Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

corporate

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Some things about my office.

I cannot bring myself to trust fat, bearded woman. I don’t know what it is; they’re shifty. They’re always changing their answers, backtracking, being contrary just to avoid a solution. I’ve very carefully studied my reactions to these potential carnies, and I can safely say that their weight or facial hair alone does not change my evaluation of their behavior. All of those chubby, hairy parts combine to create a greater, harder to like, whole. Every one I have ever met has been the same: belligerent, defensive, and stubbly.

When I arrived at the muffin basket today, there were blue-dotted pastries as for as the eye could see. All blueberry. I have eaten two blueberry muffins so far, and I may go back for a third before they put out the lunch spread.

My fellow intern and I have been chosen to present about our internship experience in front of the president of our rather large organization, who seems to be a figure of nearly mythic proportions if my co-workers are to be trusted. The two of us beat out over twenty other interns for this distinction; I thought my boss was going to cry when I told her we were selected.

The funny thing is, ever since my introduction to the “Season of Achievement” program I have been consciously eschewing all contact with it. It’s an intern ghetto, coddling where it should be inspiring, with HR people pulling us away from our actual work in shockingly long four hour blocks in order to act as a motley crew of corporate orientation leaders to our group of exceedingly inquisitive, capable (and increasingly jaded) college students.

Either the force of my personality shone through so brightly at the only workshop I ever attended that they have been craving more ever since, or my fellow intern has been impressing the hell out of them every week while I’ve been deliberately scheduling meetings with Medical Directors to make sure I never have to show up.

In other news, two weeks ago i drank a really large latte and became convinced that if I deferred senior year in favor of taking a bus up to Buffalo to camp out on Righteous Babe Record’s front step that they would eventually be forced to give me a job, but then i realized that OH MY GOD, I really want to get college over and done with.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105776358824404144/

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I sit on the end of our row, adjacent to three women from the next department. At first their chatter seemed inexorable, endless, and inconsequential, but now I see that it is what allows them to be here, to somehow reconcile whatever they care about to the reality of sitting in front of their alarmingly lo-fi DOS-like interface.

The woman who shares a cube wall with me talks the most of the three; the smile in her voice hide a constant crease of worry, which somehow makes me picture my grandmother in the next cube endlessly chatting. She is obsessed with controlling her son. I found it amusing, but today as she rambled on I started to see the simple misery hidden at the bottom of her creases.

Her son is headed straight for teenage years, sure to be ripe with youthful misbehavior and sexual experimentation. She talks about him with her creased voice, about how he does not want to wear the shirts she lays out, preferring t-shirts from Hot Topic and loose jeans. About how he tries to play money from her so that he can pay for the older kids to go to the movies with him, and how they in return take him to the drug store to explore the condom aisle. “Of course,” she says matter-of-factly, “he doesn’t have the slightest idea about all of that.”

She has an image in her head of how her son should be; what he should become. It is faceted in her mind, I’m sure, gleaming from every angle. But, maybe not as faceted as he would wind up doing things on his own. I’m not sure, actually, which is why I have become so obsessed with following her endless stories, and why I sometimes feel sad for them both.

If my mother had that image of me, she never revealed it. I think she had the barest of ideas, with no overarching goals or guides to my personality or morality. I never had to make the bed, always got to buy the music i wanted, and never had any restrictions placed on how much or how little time i had to devote to people other than myself. Did she mean for me to value art more than industry, and myself more than anyone else? I was left to fill in all of those details myself, never realizing that there was not an upper limit to the facets I could have because she never thought to impress them upon me. And now, sometimes, I feel as though because of it I have organized my life horizontally — only one layer deep. Not multifaceted.

Who has the better mom?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105768499661166966/

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In our departmental manual there are examples of all the different types of health plan member ID cards that our offices might encounter, and i’ve noticed that after a few stock names like “John Smith” and “Jane Doe” that our members are a mix of fantastic heroes (i wonder what we charge to cover Action Jackson and Buck Rodgers?) and names that Bart has used to prank call Moe, albeit with altered middle initials to avert the punchline (I. R. Freely doesn’t have quite the same ring).

It’s nice to know that you work with people who share your mindset.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/06/105655947184665642/

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But, what if being a good corporate employee is not all about knowing who to say yes to and how loud to say it, but knowing why they want to hear yes and if they could be convinced to hear it at a different volume.

This is the reason i, with my year of college left over, am not jealous of my friends from high school who graduated last month: i’ve had a year and a half of nine to five to learn working logic, against their optional three summers of internships.

Well, plus i’m not ready to be a grown up yet.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/06/200432789/

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Cradling my head in my hands at my desk, I inch my fingertips around to the temples, massaging. I sometimes wonder what would happen if i could open up my head, pressing my fingers tightly on either side and pushing up ever so slightly, swinging it up and back, tipping it back to rest on the hinges that would lie buried beneath my thick hair. Instead of a mess of flesh and blood I imagine inside a tangle of color and light, and of thoughts, packed in tightly and giving off sparks of electricity as they rub excitedly against each other. They would have no gravity of their own, their weight inferred by my body. Exposed to the outside air would they be like balloons, floating up in a parade of escaping color? Would I just helplessly grasp at their strings, not even knowing what I was trying to hold on to, but acutely aware that my insides were on display — not just one fleeting thought that would have never escaped through my lips, but the whole of all of my thoughts. All those parts that I would rather keep hidden or leave forgotten, just ascending up, up, up and away, leaving me empty and inexorably heavier without them because our gravity is reciprocal, lending them my weight in exchange for their ability to lift my head nearer to the clouds.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/06/200411847/