Path to Enlightened Insanity

I had one of those Ah! Ha! moments today.

Lots of us employees were disappointed about Chiquita staying in Cincinnati. Ironically both people who ultimately wanted to move with the company and keep their jobs, and people who wanted to stay in Cincinnati (and presumably lose their jobs) were disappointed.

This struck me as odd, but most of those who were disappointed in one way or another were/are seeking change.

The Ah! Ha! was that for people to initiate change on their own is terrifying. If for instance you choose to leave your job, and it doesn’t work out well, you’re the one who made a bad choice. But, if you lose your job because your company moves, and it doesn’t work out well, there is blame to share. Don’t get me wrong both are terrifying. But, it is almost antithetical to our being to bring change upon ourselves that could be negative.

I have to remember my December 2003/January 2004 time when I took a huge jump to quit my job on the potential of jobs in Cincinnati. I think it paid off pretty well all in all..

Change is good, you just have to be open to it and embrace it and run with it.

There is a quote from a writer whose name I forget that I’m going to paraphrase and butcher right now:

I kept telling myself that there was one more hurdle I had to clear so I could start living my life. But, then I realized that instead those hurdles were my life, and I should enjoy them and live my life.

See, I warned you I was going to butcher it.

Chiquita announced this week that headquarters, where I work, will be staying in Cincinnati. It was Fernando’s decision alone, and I have to agree with him, it was the right one for right now for Chiquita.

The problem is I really wanted to move. In many ways I was looking forward to moving and keeping my same job. (okay there are a huge number of assumptions there, but the odds are pretty good that I would’ve still had a position with Chiquita.) Some of this is that I’m scared to get too far away from my family. Its not that I don’t think I could take care of myself, (I’m more or less independent from family, its not like they’re doing my laundry or anything.) its that there is a lot of comfort of having a safety net of being able to lean on parents, especially when crazy ass people try to kill you or you can’t make the rent.

Another piece of this is that I’m a change junky, and right now I’m bored. (My primary operational responsibility at work currently bores the shit out of me, and I’d really like it if our primary vender got their shit together. I’m torn on that because they do a good job with what they’ve got to work with, but the thing is generally messed up and I’m the one who gets the pressure internally.) School, lets not even get started on that, but suffice it to say I’m not interested in it right now.

I looked at maybe buying a house, but I’ve got a rent that is hard to beat, and anyways the only rationale I could come up with for buying a house is to invest, and the experts say you’re better off investing elsewhere, especially given where I’d like to live right now.

I’ve also got a promise to myself that I’ll move out of the Midwest in the next five years or so. This means I’ll need to start plotting where I’m going, and right now I feel stagnate.

I have this dream that I’ll meet some wonderful guy and we’ll move (out of the midwest of course) and I’ll find a great job and everyone will live happily ever after. Yeah fucking right. While I didn’t read that in a fairy tale, it definitely is a fairy tale. I’m bad at being a catalyst for change. I want a cute boy, or my job, or some other external force to be the catalyst, and usually it is. But, this also means I’m just waiting for something to happen..

In case you haven’t figured out by now this is one of my trademark rambling entries, and I have no idea how to end it.

Until next time, when I’ll discuss dinner parties, goodnight from two felines and a human in a bed. (I swear, there is nothing funny going on….)

I watched Rent not once but twice this weekend.

I’m conflicted.

One part of me wants to say, “YES, its finally made it to the big screen!” But another part of me feels that a huge piece of the show’s charm was lost or sanitized out in the transition to film.

I’ll be honest two of my favorite songs, “Halloween” and “Contact”, didn’t make it into the movie. Halloween was apparently shot, but they didn’t even record the music for Contact. (Contact was known as the “sex” song in my mind, and for the longest time I hated it, but I’ve grown to love it.)

Cutting Contact from the film is a perfect example of the sanitization that took place in the transition. The amazing thing about Contact is that is is both a hot erotic song with people having sex, a song where the characters brashly proclaim their dissatisfaction with sex, and a song in which one of the main characters dies. Sex, sex, death. Or to be more precise, Sex, Sex, death of a gay man who got AIDS from Sex.

I’m annoyed this juxtaposition isn’t in the movie. Instead the only way HIV is showed as spreading in the film is from drug use. Granted, the show didn’t illustrate any HIV transmission methods, but alluded to multiple methods that people are infected with HIV.

By removing the allusion that HIV is transmitted by sex, and replacing it with the example that HIV is transmitted by drug use it has denigrated people living with HIV/AIDS.

Its also disheartening how some of the songs have been edited. Opening song “Rent” emasculated into a simple linear expositionary song that is a triumph in literalism. Whereas the musical’s version of “Rent” serves to introduce a majority of the main characters in wonderful polyphony and illustrate the Rent that is developing within the group, the movie’s version just about protesting the fact that people have to pay Rent. These missing pieces haven’t even been covered up, there are long pregnant beats just stick out and that now interrupt the flow of the song. Quite frankly I prefer Homer Simpson’s version of “Rent” in Rent II: Congo Fever, at least that was funny.

Also, someone forgot to educate the idiot screenwriter, Stephen Chbosky, what a sung through musical is. I understand fully that things have to be reworked and sometimes changed around so the story works in a different medium, but we’ve lost the fun sung answering machine messages, as well as numerous other pieces of music, in their place are uninteresting spoken replacements, or even worse, the same words spoken without music. Additionally, peppered through the movie to adjust for the loss of Jonathan Larsen’s wonderful work, are lame lines penned by Chbosky.

Somewhere along the line with all this tinkering and reworking Rent lost its heart and soul. The movie marginally works, but its a different animal, and it disgraces the brilliance and compactness of its predecessor.

So, I’m behind in my school work, generally tired, and I’m working the bitch port that takes all my patience and then some, so what do I do? Same thing I did on May 19, 1999; Go see a premier of a movie slightly after midnight. Although this time I wasn’t 18 and watching my 15 year old sister while our father was out of town.

Harry Potter: The Goblet of Fire is a good movie.

Now, I need to be sane and catch at least a couple of hours of sleep.

Chris Baty is a Genious. Nanowrimo isn’t anything horribly complex, it just is psychologically an extremely interesting mix. It takes all the good of peer pressure, the structure of procrastination, a time limit, a doable but tough goal, combined with just enough insanity..

But, it is at a horrible time. Whoever though that November was a good month to write a 50,000 word novel apparently has never lived my live. Without going ad nasuem into all the reasons her are just a few:

1. Academic terms are right near their end. For any variety of student we’re already under a much larger workload than normal.
2. Thanksgiving takes time out for all that family stuff.
3. Hurricane season lasts through this month. In any case those of us unfortunate enough to work in an industry affected by hurricanes will be cleaning up the paperwork for the next three months, the bulk of which is really hitting the fan right now.
4. Its the start of dark dreary cool weather, I want to be outside!

So here is what I’m going to do. I’m going to pick up the month of Nanowrimo and move it February. I’ve always thought February was a rather boring month and nearly a perfect fit. You’re not working off the hangover from New Years, and you’re not yet in the school crunch, and the fucking hurricanes have disappeared almost out of your memory. (only to be revisited by dinner in March to recognize for the efforts around the hurricanes that started in June (yeah Banana land is timely.))

So February, will be NaNiNoWrimo!

So, less than two hours ago I was berating Jen about writing her next novel for Nanowrimo.

So, somewhere along this path in the last one hundred and twenty minutes I decided that I’m going to participate again this year. What did it you may ask? I was taking the cat shit out to the trash can and low and behold I have plot ideas streaming out of my brain, all of which elude me at the moment. (One just found its way back to me.. its about a hypersomniac crime fighter that requires Starbucks coffee to stay awake, when he runs out he has to get more somehow, oftentimes pasting himself to the local Starbucks’s door with a Starbucks Card for the barista to fill his next drink up when they reopen in the morning. All hypercomedy style, so I can get away with long incoherent rants. (hey if you can’t get away from your flaws, make them part of the plot!) Yeah I’ll decide on that sometime soon.)

So I’ll need to average 1666.66 words per day.. wheee!

An this year I won’t have FedUp Kink copy-hell, or bull shit election-hell, or I’m going to Canada pleasure for relief from election-hell to deal with. I’ll just have Banana hurricane hell, so all-in-all it’ll be about even.

For the longest time I used to despise my Dad’s choice of time management. I often felt that he placed work above family and his children. (There is of course the balance that work is to provide for family and children.)

I spent last Friday in Dayton, among other things participating in career day at my upper school, The Miami Valley School. It wasn’t always exactly pleasant, and it was odd admitting to my teachers that some of my habits (preparedness) haven’t exactly changed. (and somebody had the idea to play a sick joke on me and have me present in Mr. Romeo’s room. Romeo is your classic hard ass English teacher. I failed two out of three terms of his class and the school fudged the requirements to have me graduate.)

Besides the lack of preparation and a few hard questions, one student asked the question I would’ve asked, “Are you happy?” I pseudo-feigned a yes. Its not that I’m not happy, but there are major areas of my life that are missing. (namely something resembling a coherent personal life.)

I place a high importance in my work. (whatever that may be at the time, Lambda, McDonald’s, Citigroup, Chiquita, Relay, theatre, etc..) So this explains why I’m at work at 9:27 pm on a Friday. I’m making sure everything is ready to go for our ship next week. Its one of those special oddballs that makes hurricanes at Chiquita so much fun. (The Wild Lotus if you must know.) To top this off the usual suspects who would run this are not here next week, so it falls to me; I don’t want any surprises.

Okay getting to the point. I’m realizing that I’m like my dad, a work-aholic, career guy. Given all the discussion about moving to Atlanta or South Florida and I’m very seriously considering and planning on moving with the company. I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise, but its one of those ah! ha! moments.

but I’m not sure I like it.

I really love getting emails like this:

Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:55:13 -0400 (EDT)
To: nick@inmff.net
From: tohellwyou <fcktU@yahoo.com>
Subject: gay fag
X-Pass: WebEmail

Below is the result of your feedback form.  It was submitted by
tohellwyou: fcktU@yahoo.com on Monday, September 26, 2005 at 20:55:13
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

content: I would like some information on my account I have sent more than a few disc 
back just like I was have before without realizing that they were going to lansing 
michigan whats up with that. I am a business owner and I realize that if netflix can 
take longer in shipping and reciving they can make more money, if this is the case
why don't you just chare everyone $1 more and ship the correct way? I have been a
very loyal customer of yours for a long period I would hate to see me cancel my
account because someone is getting greedy or is it someone really messing up? I
suggest that see to this matter as I am not the only one if you will follow the link 

http://www.hackingnetflix.com/netflix/2005/08/nearest_netflix.html you will find I am
not the only one with this problem. please feel free to contact me anytime thru 
e-mail XXXXXXXXXXXX and don't give me that it is returned to the nearest netflix 
shipping facility my friend is the post master, it goes to the po box label 
(whatever state that might be)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR
 1.1.4322)
REMOTE_ADDR: 65.70.230.144

Ahh stupid idiots on SBC DSL on Windows. Perhaps I should send them a copy of Strunk and White. Or maybe just a general style guide regarding capitalization.

But really folks, why the hell do conversations about Netflix get so emotional? This is about a company. State your position and defend it. Or better yet, realize that my web form isn’t Netflix’s customer support email box. Don’t send forty-five nasty emails to random people who have once commented on a blog about Netflix.

Another question that is sure to be asked, is why would I post this crap on my blog? For the same reason Fred Phelps is my favorite anti-gay activist. Because this shit is ugly, it deserves to be and needs to be public.

One of those things that is collateral damage from my job is, I cannot go into a grocery store without thoroughly inspecting the produce aisle. Seeing how crappy the melons are, or who sold them their grapes, or how many pineapples are sitting around.

And wondering what the hell happened to the pineapples that I shipped into this store’s DC the week before, because they’ve got the competitor’s pineapples sitting all over the place. (Or in this case going into the store and seeing the stacked cases of pineapples, and realizing why they canceled their orders this week…)

And thats before I even get to the Bananas.

Re: Leaving Identity Issues to Other Folks

What does a 24 year old white gay man have with in common with a 50 year old black woman?

Every time I listen to this essay I’m brought to tears. Not bawling morning tears, but tears of camaraderie and recognition.

Phyllis moves through the history of African-American (or Black, or Negro, or brown) identity politics. Then comes to the conclusion “I believe that I’m free to be whoever I choose to be.”

I’m at a loss for why this is dramatic for me, but I’ve come to despise the identity politics of being gay, but at the same time I practice them.

I want to be 15 years down the road (or in Canada now) where no one thinks too much about my identity beyond “Nick” (or “Mr. Barnard” or “Dad”).