misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

My latest movie has posted online. The film group i am in entered a contest about a month ago - Each team would be given a genre and subject, and have exactly two weeks to write, film, edit and score a movie no more than 10 minutes in length. The genre we got assigned was "mockumentary" and the subject was "stealing". Our end result is rough, as everything was rushed and limited by time, but we're working on a smoother version. Anyway, here it is: Urban Truths

A few months ago, during an autumn trip to the forests of northern Vermont, Adrian and I took a day trip to learn the art of fly-fishing. Standing thigh deep in the frigid waters of a fast-moving river, warmed by the northeastern sun at our backs, we learned why "fly" comes before "fishing". Knowing about flies is more important than knowing about fish. Fish are mindless feeders. They gaze up hungrily towards the surface of the river, sense the movement of a fly, and attack it. Flies, however ... Flies are much more complex. They move differently. Smell differently. Think differently. Master the fly, and you master the fish. Our guide, who looked like a weathered, retired Indiana Jones, had a one-hundred page book, stained with blood, river dirt, and water, each page containing twelve different species, with characteristics, of flies. One fish. Thousands of flies.

The fly we studied for hours before being allowed to actually cast was the caddisfly, a small, moth-like fly with a fluttering movement pattern. It bounces against the smooth surface of the water laying eggs, up and down, here and there, like a drunken, disoriented water fairy trying to escape from its own reflection. When you are near a river or stream during sunrise or sunset, and you see all that dust-like movement in the sunrays, chances are they are thousands of cadisflies laying their eggs, dying of exhaustion, or both. And that is the thing that made it sobering. The life cycle of a caddisfly is almost exactly a year, but almost all of that year is spent as larvae. Compared to the mayfly, caddis live forever. They get a few days after hatching. The mayfly aren't as lucky. They hatch in the morning, mate in the afternoon, lay eggs at sunset, and die. One day of glory, before the cycle begins again.

As I've observed before, life, for me exists in a similar cycle. Only my cycle goes in four years, not one day.

The life cycle begins in high school, of course. As dragonhair has aptly pointed out, you don't really have a useful brain before age 13, thus high school really marks the beginning of existence.

High school is essentially a four-year mini-life consisting of birth (freshman year), growth (sophomore and junior year), and death (senior year). In psychological terms, the cycle spins something like this: Freshman year, you are like a caddisfly recently born from the river waters, fluttering your wings in an awkward attempt to reach the shore, confused at the world around you. You walk around with a over-stuffed backpack, wide-eyed, nervously shuffling from class to class, awed at the size of the seniors, the beauty of the girls, and the difficulty of the classes. The following two years you spend adapting to your surroundings, looking for a mate, realizing the campus isn't as big as once thought, that seniors (the big fish) aren't really that intimidating, and if tackled properly, classes could actually be quite simple. Senior year, you begin the inevitable decline into sunset and metaphorical death. You begin to hate the people, the color of the river, the campus, the redundant experience. The ceaseless desire for change takes hold. It isn't just a choice. You require something new. Fuck off-campus passes, senior lawn, and food carts, you say. It is time for college! Fuck the willow trees, stupid trout, and algae, the caddisfly says. I'm ready for a lake!

One markfly down, thousands to go.

In college, you are reborn once more, and the cycle begins anew. The stakes are higher, the experiences more vibrant, but it follows the same path as high school. Freshman year is a wonderific (made-up word) exploration of alcohol, brain expansion, and Sega Genesis. By senior year of college, however, the second sunset of your life blazes its thick rays at you. Fuck red cups, midterms, and broken-down Hyundais, I said. It is time for the workplace!

Second markfly dies. A new one is born.

Once you enter the workplace, you experience the end of forced four-year cycle. There is no official "freshman" title. You won't be forced to leave your job after four years, like college (unless you're Jill, then you get five years). This, though, does not mean the cycle goes away. Far from it. It simply transfers to different settings. Four years in the dot-com brought me from fascination with computers and stock options to disgust with those same things. Four years in San Francisco brought me from wonder with the steep streets and gays dressed up like G.I Joe on the bus, to boredom with those very same things. Four years shopping at The Gap brought me from love of plaid to hatred of plaid. The four-year cycles intersected at various points, but the four-year cycle itself remaind constant.

In an attempt to break the cycle, four years ago I went to ad school. This would be the career change I needed. I would find love. I would find satisfaction. The four-year cycle would be broken. I was finding permanence at last.

Well, I am nearing the four-year point of my career change into advertising. And lo and behold. The wonder has been lost. The tedium has set in. The blithely ignorant dreams of an ever-fulfilling career have teetered over the edge of my mental cliff like Arnold Schwarzenegger escaping The Predator. I flail my arms wildly as I plummet towards the aqua blue Costa Rican lagoon below.

The only constant in the neverending cycle of cycles, the escape, the pinprick in a bellowing balloon, is change. Change is at your disposal at all times. When your larvae shell begins to box you in, you can emerge, stream towards the sun, shake the water from your sliced paper wings, and start a new cycle.

Tedium lives in routine. It is the unshaven hair of the beast, the remora, undersucking the giant belly of your life, slowing you down in the waters. And newness always becomes oldness in four years. That is your life-cycle. Then you must find change. Find a new freshman year. The freshman year of pianos, or a bar, or an apartment.

For the caddisfly, change is death. For humans, it is moving, or changing jobs, or getting hobbies. Until one day, you'll find you wake up and realize there are no more freshman years to find. You want a change from life itself. And there is only one more place to go. One last change. Change life to death, and start it all again. Both you and the caddisfly will always have that in common.

And that, my friends, is why you should never learn to fly-fish. Our tour guide on that warm day in the river was right: bugs will fuck with your head.

Yesterday, I made my annual trip to the dentist. As I never stick with the same dentist from year to year, I always have to go a bit early to fill out a new patient application (well, by "a bit early" i actually mean "less late than usual.") Usually, these applications are fairly standard. Aside from asking for your name, address, and so on, it usually asks about your health habits and medical history. This is usually a no-brainer. You simply have to scroll down the boxes and check off "No". No, i don't have epilepsy. No, i don't have angina (as I don't even know what that is, though that word looks conspicuously like vagina, which I like, so in retrospect, maybe I should've checked that box in the affirmative). No, I'm not currently experiencing double vision (because if I were, I'd be at the fucking doctor, and not the dentist). And so it goes.

The problem with this particular questionnaire I was filling out yesterday was that it asked questions in such a way that a single Yes or No answer wasn't necessarily possible. By making a choice, my answer would either be misleading, or a lie, thus put me in a difficult predictament. An example of one such question :

Do you consume alcohol, cocaine, or hallucinogenic drugs?

Well, I think the difficulty of this question is self-evident. By checking Yes, I was associating myself with coke-heads and LSD-junkies, simply because I like to drink beer. Do they really not distinguish between people who drink Sierra Nevada and those who shove chemical compounds up their ass so they can run around for twelve hours seeing lion-headed teradactyls and talking rain puddles? Do we have the same teeth concerns somehow? I mused such concerns while I continued answering questions. The next question was equally baffling.

"Have you ever had any minor surgical procedures or serious medical problems requiring hospitalization?"

Well, this is a bit vague. Yes, i've had two knee surgeries, which qualify as minor surgical procedures. But how this connects me to people who have ebola or flesh-eating disease is up for debate. And why are those with serious medical problems coming to the dentist anyway? To get their teeth in order just in case people can still see them in heaven? If I had ebola, I think i could overlook a bout of puffy gums.

As the questions continued, I got increasingly confused. By the time I handed in my questionnaire, I was convinced I had major medical issues well beyond my teeth. I had to check No to the question "Do you sleep well?" and Yes to the question "Do you get hungry often?" You can be assured that as soon as my date with the dentist was finished, the first thing on my mind was setting up an appointment with a doctor to get checked out. And I just might take PCP before I do, seeing as how it apparantly is no worse than taking SN (sierra nevada).

I'm not sure if he'll ever see this, but this holiday season, i'd like to give thanks to the man who, every single morning, leaves the NY Times Sports Section nicely folded on the handicap rail next to the office shitter.

While celebrating the Christmas season yesterday at Red Lobster (nothing reminds me of the holidays quite like a crab and lobster-stuffed mushroom), I took a moment to listen to the lyrics of "Winter Wonderland", blaring over the fine Red Lobster speakers. "Winter Wonderland" was one of the first songs I learned how to play on the piano, and I remembered being highly confused by the lyrics then,. Unfortunately, Google didn't exist at that time, so my small, skeleton-esque hands were tied. No longer. I returned to the office determined to find an answer.

The two lyrics that had always left me scratching my balls, i mean, my head:

"In the meadow we can build a snowman, and pretend that he is Parson Brown."

"Later on, we'll conspire, as we dream by the fire."

The questions here are obvious. Who the fuck is Parson Brown, and why are people conspiring? You only conspire to do bad things, like murder your teacher, or blow up a bridge. Could it be "Winter Wonderland" is a secret terrorist manifesto, spreading hidden messages to those who will do us harm?

Of course, I knew Google would have the answer.

Here's the problem. Upon typing in "Parson Brown" into the search window, I was returned thousands of results. Apparantly, I was the 14 millionth man in the world to wonder about Parson Brown. There were about 2 million blogs about it alone. Mine would have just added to the pile. At this point, I didn't even care who Parson Brown was (if you still do, google it. You'll have your choice of answers. They are all fairly boring). Instead, I was plagued with anger ... Are my ideas for blogs really that unoriginal? Did my pathetic brain really think I was the first guy to think about a blog about the Winter Wonderland lyrics?

It gets to the heart of the matter: Being "creative" isn't difficult. Anyone, technically, can write. Anyone can draw. Anyone can sing. Not everyone can do it well, but everyone can do it. But while being creative is easy, being original is not. That is what makes something good. Thinking up something nobody has thought of before, or, at the very least, something nobody has written about. When you see a comedian, or movie, or hear a song, what makes it good is when you've never seen anything like it before. Which is hard, cause you are programmed all your life to think like everyone else. It is the herd mentality. You are battling your own biology, and about 10 billion people worth of original thought since the beginning of time. That is why only the really fucked up people can be original. And i'm not one of them, so fuck my Parson Brown blog. Read someone else's words.

Not to mention i've recieved several complaints that my blogs are too long. So, i'll end this one. But not without first trying to be the first person in the history of the earth to write these original words. Something that google can only return one result for:

You all can masticate upon my lemon-scented, tempura-coated, over-hard nut sack.

As I bitterly come to the final hour of work before Christmas break, I must share a few final pet peeves. This shall complete my list for 2006.

* About 17 times a day at work, I hear the following phrase: "I'm just playing devil's advocate". I fucking hate this saying. Roughly translated, it means "I'm being an argumentative cunt-whore, disagreeing with your points simply to make myself feel relevant." Seriously, what exactly does it mean to be devil's advocate? If you are truly employed by the dark king, you should at least have powers beyond simply arguing the counter-point to my postion. You should at least be able to blow fire, turn paper into 100-dollar bills, or fly. Something interesting. And how does arguing a point connect you to the devil? If anything, you are playing the boss's advocate, not the devil's. And whatever comes after the "i'm just playing devil's advocate" is usually boring corporate bullshit that satan really could care less about. It usually is something like this, "I'm just playing devil's advocate, but I don't think the client will like the idea of a blue border around the banner, unless you stretch the resolution out to compensate, which i'm not exactly sure the media buy will allow for." What? Why did you have to play devil's advocate to make that point? Couldn't you have just made the point? Is satan sitting down in his fire-house, listening to millions of people claiming to be his advocate, and getting all pissed off? Maybe he has real advocate, some other demon or dark prince, the only one who could claim "devil's advocate" on his resume. And if he does, this advocate probably deals with more demanding issues than corporate bullshit, things like disease and violence and strife, not media buys, resolutions, and profit ratios. I mean, who knows, maybe the saying is useful, i'm just playing devil's advocate.

* After walking by a popular NY night club the other day, it dawned on me, that about 3 out of every 4 clubs has a name somehow connected to water. States of water, adjectives for water, actions of water ... Some examples of club names: Flow, Pure, Freeze, Fluid, Liquid, Drop, Stream, Bubble, Cleanse .... The irony is, of course, you drink anything but water at a club. And there is nothing pure about it, unless you are talking about the cocaine, at which point it all makes sense.

* I propose it is time to retire "Preaching to the Choir." I like the phrase, I use it often, but it is time for us all to put our heads together and replace it. I'll start the bidding with "Feeding the fat", as in "Dude, I agree with you, you are feeding the fat."

Ok. Merry Christmas.