Reaching the End of My Last Nerve: or, child sacrifice at work

From a conversation I had earlier this morning, at work:

*phone rings*
Me: Good morning, ____ Gallery.
*ambient noise on the other end of the line, no voice*
Me: Hello? ...Hello?
Guy: *after more silence* ...Oh, hi.
Me: Can you hear me?
Guy: Yes...
Me: Hello...
Guy: Who is this?
Me: This is Lynsey at the ____ Gallery.
Guy: Oh.
Me: ...can I help you?
Guy: Well somebody called me from there.
Me: Ok, there are about 25 people at this office. Do you have any idea who it might have been?
Guy: Oh!
*silence*
Guy: It might have been M____.
Me: Well, she works at our other location. But I can put your call through from here.
Guy: Ok.
Me: ...can I tell her who's calling?
Guy: Oh, yeah, it's P____.

...now. Who in the HELL calls someone without: A) being prepared for someone to pick up and say hello on the other end, B) considering who it is that they're calling, or C) being prepared to identify him or herself? Obviously this guy, but really, what KIND of person does this?

Am I supposed to telepathically know who you are, what you want, and who you need to talk to? If so, that would be bad for you, because by virtue of knowing telepathically what a douchebag you are, I would also (in my version of an X-Men mutant power world) be able to telekinetically strangle you, thus saving the gene pool from another line of morons.

Yesterday I got so annoyed with the borderline handicapped people calling me every thirty seconds that once as I was picking up the phone, I had to take a moment to remember how to answer, because I almost said: "I will sacrifice your children to my dark god" in a spooky goth voice instead of saying: "Good afternoon, ____ Gallery."

This isn't good. I can't keep up the happy smiley voice much longer.

Crappy Coincidences, or Bad Omens?: or, how to tell you're going to have a bad day.

When I woke up today, I absolutely could not convince myself to get out of bed. It was warm in the bed and cold in the room, it had snowed all night and looked soft and quiet outside, and I knew that today would be a very long day of sitting in a chair in various places if I did get up. It didn't look promising. But I told myself I'd been so productive the past few days and had so many things to accomplish that getting up would be worth it. So I did.
And then the shit started happening. Small at first, but escalating slowly. I had slept in too late to yoga, which I've been trying (somewhat successfully) to do every morning to help keep my energy up. Instead I got in the shower to soften up my skin so I could give myself my two weekly injections of anti-joint-hurty medicine, but then remembered that I'd left the refill of Enbrel at work because they have to be kept refrigerated and I hadn't gone straight home after they were delivered yesterday. So I gave myself the other shot when I got out of the shower. When I was done with that, I set about making eggs to go with the Korean-style kimchi-fried-rice bowls we had half-prepared the night before, but all the frying pans were dirty. So I had to wash one, and of course I chose the one that had the most stubborn grossness in it, which took me a good ten minutes to clean out of the pan, only to get it dirty again, which seemed wrong and made me angry. As I set about cooking the eggs, the ferret came up and started giving me the most mournful, "I-know-you're-going-to-leave-me-all-alone-here-all-day" looks and pawing at my leg, which made me feel really shitty. And then, for no reason at all as far as I could tell, both the eggs I broke into the pan had broken yolks.
I had no time to eat breakfast after this, and left my house later than expected. On the way to the subway, I got dripped on three times, all over my face, the makeup I had just put on, and the hair I had just blown dry. I told Connor I was sure this was going to be a bad day, and he told me these weren't omens. I disagreed.
Once at work, I realized how little money I have when I glanced at my banking account. Then it turned out that my coworker had called out sick, which will make it much more difficult for me to leave here in time to get to my first night class of the semester. Showing up a half hour late for the first class would be embarrassing and unpleasant.
Just now, I decided that I'd give myself my second shot in the bathroom on my lunch break. Giving oneself an injection in the work bathroom is not fun. Not only because this particular injection hurts like a motherfucker and then stings for hours afterward, but also because the bathroom here is like a middle school bathroom. A row of four stalls and four sinks and no way to lock the door to keep out the constant stream of other women who need to use the loo. So there I was, with my shirt rolled up and my pants pulled down so I could see my stomach, where I was preparing to inject my Enbrel subcutaneously. I'd brought a cotton swab and alcohol in a plastic bag, and as the woman in the other stall made the usual preparing-to-pee noises, I was standing creepily in the other stall and crinkling a plastic bag a whole lot. I'd already gone to the bathroom a half hour or so before so I couldn't even fake like I wasn't doing something shady by popping a squat. As she left the stall to wash her hands, I actually injected myself and bit my lip--hard enough to really hurt--to keep myself from sucking in a breath at the stinging pain of the medicine going into my body. I think it might be one of those things where the molecules in the medicine are too big to fit in with the molecules in the blood stream or something, but I'm really bad at remembering science-y facts so maybe I made that up. Whatever the case, injecting this shit hurts really bad and I had to try really hard not to make some noise that would fit the context, but to someone else in the bathroom minding her own business, would sound really, really creepy. It hurts so much that no matter how much I try to inject the very small amount of liquid into my fatty tissue, I just cannot push the plunger down very quickly. At home, when I'm being more of a baby about it, it can take me up to a minute to get it all in. This time it took me maybe half that long.
Finally the other woman left the bathroom, I finished injecting, and I put the used syringe on the makeshift 'shelf' I'd fashioned out of the toilet paper holders. I got all my clothes back to where they were supposed to be, and as I reached up to put my instruments of torture back in the plastic bag, I accidentally knocked the syringe into the toilet.
GOD DAMN IT.
There was nothing else in the toilet, and our toilets get cleaned every day by the building cleaning guy, and I've heard a billion times that the water that comes into the toilet is just as clean as the water from the tap, but... There are like 20 women at the gallery who use this bathroom every day. I did NOT want to stick my hand in there.
Luckily--I thought--the air in the syringe and the plastic of the stopper and hand-grippy-thing at the end were keeping the syringe floating, needle-down, in the potty. If I could reach in and just grab the very end of it, I might be able to avoid getting wet.
I grabbed a paper towel/napkin I'd been using to set things on and folded it up so it was long and thin, then bent over the toilet. I balked the first time, and rearranged the way I was holding the paper towel, then reached for the floating end of the syringe. As soon as my hand brushed against it, the entire thing stopped floating and landed with a soft 'chink' at the very bottom of the toilet bowl.
No words for my frustration. The skin on my stomach burned and itched where I'd injected it (this happens every time... actually, it still does...), but it was really annoying right now. "Fuck it," I muttered, plunged my entire hand into the toilet bowl, brought out the dripping syringe, stuffed it in the bag, and stormed out of the stall.
Thank god nobody saw me come out, all wet, and stuff a plastic bag into the garbage, muttering obscenities to myself. I washed my hand for a LONG time and went back to the desk, where I'm writing this now. If you don't hear from me for a few days, rest assured it's because something even STUPIDER happened to me, and I am hiding out in my bed until the bad days pass.

The weirdness of my life escalates: or, it's been a while...

Well, my lovelies, it's been a while. And I don't think I've sat down for more than a few minutes of it. Well, aside from seeing "Inglourious Basterds" the other night, which I feel compelled to see again on the basis that it f-ing ROCKED. Although I have no time in which to do so. We'll see how it goes.

But, the weirdness of my life is escalating like a kid with no respect or fear for the escalator. I'm reaching dizzying heights of insanity here. I just got a TWITTER account for my new persona as a correspondent for Whack! Magazine, have been in touch with numerous folks in the adult industry about interviews over the past few weeks, have done more 'research' for my book in a very unexpected place, may have begun to be stalked by someone I met on a research outing (that has yet to be proved, though), and haven't really relaxed at all. I'm trying to figure out ways in which to get myself fired on good enough terms that I could collect unemployment, but haven't come up with anything yet. All my friends who are on unemployment seem to be living the good life, and having just spent the past two days being wildly productive at writing while at home, I think I may want to try their lifestyle. Only problem is, the gallery won't fire me unless I crap in the middle of their floor. They may be jerks about it, but they love me. It's an abusive relationship, but they do give me a kickin' health insurance plan, and if that ain't worth a little backhanded slapping from time to time, I don't know what is.

But anyway, I've been thinking a lot about porn lately, since I've been writing about it and planning to go to a convention next month (that's a whole other story). Last night I watched a documentary about John Holmes that featured a lot of footage from his films in the 70's and early 80's, and it really drove home to me the differences in the aesthetics of porn performers then and now. Back in the day you had lots of body hair, somewhat saggy boobs from time to time, flabby butts, and more or less real sex going on in skin flicks. These days it's often fake tans, fake dyed hair, fake nails, fake eyelashes, fake boobs, hairless genitals, and sex that, while real, isn't very often the kind of sex normal people are having. It's like a mechanical depiction of an act that carries in it nothing sensual, only sexual. It's like watching robots go at it.

No, seriously. I've been thinking a lot about the fake aesthetic of porn, and I've been wondering if the increasingly Barbie Doll appearance of mainstream porn stars is a result of the adult industry's typical tendency to take a good thing and go way overboard with it. Men like big boobs, in general, so porn takes the big boob ideal and turns it into a charicaturized monster-mammary fetish. Everybody likes looking tan and healthy, so porn gives us oompa-loompa orange stars. And so on. And the public watches it, maybe because we have to watch what we're presented with, or maybe--and here's where the robots come in--because we don't really like to think that these piston-like penises and hairless vaginas are really human. We don't like to think that the hardcore sex acts we're watching and getting off to are taking place between real people, because that implicates us in some kind of gross moral degeneracy, throws our own less-stunning sexual prowess into a very dim light indeed, and most of all, puts us and the people boning on camera on the same basic level as human beings.

So we buy up porn featuring people who don't look like real people. We go to strip clubs expecting the performers to be surgically enhanced Femmbots from Austin Powers. We hold them at a distance from ourselves, as something vaguely like ourselves and yet safely different, like robots who can have sex but with whom we have no fundamental similarities. It feels safer that way.

But it's not, obviously. I watch some of the porn being made today, both in big studios and for low-budget online enterprises, and it's all featuring intensely fictionalized faces, oversized cocks, spitting, gagging, violent humping, weird fringe acts that have become mainstream. And I think, these people are doing this because they know people want to watch it. We want to watch it because it seems fake. But the overlap is inevitable and it's got to be going on in bedrooms everywhere, and in the computer-lit basements of teenage boys everywhere, who are growing up thinking that this kind of behavior is normal. That these bodies are standard. That this is what a man is supposed to do to a woman, and vice versa. And that scares me in the same way that the idea of intelligent or morally informed robots scares me. It says something really terrifying about our view of ourselves and the things we create. We want them to be bigger, better, smarter, faster, stronger than we are, more than we want to be ok with what we've got and use it. Of course robots started as time and labor saving devices equipped to help us, but many robotics experiments out there are taking some of our basic human roles away from us because they are NOT us, like mechanized soldiers and battle bots, even companion robots designed to give the appearance of feeling love, or just to have sex with (see that picture above? that's what that is. a sexbot). We watch robot movies because they feature super-intelligent and super-sophisticated bots that are so human we must anthropomorphize them in order to villainize them in order to watch them, and again, there's that creepy overlap. And sure, porn started as a sexy alternative to our imaginations when we masturbate, but it's turned into this multi-billion dollar monster industry that caters to our cruelest instincts by turning its stars into nonhuman objects who just fuck and fuck and fuck away.

I'm not sure how to end this, but there it is. Food for thought.

The underutilization of English majors: or, how I plan to make a living...

Well. I have not been posting much lately, and I do apologize. I've been going through an intense period of thinking about my writing as per its career aspects, and where I'd like to consciously take it from here. It's been quite overwhelming and stressful, and I've been pretty busy to boot.
But I think something is afoot. Last week I purchased a new computer, which will arrive in a day or two and hopefully make my life as a would-be writer easier (the one I have now will no longer work unless hooked up in just-such-a-way to one single socket in my apartment and no other, nor will it connect to the internet, no matter what type of connection I try to establish; its Graphics driver has stopped working, and I think it basically just wants to die, so I'm letting it), I'm embarking on several new projects (co-producing, casting, story editing, and generally helping a friend with his awesome webisode, taking night classes in Illustration and publishing starting in a few weeks, and working with a musician on an album), and... oh my god, you guys... I just accepted a year-long, once-a-month column at McSweeney's Internet Tendency!!! AAAAHHHH!! I'm a writer!! Holy crap!!!

!!!!Exclamation points!!!!


...ok. Now that that's over with. There's a reason I'm exposing you all to my own self-congratulatory festival. Namely that, with all these projects and classes going on, I'm looking at my schedule and thinking: "This is nuts. How am I ever going to make time for all this without going crazy?" And, of course, since I'm at work, my brain is giving me sneaky answers like: "You're probably going to have to quit your full-time gig at the gallery." Which, my other, less sneaky, brain answers with: "That's ludicrous. How could we ever pay our bills?"

To which my third, more rational yet also creative and fun brain, answers: "Work the English major angle."

Ok, I know some of you are probably snorting with laughter at that. "What English major angle?" you're giggling. "That's no angle at all!"

And it would seem you'd be right.

But think about this. When's the last time you walked down the street, drove down the road, or even sat down at a restaurant without seeing a grievous error in spelling, grammar, or punctuation? I might see these errors more often than others because I live in a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood, but I'm sure many of you share my annoyance when you're handed a menu at a decent dining establishment and find an option like "Chicken Brest" or "Sasoned Rice." It's infuriating to me because I'm trained to notice things like that, and I would imagine it's mildly annoying to other people; but more importantly, it hurts a business when the people who write the signage and menus are made to look like fools to their clientele, or to anyone else who can read. Websites are even worse; I don't really even want to talk about the horrific crimes committed against the English language on the Web. But, suffice it to say...

That's where I think English majors should come in. Like many other people these days, English majors are hurting for cash and jobs, but unlike many other demographics, for English majors this is almost always the case. We're the slightly more academic Art Historians of the modern world; we have lots of practical knowledge but rarely find good ways in which to use it. Why not mobilize against the forces of stupidity? Why not take arms against a sea of idiocy, and by opposing, end it?

I think, if in my frantic writing/singing/running about this fall, I should lose my full-time job, I would march directly from the gallery over to Staples and have 250 business cards with my name and number and the words "English Major for Hire. Will proofread, edit, and correct any and all signage, menus, and online text."

I'd then go around to every business I could find and drop off my card. Simple. You pay me a very small amount, I fix your language problems. My fees would be modest. $5 for all your signs. $10 for signs and over-the-counter menus. $20 for paper menus. Maybe $.05 a word or something websites, maybe less (haven't done the math to see if that makes sense). It would benefit everyone: the business and its employees would look smarter, which would draw more clients, and the general public would be exposed to less bad English, thereby reinforcing good English.

Soon enough, we'd have a movement. English majors being paid for what they're good at anyway, making some money to pay the bills, and feeling good about their decision in college. More people knowing how to spell and use punctuation. It'd be a happier, better world.

Now, I know I'm too busy right now to start this revolution, but who knows what might happen in the next few months? If I do get kicked out of this high-falutin' gallery anytime soon, I'll start it myself. And if not: English majors, I urge you to unite! Help your less-educated neighbors learn how to spell! Become a positive force in your society! I emplore you! Please, for the sake of the Chicken Brest with Sasoned Rice.

Why I hate Abercrombie: or, gagging and coughing on my way to work.

I have about had it with the goddamn Abercrombie and Fitch flagship store, guys. It's bad enough that people--excuse me, not just people, but midtown tourists, on whom I love to lavish contempt because I'm a New Yorker and they're not, and because they clog up the sidewalk with their slow-ass walking and sudden stops in the middle of a crowded corner and cause me to almost lose my balance as I swerve out around them daily on my hurried route to and from work--line up literally around the block to get in all day every day. And it's obnoxious enough that the reason they line up for the overpriced and not-all-that-cool merchandise inside is because they post a shirtless beefcake in the store to chat with the ladies and get his picture taken. Seriously. See the above picture. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to beefcakes, and I certainly don't want to give the impression that the sight of a hot piece of manflesh doesn't get me excited, but when it's being blatantly used as a ploy to get me into a store, that kind of makes me angry. From the perspective of someone who hates to see anyone's sexuality being blatantly abused to sell stuff, it's just kind of gross.

But if those were the only obnoxious things about the store I probably wouldn't mind so much. It's the fact that apparently the lines that beefcake draws are not enough for them. Whoring out a man's body is not enough for them. Oh no. They can't stop there: they also pump the scent of their godawful cologne out of all their doors in clouds so thick that I literally cannot walk through them without gagging. It makes the entire corner of 56th and 5th reek at all hours of the day. I can't figure out how the tourists can sit/stand/lounge around for the hours they typically do waiting to get in without passing out from lack of oxygen. No, I am not exaggerating. It is really that bad. And the cologne in question is AWFUL. It's like Preferred Stock mixed with lead or something. It smells like metal and fakery and is completely unsexy. And they pump it out into the already-polluted Manhattan air like it's a tonic for what ails people.

I guess maybe the idea is that the scent of the collogne, when combined with the lure of the hunk of man-meat inside the store, will inspire in women an overwhelming pseudo-sexual urge to go inside the store and buy things. On a social acceptability level, I guess this works. There are people lined up out there all the time. But, really, it's a bad plan: researchers in Chicago have found that the smell of men's cologne actually reduces blood flow to the vagina (no blood flow, no arousal).

Take that, Abercrombie.

Some Dudes are A-Holes: exhibit B

So on Tuesday I was sitting here, as I am now, at the desk at the gallery, no doubt working on something VERY important. (That's how I roll. I look like I'm just surfing the internet but I'm actually almost always working on one project or another of my own. And they're important. Top secret stuff. You wouldn't understand.) It was mid-afternoon, the time of day when my mood invariably takes a sudden turn. Sometimes it's into the realm of indiscriminate randiness, when I can't stop thinking about sex for an hour at a time. Sometimes it's laziness, which in turn inspires drool-inducing, mind-numbing, ripping-my-own-hair out boredom so profound I can't even come up with any ideas for things to do. And sometimes, particularly this week when I've had a bunch of deadlines and projects to work on and lots of things on the agenda, it's hysterical, headache-causing stress, which in its turn morphs into annoyance and very near explosive bouts of temper every time the phone rings.

On Tuesday, it was stress/anger. I was trying to keep myself under control to avoid head-explody (nobody wants brains on the artwork, after all), when a middle aged gentleman in khakis, a very very bright orange polo shirt, and black suspenders walked in. The outfit in itself was warning of a really annoyingly unselfconscious geek of a human being, but to add insult to injury he was carrying a gigantic camera in a case strapped around his neck.

He walked right up to me, blinking behind his thick glasses, and said, in a nasal and wheezing voice, "Excuse me, I hate to bother you," --PS, when people come into a retail establishment and say this to the person at the desk, they ALWAYS, very definitely DO mean to bother you-- "but could I ask if I have permission to take some flash photographs of the beautiful sculptures downstairs in the entryway to the building? The flash isn't very bright, but there is a flash on it, but I just thought those sculptures were so beautiful, and..."

"Yes," I cut him off. "Those sculptures are open to public view and as such they can be photographed. People take pictures of them all the time."

"Oh, well that's good," he started up again. "I always like to get permission before I take photographs of any artwork because sometimes, if you don't and you start to take pictures, then the man at the desk in the lobby will come and tap you and say, 'You can't do that.' So I always come in to ask permission first, and I was just out to lunch nearby and saw a way to get from 56th to 57th near your building so I walked through and there were these beautiful sculptures and I thought, 'I should ask if I have permission to photograph these wonderful artworks'..."

He just kind of kept going like that for a while. He talked as if everything were one long sentence, jam-packed with fuckery. While he was going through his laundry list of inane prattle, the phone ran several times, a few other people walked by and spoke to me, and he just kept going. I went back to whatever I'd been doing on my computer, even, and he kept right on. Eventually he did seem to pick up on the fact that I wasn't listening, and then leaned in: "May I have permission to take a look around this lovely gallery, then, before I leave?"

I'm sure I shot him a "please go fuck yourself and/or die" look, but I said as politely as possible, "Yes, go ahead. We don't permit any photographs in the gallery, however."

"Oh, no, of course not, I wouldn't want to..." he started talking as he walked away. For all I know, or care, he could have been talking to himself the entire time he spent walking around the gallery.

He was admiring the lovely artworks for a good 20 minutes before meandering back my way, at which point he IMMEDIATELY started up with the boring chatter. I was astounded. This happens from time to time at my job, it's nothing new that somebody decided I was to be their next victim in a long line of serial attacks of drivel, but I'm always amazed by them. I mean, are these people really just lonely and possessed of a smidgen of acumen which tells them that above all other people in the universe, gallery receptionists are helpless to get away from them? Or do they do this to everyone? I get images of them sitting in busy restaurants, telling the waitstaff in great detail about the spices they uses on their own tilapia at home, while food goes cold at the order-up window and other customers wait impatiently for service.

This time, dude was telling me about how he comes from a family of artists; his sister is an artist and his aunts are artists; his daughters are artists; except the one daughter who started out in a program for studio art in college but then switched to English; but she produced some really great pieces that friends are constantly praising; he thinks someday she'll go back to art; because there is no reason to do just one thing; we can choose what we do...

In the middle of his slowly unspooling yarn of crap, the phone rang several times in a row and I was able to stay on the phone just long enough for him to lose interest. He thanked me and then walked away. I heard him press the button for the elevator, and in a spirit of profound thankfulness, I finished my calls and hung up.

Well, he HEARD me hang up. And to him that meant I was fair game for a lecture on mental handicapped-ness, from someone afflicted by it. And that bastard turned right around, just as the elevator was opening for him, and walked BACK to my desk!! He immediately launched into a story about how his English major daughter had made a painting when she was 2 and 1/2 and they'd framed it and given it to his parents, and those parents invited some art experts over for dinner, and the art experts thought that the painting was very good, and it was just so funny because it had been done by a 2 and 1/2 year old. And he just always really resonds viscerally to art even though he's no expert; he just sees things and likes them; and he's kind of an artist too; he's from an artistic family, you know; he takes photographs of art, flash photographs, with not a very bright flash, and his relatives have all said that his photographs are very good...

Seriously, this went on for a good ten minutes more. My co-workers kept walking past the desk and just leaving me out to dry for this ass-hattery. He wouldn't go away. Let me tell you, when I'm in the depths of a stressed-and-angry bout, this kind of situation makes me virtually shake with suppressed rage. I was ready to knock his block off but had to keep myself in check because I was, after all, at work.

I suppose he either lost interest, or I just began so blatantly ignoring him that he got bored, and wandered off, out into the July heat, to wear the nerves of more helpless gallery workers down to their very thinnest and last wire.

Dude was an A-hole.

Fog in the Apple Store spreads to brain...

Uck. I'm so out of it today. I think it may be the gratuitous number of multi-flavored over-sized Swedish Fish I stuffed down my throat on my lunch break covering my mind in a sugary blanket of "Wanna Go Home"ness. Also, the Big Boss is back from 10 days in Europe and, as expected, terrorizing the office drones, so the general mood in the gallery is one of stiff-legged, wide-eyed anxiety. Doesn't make for a fun work environment or one that lends itself to good moods. And I've had just the appropriate number of itch-inducingly annoying phone calls, placed at just the perfect intervals (ie, the phone is silent for five minutes, but the moment I take out the lukewarm pasta I've been trying to eat for two hours and get a forkful of spaghetti perfectly twirled around the fork, the phone rings. Or, after I've managed to get said delicious eggplant-tomato saucey deliciousness into my mouth and am in cheek-bulging Italian food heaven, three calls come in at once, and each and every one of them is an elderly individual who needs something but can't quite remember what it is, and oh but they're calling from Bumfuck, Nowhere and they were just... um... putting down their knitting and thinking about... oh, what was it now? Wait, is this the lawyer's office? Ugh.) to push me over the brink of annoyance into glaring and swearing at the phone every time it rings, regardless of whether there is anyone in the gallery to hear me. I didn't get quite enough sleep last night and I may or may not have irresponsibly indulged in some olive-juice flavored vodka with a splash of vermouth last night. And I might have, possibly, spent the last two days being wildly productive and energetic and it's possible I've burned myself out. So it's just a blah kind of day.

Also, the weather is the kind made specifically to encourage people to lounge around in T-shirts and mesh shorts and eat junk food and do nothing productive. So the fact that I'm in a pair of stylish flats, an A-line skirt and a very low-cut top that has elicited all kinds of comments from street vendors today does not improve my mood. I want my pajamas! But, nonetheless, two points of note:

1) On my way to work this morning I went by the Apple Store at the corner of the park. You know, the big glass tourist trap cube? I walk by every day and chuckle to myself about the people taking pictures, because while I understand that the thing is a feat of modern architecture and stuff, I also know that once you walk down those extremely treacherous glass stairs, the scene below is total mayhem. Older men from Wisconsin walking around below the stairs, just staring vacantly upwards through all the glass to the open sky above, bumping willy nilly into everything; children from West Virginia running about helter-skelter, screaming and pummeling each other; bedraggled Apple employees trying to answer questions from ten people at once... Total chaos.
Well, today I walked by and laughed even harder because, for once, the fracas going on down below was actually showing at the sleek, sophisticated street level. It was so humid and warm outside, and so ridiculously temperature-controlled inside the store, that the glass was steaming up. It was like walking past a lone car in the very dark back corner of the parking lot, which is rocking just so slightly, and the windows are all fogged up in there. And you laugh to yourself because you know that inside there are two very sweaty, probably fumbling and confused, frantically humping adolescents getting it on in their parents' Jetta. And that, my friends, is exactly what we think of tourists in the Apple Store.

2) I attended Nerd Nite last night with my most ass kicking friends, Ginn and Paco. (I'm not going to explain it - my hands hurt, but here. It's pretty self-explanatory. Well, we all got drunk and very excited and Paco suggested that I do a Nerd Nite presentation on swinging. Which got my gears going. A Nerd Nite presentation is only 10-20 minutes long, only needs a presenter and a basic Power Point presentation to work, and is really probably pretty easy to put together if you know what you're talking about. And I do. Oh, I do know what I'm talking about. But here's the really cool thing - by doing a presentation on swinging culture today and where it's come from and what it means and what I've learned, I'll basically have to take all the mountains of research and notes and interviews and write-ups I have accumulated, and... dum dum dum... put them into some semblance of order! And not just order, but cohesive, easy to digest, and very much condensed order. It'll be like a synopsis of my book. Which is exactly what I need for my book proposal in order to sell it, and what I need so that I know what the hell it is I'm trying to do in general with this book!
So, I e-mailed the host this morning, and voila! I'm Nerd Nighting!

September 18 is the tentative date. May change. I'll keep you updated.

Unibrows, low-lifes, and garbage compacting...

Ah, more New York happenings. Today feels like Friday. It's not Friday, but I've asked several of my co-workers and they all agree that it feels as if it should be Friday today. I wonder what tomorrow will be like. Perhaps we'll all just sleep in and forget to come to the office... Oh, that would be delightful.

I'm a little pooped because last night I was at the gallery until 9:15, manning the front desk for a benefit party and auction for Pure Vision Arts, an advocacy/representation group for artists with developmental disabilities. While I totally support the idea, and think it's really great that there are people dedicating themselves to helping artists who might have trouble getting representation otherwise, the evening in reality was really, really, really awkward. It was me, a bunch of caterers and organizers, two other people who work for the gallery (one of whom, who lives upstate, had just contracted Lyme disease a few days ago and we were basically trying to make sure she didn't pass out the whole time), and 200 guests. About a third of the guests had developmental handicaps ranging from Downs Syndrome to autism. It was... well... awkward. But the event was catered, I got paid overtime for doing very little, AND they had Perseco. So it's all good. I'm just a little tired today.

But, nevertheless, I've seen and heard some fun things in the past two days so I thought I'd post them for your entertainment!

1) Last night, during the event, I was in the lobby of the building talking to the night front desk man, George. He's great. While we were discussing home prices in New York versus Puerto Rico, a delivery man came in with a late dinner for someone on one of the upper floors. I don't know where this guy was from - he was white, spoke very good English, but had a heavy accent of some sort I couldn't quite identify. He was mostly bald on top, with salt and pepper hair around the sides, and the most AMAZING Unibrow I have ever seen. The thing was utterly glorious. I can hardly do it justice with words, people. Now, I am not exactly a fan of the Unibrow look, but when something is done right, you have to give credit where credit's due, and let me tell you - this Unibrow was the Platonic Ideal of Unibrows. It was thick, dark, and made a perfect V on this guy's forehad right between his eyes. Perfectly symmetrical. If Spok had a Unibrow, it would look like this man's. I was in awe. I didn't say anything to him about it, because I have a feeling he hasn't cultivated it purposely and he might be offended if I said anything. But, wow, I really wanted to shake his hand.

2) On my tired, several-Perseco-ed way home, I just got on the first train to come to 59th and Lex, without looking to see if it was a 4 or a 5. Turns out it was a 4, and I ended up at Yankee Stadium, really pissed off and tired and waiting for the downtown train along with every idiotic Yankee fan ever. Usually I identify with Yankees fans and try to appreciate their zeal, but last night I was NOT in the mood. I ended up getting on a train next to this dorky older guy and his 13 year old son, who was asking kind of annoying questions to his dad, who was then mumbling the answers unintelligibly. But I did catch this little gem of conversation:

13 year old boy: Dad, how long is this train ride going to take?
Dad: Well, it's about 10:15 now, and we're at 161st street, so I'd say, depending on the low-lifes, we'll get home around 10:45.

...I can't fathom what low-lifes would have to do with the length of a train ride. Maybe he meant the MTA? But then you'd think he'd say "The low-lifes at the MTA." Certainly there were lots of low-lifes among the people leaving the stadium, but they were all already on the train and couldn't hinder it from going whatever speed it wanted. I'm stumped.

3) This morning on the 5 on the way to work, two very tall guys got on at 125th Street and stood in the doorways of my car. They were being kind of loud and annoying, almost as if drunk, but it was 9:15 in the morning. Not that I'm judging anyone who's durnk at 9:15 in the morning. But... seriously. Anyway, at some point I looked toward the one guy and noticed a giant streak of SPIT runnng down the door and onto the floor in front of him, where it was forming a big frothy puddle. DUDE! If you have to spit THAT bad while you're on the train, go OUTSIDE and spit BETWEEN the cars! Don't f-ing spit on the FLOOR! God! The subway is filthy enough with all kinds of mysterious grime and dirt - the last thing we need is somebody spitting on the door AND the floor at 9:15 in the goddamn morning! I was so angry. Sometimes I really want to just get up in people's faces and yell at them about common decency and respect for one's fellow man, but... eh... I'd probably lose the fight. This IS New York.

4) I had to run to the post office at Rockefeller Center today to drop off a package. On my walk down 6th Ave, I passed a bunch of guys who were bringing large metal grates of some sort out of a back door of a building and across the sidewalk to a truck. I just tried to get past them without getting knocked down by one of the grates, but as I went by I heard this horrible crunching, grating, squealing noise, and turned to see tha the truck they were loading was a GARBAGE truck! There were a bunch of guys around it, loading the metal grates into it one by one and watching them get crushed by the giant compactor in the back of the truck. Funnest thing ever!!


And, lastly, from our friends at OverheardInNewYork.com:

Texting teenager: Is there two "L"s in "Fordham"?
Teenager's friend: Uhh...just one, I think.

Here come the crazies!

The weather was pretty bad for most of this week - rain, drizzle, mist, chill, puddles, etc. Yesterday I went down to get on the 1 train at Columbus Circle and literally had to walk through a good two inches of water IN the subway station to get to the platform. It's been gross.

And as often happens during bad weather, the crazies seem to have been damped down by the humidity and shivery cool temperatures. But thankfully, the past few days have warmed up a bit and today we even had some intermittent sunshine, and just like crocuses and daffodils bloom to announce Spring's arrival, the crazies have jumped forth from the woodwork and begun to entertain me once more.

(Let me just make a note about my relationship with the crazies and other unfortunates upon which I frequently comment here on the ol' blog. I find that many people find my sarcastic comments and laughter at their antics to be distasteful, and I can understand why. It seems callous and downright mean to poke fun at these people, most of whom in one way or another have lost control of their lives and end up in unfortunate places, mindsets, and situations. I don't want anyone out there to think that I'm a totally evil person, although I guess if I really were trying to "Mimic Maleficent" I'd be unrepentant. But, the point here is, I'm not totally insensitive to the plights of these people. If there were a clear way in which I could help them, I usually would. However, living in a city like New York, one simply MUST develop a thick skin with which to ride the subway, walk down the street, and, of course, answer the telephone at the gallery. One cannot go through one's day with a soft heart worn on the sleeve without risking spending all one's time and money on trying to help people who need far more help than one person can provide, not to mention spending all one's money on beggars and risking getting chopped to pieces by truly psychotic people. You have to learn how to keep walking, eyes straight ahead, and be ready to laugh at things that, really, are just funny. It's part of living in the city. One that some people who haven't spent much time here might not think of.)

So, back to the crazies. Yesterday was a good day for them - it was very warm but still humid so they were out and about, but festering in the mushroom-y weather. They do well in conditions like that - they send out their spores. They needed to be heard.

So here I was, at the gallery, trying to get through the day without tearing my hair out or screaming at the dumb questions I get asked by tourists or the insanely haughty demands I get from the super-rich a-holes that frequent our establishment. It had been a tough day so far - lots of idiots and high-falutin' snobs in and out. I was trying to write, I think. I was feeling flustered.
The phone rang.
I picked it up.
And elderly woman's voice said: "Kenneth Snelson."
He's one of the artists we represent. We just took down a show of his work last week at our Chelsea gallery. But he sure doesn't have an office here.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"Kenneth Snelson," she repeated. "I have to talk to Kenneth Snelson."
"Oh, well, ma'am," I stuttered, "we represent him as an artist but he does not have an office here. I can't put you directly in touch with him."
"Well can you give me his phone number? I know him personally, I'm an old friend." Just about everybody who comes into the gallery tells me they're a good friend of some artist or another. "I mean," she continued, "I haven't seen him since 1968 but I know he'll remember me. It's very important that I talk to him."
"Well," I started, "you could mail the gallery and we could forward it..."
"We knew each other when we were very young," she interrupted. "when he had his work on display in Bryant Park, but it was before he was famous. He liked me and he made me a sculpture out of straws. I'm sure he'll remember it. I lost it, but don't tell him that. I've become a very successful photographer since then." Pause.
"Uhhh..." I said. "Well, I'm not able to give out contact information, but if you'd like to send a-"
"Is he in New York? Does he live in New York??"
"Well, ma'am, I don't really know off the top of my head," I lied. He totally lives in New York. But this woman did not sound like the kind of person you want showing up on your doorstep with her straw sculpture.
"Well I mean I just was thinking of him and I just have to speak to him and I hope he'll be happy to hear from me," she started up again. "I could leave just a message there with you. Will you call him for me? I'm sure that-"
I cut her off: "Ma'am, what I would recommend would be to send a letter or an e-mail to the gallery and we can forward it to him from here. Especially if you have any personal matters you'd like to discuss with him."
"Well, we didn't sleep together or anything," she said hurriedly. "I mean I want to introduce him to my husband and everything. But the other day I was just there and I saw his face in blood red in my mind and I just knew I had to talk to him."
"Uhhhh...." I said again.
She gave me her name and told me that if he called I should tell him she was looking for him and that he should Google her, and that she would send an e-mail to be forwarded right away. I cannot WAIT to read that.

Well.

I'm a little unable to put up a blog post today. I was, of course, going to write about my deep and wild excitement about the fact that we not only have a new president who is NOT George W. Bush, but that we have a new president that's not Bush who is a really awesome guy. But I'm feeling a little disenchanted at the moment, since I was planning to watch the inaugural ceremonies streaming live on my computer at work, and instead was treated to chopped up sound bites and frozen pictures on my screen, no matter what website I tried to use. Seriously, throughout the ceremonies, when everyone I work with was crowded around a TV twenty feet away from me and behind a door, I was trying MSNBC, CBS, Huffington Post, Wonkette, New York One, and Hulu in succession to see if any of them would work on my ancient and grumpy computer. But none did. So I got a few good screenshots of Obama talking, each of which stuck on my monitor for a good fifteen seconds before getting replaced with a snapshot of some random person in the crowd waving a flag and two seconds of confusing noise. Ugh.

So I'm a little disappointed and way less excited than I was this morning. I'm going to wait to go home to try watching it again, this time on a better connection and faster computer. And then maybe tomorrow I'll have something to blog about.

Stupid work computer. Interfering with my experience of historical moments. Grumble.

Crap

Well I just realized I haven't blogged in two days but I have absolutely no ideas about what to write. But I only have ten minutes left of work and nothing else to do so it seems like I should write something. I really need to pick a theme for this blog and stick to it, it would narrow the field of options considerably. But that seems so limiting... Hm...

I've been surfing the interwebs all day looking at random things in between bouts of frantic copy-writing for one of the magazines I freelance for, and I've realized something. The internet, in most of its blog and list and funny pictures areas at least, is a vast wasteland populated almost entirely by people like me. People who are gainfully employed in a manner that puts them in front of a computer for at least eight hours a day, but who still have absolutely nothing to do. It's amazing. How much manpower is being wasted in this world by losers who have learned the entire LOLdictionary by heart? They make Photoshop masterpieces and post them on all sorts of sites, and then write comments about them, sometimes inventing whole new personas from which to create debate, which creates interest, which brings in more hits to their site, which... is... self-aggrandizement at its finest.

I watched the music video for Rammstein's song "Amerika," which was sent to me by a friend, and which is hilarious. Of course I'm sure they meant it as a very serious political statement about how American stupidity is taking over the world, but Rammstein as a band takes itself so seriously that one can't help but laugh at it or risk brain-explodey. But the comments! Oh, the comments! These are the people who have no creative talent with which to make things to post and then comment upon. They write things like: "whatever. britan i dont think is the best cause thats the whole reason why america exists. the whole world isnt perfect."

...

And Rammstein's point is proved!

...That really had no point to it, but it's interesting food for thought. And now my ten minutes are up and I must venture out into the Arctic Tundra that is New York City in January. Wish me luck!

(PS - Post-Christmas musings.)

I know I was a crazy mess of nerves before Christmas, and to some degree I probably still am. See, I love buying things for people. I LOVE it. I am the kind of person that will spend hours in a flea market, pawing through every bit of rubble to find the PERFECT gift for each person. Throughout the year I make notes to myself when I discover something that someone would like, but that I have no excuse to give to them until the holidays. So I wait and I wait and I wait all year until the season is upon us, and then I go absolutely wild in an orgy of spending that leaves me bankrupt for months, for which I reproach myself until June, at which point I start looking for gifts again.

So, I can understand people who go a little crazy from holiday stress. I understand it. This year I was so out of control with stress that I literally got sick as soon as I was done opening my gifts. My body said, "Oh my god we MADE IT! Time to crash!" and I spent the rest of the day bitching and griping and laying on the couch. It was kind of nice.

But be all that as it may, some people's Navidad Nervous Breakdowns were far too publicly on display this morning when I got my grumpy ass out of bed to come the most pointless day of receptionist work at an art gallery - EVER. (But that's a whole different set of gripes...)

First thing that happened when I left the house was that I noticed the overwhelming amount of animal feces on the sidewalks. Normally there's a bit here and there, but most owners are respectful enough to pick up after their pets. Apparently not on Christmas. Too important to get back to the eggnog.

So I stepped carefully through poos of all sizes toward the train. As I came around the corner by the Duane Read drug store, I saw an elderly woman who had her hand on the door as if she were about to go in. At the last minute she turned around and looked right at me. I smiled, and when she realized she had my attention, she flicked her head toward 3rd Avenue with the cars going by on it, and said, "My GOD, are they turning it into a HIGHWAY?" I looked at the road. 3rd Avenue is pretty big - two lanes each way with a left-hand turning lane at the big intersections, and there were some cars moving around, but... It's 3rd Avenue. In the Bronx. There are stoplights EVERYWHERE. I looked back at her and said, "What?" Her eyes were huge. "It looks like they're going to turn it into a HIGHWAY!" she said, staring at me as if I would know. I guess I WAS walking down the street. And I WAS in a coat. So OF COURSE I'm now the local traffic maven. WTF? I just told her I didn't know, and kept walking.

When I got to the train station I walked toward my usual waiting spot right between the two benches, but then turned immediately and walked back toward the center station, because there was a man sitting on one of the benches who was being straight up, balls to the wall, batshit crazy. Luckily for me, my train came pretty quickly, so I wasn't around for the full showcase, but during the minute or so I was there, I saw him gesticulating wildly and screaming, throwing his hands in the air and laughing maniacally, and making some sort of noise that could have been an owl hoot or a song. Not sure. Wow.

So when the train came I stepped in and found myself face to face with an older white man whose eyes were almost popping out of his skull because he was staring at me so intensely. I sat far away from him.

Once off the train, I made it to work with minimal crazy, if you don't count listening to a native New York African American lady cop trying to give directions to completely non-English speaking Eastern European tourists. I thought I'd had my share of insanity for the day.

Wrong! Aside from the fact that there are eleven of us here the day after Christmas, making us the ONLY gallery IN NEW YORK that is open today (I guess there are some poor desperate souls out there who might go into gallery shock and decide that they NEED ART NOW and it doesn't matter who it's by or what it's of or where they get it, THEY MUST HAVE IT, and if this happens then we will the only ones here to supply it to them, in which case this is a great idea), there was more crazy in the wings. A man came in at around eleven, said hello, and then walked back into the gallery. He looked at the art (I'm assuming, anyway) quietly for about ten minutes and then suddenly burst into hysterical, uncontrollable, very loud laughter. It was so over the top that at first I couldn't tell if he was laughing or hysterically crying, but either way I just kept thinking, "Oh my god, don't let him come here and talk to me because I do NOT want to deal with this. And please, please don't let him be pooping in the corner!" Eventually he walkd out, still chuckling to himself. He was not on a cell phone. There is no comic art up in the gallery. I have no idea what was going on in his head.

So, as of this moment, I have 2 hours left till closing, at which point I am going to get on a train at Penn Station. Which, as many of you may know, is in fact where the crazy people in New York go to hang out. So. I'm hoping to make it to Pennsylvania to give out my hand-selected, awesome Christmas presents without first getting mauled by a lady who thinks she's a cheetah, or cornered by an overly hyper out of work mall Santa Claus. Wish me luck.

The (Not) Comsuming Culture

Working at an office populated mostly by attractive young women (our boss is an old French guy who gets what he wants) is strange in many ways, as I'm sure you can imagine. I'm simultaenously blessed and cursed to be seated in an area that is completely cut off from most of the activity in the gallery, so whatever strange female issues may be going on in the offices is mostly unknown to me. I am alienated very physically from any camaraderie that might occur, but I'm also ignorant about any catfights, back-biting, etc. It's kind of nice.

But there's one thing that I have definitely picked up on from my year and some change here. The women all seem to be putting on a show about what and how much and how often they eat. It's fascinating! I'm sure it's possible that some, maybe even most, of them really do eat salads with no cheese or meat every day, or refrain from all sugar, but I just don't think it's very likely. Yet, while at the gallery, they consume fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and unsweetened beverages, almost to a woman. There are a few of us here (not necessarily me - I'm a sucker for peer pressure, it seems) that allow ourselves to occasionally be seen with a cookie, or a big fat juicy something delicious, but most of us stick to the "we are so perfect we never eat french fries" song and dance. It's bizarre.

Actually, no, it's not bizarre. Because try as we might to be one big happy estrogen-producing family, women are catty bitches, and we will go to ridiculous lengths to look better than one another, for stupid, stupid reasons (mostly men's attention, but that's another blog entry). Especially here, where most of the women involved are thin and beautiful and young, there is a strong urge to try to be the thinnest, most beautiful, youngest, etc. And apparently that means rabbit food. Because God forbid we allow ourselves to enjoy food, or independence from super-model skinny expectations, or sex, or anything visceral. We're women. In order to be respected we have to look like the cover of Vogue and experience as little emotion and pleasure as possible. Ice Queens, all of us. It's ridiculous.

Now, don't think I'm immune. As I said before, I'm a peer pressure floozy. I rarely eat big juicy anythings at work, mostly because I don't want anyone to see me. I'll admit it. But then again, I'm the receptionist and if clients come in and see me taking dripping bites out of Big Macs all the time, well, I might lose my job. (Which in itself is pretty stupid and reinforces the idea that we have to behave in a certain way to be successful, but that's another blog entry entirely.) Also, I have to stick to things that are easy to eat behind the desk, so that if the phone rings I won't drop my sandwich or difficult-to-approach falafel wrap, or whatever. So for practicality's sake I tend to stick to soups, salads, and other small dishes I can hold , whether I recognize my reasoning as faulty or not, I fall right into the "I can consume fewer calories than you in public!" war that seems to be going on in the office psyche.

Sure, I'm certain that there are lots of ladies here who really just enjoy being healthy, but you can't convince me that they don't all go home and chow down on greasy Chinese food and cookies. I sure do.

Really cute moment.

Yesterday as I was trying to keep myself awake after a night of fitful sleep, and putting an old friend on a plane in the wee hours, an elderly lady came into the gallery. She was very nice and asked to see a catalogue of Michele Oka Doner's work, which she had never heard of before she saw a picture on my desk.

She took the catalogue aside and looked at it for a while, then up at me and said, "This is the most exciting thing I've seen in a long time!"

She was very earnest about it. Not being annoying or asking dumb questions or demanding information out of me. Just really, really excited and nice. She got herself into kind of a tizzy, then took a press release and set off into the bowels of the gallery to look around. "I'm supposed to be on my way to a hospital," she told me. "But this comes first. Art is far more vital to life."

What an entrancing lady! I hope she comes back. If we had more people come into the gallery who were as excited and in love with ART itself, I might really enjoy my job. As it is most of our visitors are just gawkers who seem not to feel anything when they look at the work, or stuck-up art snobs who only want to know about technique, or rich people dripping with money and privelege (although I've seen fewer of them over the past few months).

It's sad to see people's reactions - or lack thereof - to art sometimes. Granted, the gallery IS a commercial venture, and if you aren't planning to purchase anything here (ie, if you don't have a few hundred grand at least to throw around) then we can't do much for you on a practical level. But the art is here to be bought and sold only on a very superficial level. Art, as Oscar Wilde put it more eloquently, is "quite useless, practically speaking." But art is really HERE to be experienced. To be entered into with the naivety of a child, with the innocence of... well, an innocent. It is here to awe you and take you someplace where you don't think about money and commerce anymore. And of course not all of it will. There this hideous Jesus Rafael Soto piece in the vitrine right in front of me that makes me puzzled and mildly unhappy to look at, for instance. But why come to an art gallery with an agenda? Why badger the receptionist for information she doesn't have, or look dour, or drag your kid around by its hand? I much prefer, and better understand, people who come in wide-eyed and stand for hours and stare.

Afternoon malaise

Holy cow you guys, my stupid blogging knows no bounds. And my boredom is deeper than the blackest of seas. And my mood is blacker still. The neverending stream of stupid people who cycle through the gallery is continuing unabated today. I must hve told at least ten people that the Desiderio show isn't here today. And at least five that we don't have a bathroom. And at least five more that I don't speak Spanish, or French, or whatever-the-hell-else language they were speaking. It took me two hours to eat my lunch because of the constant interruption of dumbasses in person and on the phone, and damned if I didn't get some mystery meat in my bimibop. Or however you spell it.

If I were a praying person, I would pray for the patience to get through today, but I am not.

Instead, I write.

About nothing, apparently.

Ah, well then, let the observations of people and happenings in New York continue.

There is a grey man who comes into the gallery sometimes. Yesterday was I think the fourth time I've seen him, and I recognize him each time despite my terrible memory because he is grey. All of him. Grey. His skin is pewter colored. The first time I saw him was last winter on a particularly cold day, and he had a bike helmet in his hand. His skin was almost shining and looked silver, and I could only think that he might have had on some sort of skin-protecting silver lotion, like zinc oxide, all over his face to protect him from the cold. But then he came in again, while it was warm out, and he looked the same.

I mentioned it to a few people, and they suggested that maybe he was one of the Blue People from Kentucky. I researched it (online, of course) and discovered that there was indeed a family in Kentucky, in days of yore, that had an extremely rare congenital condition called methemoglobinemia. About a quarter of them were blue skinned. Caused by a combintion of recessive genes, this condition comes about when the blood is not able to carry enough oxygen, and as a result turns brownish blue, leaving white sufferers with a blue appearance. The condition is treatable, but extremely rare.

Methemoglobinemia can also be acquired by ingesting certain types of chemicals in oxidizing drugs, some antibiotics, local anasthetics, and others.

I'm assuming my Grey Guy has one form of this condition. Otherwise, the only conclusion I can draw is that he is indeed dead and reanimated. For a zombie, though, he knows an awful lot about sculpture.

Boredeom = frustration = ranting.

Well, I've been endeavoring to do absolutely nothing this week, given that I have one whole day (whoopee!) off for Thanksgiving, which makes the week seem kind of pointless. I figure I should be just as useless myself as a week with no Thursday in it.

So I've shut down most of my daily rituals, like blogging, have done absolutely no work of any kind besides the bare minimum of answering the phone and pretending to be civil to the people who come into the gallery. The phone calls and visitors alike have been relatively few and far between, but I swear, they must have all turned off their brains just like me! It may very well be that I am so bored and listless that anybody would annoy me at this point, since I see no reason I shouldn't be just sitting at the desk today coloring or something (but my boss does, so there goes that idea), but I really honestly think the people are just getting dumber.

Firstly, last week we opened two shows. One, which is currently on display here at our gallery on 57th Street, is a group show of Latin American artists. The other, at our 25th street location, is of giant and amazing paintings by Vincent Desiderio downstairs, sculpture and prints by Michele Oka Doner upstairs. Seems simple enough, given that our advertisements and website and everything give this information to anyone looking for it.

Well. Apparently this info is not so easy to digest for the stupid masses out there. Because damned if I haven't gotten at least ten calls a day from people looking for information on the Desiderio show, which they all seem to think is here at 57th Street. Not that I'm against people liking Desiderio - he's one of my absolute favorites and an utter genius - but for crissake, read the damn fine print, people! I don't know what price they're going for because they're not HERE. The only thing more annoying on this count than the constant phone calls are the people who actually come here, to 57th St, looking for the Desiderio show, and then get all pissy and disappointed and obnoxious with me because it's not here. Well what the hell am I supposed to do about it except sit here and smile vacantly as if I have the slightest interest in their plight? Some of them get all mopey and accusatory, like it's my fault they can't read and apparently have been in NYC for a week and for some reason waited until the morning they have to be at the airport to come see the show, only to find it's not here. I'm not sure what they want from me, but I've been adopting the "gallerista" model of receptionist-ing lately and just ignoring the crap out of them. Dumbasses.

And on top of all this confusion, I've been getting people who come in looking for the last show we had here at 57th St, as well, which came down TWO WEEKS ago. These same people get very upset when they find out it's not up anymore, and want to talk to a director about seeing some of the pieces, then get even more annoyed when the directors tell that because most of those pieces sold, we've already shipped most of them back to their owners. As if we should be expected to keep things here for months after a show just to placate them.

I've also had a host of calls and visits from people who think that, because this is an art gallery, I - as a receptionist - will know every detail about every other art gallery, not only on 57th St, or in New York, but in the goddamn world. Or, if not about other galleries, about the contemporary art world, in vast amounts and excruciating detail. Or to know the minutae of all of our artists' creative processes.

This makes no sense to me. I am the receptionist. It is my job to answer the phone for the people I work with. That's it. If I don't know the answer to your question, then it's your job to accept my answer of "I don't know" and move on with your goddamn life. I am not a 411 operator or an encyclopedia of the contemporary art world.

Hot damn.

And to top off my list of annoyances, I have been getting phone calls literally every other minute from a recorded voice at Verizon that wants me to hold on the line while I'm connected to a representative. They. Called me. And told me to hold. Are you SHITTING me?

I am so ready for a day off.

/end rant.