misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

It appears a few months have passed since I've written. I'll dispense of the usual excuses offered to create the image of an overly-busy life that I do not, in truth, lead. Suffice to say I shot a bunch of commercials for Mercedes which I'm sure you've all tivo'd past while watching "Lost". Upon completion of these thirty-second achievements, I quit my job. Now, I am sitting at a new job, which is like the old job, in that i'm doing the same thing, only now i'm writing cliche scripts for Verizon instead of Mercedes. Scripts which, if they get made, you will Tivo over. Talk about a rewarding career. As an act of preparedness, though, I started on a freelance contract to make sure I liked the place before going full-time. Freelancing sounds a lot more appealing in name than in practice. (Come to think of it .. freelancing? Never actually studied that word before. I sure as fuck am not working for free, so I don't know why that is that part of the word. And I'm not lancing, whatever lancing is. Could it be "lancing" is a term from the medieval days? Or is that jousting? Weren't those long metal spears known as lances? Did people walk around with them and fight each other for free, hence leading to today's term for overpaid, useless professionals like myself? Am I a corporate mercenary? Okay, my curiousity led me to an entry on freelancing in wikipedia, where I have found, as usual, that my astute instincts were right on the money. Freelancing was originally created to refer to knights (aka lances) for hire. Which must have sucked, being a knight and getting hired for a couple of sixpence to go fight a fire-breathing hell-dragon.)

It isn't that far from truth even today. As a freelancer, u get no respect. I had to fight to get email and voicemail, and people treat you like that guy at a bbq nobody really knows but is sitting by the keg drinking all the beer (ever notice these guys usually have moutaches?). Worst of all, since freelancers aren't on the full-time payroll, we have to fill out all these hour reports and submit them, then they can pay you whenever they feel like it. Oh, and you don't have insurance. So I am just kinda sitting here coming up with shitty ideas for Verizon for free. Which is probably more than they're worth in the first place.

To complicate matters, some ad agency down in Durham, NC flew me down for an interview yesterday (my headhunter is preparing me for the fact that to work at the kind of agency i want -- namely, the kind that doesn't spend all their time making shitty commercials -- I'll have to leave NY. Reason being NY is home to the big, corporate agencies that work for the big, corporate corporations that make big, corporate commercials. Like IBM, as example.) So they flew me down. Or rather, American Airlines flew me down. The agency simply paid to have American Airlines do that for me. As the fifth side-note of this blog, when is the last time you flew in one of these regional airliners like American Eagle? Durham isn't far enough away from New York to merit the use of a real plane, apparantly, so they use these "regional" jets called Embraers that are the size of corporate jets, only they fill them with about 30 people. It is comparable to flying in an apartment elevator laid on its side, filled with eighteen people. Which should be fine, as the flight to and from Durham is only supposed to be an hour. But thanks to thunderstorms and two hours of circling over the airport, that one hour became three. Suffice to say, these flying elevators take travelling to a whole new level of misery.

So, Durham definately isn't New York. Which primarily means you can find two-bedroom apartments for less than $6,000, it smells like something other than rat vomit, you hear more birds than sirens, and you can leave your window open for more than forty minutes without Sri Lankan pubic hairs floating onto your pillow. But you also need a car, something I've grown extremely fond of not owning. And I don't know anyone in Durham. And it's .. Durham. Which I'd be okay, with, if the people who read this blog moved there with me. So get back to me on that point. Collectively, we can make a decision. If they offer me a job, which, based on the final person I interviewed with, isn't likely (at a certain point an "interview" crosses over into an "interrogation", and he was dangerously close to that point.) But we should all do it anyway. It'd be like Bay Area all over again, except we'd have research triangle park instead of silicon valley, and blimpie's instead of togo's. Other than that, it's the same place. And I hear they aren't as spiteful towards "orientals" as they were fifteen years ago. So that's a plus.

Let me know. I should be blogging more these days as it seems I am working for free. So warm up your reading glasses. The workmonkey will be comin at cha.

During a recent weekend away at Mystic, Connecticut (don't ever forget when you have to spell Connecticut, to spell connect first, then add the i cut after ... else you'll start adding an "a" or an "e" and things get all fucked up fast), I realized that I had forgotten to pack my toothbrush and toothpaste. These are the most commonly forgotten items because 1) They are easily replaceable if forgotten, unlike, say, pants. So I don't think too much about them and 2) I usually pack the night before I leave on a trip, and I have to leave out my toothbrush and toothpaste so I can brush my teeth in the morning before I go, so my breath doesn't smell like a corpse's rotted vagina, and thus I usually leave it in the bathroom (the toothbrush and toothpaste, not the rotted vagina).

In any event, upon realizing I had forgotten my teeth maintenance supplies, I headed across the street from the B&B to the local store. After walking up and down the store's aisles for a couple of minutes, I realized something was wrong. This wasn't a normal store. It was a specialty store -- selling nothing but all-natural, environmentally-friendly, recycled crap. Now, there are several problems with the increasingly-popular all-natural market. Firstly, as a general rule of thumb, if it is all-natural, it is all-expensive.

To demonstrate this point, the average price of the toothbrushes they offered was about eight bucks. The toothpaste was about seven bucks. So, I was looking at fifteen bucks for a toothbrush and toothpaste. Secondly, there is a reason not everything is all-natural. Namely, an all-natural toothbrush sucks shit. It is made of reclaimed plastic material and has bristles made of some horse-hair type material. Not exactly the soft, cleansing synthetic material found on an Oral B. The toothpaste (this Burt's Bees wax-flavored mouth glue that had the texture of melted bananas) was equally disappointing. Even a whole mouthful of it didn't offer me any foaming action. To further piss me off, the $8 dollar toothbrush was useless after one use. The all-natural horse bristles/porcupine quills broke apart after giving my gums a good medieval bleeding. And the $7 dollar toothpaste left behind a filmy residue on my teeth that felt as if I had just eaten a metric mile of Strawberry Charleston Chews. So a single tooth cleansing cost me $15 bucks and had undesireable effects. And really, are you telling me we need all-natural toothpaste? I'm guessing they had all-natural toothpaste in the 15th century, and there is a reason we no longer use it.

Progress is good. Synthetics are good. They demonstrate the advancement of the human race. They have enabled cheap, effective tooth cleanings for all the world. This push to return to the days of pre-synthetics and non-chemicals is fine, but you better use the same prices from those days as well. I doubt that Marco Polo was paying $8 for a toothbrush. It is clearly a racket. All the organic, natural, and recycled industries are charging exorbiant prices and hiding behind the "good-for-the-world" arguments. I'm guessing it is good for your wallets, too. So next time I see the Burt's Bees guy driving in a $220,000 Mercedes, I'll know exactly what he's in it for. Somehow, I don't think it is my health.

I've recently returned from our three-day celebration of Taj's decision to enter into the sacrament of marriage, also known as his "bachelor party" (the use of the word "party" is a bit erroneous, as in reality it was more like a "funeral" for the impending death of Taj's previous life, attended by Taj's oldest friends: cards, breasts, alcohol, nightclubs, and gambling ... when i get married, you are all invited to attend my "bachelor funeral"). Six years ago, we would have all met up in Las Vegas. But as four of the five members of the wedding party are now stationed in East Coast, we traded in Vegas for Atlantic City.

So as not to confuse anyone, I'd like to be clear on this point: Atlantic City is a steaming shithole of back tattoes, bad buffets, and architecture that was apparantly modeled after game show set designs from 1973. The brand new casino that everyone raves about, the Borgata, wouldn't make it for one day in Reno. Or CalNeva, for that matter. It rises above the New Jersey landscape like a large piece of molded shit that's been dipped in melted fool's gold. And, as usual with amateur shitholes, they charge more than anywhere else and have more attitude. It took six people and a trip to the security station just to approve my passport so that I could get into a shitty bar run by some bodybuilder bartender who had a head that seemingly grew in a vise for ten years. All so I could hang out with obese, diabetic, 83 year-old, cart-driving fat couples who have bussed in from the surrounding area to gamble away their social security checks in some digital slot machine called "Bealie's Wheelies" featuring a singing gopher and a chance to win 800 dollars.

Luckily, as the temperment of our group has proven time and again, the only thing we need to have a good time is cards, beers, and a table. It is also worth noting that the bachelor parties of seven years ago, when I often found myself eating cherries out of stripper's vaginas, have evolved into something a bit more .. acceptant. Acceptance that cards next to the pool can be as enjoyable as cherries next to the stripper. Acceptance that my dancing-at-club days are over (with an assist from my knees). Acceptance that ordering bottle service to your room and watching the basketball game can be better than watching that same game at a sports bar. Acceptance that going to bed at 6 am one night means you'll be going to bed at 10 pm the next night. Acceptance that all of these things I just said mean nothing after three shots, cause then you'll revert back to the days of cherries. In any event, we made the best of what Atlantic City gave us. That said, I can assure you I won't be within 100 miles of that shithole when my bachelor funeral comes around. Unless between now and then I grow a penchant for foot tattoes and overpriced fish.