Planned Obsolescence. Or Get Thee to a Knocking Yard

The last couple of days I've done something I absolutely hate to do; namely tinkering with technologies I'm not overly familiar with. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm the worst student ever and a complete and utter brat when it comes to learning things I'm not innately gifted with. Hombrelibre still shudders at the memory of teaching me to drive. As a result, I'm pretty much self-taught in almost everything I do. And sometimes it really shows.

Yesterday I was burning pictures onto disks, which is at about an ape-level skillset but something that regularly flumoxes me. It's not as if I haven't done it before, but every computer has their own set of drama associated with different programs and what not and I was burning massive files and a shit-ton of snaps which only complicated the matter. After a lot of tinkering and swearing I finally got three disks burned, then just about had a coronary when my coworker couldn't open them. Much like in setting up a blind date, you had to make sure the fuckers are compatible.

Today I was creating a flier in InDesign, which again, isn't altogether that challenging but definitely a program I have just enough familiarity with to be dangerous. I was patting myself on the back for remembering how to text wrap and color match but my flier still looked painfully amateurish. I'm such a design snob that my inability to create something truly spectacular made me want to rip out my eyes and fling them at the screen, which makes about as much sense as a beginning piano student blowing their head off for not mastering Chopin. Welcome to the Virgo brain.

In any case, all of this strang und durm got me thinking about how many of the skills I learned while growing up are rapidly growing obsolete. I'm not even 30. I wonder how the 80 years olds feel right about now with all those crazy kids and their cell phones and blackberries and Ipods, texting a collective "the future is now" while we stand hopelessly by.

My 60 year old coworker, whose methodology pains me at times, is like a walking billboard for obsolescence. She prints out every single email she gets and diligently files them. I caught her the other day printing out websites for reference. I don't think she knows how to cut and paste, much less resize a picture. And none of this would really matter if she weren't in a department that depends explicitly on all of these technologies. Lately, I've noticed my rage toward her verges on the irrational. Granted, she has a nasty habit of singing classic show tunes at full tilt pre-9 a.m. which is no doubt grounds for murder in some countries, but my knee-jerk vitriol at her inability to navigate powerpoint may belie some deeper impulse in me.

One might surmise that she represents everything I'm starting to fear as I creep toward my next decade of life. That I'll be somehow left behind, rapture-style, as the young and clever are sucked toward career heaven, leaving me to languish in early-thirties purgatory. No longer young, not quite old, I fear I'll dog paddle my way through the next chunk of my life, clinging to my proverbial MySpace as the kids gravitate toward Facebook. Or whatever the hell they like these days. I can't keep track.

"Oh my god, Becky, look at the size of her vest!"

I am wearing a vest today, something I haven't done since 1992, when I was in middle school and liked to wear my hair in artfully labored-over bang constructions. It feels good.

I've always dug the menswear look, which is a shame, really, since my body type is about as far as you can get from a man's. I have equal parts hootertown to my padunkadunk and a whole lotta thigh to match. Suffice to say, I don't even really do proper justice to most pants, much less vests, suspenders or pork pie hats.

I have friends, wily lanky friends like glassmongoose and knitsybitsycycler who look so good in this stuff it makes your teeth hurt. I watch them effortlessly pulling off aspects of Annie Hall aesthetics and think, "damn, that looks good. I should try that." But like the consumate younger sister I am, trying to emulate all that inspires me, such flights of fancy are often best left to paper doll fantasies than actual fruition.

So I look like a dork. I know it. I'm wearing a vest covered in stars, straining where it should be relaxing, and as cool as I want to feel right now, I am patently aware that my outfit screams "Ren, ren, rennnnnn!" That's Ren as in Rennaissance, for you non D&D-eschewing homies out there.

But what the fuck. I am Ren. I read Harry Potter. I have a NeverEnding Story tattoo. I play D&D. I don't live in my parent's basement and I am getting laid, so really, what do I have left to prove?

The vest, she stays.

The Unbearable Lightness of the Return

I like returning things. It brings me an enormous sense of relief and almost, dare I say it, a high. This is partly due to the fact that I'm cheap. Spending money makes me nervous. But the true underlying impetus is that I get off on feeling unfettered. I'm a freedom junkie with an almost physiological need to purge. My shopping trips are roundtrip: I almost never escape a purchasing excursion without a return trip scheduled for the not-too-distant future.

My mother is a bit of a hoarder. To this day, she won't let anyone into the basement as it's so full of stuff. She lives in a three bedroom house with a full footprint basement and every room is at saturation point. She's definitely not a full-blown hoarder. Nothing to Oprah-expose levels or anything like that. But the woman certainly clings to things and feels physical stress at parting with even old magazines or well-worn clothes.

It doesn't take more than a semester of Psych 101 to draw the connection here. Many of us feel compelled to remake ourselves in the inverse image of our parents, and I am no exception. Material possessions equal burdens. So I unburden myself.

I am in the process of buying a wee house. Not a small house, mind you. A wee house; an almost midget house weighing in at a mighty 810 square feet on the main floor with additional basement space. I'm beyond thrilled about this, yet cautiously thrilled as our inspection won't happen until tomorrow. It's so cute you could puke at the cuteness. It's hobbit meets hello kitty with all the class and sass of old Hollywood and art deco. It's both old and moderne--a cozy hidey hole perfectly proportioned with curves in all the right places. And soon it will be mine!

But as mentioned, I'm a compulsive returner. So what am I doing? I'm continuing to scout the house ads every day, just to torture myself. Is there anything else? What else is out there? I feel a manic need to compare and contrast. Just in case. My itchy trigger finger longs to release, daring me to back out, to run before it's too late. But like many a well-chosen Target purchase before it, my gut tells me this house is staying with me. It's already chiseling out a little castle-shaped hole in my heart.

And if we buy it, if we really truly buy it, I'm already excited about all the purging of my possessions I'll get to do before we move in. A small house demands disciplined streamlining of objects. I can hardly wait!

Que sera sera

Whatever will beeeee, will beeeee.

Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. Over and over. As I rock back and forth. Baaack and forth.

We lost out on the house we bid on. Bid on, and, I might add, shelled out four hundred dollars for an inspection on. And wasted god only knows how much psychic energy on. Bah. Apparently some fucker paid cash and offered more than us. I hope they get mauled by a bear.

The hippie/spiritualist in me says "it wasn't meant to be." The really bat-shit crazy superstitious freak in me says, "you offered a number comprised entirely of threes and sevens and there were 13 offers. What did you expect?"

Does anyone know what the fuck I'm talking about? This is what happens when you're the only one of your friends who attended Sunday school. You can take the girl out of the church, but you can't take the church out of the girl.

So back on the horse or bike (neither of which I can operate, I should point out). Tomorrow is another day.

What Brown Can Do For You

I'm dead serious about chocolate. I don't fuck around. When it comes to general sugar I'll eat just about anything, from Necco wafers to peeps. I'll even down a stale marshmallow circus peanut if I'm desperate. But for chocolate, I have standards. I won't eat a Hershey bar, for example, and Snickers are taken only grudgingly. And while I might scarf down Halloween candy at a friend's house or from the front desk at work I certainly won't buy most mass-manufactured chocolate.

I like the good stuff. High quality, well-sourced, local, organic and fair trade if possible. 3400 Phinney and Theo's, Fran's, oh my. Or Vosges from Chicago. Or Dagoba and the sinful semi-sweet ultra dark bars from the co-op. Dear Lord.

I was just reading about how Seattle's Fran's Chocolates (a.k.a. "The Best Overall Chocolateir in the United States" according to the "Book of Chocolates" and more importantly, yours truly) is opening another shop in the belly of the new Four Seasons Hotel. Sure, I'm excited about this, but I'm also still smarting from my last visit to Fran's.

You can buy their gold bars all over the city, but to get their coconut gold bars, which are basically like crack to me, you have to actually drive to one of their retail outlets. Unfortunately, they hire what appears to be the slowest, most incompetent work force I may have ever encountered in a retail environment. Everyone who works there is frail, skinny and scared-looking and moves at a snail's pace, which are not attributes I typically associate with chocolate consumption.

Shit, if I worked around chocolate I would be ecstatic. I'd probably be about 50 pounds heavier, but I'd look like I was in the throes of an orgasm and greet each customer with manic energy and joy. I would move at a blur, slowed only momentarily to throw back a shot of hot cocoa between raucous bursts of laughter. How can someone look nervous and pinched around chocolate? Did chocolate beat you as a child? Does chocolate yell at you? No, my friends, chocolate only gives. Gives joy, gives pleasure, gives cellulite dimples to your ever-widening thighs, but by god it gives.

So there I was at Fran's, standing in line with my coconut gold bars, my mouth filling with drool, when I witnessed what can only be described as a new level of inneficiency playing out before me. There were maybe 15 people in the store, roughly ten of whom were, like myself, just trying to purchase items they could grab from the store shelves. The other five people were purchasing boxed chocolate. There were four employees.

Two of the employees, looking as if they might break at any minute, were sloooooowly and deliberately packing chocolates one by one for two of the customers who were picking individual chocolates. One of the employees was sloooooooooooowly and deliberately wrapping a box of chocolates and the fourth employee, who I assumed was the manager, looking very much like a praying mantis but without the sex appeal, was talking to a customer. No one was at the register. No one was ringing up the ten of us who just needed something rung up. This went on for 15 minutes.

By the end, I was literally sweating, I was so angry. I am horribly offended by innefficiency, to be sure, but this was amazing. I almost expected people to jump out and announce we were on Candid Camera or something--such was the ridiculousness of the situation. Finally, after loudly suggesting someone actually man the register, to the murmured agreement from my fellow patrons, I screamed "this is ridiculous!" threw my gold bars onto the counter and stormed out.

I haven't been back.

I miss my candy, though. I'm not willing to punish myself by living a gold-bar free life for the sake of driving home a point. But I'm pissed. So what's a girl to do? Slink back and admit defeat? Force feed the anorexic bitches running the place until they speed up? Complain directly to the company? I want my motherfucking coconut gold bar!

All Penned in and Nowhere to Go

My boss came in at 10:20 this morning, left for lunch at 11:30 and still isn't back at 1:48. This is normal. The guy is never here. He might be looking for another job. Lord knows I am. But the question remains- will my next job be any better than this one? Will I ever be happy working for someone else?

I was talking to knitsybitsycycler yesterday about how we're part of a whole generation rife with creative people who are stuck in office environments where they fundamentally don't belong. These are people who have taken cross-trained artistic abilities to a new level-they're often irritatingly talented in a whole pantheon of disciplines, with gifts in painting, drawing, photography, design, writing, music and general crafts. And they're not doing any of these things. They're sitting, usually in a cubicle, in some warehouse like environment where they are churning out uninspiring crap that doesn't matter for people who don't appreciate them. Don't get me wrong, I don't think most people enjoy the modern job market, whether or not they have artistic tendencies. But for those who do, I think the pain is taken to a new level, an uber pain if you will.

I told knitsybitsy that we're like veal cattle-young and semi-maleable big-eyed calfs penned into our little boxes, where our muscles atrophy, our coats lose their luster and our bleating becomes softer and softer until we finally go quiet.

This is not ok, people.

The worst thing for me is I have no solutions. I like to think of myself as a fairly skilled strategist but I have beaten my head against this issue until it was nothing but a mass of emotional scar tissue and I can tell you I've got nuthin'. Or rather, I have some ideas but they all scare me and the last time I up and quit to go out on my own I started crapping myself and was diagnosed with a chronic disease.

What I do know, however, what I'm sure of, is that we can't stop bleating. It might sound like just so much whining to the untrained ear but I am set on this point- keep bleating. Keep talking. Keep screaming until your voice is strained and hoarse but don't go quiet. Beat on the wall with sticks if you must-just keep making noise. Don't quietly accept this shit and tell yourself that this is just how things are. Nothing good has come in this world by just accepting things. Change comes from unrest and agitation.

So agitate.

Gimme Shelter

By nature I'm a nester. And my nesting impulses have, as of late, swung into overdrive. These days I'm often found in the park, hopping quietly with twigs hanging from my beak, my feathers ruffling in the wind. Or up in a tree, regurgitating vole bones and fur into little pellets.

Or I'm just looking for houses. And thinking about houses. All. The. Time. I'm obsessed. It all started when HombreLibre regained full employment after a four month stint of spending even more time at the corner coffee shop. The second he got work a little light flipped on in my head and a little voice started providing non-stop fantasy scenes of glossy technicolor homeownership, with all the good bits and none of the hassle.

It isn't a space issue. Our apartment is huge. It isn't where we live, because I can biasedly say we're in the best neighborhood in the city right now. And we love our neighbors, despite their tendency to play Rock Band above our heads for hours at a time. It's just....some intangible desire to own a place, to have it as your very own, your preciousssssssss. And i've also found that I cannot sleep with anyone walking above my head, a lesson I have been fortunately spared until this, my first first-floor apartment.

I think it's a natural human impulse, or at least I'm telling myself that. I bet even cro-magnon man fell prey to such an emotional pull. He probably wanted a cave in a nice neighborhood with good access to tool shops and fire pits. Or some shit.

My issue with the house hunt, of course, is that Seattle is so bloody expensive it's hard to not get jaded and give up, or as I'm wont to do-throw fits. We went out on Saturday to poke around and the hunt devolved, as usual into me going quiet and sullen followed by a little hysterical rant about how "impossible this is and how are we going to do this and where do these people get all their money, the fuckers!" At one point I was shaking my fist at a row of Craftsman bungalows screaming "Give me your house! Give me your houuuuuuuuse!"

Shortly after the feeling sorry for myself bit, I also typically sink into a deeper pit of sorrow where I extrapolate into the greater unfairness of the economic system, the plight of the middle class, the yoke on the necks of the poor and how I am actually so priveleged and should just shut up, give away everything I have and dedicate my life to helping others.

Then I nap. And usually wake feeling better.

Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. I'm a veritable barrel of laughs, I am.

This will undoubtedly go on for several months, until such time as we actually put an offer on a house. And then I'll find something else to obsess and fret over. But in the meantime, if you catch me with a glazed look, I'm probably looking at house porn.