Ink-Stained Minds

It's one of those questions that people ask to be polite. To make conversation. Not conversation, really, but small talk.

"So what do you do?"

How disingenuous. How typical. No one wants any sort of real answer, and god forbid you should give an honest one. It's the sort of question that made Holden Caulfield gather his little fists into balls of post-pubescent angst, I'm sure.

The list of acceptable answers is pretty short. You could offer your profession.

"I'm an assistant copy editor at the paper."

But that doesn't work well if you've just been introduced as an assistant copy editor. So you default to a suitably inoffensive hobby.

"I like to read crime fiction."

This is one of those social dances, though. You can get dangerously honest with this, if you don't think about it. But if you out-and-out lie, then you might be caught up in the expectation that you can talk about something you don't really care about. Add to that there's the issue of whether or not you want to talk to them at all. If, for example, they seem like the ditzy, bubbly, reality show watching ex-sorority girl type, and you're disgusted by them, you don't want to tell them that you read a lot of magazines, or listen to music, because then she might want to talk to you more.

So you say "I like to read crime fiction." It's crisp, precise. It gets the job done. It's honest enough, but it doesn't open the door to more conversation. She obviously doesn't read Dashiell Hammett. She probably doesn't even read Thomas Harris. At worst, she might mention that she reads Janet Evanovich, to which you can politely respond that that really wasn't what you meant, and worm your way out of the conversation.

If you're feeling like taking a risk, you could make a joke. Probably self-effacing. But that can over-expose yourself, especially when dealing with her. "Have you ever seen that show, the Office? What I do is kind've like that, except it's never worth laughing about later."

What you don't want to do is talk about the real you, no matter who you are. You don't talk about your hopes, your aspirations, or the things that seem like a hobby but, in reality, are pretty much your true vocation.

You can't say "I'm biding my time until the day when I luck into being alone with your boyfriend, preferably while he's drunk, so that I can show him what he's missing out on by dating a poodle like you."

Don't be cutting. If you say "I like to look at gold jewelry and wonder if the girls who wear it are the sort who get jewelry because they're so quick to jump in bed, or because they take so long." Especially don't say this with a pointed glance at her ring.

The conversation would end quickly if you were brutally honest, but that's the kind of thing that gets mild-mannered copy editors locked away for a long time.

"I look for good opportunities to indulge in my compulsive search for the anatomical location of the human soul by cutting people who probably don't deserve it into progressively smaller pieces."

"Right now? I'm thinking about the taser and roll of duct tape in my trunk, and wondering what the odds are of being able to remove you from this party without anyone noticing. I think it'd be a pretty good way to kill two birds with one stone, it's just too bad that I try not to shit where I eat."

But that gets to the heart of it, doesn't it? You can't tell the truth, even if you want to, when someone asks a question like that. You say something polite, and you try to move on, because anything else would be shitting where you eat.

"I like to read crime fiction."

"Oooh, really? Like J.D. Robb? I love her! I just finished that book she and Nora Roberts wrote together. It was an amazing book."

And that's why you don't mention the duct tape to a sorority type. There's probably nothing to find there, no matter how many cuts you make.

We all know how Michelangelo did it. He insisted he didn't impose his will upon the stone, instead he saw the form trapped within a piece of marble. He was only setting the form free. I wonder, then, how he approached a canvas.

A canvas and an unwritten page have a lot in common. They're both simply blank. An empty field. Negative space. You can't look at a blank page and see the form trapped within. Stare though you might, you'll find, at best, an interesting arrangement of fibers and maybe a stray bit of wood pulp in cheap stock. Nowadays, you won't even find that. All you'll find by staring at the page is the same uniform network of red, green, and blue pixels that you'd find if you stared too closely at any monitor.

But just as David called to Michelangelo saying "Release me," so too do empty pages beg to be filled. That frustrates me. The naked sheet of paper is incomplete by nature, but how do you fill it? What do you fill it with? Is it better to simply smear an incoherent stream of words across it than something which is intelligible but poorly written? You don't give freedom to what's inside the page, but can you birth something on to the page that might have been better off aborted in your own subconsciousness?

I read something today. "Not writing is hard work, almost as hard as writing."

Amusingly, these stats were probably accurate a couple weeks ago when this was posted.

Now, however, google pulls up 30,900 hits for "Died in a Blogging accident."

Bloggers beware, your hobby is getting more dangerous by the minute.

Something poetic goes here.

Okay. So it's odd for me. So sue me. But the hubub in the news the last week has had me thinking.

For those of you not familiar with this piece of detritus orbiting the blogosphere (de-orbiting, now, it's gone quite stale and is expected to impact somewhere in the Australian outback sometime this Thursday), Jeff Gerstman, an editor and reviewer for the popular site Gamespot has been fired, with the implication that this was because he gave a 6.0 rating to a game published by one of the sites largest advertisers.

The story, of course, that most folks sieze on is "hey, reviewer fired presumably for giving bad ratings to a sponser's game!" and that does, in fact, stink. But that hardly seems like the issue, to me.

The issue is, on a scale which ostensibly runs from one to ten, is a six really that bad? It's above the median, which would seem to indicate above-average. So, two-and-a-half stars? That's hardly call to fire someone.

I guess it just irks me that it's more than acceptable, it's the norm that video games are rated on a seven-to-ten scale, these days. Like the arbitrary numbers assigned to women's clothing sizes, it seems as though game reviewers are encouraged to make up values for games that have nothing to do with actually rating the quality of said games.

I remember a time, in the yesteryear of my youth, when the standard for quality in videogame review was "along how many dimensions do they rate their games?" It wasn't unheard of to rate games with a matrix, judging five or six qualities on a scale of one to five before coming out with an "overall" rating which judged the way these elements synthesized together.

Where are the complicated graphs and charts?

If this trend continues, perhaps in the near future, when asked to sum their reviews to an easily repeatable rating, journalists will eschew numbers alltogether, and settle for adjectives. Not a stock roster of adjectives, mind you, but whatever adjective they feel like tossing out (regardless, of course, of its reflection on the game's quality).

Have you picked up Mario Galaxies yet? I hear it got a Splentastic from IGN.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

So, I found my sister, Zoë on facebook. Fancy that. I'll bet your sister's name doesn't end in an umlaut, eh?

Kind've odd that, though, on one hand, "ZOMG! I've made the effort to reconnect with my estranged family!"

On the other... "Hi... Uh... Remember when you were three and I used to chase you around the house making faces at you? Good times."

I should've held out for another five years, then I could just say "Hey, let's go for a drink!"

Jess: "Just so you know, I mean, fair warning and all, if you keep calling me Jen, I'm going to hunt you down and castrate you."
Adam: "Bring it on, Jen!"
Me: "So... Only Shanna can keep calling you Jen?"
Jess: "Yes."
Shanna: "Neat."

I ought to be working on an Ethics paper that's due in three hours, but I have a quarter of it done, and so this seems like a good time to procrastinate.

Note to self, ask instructor how procrastination fits into ethical systems.

German, thus far, is proving terrifically useless, and so seems very relevant to my course of study. Eventually it's going to become challenging to pursue a degree of "Liberal Arts Somethingorother," but I'm sure with enough time I'll be able to find a school which actually does offer graduate programs in underwater basket weaving.

Ich heisse Chad. Ich bin ein hundert funfundachtzig zentimeter gross, und ich wiege einundachtzig kilogramm. Schrieben und Computerspiele spielen machen mir spass. Ich komme aus und whonert in Dublin, Ohio. Ich bin unpraktisch, faul, und romantisch. Mein Deutsch is sehr schlecht. Santa hat einen Tumor in seinem kopf die größe einer Olive. Er kann beseres Morgan erhalten, aber wir denken nicht so.

It turns out today has been an excellent day as far as stupid things happening go, and as near as I can tell, every stupid thing can be placed neatly under the column of "my doing." I'm quite proud.

The first stupid thing is forgetting to charge my phone overnight. This is actually a fairly common stupid thing for me. Typically the occurance is prefaced by me opening my phone, seeing several bars on the battery, and declaring "Well, it's got a nearly full charge, no sense digging out the charger tonight." In this case, though, it was dead yesterday. I knew this. Jess asked me about this, and I said "Yes, it's dead, I will charge it over night." Obviously, I did not charge it over night, else it would not still be dead. I could blame this on my being tired-- it was nearly two when I got home from Jess's-- but that would be quite the cop out. I did a stupid thing.

Said stupid thing leads to the next stupid thing. If Jess hasn't called me by now, she'll be calling me in the next few minutes. She'll get my voice mail, and we won't get to talk until I get home. At the moment, I find this sequence of events more distressing than I would have in the past. That's not a stupid thing, though, merely a complicated one. If you speak to Jess today, tell her I love her, and that I'm well aware of how stupid that was of me.

The next stupid thing is my exam schedule. Had I taken the time to check the website properly, rather than listen to the half-muttered rulings of my instructors, I would realize that both my humanities exam and my political science exam are thursday morning, rather than one this day and one that day. This means that after all the bother of wringing what time with Jess I could out of last night before hurrying to bed to toss restlessly until I got up at eight I've spent the last five or six hours wandering listlessly around Columbus State, stopping at computers and in rooms where I think an exam might take place. I've studied all the trigonometry I can handle, and have even grown bored with looking at The Onion. Dark days. This wouldn't be nearly as bad a stupid thing if I had someone to talk to. See earlier stupid thing for more on that.

I ought to be writing something interesting and brilliant, but I'm tired, and stressed, and don't even remember any of the stories I was toying with. Instead, I'll indulge in auto-biographical rants, try to remember what sleep is like, and hope I haven't ruined Jess's night completely.

I need to read more Vonnegut.

See earlier post about being a shit. Compress that shit. That shit as a sick dog wearing someone else's skin.

Still moving to Europe. The Netherlands sound good. A genteel people with easy access to heroin and prostitutes. Fitting.

I'm certainly not. I just got back from the financial aid office where they delivered some rather disconcerting news. It seems that my unsubsidized loan (that is, the heap of debt which the businesses that run the government would like students to accrue so as to limit our social mobility) has been put on a back-burner in the FA bureaucracy. Okay, neat, so I wont get my $600 (which will cost me significantly more to pay back) until next week. We hope. More disconcerting, apparently my grants and loans payed out twice this quarter as I'd been dropped for non-payment and subsequently re-registered for classes. Deep breaths, though. There's no way I would be saddled with double the debt for a quarter just because the system is poorly designed and weighted in favor of putting students further in debt in the event of an error, right?

In other news, my cell phone's dead. I was charging the headpiece last night instead of the phone itself. Go me. I need to get a bigger power strip. If you're reading this, Jess, I'll call you when I'm home and have access to a charger.

My schedule has been dicked due to my failure to check e-mail. This, in tandem with traffic, lead me to go into things thinking "My, what a horrifically shitty and generally sub-human day."

It was all straightened out quickly, though, and to my benefit (I think). Campus is sunny and lively, and after a spicy sausage and warm cup of coffee I feel rather human (though that may just be sleep deprivation writing).

I doubt I'll stop feeling insular and distant from people, and I certainly enjoy my "me-time" more than almost anything, but holding Jess feels good and right, and makes me happy in a sappy sort of way that's hard to articulate. If you're reading that, hon, that's what that weird smile or chuckle I make usually is.

And damn if I didn't just get another wave of "vroom vroom" anxiety. I'll get you for that, Rikki. I'm going to go smoke (and perhaps pace while moodily sipping coffee) and then try to help Burt deal with his normalcy. Back in a moment.

It was thursday at Wake's Grill and Pub. This wasn't unusual, as it was thursday most everywhere else in the city. The fact that it was thursday in the small restaraunt was just another of the long list of ways in which Wake's failed to distinguish itself in any particular way from the rest of the city. Like the rest of the city, it was filled with the usual 11:30 crowd. Men and women in business suits, a roughly equal mix of the smart and the shabby. It had the smell of cooking meat plus the unique leather-cum-polyurethane smell of business people and an open tap and could generally be described as a brown but comfortable place. All in all, as has been explained, it was quite typical of the time and place.

Even more typical of this time and this place were two of the occupents of Wake's Grill and Pub. Seeing as it was thursday, and it was 11:30, it was the occassion of Bertram Laden's weekly lunch meeting with the Rainmaker.

Bertram Laden worked in the human resources department of Cross-National Insurance. As a mid-level administrator, it was not his responsibility to oversee the hiring or firing of employees, nor did he at any point take actions to reprimand or discipline employees who had violated corporate policy or where in any way remiss in their responsibility to the company. He also was in no way expected to answer questions, complaints, or concerns employees might have regarding their employment status, wages, or other benefits and perquisites. Rather, it was his duty to review such actions when taken by those in lower payscales, analyze the propriety of their actions, and submit said reviews to his superiors who were in a position to decide whether any oversights, mistakes, or laudable successes on the part of Bertram's subordinates were in any way actionable. Bertram's job, then, consisted largely of sitting in a room, looking at paperwork other people had completed, filling out paperwork in reference to the first set of paperwork, and submitting both sets of paperwork (with the proper cover sheet, of course) to other people for yet another review. Bertram Laden, in no uncertain terms, was a bureaucrat.

The Rainmaker, on the other hand, was not a bureaucrat. In fact, as far as Bertram could tell, the Rainmaker led a very interesting life. Although Bertram was sure he had a proper name of the sort which most parents see fit to grace their children with, he preferred to go by the title of his profession. Hence, the Rainmaker. Bertram was not entirely clear on the specifics of what being a Rainmaker entailed as a formal position. As near as he could tell, it was the Rainmaker's job to find prospective clients of various sorts-- Those in need of a lawyer, a talent agency, a corporation, or even an insurance agency-- who happen to be in the unique position of being in posession of large sums of wealth, an urgent need for certain services, and lacking an extant provider of said services. In exchange for introducing the two parties, the Rainmaker would recieve a comission in either monetary form or that of influence from both involved parties. Although Bertram was not certain of the legality or ethics of such a position, it seemed to suit the Rainmaker quite well, affording him a comfortable lifestyle and letting him easily maintain a consistently pleasant demeanor.

How a bureaucrat who didn't really do much of anything came to have a standing weekly lunch appointment with a rainmaker who seemed to do quite a bit was something of a mystery to Bertram. It didn't strike him as terribly odd that he couldn't remember how they'd met, as it was the nature of the corporate world that Bertram met quite a few people, far more than he could keep track of, even as a mid-level administrator. It did somewhat confuse him that their relationship was as long-lived as it had been (the lunch date had been standing for going on two years now) when the two had no real contact outside of their lunch date and almost no common grounds in terms of business or social lives. Six months ago the Rainmaker had served as an intermediary in introducing the heads of a large Asian automotive corporation to the heads of Cross-National insurance when the auto company expressed interest in opening production plants in North America, but if his lunch dates with the Rainmaker had any influence on that rather lucrative meeting, Bertram wasn't aware of it. As near as Bertram could tell the basis of their relationship was a mystery, which, on this particular thursday, was a thought he expressed to the Rainmaker.

Pausing in the act of cutting another slender bite from his steak, the Rainmaker set aside his knife and fork to fix Bertram with a confused look that must have mirrored the bureaucrat's own. "Come again?"

Stalling for time as people do when the issue at hand is delicate, Bertram fiddled with his tie under the pretense of adjusting it. It wasn't easy directly confronting things with the Rainmaker. After all, where Bertram wore a simple white linen shirt and a brown tweed blazer (currently hanging unceremoniously from a hook at the side of the booth), the Rainmaker wore a silver shirt made of some material that was like silk which maintained a wet, metallic shimmer while still appearing to be made of natural materials. Where Bertram's hair was short, brushed into a businesslike part and quite unremarkable in color, the Rainmaker's was stylishly drawn back with product to evince something aggressive like porcupine quills while still remaining subdued enough to pass in polite circles. Bertram smelled of cleanliness and a subtle aftershave, and the Rainmaker smelled of cool spring rain distant electricity. In short the Rainmaiker quite plainly occupied a station in life more significant than Bertram in every way. And of course there was the matter of the Rainmaiker's curious manner when confronted with direct questions. So, when the Rainmaker asked for clarification, Bertram fiddled with his tie and took a small bite of brocolli before answering.

"How long have we been having these meetings? I was just wondering, why do we have these meetings?"

Something that looked like hurt flashed across the Rainmaker's face before he responded "Do you want to cancel next week, or something?"

"That's not it at all, of course. I just can't figure out why we've been getting together for so long. I don't really even remember how it started. Why do we have lunch together?"

"We've got a standing lunch date for thursdays, Burt. You know that." The Rainmaker smiled and returned his attention to his meal. It was an honest answer, just as Bertram had come to expect from the Rainmaker. Honest, but ever obtuse, the answer you recieve from someone not accustomed to having to answer for anything.

"Well, yeah. But everything starts somewhere. Everything has a reason, you know?" Bertram took another bite of his brocolli as he mused on whether or not what he'd just said was right. "Why has this appointment been standing for so long?"

"Honestly?" The Rainmaker set aside his silverware again, leaning back in the booth and passing a hand over his head, smoothing his hair only to have it agressively spring back to attention as he lowered his hand. "You're normal, Burt. I don't get a lot of normal in my life, so it's kind've nice. I always figured you were the same way, you know?"

Bertram didn't need to muse long on this before the implications upset him. "Normal? So, you're saying, I'm boring?"

"Not at all." The Rainmaker's answer came in an enthusiastic tone, a popular standard in the Rainmaker's repertoir of tones. He pushed his plate to the side so that he could indicate the flat expanse of the table as he went about explaining. "Your life isn't boring at all. You meet people, gather up stories, gossip. It's interesting, it touches stuff." As he spoke, the Rainmaker traced a slow spiral on the table as though he were illustrating some concept.

"You're not quite selling me on this. How does that make me normal but not boring?"

Reaching into his breast pocket, the Rainmaker produced his sunglasses, an affectation he seldom parted with. Apparently now that he was finished eating for the moment it was time to recall them, banish those stormy grey eyes of his behind the sleek, smokey shield of the glasses. "Imagine that life, in the big sense, is a great, smooth pond" He gestured to the table. "Individual lives are things on the surface, bugs and skipping stones and that sort of thing, things that make ripples." For each of these things he described, the Rainmaker ran his finger across the table, or bounced it like a skipping stone, conjuring up an image of the whorls and rings these lives created. "Some lives make big ripples, the sort of ripples and waves that touch everything. Other lives make little ripples, they're not going to make huge splashes and shake up the whole deal, but they make ripples. That's normal. Boring is someone who doesn't touch any other lives, or who isn't touched by the other lives. A boring person touches the surface without really moving or being moved. Boring's not normal, it's the definition of abnormal. See, Burt? You're anything but boring. You're normal. I like normal. I could use more of it."

It was then that Bertram sighed, watching the imaginary ripples fade from the pond of their table and growing increasingly certain that he got the drift of what the Rainmaker was telling him. "So, you're saying that you like having lunch with me because I make little ripples. So I guess you make big ripples when you move around, right?"

The Rainmaker's grin at that wasn't a normal grin, even by the Rainmaker's standards. It was proud and hungry, and with his eyes behind his sunglasses, somewhat pitiless. It was a shark's grin. "Me? I don't move around on the pond, Burt. I make the pond. I'm the Rainmaker."

The Rainmaker then gestured to the waitress, conjuring up a check and summarily ending their meeting as if to brook no further conversation. Bertram was surprised to see that time had somehow escaped him and, as it was ten minutes until noon, their appointed time was up. While this mitigated somewhat the feeling that the Rainmaker was dismissing his feelings, Bertram couldn't escape the weight of his friend's declaration, and he left Wake's feeling quite heavy with normalcy.

Dharma Girl is feeling restless.

She would like you to know that she appreciates everything you've given her, but it's time she got to moving on. It's not you, says Dharma Girl, it's her. She asks that you overlook her name with its strength of purpose, and focus on the insurmountable weight of all that is. No matter how fast the wheel turns, she says, its inertia is impossibly heavy, and so she says again, it's not you, it's her.

Of all the people she'd like to thank, she'd like to thank the sun the most. With crisp precision, it has demarcated her days spent here, but even with its solar punctuality it still has taken the time to crawl at an impossibly slow pace when she needed it to, stretching its trip towards the horizon out infinitely on long summer afternoons amidst the ruckus of cicadas chirping and children laughing. The sun, above all things, has been kind to Dharma girl.

She would also like to thank the blue stone she found in the seventh grade. She kept it in her pocket for two weeks, and pressing her thumb over it's rough-smooth surface served as a timeless reminder (for those two weeks) of just how blue a stone can be.

Dharma Girl would like to thank Jinny, though Jinny doubtless does not remember Dharma Girl. First crushes can be rough that way. Jinny is not the reason Dharma Girl is feeling restless, but thanking her seems appropriate any how.

When next you see Dharma Girl she obviously won't be herself. Her hair will be different, and her face, and perhaps her skin as well. Dharma Girl was not made for Bodhi Tree afternoons wonderful blue stones, and if she was made for Jinny then Jinny wasn't made for her. And so, for these reasons and others, Dharma Girl is moving on.

Don't worry, though. The thing about Dharma Girl is, she always comes back.

Jeremy is a wolf, though you wouldn't know it to look at him. He doesn't have a wolf's name. Wolves have names like Serge, and Jeff, and Ralph (provided the last is pronounced "Rafe.") He doesn't have a wolf's eyes, clear blue and sensitive, honest to all appearances. His smile is understated and comforting, refusing to even hint at what he's capable of.

He certainly doesn't dress as a wolf. He prefers khakis to jeans, and if his shirt seems disheveled it only seems so in the calculated way shirts are meant to seem, saying "I've worked hard to look this casual." He uses product in his hair, but never in such a way that he would seem bold, or rakish, or the slightest bit wolf-like.

Overall, he carries himself as a kind and gentle man, and this in many ways the key to his wolfishness. Jeremy is a wolf because no one knows what, exactly, he will do when cornered. No one expects that he really has fangs, or claws, and so when they come out they do so with brutal effect. He stalks in a quiet way, his easy mannerisms seeming to all appearances not the least bit lupine, but in truth they are, a fact his prey never notices until he's quite finished with them, after he's savaged them and had his fill.

He hunts for many things, for sex, for power, for entertainment. He does not, strictly speaking, hunt for food, but all these things nourish him. All these things feed the wolf inside of Jeremy.

Although he may not seem it, anyone who's been stalked by Jeremy will attest that he is, in fact, a wolf. Be careful, then, when you meet Jeremy or the various far-flung members of his pack. Beware their honest eyes and easy smiles, beware their accessible friendship and soothing voices. These are all signs of wolves on the prowl.

It would be hackneyed, selfish, and arrogent to re-imagine Kafka's Metamorphosis from my perspective.

The snow didn't so much fall on Columbus as it did descend, riding on the white wings of some predatory bird. It swooped down over campus with a baleful call that sent shivers down spines, drove pedestrians indoors, and raised forlorn looks in the eyes of men and women who stood motionless at bleak windows.

Personification of weather comes easily, sometimes. It's difficult not to put a face on forces of nature. When the entire city grinds to a halt, the landscape changes, even the light itself takes on new qualities. The snow arrives in our lives, a strange guest, a haunting specter, an old lover whose familiar fingers seem to brush our skin even as she never lingers long enough for anything meaningful.