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary” when people ask me what I’m reading: A history about the politics behind the making of the Sistine Chapel.

Body part that sounds most like a jungle cat: Femur

Letter I’m most sympathetic toward: “Y"***

*It’s a not a name; it’s a suffix.  Highly suspicious.
**Kate hates the term “blog.”
***Is it a vowel?  Is it not a vowel?  It’s in a constant state of identity crisis.

One of the VPs at work found a tarantula in his back yard and made it a pet.  He keeps it in a glass cage on his desk.  The spider’s name is “Fred.”

Recently he found another spider, whom his daughter named “Prinze.” He brought Prinze to the office and put it in Fred’s cage just to see what would happen.

What happened was: Fred and Prinze started fighting.

Fred versus Prinze: They’ve got legs, and they know how to use them.

We watched the fight for a few minutes.  Then they stopped fighting, so we went back to work.

The next day, the VP sent us an email: “Prinze appears to be mulch.  It happened overnight. Fred is covering the body with gravel.”

Here’s what we don’t know: did Prinze die a horrible, violent death because Fred was protecting his territory?

Or did Prinze die an ecstatic, wonderful death because they actually mated and Fred (who may be female) finished up by biting his head off?

The fact that we don’t know seems like a life lesson of some kind. But damned if I know what it is.* Do you?

*Other than never have carnal relations with a tarantula, but I pretty much knew that already.

I hate driving home from work in the winter.  Or rather, I hate how the drive becomes a drive home in the winter, as the light gradually fades from day to day, like a dying campfire, until the sky bruises into an ugly purple and eventually turns oil black.  In the summer I barrel down the freeway; in the winter I slog through shadows.  Voices whisper to me: You’re done.  You’re going home.  Watch some TV, maybe read, but don’t go anywhere.  Don’t see a friend.  Don’t go to the gym.  Lie down.  Play dead. You’re done.  You’re done.  You’re done.

“Shut up,” I say, “I don’t have to listen to you.”

But everyone else is listening to us.

And it’s true.  I turn from side to side and I see my fellow commuters, their faces green from dashboard lights, and no one sings despite the fact that we’re almost invisible to each other.  This is the perfect opportunity to sing!  Even the shyest among us can belt out tunes in the cover of darkness.  We could roll down our windows and exchange favorite songs.  Right now, for example, I could do Belle and Sebastian’s “I Fought in a War.” And you sir?  Classical music?  That’s fine; let us hear you hum Berlioz.  Do it “LA-LA-LA” style so we can all hear it over the sounds of our engines.  Or we could all join forces and do a Barbershop’s Quartet, a perfect, egalitarian team of Civic, Camry, Ford, and BMW racing together down highway 580.

But the darkness confounds our intentions, saps our energy, and leaves us voiceless.  We’re tricked into believing that we won’t live again until the morning--but even the new day offers few opportunities because it’s bookended by darkness, broken up only by hours of fluorescent lights, meeting requests, and bitter coffee.

I’d like to say that I have something inspirational to close this with, some tried-and-true method for defeating defeatism.  And of course, one does things even in the winter; I’m simply saying that in order to do so, the deck is stacked and you have to fight to beat the odds.  It’s inescapable.  But I can say that around this time of year, you begin to see the oil black turn swirly with purples and blues, and you know that time is suddenly on your side again, and eventually the shadows will slither away.  Soon you can leave work and drive off into a blinding brightness.  You can go running or eat at a new restaurant and--this is the weird thing--stay out after dark gladly, because staying up late on a hot night is like a comforting embrace, whereas staying up on a cold night is like a hard slap.  And new voices start whispering to you, soothing ones, and they tell you: “You’re free, don’t go home, come play, come play, you’re just getting started, you’re going places, come play, come play, come play.” And you say “Wait just one moment and I’ll be right with you. I’m examining winter’s corpse and making sure it’s good and dead and won’t come back until it’s supposed to, because the last thing I need is the lights going out in the middle of April.”

I don’t usually lose my temper, but boy did I hit the roof this weekend.

It happened Sunday evening when I checked my site stats.  They tell me interesting things, including search words that people have used to find this page.  One of the searches came from Google:

Pictures of Juliana Margulies in the shower

I became outraged.

Now, you might think I was upset because losers type dumb searches into Google at all hours of the day and night, and this site became caught up in their dysfunctional lameness because a random assortment of posts happened to form a match to this search request.

But no, that wasn’t it.  I was upset because I knew she had been writing on my blog again.

“JULIANA!” I yelled.

She poked her head out of the bathroom, wet hair pasted across her shoulders.  White clouds of steam spilled into the air. “What’s wrong, Greg?”

“I’m getting search hits about your shower pictures again.”

“Oh.  Uh...that’s weird.  I don’t know how that happened.”

“Don’t lie to me, Juliana.  You posted shower pictures and then took them down again, didn’t you?”

She hung her head in shame.  “It’s just that...posting to your site can be very cathartic...I love the way I feel after taking a shower, and I just wanted to share that with the world, even for a moment.  But I deleted the post immediately!  Honest!”

“Well, Google still managed to take a snapshot of it and now I’m getting search requests.  Can’t you just start up your own blog instead of screwing around with mine?  julianaintheshower.blogspot.com or something?”

She rolled her eyes.  “I’m not going to get all into it.  It’s just a lark.”

“That’s what they all say until they get sucked in.  Now look, Juliana, I don’t mind you staying at my place and recuperating and thinking about your future career plans.  Which is a good idea--it’s not like you’ve done a whole bunch since you left E.R..  And your movie choices haven’t exactly been stellar.  I mean, not only was Ghost Ship a pretty bad movie, but your performance in it lacked your usual vibrant, method-acting believability--”

“Wait, you actually saw Ghost Ship?”

“Shut up.  Anyway, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want, but stay off my blog.”

“Okay.  I promise.”

“And while you’re at it, stop tying up the computer with all your instant messenger chats with Clooney.”

“Okay.” She began to duck back into the shower.

“Oh, and Juliana--?

“Yes?”

“Don’t use up all the hot water.”

Prologue:
Helpful, sparkling, user-friendly text on Earthlink support web site, accessed from work after DSL modem at home refuses to connect to the Net:

SAN FRANCISCO - Original on 14-Jan-2004 14:55:13 Eastern: We are currently investigating loss of sync, pppoe timeout or difficulties accessing sites and services on or off the EarthLink Network for DSL Customers in the Bay Area. Additional information will be provided as it becomes available. Earthlink Operations

That evening:
Hour one.
-Hmmm.  What did I do before the Internet?  Oh I know, I’ll watch some television.

-What the hell is all this?  People shouting at each other and waving guns and driving fast in cars.  I don’t get it.  I’ll just navigate to another page…

(Hits screen with fingers)

-Ow!  Where are the hyperlinks?  How do I change the screen?  TV sucks.

Hour Two.
-I know, I’ll read.  I love Pride and Prejudice so I’ll read that.  I don’t care that I haven’t checked my email in six hours.

“Elizabeth was sitting by herself the next morning, and writing to Jane, when she was startled by a ring at the door.  The door opened, and to her very great surprise, Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Darcy only, entered the room.

‘How did you get here?’ Elizabeth gasped.

‘Oh, I used Mapquest,’ Mr. Darcy said smugly.  ‘I downloaded the directions into my Handspring, where I also keep the recipe for a very fine cabbage and potato recipe that I obtained from Epicurious.com.’”

-Wait a minute, that’s not what happened.  My God, I’m going into withdrawal and hallucinating.  Must stay...busy…

Hour Three.
-I know, I’ll call a friend on the phone.  That’ll be great.  Wait...how do I call my friend?  I don’t remember.  Oh, I’ll just type in some numbers at random.  That should work.

“Hello?”

-Yes, hello sir!  I am trying to reach a friend.  Are you a friend?

“Screw you, jerkoff.  I’m sick of being bothered by you sickos.”

--L-O-L, sir!  L-O-L!

“What?  L-O-L?”

-It means I am laughing very heartily at the moment!  Smiley face!  Winky emoticon!

“Wink at this, dillweed.” (Hangs Up)

Hour four.
Lying on living room carpet, surrounded by vast, heavy, unbearable reality.  Suddenly, a man appears.

-Who...who are you?

“I am your Man Friday.”

-Go away.  You’re another hallucination.  A product of my fevered imagination.  Let me die in peace.

“No, good sir.  I am to be your teacher on this island of despair.  I will help you to survive in this Internet-less desert.  You will learn to find spiritual fulfillment in the simple life, away from the perils of things like hyperlinks and javascript.  At the end of our companionship, you will be a new man...and a much richer one, even if at the moment you feel most poor, most poor indeed.”

-Oh.  What are you carrying under your arm?”

“A Sony Playstation.  Up for a round of Resident Evil 2?”

I felt the icy touch of own mortality today as I donned the long, black jacket that was a gift from my brother.  He had said, “You can wear this jacket over a suit.” Which at the time I thought, sure, okay, cool.

But today I had to wear a sportcoat because it was time for my company’s monthly networking event. I was able to drape my new jacket over the rest of the outfit, and I thought, This is a very mature jacket.  By wearing this jacket over formal attire, one ends up being very presentable.  One no longer has to cram one’s suit underneath a tight leather jacket, as though one is packing a parachute.

Or, you know, one might even make a worse impression than that.

“Hi, I’m Greg.  Thanks for coming to our monthly networking event.”

“Uh, sure.  What the hell do you have stashed underneath your leather jacket there?  Is your sportcoat all bunched up?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.  I’m, uh, packing away food and nutrients in case the presentation runs a little long.  It operates on the same principle as a camel’s hump.”

So it’s a smart move, this jacket.  But it’s so...adult.

And then it hit me:

I’ve gotten to the point where I wear serious jackets.

I’m going to die soon.

Youth is melting away from my face like the Nazis’ heads at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Wearing this coat is like wearing a shroud.  A shroud of doom.

I should just paint a skull and crossbones on the back of it.

But then I stopped a moment.  And collected my thoughts.  And I realized:

This New Year’s Eve, I was able to answer the trivia question “What Marvel superhero is based on a figure from Norse mythology?”

My personal artwork (stick figures underneath a swath of blue) looks exactly the same now as it did when I was six.

I used a Raiders of the Lost Ark simile in the above diatribe.

It’s also possible that if I were walk down the street playing the flute, children would swarm out after me.  I don’t know for sure, but I have a good feeling about it.

So maybe I have a few last embers of youth after all.  And besides, the coat is cool.

Although I really need to remember to fix my collar.

I find it very suspicious that Jenny Craig never appears in her product’s own commercials.  Has anyone ever seen this woman?

What if she’s so big that she can’t even leave the house?

Dan, I am right and you are wrong.

I’m amazed we actually hung out at Cato’s pizza and ale house once and didn’t come to blows.

I had to buy some new closet doors this weekend.  So off I went to Home Depot.

“I like that one,” I said, motioning towards one of closet door models they had on display.

“Okay,” the guy said.  “Do you have the measurements for the closet space?”

“Sure,” I said, “But you know, maybe I like this one over here better--” and I took a step.

“DON’T DO THAT!”

“Huh?”

“You can’t walk over there.”

“Why not?”

The guy grimaced.  He appeard to be struggling with an inner conflict.  Then he said, “That closet door model is located in a red terror zone.  Although the United States recently lowered its terror alert to yellow, you may have heard Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge say that unspecified parts of the country would be asked to remain on a heightened state of alert to guard against possible terror attacks. “

“So the terror alert is mostly yellow, but in some undisclosed places it’s still red.”

“Right.”

“And one of those places is inside this Home Depot.”

“Well, parts of it.  I can’t tell you exactly where, of course.  Unless you go into one of the red areas.  It’s a strictly need-to-know thing.”

I sighed.  “Okay, look, what if I bought this model over here--”

“DON’T TOUCH IT!”

I jumped back.  He eyed me warily.

“You seem to have an uncanny knack for knowing where the red areas are.  What’s your position on, like, being evil and overturning democracy?”

I threw up my hands.  “Look, forget it.  I’ll take the first model I looked at.  You know, the one that’s in the yellow area.”

“Fine.”

“And now I’m going to buy a cup coffee.” I took a step--

“DON’T STEP THERE!”

I snapped, “What, this piece of the floor is located in a red area too?”

“No, but I saw someone spit on it an hour ago.”

Okay, so I didn’t weigh in on the whole plagiarizing thing because 1. I was barely plagiarized and 2. Julia can stand up for herself, as she has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.  I didn’t think it mattered because the culprit was obviously a very young person with very few brain cells.  And it wasn’t like he was making money off the swiped content.  And it wasn’t like anyone was reading his site.

(Just to recap for those with non-blogging lives to live: the fabulous Julia had whole blog posts swiped by Bryan “Jayson Blair” Lamb.  A post of mine was also plagiarized.  It was a dumb post, and he made it even dumber.  Which I thought was kind of impressive; I wouldn’t have thought it possible.  The thief has since re-edited the plagiarized material after a blog outcry that rivaled the reaction over New Coke.)

(And there goes my new year’s resolution to stop making pop culture references that are 20 years out of date.)

Anyway, I decided to raise the issue because it reminded me about human nature and the choices we make when we find ourselves under fire.

(Shut up.  It’s my blog and I can talk like that if I want.)

See, I don’t think plagiarism is the worst evil in the world.  It’s a very tempting thing to do, and a lot of people do it, and it’s bad, but it doesn’t make someone irredeemable.  Everyone makes mistakes.

Heck, I don’t even think that woman who lied about the winning lottery ticket was evil.  I’d totally invite her to my place to play a game of Justice League-themed Monopoly.  I simply wouldn’t allow her to be the banker.

But this guy?  One of the posts he swiped from Julia was a sad one about her cousin with HIV.  Bryan didn’t lift facts or even figures of speech; he lifted, word-for-word, nearly the entire post, and attributed the story to an ex-girlfriend of his.  And when he took it down, after being barraged by emails and complaints from outraged readers, what did he put in its place?  Not an apology. Not an admission of guilt.  No, he wrote:

“N has asked me to remove her story from the website. I have complied, and appreciate her bravery in allowing me to post it in the first place. Her courage is a testament to the power of the human spirit, and we could all learn a lot from her example.”

Check that out.  That’s not the kind of sociopathy you buy in the store.  It comes from a very special place deep down inside.

I wanna digress and tell another story about plagiarism.  I used to teach freshman English so I’m pretty familiar with the concept of “creative borrowing.” Once I taught at a business college where the students were poorly educated, at least in comparison to students at other universities.  A lot of them had serious writing problems.

One girl was very nice and enthusiastic, but not an adept writer. She struggled with the class.  She wasn’t going to fail it, because she participated in discussions and did a lot of rewriting, but she was tilting somewhere between a C+ and a B- by the end of the semester.

The final paper assignment had a fun option: analyze a pop song.  Write a structured, coherent paper that discusses both lyrics and music.

This student came back with a discussion of Leann Rimes, and there was a chunk in the middle of her paper with sentences like this one:

“With vocals that seemingly echo with a preternatural stillness, Rimes doesn’t always let you know whether she’s being a truck stop darling or a kitten with a whip.”

And so on.

I called her into my office.

I said, “What does ‘preternatural’ mean?”

She didn’t know.

So that student made a mistake and succumbed to the temptation to let a Rolling Stone review write her final paper for her.  And she failed the paper.  (Not the class.  I’m a weenie softie.) But you know what?  She’s probably over it, even if she remembers the incident.  I’m sure she became a successful businesswoman doing things that had absolutely nothing to do with close analysis of Leann Rimes songs, and is no doubt thankful that the real world doesn’t generally require five page essays on a weekly basis.

She owned up to it, took the hit, and her life went on from there.

But in Lamb’s case, when he was caught, all he did was pour out vitriol and lies into the ether.  It may be a reflection of his own self-loathing, but that doesn’t change his actions or what they represent.

I’m not a religious person at all.  But I do believe that if you continually pour negative energy into the world, it’s likely to travel the globe, arcing through the sky and shooting across continents, and eventually swoop back around and smack you on the ass.  It’s not karma, it’s not spiritual redress--it’s pure physics.  Cause and effect.  Nature abhors a vacuum--and let’s face it, our friend the plagiarist is a Hoover.

It’s something to remember next time you’re faced with a situation in which you look bad.  Even one in which you look very, very bad.  When it happens, you still have a choice, and it’s the only one that really matters: whether or not to face it with honor.

Personally, I’d rather not go out like a Lamb.

1. Many serial killers have eaten mushrooms.

2. The popular acceptance of mushrooms have crowded out toadstools, which are much more interesting on both an aesthetic and philosophical level.

3. Everyone likes mushrooms and that makes it difficult for me to get the pizza topping I want: artichoke hearts and garlic.

4. Snowshoe Crab also hates mushrooms.  And does she look unhealthy to you?

5. They taste really, really bad.

6. No mushroom has ever had any good words to say about me.

7. I once misplaced my car keys for a little while, and for all I know mushrooms were responsible.

8. If I fell into a 30 foot vat of mushrooms, I would eventually suffocate and die.

9. When radiation in our atmosphere turns mushrooms into 50-foot man-eating killers, don’t come crying to me.

10. The only good mushrooms I ever had were in Italy when I had this amazing mushroom risotto that tasted so good that it didn’t even taste like mushrooms, which means it wasn’t actually mushrooms but a big Italian trick played by Italians, which proves that mushrooms are always bad and therefore I hate them.