Love, Future Dwight

Just call me Jim. It has recently come to my attention that this internship I’m so fond of seriously resembles The Office, and my boss could be a real, flesh-and-bone incarnation of Michael Scott. He was courteous enough to stick one of those “The Office” signs on the intern room door, exactly like the one they slowly pan in on at the end of the show’s credits, and a part of me thinks that he gets a lot of his wacky business ideas from the show. Safe to say I wouldn’t be surprised.

Exhibit A: Last Friday, Ken came into the office an hour and a half late with an elderly gentleman in tow. He had been talking a big game about one of his clients, a man named Bob, who was going to be in town to hear his presentation at the Concord library Thursday night, so me, S and R figured that this was that man. Au contraire. The old man shuffling down the hallway was not client Bob, but FATHER IN LAW Bob. Sorry I didn’t know it was bring your elderly family members to work day, Ken, I would’ve made a couple phone calls. So after introducing all of us to Bob, Ken breaks his big news of the day. Get in the car, kids, we’re going to the Concord Museum.

. . . . . . .

I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about the Concord Museum, but I definitely hadn’t. I guess it was a nice gesture for a Friday and all, and it’s not like any of us are getting paid anyways, but I really really was not expecting to be taken to a decrepit house full of revolutionary war paraphernalia while on the clock for work. We basically had the place to ourselves, and had the express privilege of getting a private viewing of their 15-minute video on Concord through the ages. The rest of the house was essentially a shrine to the Transcendentalists, which obviously got Ken all hot and bothered. I could just feel the smug coming out of him when Bob called him a modern-day Thoreau. So this is why Bob gets to stick around – he’s an ego boosting enabler who makes Ken think it’s OK to act the way he does. I’m being harsh, but honestly this is not what I signed up for.

After the museum trip, which really was kind of funny and was better than sitting in the office all day, Ken took us all to a French café in downtown Concord. It was delicious and Ken tried to speak French to the waitresses, which really just was the icing on top of a lovely afternoon. Bob was a sweet man, complemented my residual Latin knowledge (cogito ergo sum, get it get it), and fell asleep during Ken’s webinar so I decided I really wouldn’t mind it if he made an encore appearance before the end of the summer.

Exhibit B: After the long weekend, I figured that things would get a little more serious around the office. No more field trips or surprise family member appearances. Not so. After skipping Tuesday because I couldn’t drag my ass off the Vineyard in a timely manner, I came in an hour late on Wednesday only to find that our internet was failing. It has been spotty at best since I’ve been working here, but this time it had truly kicked it. Nothing. And when the internet isn’t working, there is absolutely less than nothing worth doing here.

Ken came into our room in a frenzy, claiming that he heard somewhere that if you unplug the phones (because they’re on the internet line….) and wait a while, the wireless will automatically connect again. Oh really, Ken? Does you also get your car to run on unicorn tears? There are solutions for things like this, and the do not involve unplugging the phones and staring at the router willing it to work again with your thoughts. I wouldn’t be so bitter about that if he had let us go home and do our minimal amount of work from there for the afternoon, but instead he kept us. And kept us. For 4+ hours, with absolutely nothing to do.

He finally let us go half an hour early, promising to get a geek squad in by the morning so we wouldn’t have to spend all of today internetless too. Thank God for the geeks.

Exhibit C: Finally today. We come in and the geek squad has not showed up yet and the internet is still down. Not wanting us to waste another day staring at internet error screens, Ken had something else up his sleeve – another field trip. This time unaccompanied, to Louisa May Alcotts residence down the street. I don’t even want to describe this place and this post is going on way way way too long, but it’s clearly just a lot to deal with. 2 museums and one voodoo home internet remedy in 5 days, this isn’t real life.

I’m waiting for him to start dating his regional manager (if we have one of those), bring in a Clue-like charades game and start speaking in a southern accent, or any of the other things Michael Scott does. It would in no way surprise me. Hil hope all is going well in Houston, lovelovelove you, S A V E M E.

Sorority Girl Moment

So I forgot to post this yesterday, mostly because I started writing with 15 minutes left in my day and had to cut myself short before I got all hot and bothered again about the JA meeting, but I actually had a pretty embarrassing srat-moment yesterday that somehow completely slipped my mind.

Upon returning from JA and going out to lunch with Ken and the boys (who will from here on out be referred to as K, S and R, Gossip Girl style, xoxo), we took a stroll around Concord. Concord is actually a pretty picturesque little town, I highly recommend the Main Street Deli and Comina, which my moms friends husbands mom owned for a while and has the most amazing furniture / rugs / pillows / basic housewares I've ever seen. Anyways that's not where Ken took us. He took us to the town hall which is now a Unitarian church with an interior that looks suspiciously like the inside of Lee Chapel.

He took us here because this place, as well as the tavern next to it, have historical significance in the time surrounding the Revolution. K has his heart set on making sure that we leave this internship with a basic understanding of why we shouldn't perform self-lobotomy because we;re in Concord and not downtown Boston, so it was a nice gesture. In the basement of the church (more church basements, can't get away), there was a picture of K's personal heroes, the Transcendentalists. Maybe you've heard of them - Thoreau (whose name is apparently pronounced thorough, not thor-OWE), Emerson, etc. Well this guy named Oliver Wendell Holmes also apparently hung out with them, and here is where I make my sorority girl blunder numero uno.

K claims he doesn't know much about Holmes' body of work, but something in his name rings a bell for me. I get all excited to show off that I do, in fact, know something about history, and start rambling out loud. Holmes was a poet. I know that. He wrote something really nationalistic I think. It was turned into a song. The Star Spangled Banner? The inscription on the Statue of Liberty? I'm all over the place here but I KNOW that I know that Oliver Wendell fucking Holmes wrote something that, at one point in my life, I had to commit to memory.

Hil, do you see where this is going yet? If not I'm kind of disappointed. Well once I get excited about something I really don't give up until I've figured it out, so I'm frantically searching OWH poems on the crackberry trying to prove to mah boiz that I'm not actually retarded. They're all already giving me blank looks and starting to move on, but you know I never quit when I'm on a roll. So I search search search and SUDDENLY there in front of me I see it.

The Chambered Nautilus.

The Kappa Delta Poem.

I don't even want to say it. I just made a huge deal about how Holmes was something that I KENW I learned and was comparing it to, say, the National Anthem, and there on my blackberry screen is the one stupid little poem we had to memorize everytime fucking Kristie Noel decided to show her face in Lex. In case you forgot how it goes, here it is:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

That snippet is apparently only the last verse of the entire poem, but it all flooded back to me and I got super embarrassed and mumbled something about a sorority poem and shut myself up for the rest of the walk through the church. Thanks for nothing, Kappa Delta.

Everyone knows about AA - they meet in church basements once a week, stand up and say hi my name is (katie) and i'm an alcoholic, and get positive feedback for their heartwarming stories of chronic abuse. Not everyone knows about Jobless Anonymous, however, or JA, as I like to call it. JA is an unemployment support group, and is actually called something like WIND Not sure exactly what those letters stand for, but they probably don't come nearly as close to hitting the nail on the head as JA. Why? Because these people are in fact jobless, they meet in a church basement to talk about it every week, and sometimes give each other advice and pats on the back. They even serve coffee out of the same huge metal urns as AA, but trust me the AA coffee is much stronger. I'd know.

Anyways, my boss Ken decided to make up for the fact that he didn't come in at all yesterday by giving us the privilege of watching him speak at one of these JA meetings. He neglected to tell us, however, that while the meeting started at 9, he wouldn't even be going on until 11:30. So me, Steve and Ryan all show up in our professional work clothes at 9 am to find a largely empty church parking lot. We wander around the church for a while, find where we're supposed to be going, and realize that it is in fact the most depressing place in the entire world. The man at the door had a greasy, floppy combover and a striped short-sleeve button down with his pants too high and his glasses too '80's. And they wonder why they can't find jobs. I don't think they own mirrors.

At the risk of sounding seriously insensitive and snobby, if I ever end up like any of these people I hope to god it's because I've acquired some kind of early-onset Alzheimer's that makes me forget what it means to pull my shit together and stay far far away from church basements under any circumstances. We then called Ken, essentially to say what the fuck please, and he told us he wouldn't be there for another 2 hours. THANKS BOSS. So we went to a Dunkin Donuts and sat there for approximately two hours twiddling our thumbs and thinking of creative ways to all quit simultaneously.

The speech Ken gave was entertaining, but the crowd was one of the more dismal assemblages of people I've ever witnessed. And you know I've been through my share of actual AA meetings. At least the ones in AA are the winners, the ones who got out. The JA crowd sits there in their ill-fitting black pants and sweater sets from Kohls and thinks about the easiest way to tell someone you meet at a networking event that they've been out of work for the past 3-6 months. If there is a karmic force in the universe it's going to come back and kick me in the ass for being so wildly insensitive on an internet forum, but I really was scarred by what I saw this morning.

Also naturally Ken sold some of his books to these down-on-their-luck individuals, and proceeded to take us out to lunch with the earnings so I guess I can't really say I minded that.

Gotta get outta here now. Times UP.

shitmymomdoes

So some might think that graduating from a top liberal arts college in rural VA would put you at the top of the list for jobs... au contraire, friends. Moving back home might not be so bad for those of you whose lives aren't daily episodes of True Life: I have (an) embarrassing parent. My Mom is and will always be the only person that can embarrass me at the drop of a hat...most of the time I take it upon myself to look like an ass, but she can readily do harm in an instant.

The ever-popular book Sh*t My Dad Says was a recent purchase for me in an airport and I definitely recommend everyone reads it. Snippets of ridiculous stories followed by witty one-liners - great plane read. As I read this I kept thinking that I could really start a Twitter, FB, foursquare, myspace, eharmony - the list goes on - titled shitmymomdoes.

Everyone has heard of icing, getting iced what have you but no one has parents that would willingly do this to themselves. After explaining to my mom the concept and how Smirnoff Ice was in fact a punishment for being the dumbass that reached for one out of the Bud Light box o bottles or fell for the "can you open this?" (you're not original, sorry), she waited a few days and then much to my surprise came home from Kroger one day with a trunk full of groceries or "grosseries" as she likes to write at the top of her list, complete with a "party pack" of Smirnoff.

She said, "I got some of those things you were talking about, Judy (my crazy Godmother who has at least 10 years on my mom but refuses to reveal her age) said they weren't that bad and she actually enjoyed them..."

Ignoring her comment and continuing to be her indentured servant, I continued to unload (doing so of course in about 2 trips while plastic bags left death wounds on my arms to minimize trips to the car and time in the 95 degree 100% humidity shit weather my city provides). Next thing I know I walk inside, she is waving her hand over the party pack like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of the hat and goes "oooo this one, raspberry! sounds good," sounds what.

As she turned on Glenn Beck, for those of you that don't know my mom IS the Tea Party, and poured a Smirnoff raspberry over ice as she listened to his political banter in the kitchen. I gave her a "seriously, wtf" look and she said "I don't know why people drink these as punishment, they're sweet and refreshing."

Well, Mom, next time take a knee, throw your hand in the air and turn Glenn Beck off. Betcha it won't go down like a cool glass o lemonade on a hot summer day then.

Cheers.

enter the dragon

that title has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

hil I was under the impression "broads" was spelled that way but I'll take your word for it. currently sitting at my DESK (yea buddy)...in my windowless box of an office doing a whole lot of nothing because, oh wait, ken decided to just not come in today. ken is my boss, he keeps flexible hours and reminds me of a less-dyslexic version of my father. anyways ken isn't here today, but i woke up at the crack of dawn to make an early ferry this morning, drove all the way back from the vineyard to concord, and have been sitting at my computer trying not to fall asleep for the past 5 hours because i thought he might be actually coming to work today. and nobody really wants to just NOT show up on the fifth day of work. so thanks for this ken. i guess it could be worse...i could actually be working? proofreading articles? is this what i signed up for? it's real hard to stay motivated when you're not getting paid to do practically nothing. long story short, i'm once again blogging to retain sanity. it's like talking to yourself without actually talking to yourself. much less creepy, similar therapeutic results.

anways, jooooooosey deets of life in and around the greater boston area / islands? celeb sitings this weekend on MV - 3. if you count shep of vineyard vines as a celeb, which I guess is really tacky of me but I kinnnnd of do. him, bill murray and meg ryan. trifecta, if you will. essentially enough of a reason for me to seriously pursue the option of weekend employment out there. and by seriously pursue i mean i've already signed my name in bbm blood to my new gay bff brent to wear green crocs, lilly polos, and work in his cafe. i've decided I played my cards pretty poorly when planning this summer, and if I had absolutely no moral compass (which is debatable) and unlimited funds (psh), i would have already quit this godawful internship and would currently be at least 2 bloody marys deep, shopping around edgartown with brent at this very moment.

other reasons i like the vineyard over the lockbox in concord, besides casual celeb encounters? it was generally an exciting weekend because i can genuinely say i did things i have never done before. drank duckfarts - crowne + baileys + either jameson or kahlua, depending on your desired level of CREAMINESS. said it. creamy. woof. anyways. drank those, with lunch / dinner / accompanied by tequila shots because, honestly, when in rome. also sang karaoke on stage at a bar instead of just in peoples houses but i did notttt go for the solo cher performance. there will be other karaoke nights and many more opportunities to make a room full of people believe in life after love, but i must say i wasn't feeling it. it's not something i like to do the first night i meet people. why, you may ask? who doesn't like a grade-A, vegas-quality cher impersonator? i wasn't exactly ready to find out. so i did rich girl with a whole mess of people and our mic was turned off and it was the last song of the night so i'm not exactly sure anyone saw or paid attention. but i did it.

and last-but-not-least on the new experience agenda - played frisbee golf and didnt totally suck at it. granted i think i used muscles that i haven't used since i stopped pretending i was coordinated and athletic so now i can't lift my arms up or anything without something pulling...but who's complaining, it was worth it. they actually have a frisbee golf course out there, which is something i have never even seen before. and the frisbees aren't beach ones, but kind of look like discus(es? i? plural? beuller?) and it took me right back to dikey track practices, but in a good way. i didn't exactly keep score but i'm pretty sure i ended up something like 20 over. aint no shame in trying. on the whole, it was a fabbb weekend, definitely looking into long-term weekend employment because honestly if i don't have some kind of consistent sunny, island, beautiful, relaxing mental ammo to keep me satisfied through the week i'll start pulling out my hair and ACTUALLY talking to myself. and i could use the monies.

gross-fest, also, you would be in heaven with the food selections there. murdicks fudge is dy-no-mite and apparentlyyy, so i hear, the atlantic makes a gigantic hashbrown that's basically just a sheet of their bombass truffle fries. i didn't get the chance to sample that but it needs to happen soon. and there's ice creammmmm and art cliff has the best brunch anywhere and you're gonna come out with me one week and we're gonna go to menemsha and get lobster rolls and all kinds of other things. not a joke, fat kids paradise. i'm thinking i should go pretend to work again, but i hope yo house didn't blow away last night in the wind stormz, its finally sunny and above 70 here and i'm wasting away in this intern torture box.

peace love and duck farts,

moi