Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Someone has been stealing books from our store. I mean, it happens all the time, but I’m not talking about high school kids trying to sneak mangas out in their backpack. Specifically, I’m talking about this one guy, who’s a pro. We’re talking making off with entire shelves. He may just be an evil genius.
At least that’s what we’re telling ourselves. Because it probably shouldn’t be so easy for someone who isn’t an evil genius to steal from us, especially when there are so many of us walking around the floor all the time.
The guy’s working with an M.O., which is how we were able to connect a number of robberies over the past few weeks to the same perp. I first noticed a couple Mondays ago when someone asked for a Milan Kundera book and I noticed that there were none there, even though our computer told us there were plenty. Someone had just walked up to his spot on the shelf and apparently just shoveled them all into his bag and split. Then a few days ago, I noticed that it looked like someone had done the same thing to Camus.
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Last weekend, two of my friends from Boston made the long bus ride to New York to stay at my place. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing — they were on spring break and had called me at 11 Friday morning asking if it was ok if they came down that night.
One of them had already been to my apartment once. It was an accident, really — he had missed his connecting flight from New York to Utah and there was nothing for him until the next day, so he gave me a call. This was his fourth year in Boston, and one of my coping mechanisms when I first moved here was to say “I’ve lived in a city for the past four years, and this is really no different; it’s just bigger,” so as much as I felt the differences in culture between New York and Boston (and missed the latter), I guess I had intentionally ignored any differences in scale.
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Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Here is the only way I can envision myself getting a job at this point: I get another unpaid internship, plug away at that for a few months, let my supervisors see that I am good at and genuinely untroubled by the tedious, thankless tasks they give me and impress them enough that they make up some job for me on the lowest rung of the ladder for a tiny salary and I stay there for much longer than I should because it’s easier to just stay than go through the process of looking for a new job. But the problem with that is, how am I ever going to find that internship?
I’m not sure how I’ve ever gotten any jobs, to be honest. It must have been magic — and I’m not using that word as a sentimental way of describing the way circumstances come together perfectly; I mean it must have been actual literal magic. Like spells and cauldrons and shit. My resume is uninspiring (and unaccented), my cover letter banal, my interview dismal. The cover letter is the worst part, I think, because I am (ostensibly) a writer of some kind, and yet here’s my cover letter, and it’s about as boring a document as you’ll ever see. You’re supposed to talk about all your accomplishments, I guess, but the only accomplishment that sticks with you after going through my cover letter is how I accomplished to string together so many identical declarative sentences one after another. I did this. I did that. I learned this. I worked there. And I don’t know how to improve it, because talking about your successes is kind of hard when you think you’re a dumb kid with a lot to learn and not much success to his name just yet. (Which is not to say that I’m worse off than any of my peers. I think we’re all dumb kids with a lot to learn and not much success to our names, except for maybe a few exceptions. It’s just that many of my peers don’t seem to realize this the way I do, or at least they aren’t consumed by it.) I really am honestly a smart guy, I think, and a hard worker, but you can’t just come out and say that in a cover letter, because no one will believe you, and “I am smart” is probably just about the stupidest sentence in the history of language. My most valuable contributions to my employers are the kind of things you can’t really quantify or talk about without sounding like a complete bullshit artist. I do what I’m told quickly and without complaint. This is something, but go to an interview with just that and see how quickly it sounds like nothing.
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Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Greg’s banana bread recipe:
Ingredients
Wet:
2 eggs
1/2 cup low fat vanilla yogurt
4 really ripe (like whoa brown) bananas
3/4 c of extra virgin olive oil
Dry:
1/4 c (or less) light brown sugar
2 cups of whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of baking powder
pinch of salt
walnuts, nutmeg, orange peel, whatever else…
(As with any batter, the measurements here are approximate. If your batter looks thin, add some more flour. Too thick, add some more liquid.)
Procedure
Mix the wet ingredients together in one bowl, mix the dry together in another, add dry into wet. Stir to incorporate, pour into greased, (I prefer non-stick) pan, bake at 375 for 40-50 minutes or until a toothpick stuck into the middle comes out dry (aka not covered in uncooked batter).
Now, make it like Chris makes it!
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008
There is a skyscraper in Bristol, Connecticut, and I don’t know what it’s for, or what it does, besides stand there and look out of place. It is near tiny Lake Compounce amusement park, tucked away next to a (no kidding) lake in between some hills, so that you can’t really see even the tallest rides unless you’re right on top of it. ESPN is also in this area, and so the satellite dishes and the network’s big “campus” make for an unusual sight, but somehow it looks strangely appropriate where it is, in one of the more rural parts of the suburb. I don’t know, it’s so stretched out, like the kind of thing you’d describe as a compound. And something about those big dishes I associate with farms. Who the hell knows why. I just looks farmy and you’ll have to take my word for it, I’m afraid.
The point being, when you’re driving down 229 through Bristol towards Southington and you see that skyscraper, it looks really stupid. Not that Bristol’s this idyllic rural haven — far from it, it’s a pretty ugly town with a bunch of dumpy little plazas and not a lot else going for it except the best Taco Bell I’ve ever been to (seriously) — but it’s certainly not the kind of place to have one lonely skyscraper taking up skyspace. It always made me mad, because even though it’s impossible to drive through Bristol without wishing you were in a city (or, really, anyplace except Bristol, CT), it was like a slap in the face and somehow would give me an itch in the place that houses my little store of Connecticut (non-basketball related) pride. We’re forty-five minutes from Hartford, I’d think, and we don’t have skyscrapers here. So buzz off.
This will all make sense, maybe, later.
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