multicultural high-brow

we seem to have stumbled onto a good theme here.

during that same evening of drinking with my co-workers that precipitated this whole train of thought, i asked the jameson-snubber (js?) if he had really sent me a message the other day in portuguese. i hadn't thought about it much at the time, since we were busy and i figured out what he was talking about, but three days later was wondering why he'd picked portuguese to thank me for my help. so we discussed his various travels a little, established that his portuguese came from three weeks visiting friends in portugal plus its similarity to other romance languages, etc.

i mentioned that if js had a need to communicate with his co-workers in portuguese, i'd be happy to be the recipient but he might also try my friend dwtacc. his surprise at her brazilian heritage was entertaining in that everyone thinks she's every ethnicity but her own, but funnier was his doubt that they'd communicate well, what with the whole portugal/brazil thing. i know he just meant that different countries have different dialects and all that, but it really sounded like js thought his three weeks in portugal would be too pure for her life of understanding the language. i let him dig himself a little hole before telling him i was sure her undergraduate portuguese major would surely iron out those differences.

i don't intend to disparage the poor jameson-snubber who just didn't know dwtacc to know what he was saying (although i'm secretly hoping that dwtacc will somehow use this information to her advantage and then tell me about it). i only use it as an example of my growing theory that prizing individuality and unique experiences has its limits. we all get through education and interviewing for jobs by talking ourselves up, trying to convince everyone to hire us because we have something special that they can't get anywhere else, packaging our eclectic experiences like they grant us a unique position to understand the world. but does it hold up? i think a set of experiences gets you into a certain job, social circle, academic standing, whatever, and after that initial acceptance those experiences are pretty much a version of what everyone else has done. is it special that js speaks some portuguese? yes, if he worked in a gas station in northern wisconsin and was trying to get out. and yes, in that i don't speak portuguese. but does it make him better at his job, or funnier over a beer, or quicker getting someone to sleep with him?

i kind of wish i'd spent some time in college working the cash register at fleet farm instead of all the resume-padders, so i could be less of a hypocrite while i rant.

ps: blogmate, mb just found the jason mraz cd i bought before moving to chicago.

the 3 p's of high-browing

sadly, i think my blogmate is right. those who use the word proletariat seldom are the proletariat. that was probably even true in the age of emile zola.

nevertheless, i give full credit for use of the word, and would like to add a few more to the list. i think you'll find that proletariat is the only one allusive to gloriousness.

my second favorite (after some debate and some time spent on dictionary.com) is plebeian. my former roommate (also known as the bride) introduced me to the word during the long debate about what we were going to name our (now tragically deceased) kitten. i was voting for miko, but tb decided that he was just to plebeian for such a sophisticated name. we ended up settling on emile, which (in retrospect) is only relieved of snotty connotations by its reference to the aforementioned writer.

finally there's pedestrian, as in "your taste in literature is so pedestrian." this ridiculous statement was made by one barista to another (i overheard it when i, myself, was employed as a coffee girl), who apparently failed to realize how absurd it sounded. baristas, admittedly are a bizarre breed of service industry types. really they're lower on the totem pole than waiters, cocktail waitresses and bartenders, but tend to be more artsy and well-read, thus feeling entitled to call other peoples' taste pedestrian.

i don't know what else to say. power to the people?

down with the ship: take 2

in the ongoing saga of work being especially soul-sucking these days, my immediate team and i decided to re-invent a long-standing work tradition. it is customary that at the end of a long month, teams celebrate by going out to dinner together. it may only be november 16th, but we decided that this month has gone on far long enough, and decided to pre-empt the end-of-month civilized dinner with a mid-month beer binge. lovely.

the highlight of the evening?

one of the guys was expounding on the virtues of grey goose, and how he doesn't think jameson is good enough (and my faithful readers already know what an affront this is to me) compared with single-malt something-or-other, and his eighteen languages that he speaks, and his mastery of technology, etc... suddenly one of the women, just as educated as this guy - but two beers apparently goes a longer way for her - starts shouting...

"you have to learn to live with the PEOPLE! join the proletariat! i am the proletariat! look, i use little words! you're all, 'look at me, i'm slumming it! i ate duck pate instead of goose! tee hee!'"

now, as i argued, the true proletariat doesn't know the word proletariat, but regardless, i think plans were made to drink schlitz together, which works out well for me.

going down with the ship

while 99.9% of our loyal readers already know what it is that my blogmate and i do for a living, and while the few that don't probably don't care that much (or have already figured it out because, let's face it, we're pretty transparent)i think that i can preserve our (flimsy) cloak of anonymity and still dedicate some time and internet space to ranting about our profession and its current state of suckiness. again, as 99.9% of you are close personal friends of ours, you've probably already noticed that we're in foul moods these days, and if you've got any sense you're steering way clear of us... unless, of course, you are mb and can't really avoid the cranky or you are one of our colleagues and are just as miserable as we are.
at the end of the day, i suspect that things are seeming extra bad because our long, grueling hours of work all seem to for naught. it's bad enough that we're never seeing our beds or bed partners (or, in my case, failing to acquire bed partners), but our efforts are seeming increasingly futile. as my boss put it today, "we're basically rearranging deck chairs on the titanic." my blogmate describes it as soul sucking, my other boss just keeps saying, "my flight for fiji leaves in 20 minutes," and i keep scribbling the words "giant martini" on bits of paper and passing the notes to my coworkers.
however you want to describe it, it just ain't good.

the devil is in the details

i know it's been a long time since we've posted. work has become something i can only describe as soul-sucking for the last few weeks, and also, i'm lazy. but here is a brief amusing tale:

mb is well known for being a very numbers-oriented guy. doesn't understand the point of competition in music or art or really anything that can't be quantified. life has gotten very good for mb with the advent of google earth, now allowing him to measure every run, bike ride, and swim in lake michigan, so never again would he have to (gasp) *estimate* the distance of his workouts.

enter the upcoming hustle up the hancock race. mb decided to register himself. and me, for that matter, which is going to be a separate funny story. currently i can't hustle much of anywhere. i can sort of saunter to my coffee, meander to my beer, wander to the tv... are those races? anyway, mb was distraught to realize he didn't know exactly how far in miles the hustle-up-the-hancock is. when he asked me, i suggested that it would be impossible to calculate without knowing the pitch of the steps, width, etc.

undaunted, the next day mb showed up with detailed diagrams of staircases and an estimate for his upcoming hustle. where, you might ask, did he get this information?

"i happened to run across an office building stairwell standards manual."

he *happened* to run across a *what*?

i laughed for two solid minutes.

mb, i mock because i love.