I Want This

My dreams right now are pretty simple. Usually they're pretty fantastic and out there, I write science fiction and fantasy, after all, but for the last month they've been sort of realistic.

That only makes me feel worse when I can't achieve them.

I want a job. The job that I see at the moment is a daytime position, 9 to 5, M-F. I want it to pay for an apartment here in the city, food, and a gym membership. I want to be able to go out occasionally with my friends and visit the guy I'm sort of seeing.

That's it.

That's all I want right now.

Why Work for a Hotel?

The last few months of not having a job has been really . . . damaging, catastrophic, miserable? One of those. Perhaps all of them.

It's given me an awful lot of time to just sit around and think though, and I've come to the problematic conclusion that I really don't seem to want to do any of the things that I'm applying for.

There really isn't an alternative here. I haven't had a divine flash of inspiration about what I do want to do but I've come to realize that I'd probably be miserable in the things that I am applying for.

This is creepy because I've been working for hotels for years, ever since summer jobs in high schools and I've usually had a fairly good time with them. I work with people well, I'm usually very organized and I tend to contribute a lot.

I know, that sounds like a line off my resume. I'll have to attribute it to the dozens and dozens of applications that I've filled out in the past few months.

I have to try to remember why I went to work for hotels in the first place and right now I'm drawing a blank. Maybe because I always sort of glamorized hotels as an industry. You cater to the rich and the famous after all, you get to meet a lot of interesting people, you get to travel.

Well, I was dead wrong about that last one. The only people that travel are the sales staff: the people that understand running a hotel least. In fact, that seems to be where all of the things that could make our profession interesting go to die a miserable and painful death. Bonuses, incentives, vacation time and the ability to speak authoritatively about the hotel's occupancy.

The only people that I hate more than sales are those sad members of the HR department: may they burn in hell. This is partially an affect of my arrival and departure experience at all of the hotels that I've worked for, so I'm sure in this dry spell this is accentuated. However, where I can at least see the services provided to a hotel by a Sales staff (however small those services might be compared to their soul deadening costs to the hotel) I can't quite see the net positive benefit to the HR departments that I've seen run.

For people that are supposed to be finding the best and the brightest workers for the hotel they do their job amazingly poorly.

Right now I'm taking a fair slew of personality inventories (I've also just been informed that I've been showing too much empathy on them; apparently the hospitality industry is looking for people that won't care if you come to them with a problem) and they've been a complete waste of time.

I'm sure half the people that fill them out do what I used to do: put in the answers that they expect that you want instead of what they really feel and now you've already set the precedent of them lying to you during the interview process and you haven't even met them yet.

I suppose it does stand to reason that most people in HR departments do so poorly because don't really understand the jobs that they're filling. Managerial or front line, they have a very limited idea of what the job entails and what the qualifications should be.

I suppose that this leads me to suspect what my main problems will be if I ever am in charge of a hotel: I'm barely going to respect my Sales staff and any HR department working under me is going to find itself doing real work.

But I'm not there yet. I'm still looking for jobs at the bottom of the barrel. The sort where I smile politely and never say anything bad about a boss that I never see or can barely stand and try to convince people that the reason that I zone out is that I find most front desk work about as challenging as watching paint dry.

So I'm still looking for a job. Still looking and trying to convince myself that it's worth it.

Totally Weird Dream

I don't have a job yet and it's starting to affect me in strange ways. For example, I had this truly bizarre dream last night about looking for work.

I responded to a Craigslist ad and got an immediate response asking me if i could come to an interview right now. So I rushed out and down one of the avenues to meet the woman at her house.

She's explaining the job and it has two parts. The first part is walking her daughter to school in the morning, getting to her house at seven and then walking her four or five blocks to her school. And then the rest of it was walking down to where the mother worked, some sort of book museum with about four shelves of books (mostly children's books from what I remember of the covers).

The mother and her boss showed me around and it was a nice place. There were some tables where people could sit. It was airy and expansive, which I thought was very nice for NYC.

Then they sort of just gave me a piece of cloth, as though they wanted to see what I would do with it, and I started to dust the shelves and the desks. I remember the mother nodded as though I'd just passed a huge test. She looked relieved.

I asked when she wanted me to start and she said "Right now!" explaining that tomorrow I would need to start.

Then she asked me if I had any other questions. I pulled her to the side, not wanting to advertise my greed, and asked her about compensation. Yes, I used that word in the dream for some specific reason.

But her response was priceless. She scrunched up her face a bit and said, "Well, the Museum has an admission price of $15, and I figured that we could waive it for you."

So, walking your daughter to school and cleaning the museum and all she was prepared to give me was free admission?

In the dream, at this point, I thought to myself that I'd take the job if she would give me five bucks a day for it and immediately chastised myself for being so stupid. That was her answer though. "I'll give you $5 a day."

I didn't take the job. I just stood there, sort of expecting another offer, but maybe some realistic figure, but it never came. Instead, her boss wandered over and suggested to her that maybe she'd better make it clear that there was no pay in the next craigslist ad, and he suggested text: "Hard working Asian willing to work for nothing needed to work for . . ."

Right, that was the other thing. She'd made passing references to being Asian throughout the course of the dream, including in the original job description, except that neither she nor her daughter was Asian. And I wasn't Asian in the dream either, so I was assuming that she was just trying to fill in for someone else and until I heard the manager put that in as a condition for the next ad I hadn't realized that they were really looking only for Asians but were willing to settle for me.

So finally I said something like "I'm sorry we can't come to some arrangement," and then I woke up.

And you know what, even though in real life I'm desperate, I'm still glad that I didn't take that job in the dream.

Thanksgiving and Family History

For Thanksgiving I went down to spend the day at my Grandmother’s apartment in an assisted living community. Well, I suppose I should say that I came down. I’m still here and it’s the evening of Thanksgiving, but I won’t get to post this until I get home tomorrow, so I want to slip into the past tense.

She’s been in this community for something like seven or eight years and although she’s been in the “independent” section of the facility it’s getting to be too difficult for her to get around in her own apartment without some more serious care.

The problem is that my Grandmother seriously doesn’t like having people that she doesn’t know coming into her apartment every day and taking care of her like she's an infant. She wants her independence to some extent and she at least wants to know who is taking care of her.

Thus, my mother wants to take Grandma down to New Mexico to live with her. That means that this is probably the last time that she’ll have a holiday with her friends there.

Anyway, I sort of got roped into being here because I still haven’t found a job in NYC and I’m really the only person in our family who isn’t going to be either traveling or working.

I took the bus down yesterday (or I tried, but the stupid bus only got me half way before I had to call my cousin to drive me from Albany, yarg) and Grandma was surprised to see me. I think she’d forgotten that I was coming.

I didn’t sleep well last night so I slept in this morning and then we went to her “dinner” which is the midday meal that’s prepared by the staff and held in a large dining room. Grandma doesn’t eat much so most of the time she only eats that one large meal every day.

They did the traditional turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and green beans. It was better than I remember it. I actually liked the green beans, and I usually hate green beans. I guess that’s like my Great Uncle’s retirement facility which had the only cooked spinach that I’ve ever liked: people that cook for old people know how to cook vegetables.

They also had pumpkin pie, which was okay. I’m probably going to steal Grandma’s apple cobbler from the fridge. That actually looked much better. (Added note: I had the Pecan Pie the day after this was written. It was excellent.)

If I were you, I’d probably be wondering why on earth I’m going on about the food about my Grandma’s retirement facility, and that’s a perfectly valid complaint. I’m bored out of my mind just reading it back to myself.

I’m leading up to a conversation that I just had with my Grandma. She decided that she wanted some soup (probably to trick me into eating more like she’s always trying to do). So, after a negotiation with her I made the soup and we sat around the table and ate it.

She started talking about her family, not just her kids and grandkids but her parents and grandparents. I just want to get some of this down before I forget it because it’s interesting to me.

The first thing that caught my attention when she started talking about her dad was brought up through her nightly cup of wine. She told me that it was a tradition passed down from her father, who had always had a cup of wine when he got home from work.

“He used to brew it himself,” she said.

I didn’t know that actually.

Apparently every fall he’d go down to the farmer’s market and buy a carload of grapes from the local grape farmers (there are local grape farmers in upstate New York? Apparently there used to be) and take them home. He’d pick them off the branches, clean them up, and then pack them in barrels where they were ferment all year.

Grandma reports that it used to smell horrible, and she wrinkled up her nose to underline her statement. A friend of mine fermented mead one time and I remember that smelled bad but there weren’t barrels and barrels of it.

I think it might make a bit more sense to readers at this point if I point out that my Grandmother is ninety seven years old. She didn’t say exactly how old she was when this was going on but I think that if it was going on when she was around ten that would put it in the same general region of American history as prohibition.

This vision of my Great-Grandfather as a scofflaw during prohibition was sort of discordant to me. This side of my family has always seemed a bit traditionalist and conservative and very much law abiding. The great-uncle that lived with the delicious spinach that I mentioned above is a priest. One of his brothers used to be a priest, and their sister still is a nun. No one in my Grandmother’s generation knows that I’m gay, for example.

So, I asked her what her father used to do. He worked in the turbine section of GE (GE is a big deal to my family for this and more reasons, see below), not as a laborer or an engineer but as the time clerk.

He apparently had three siblings, two sisters and a brother: Fred, Elizabeth and Ann. Fred took advantage of the GE apprentice program and became an engineer. I think it was Elizabeth that became the secretary for the head of GE’s international division. On days that her boss was out of town on business she would sometimes bring my Grandmother into the office with her and let her play with the typewriter.

Then she told me about her Grandfather, my Great-Great-Grandfather, who was a butcher. He used to buy the animals and kill them and distribute the meat in the city where he lived but the thing that she remembered most about him was the fact that when he came over to their house for Thanksgiving he would bring a bag of nickels with him and hand them out to the kids.

She looked at me when she said that. “That was a lot of money back then,” she said, just checking to make sure I understood that. I thought of the fact that I considered a scarf from a street vendor at $10 as very cheap but didn't say anything.

All of this is repeated several times, of course. Grandma’s short term memory is about three minutes, so if I’m looking for more information on something then I have to repeat various parts of the conversation.

So, here are things that I learned from various iterations of this conversation: 1. Her Grandfather was a bit unsociable; 2. He would come over to her father’s house for Thanksgiving. 3. Her Grandmother lived with one of her aunts.

You may already see where this is going, but I didn’t. So during another iteration of the conversation it came out: “She finally couldn’t deal with him anymore. She moved out.”

In all the rest of my family, there were pretty much no divorces except for my mom and dad. It always sort of weirded me out that it was my parents that split up out of dozens of couples in my family. What made them so different?

I guess in those days there wasn’t much divorce, but my great-great-grandparents were separated too. It sort of grounds you when you realize that maybe your branch of the family tree isn't quite that crazy.

Then we moved forward again. Grandma talked about how she couldn’t believe that I was living in NYC. She didn’t think that it was a very good city in which to live but she mentioned that she liked to visit for the shows.

It turns out that she used to take “excursions” from where she lived into NYC. They were like planned tours and they would have planned times to go shopping and eat dinner, and then they would go see a few plays.

“This is back when I had money. Back when I had a job.”

Again, I guess this is something that I should have known about my Grandmother but didn’t. I asked her about her job.

It turns out that she’d used to work in the GE corporate office. She started in payroll and then moved to the government contracts office on the second floor of the GE offices. That was how she met my Grandfather: she worked on the second floor and he was a factory foreman that had an office on the fourth floor.

When she married him she left her job and became a housewife.

I don’t know my extended family extremely well. I grew up thousands and thousands of miles away in New Mexico while most of them were in the Northeast. Only the daughters were outside of driving distance, my mom and my aunt, moved away. Even my great aunts and uncles lived in stretch from upstate New York to the Baltimore area.

So my family was usually just my mom, my dad, and my brother.

I don’t know exactly what to do now that I’m out here. I don’t know how to really interact with my extended family as well as a lot of the people out there that I see. The “normal” extended families are usually people that have deep long term connections to other people, but I barely have that connection with my immediate family. I only saw my cousins and my uncles and my aunts once in a blue moon. Less often, perhaps.

So this chance to connect a little bit more with my Grandmother was appreciated and I definitely learned some interesting things about my family history.

Were the World Mine

So, I finally got the apartment internet hook up the other day. I'm pretty sure that I mentioned that. One of the things that I did in the glorious rush of high speed internet access was to watch all of the movie trailers on the Apple site, including the few that I'm especially looking forward too: Milk, Watchmen, Star Trek (Chris Pine is dreamy), and the next Harry Potter. I also discovered a few others that look good. Up (I mean, it's Pixar), My Name is Bruce and JCVD. There was also some crap like Yes Man (why is Jim Carrey doing that movie again?) and Valkyrie and Angels and Demons.

Among all of these big deal movies I found something that you could say that sort of uniquely appealed to me. It was Were the World Mine and although it looked a little bit campy, it also looked like it appealed to me on two levels. The first, obvious level was "cute guys" and the second level was "Why yes, the power to make people gay has been a personal fantasy of mine."

So I went to the offical website and found it to be a flash monstrosity. Not only that, it was a nonfunctional flash monstrosity. So I did the obvious thing and went to the wikipedia page about it where I found out that it was opening in NYC a week after I watched the trailer. Nifty.

Ben decided to visit that same weekend, so it seemed natural enough to drag him out to the movie.

I bought tickets online, we went out to dinner and then we went to the movie theater. It was packed. I mean, for this little indy film in it's second day of release in NYC there was a line stretching down the block. Which was very confusing. Yeah, it's NYC and all but I didn't think that the second day of release was still a big deal. It's like camping out to get an iPhone on the second day. People don't do that.

So I was standing in the line to pick up the tickets, and the guy behind me says: "After the 7:00 p.m. showing of 'Were the World Mine' the director and cast will have a Q&A."

And I turned to him, and sort of challengingly said, "What?" Because I didn't believe him because I had bought tickets to the 7:00 p.m. showing. Inexplicably cool things don't usually happen to me.

He pointed, and there it was, taped to the box office window. He hadn't even paraphrased it, he'd just read what the sign in front of me had said.

So I picked up the tickets, and hyperventilated a bit as I digested the fact that yes, something completely unplanned and cool had just happened to me, and then we went into the theater.

The line that stuck with me from the giant set of reviews (here's the NYT one) which were pasted onto the outside of the theater was from the SF Chronicle's review: "Tom Gustafson's queer-centric take on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream teeters between banal conceptualizing and inspired execution."

Ben agreed with that line. If you press me I'd have to admit that I do too but I really came down on the inspired execution side in the end. It was everything that I wanted it to be. It was a little campy and the ending had some writing issues, but overall it was well acted, well written, and well produced, especially considering the ~300k budget and 24 day shooting schedule (as revealed by the Q&A).

The male lead played by Tanner Cohen was just gorgeous and it doesn't hurt that he's a decent actor. I'd love to see him again in more movies but I'm pretty sure he's also gay, which means that he'll never get a major role ever again.

Crap.

The other guy, Nathaniel David Becker, is also cute but also less overtly gay which makes me hopeful that we'll see him again.

I think the girls actually stole the show though. Zelda Williams was phenomenal as the best friend, in a Chloe from Smallville way. Judy McLane and Jill Larson as the Mom and the Mom's Boss were both excellent, especially playing off against each other. Wendy Robie had some (very) flat lines at the end of the movie but near the middle her character's bliss at the chaos is quite beautiful.

So the movie ends (happily and without death, thankfully) and the audience clapped. Then Tom Gustafson, the director, Tanner Cohen, Zelda Williams and one of the other guys (Sorry, I don't remember your name!) came down and did a quick Q&A during which I learned the above mentioned facts and for a bunch of gay guys the audience showed an amazing lack of creativity coming up with questions.

Tanner looked thinner in person and was wearing a sort of lumpy orange sweatshirt, but he was still breathlessly cute. I found him and Zelda hanging out in front of the theater after the movie and shook his hand. And asked him how old he was. 21. Too young for me but I'll still dream when I buy the movie on DVD.

One thing on his age; I figured he was actually older than that. Usually the guys that play high school guys are in their thirties. I thought that since he was such a good actor with an amazing voice, he must be older that I am. Surprise. Of course, this only serves to make me feel old.

Anyway, I enjoyed the movie thouroughly. It was a great experience and I had lots of fun. If you like fun gay musical movie romps through Shakespeare, and you can locate a showing/DVD I highly recommend this.

Okay, so that was the movie review. Today I also got on the subway and rode it all the way to the end of the line out in Queens. Which my mother probably doesn't want to hear, but it's the truth.

Once there, I walked along the beach for a bit. I got a really bizarre "You're on candid camera!" stone from a nice lady, but I don't think I did anything that wasn't unfailingly polite so I'm hoping that's the last I hear of that. I took a few pictures with my phone of the shore, and then turned around and came back home.

Sometimes I seem to blend oddly well with everyone. I passed homeless people, Russians, Jews, and (when I got back to Soho) I passed rich Asians, pampered white girls, and guys in suits.

One of my friends would probably call this the comfortable annonymity of big cities, but I can't help but imagine how much he would have stuck out like a sore thumb walking through the neighborhood of Queens that I was in. Even I would have been starring at him.

If Ben and I had held hands in that neighborhood, we probably would have been in danger.

And yet people ignored me. With my lumpy black hat, my old gray A&F jacket and jeans, I just became another in the backdrop no matter the neighborhood that I was walking through.

I Need A Girlfriend

I went out to a bar called Barracuda today. Not in honor of Sarah Palin, but because it was the only place on a list of five clubs that I was planning on going to that I could actually find.

Still, I'm alone in my room now, typing on my computer because one of the only two people that acknowledged my presence tonight was one of those girls that likes to hang out with gay guys.

I know what the term is. I just don't feel like using it right now.

The other person was the coat check guy, so he doesn't count.

I wish I had someone like that, who I could call and take to a gay club that is willing to go but probably won't end up leaving with the guy that I like at the end of the night. Someone who will talk and listen and laugh at my stupid jokes.

The reason that I went out is because I just feel so alone here in New York. The irony is staggering; I'm in probably the most densely populated English speaking city and I'm alone. Well, I am.

I didn't stay long because I suddenly felt that it was futile. Well, that's not quite true; it wasn't sudden. I've felt that way for a solid week now.

It does feel futile. The people that I know are . . . well, not like me. I suddenly realize how completely stupid it was to think that I might be able to recreate the happy times in my life by moving back to the same city as Elliot or to a place with gay guys. I could barely talk to gay guys in New Mexico; talking to them here in NYC is going to be nearly impossible.

Of course, with this depression comes the mindnumbingly stupid behavior: I bought real meat today and ate it. I'm putting on weight again, and I don't have a gym membership. I spent money that I don't have buying books (The Watchmen, actually. It was amazingly good. I just finished it just before I started writing this entry).

What am I going to do with myself?

I don't know how I'm going to meet people. I can't meet people through friend one because he's Jewish and gay Jewish guys don't date the shiska equivalent guys. I can't meet people through friend two because he exists in an extremely superficial and wealthy world that doesn't contain people, only objects that move and speak. I don't seem to meet people by myself because I can't connect in clubs or just in quick random moments.

So that leaves work, and I'm having trouble finding a job again. Of course. Why would the universe gift me with good luck? The economy tanks just as I start searching for employment.

I will say that I am in a now confusing long distance pseudo relationship, which is making all this even worse because now I have someone that is theoretically there for me even though I'm alone nearly all the time. And I've lost a valuable vent toward looking for a relationship or even figuring out what the hell kind of relationship this long distance thing is.

The lesson here, of course, is that if you only have one person that you feel that you can trust to talk to about relationships, make sure that you don't go and inadvertantly start a relationship with that person.

He once suggested that I would regret having sex with him. Do I regret the sex? No. I regret the relationship. At the same time, I want to grab hold of the relationship so tightly that I can't let go and close my eyes and imagine that the rest of the universe has disapeared. Douglas Adams once suggested that the entire universe can be examined through the measurement of a slice of fairy cake. If I could, I'd make that guy my slice of fairy cake.

Of course, that has three significant drawbacks. First, as my first sorta relationship taught me, these things are like snowflakes and holding them too tightly will make them melt away so quickly. Second, it's not healthy to withdraw from the world. Third, I don't know that this relationship has a long future. I try to imagine pushing it out in the future, and I just don't see it.

Perhaps the relationship would be simpler without sex, if it was a girl instead of a guy. Or perhaps I just need both at the same time, without overlap. Or I need to find it one person at the same time.

The Big Apple

So, things have happened since my last update. I did in fact go to Europe. I saw Cory, I visited museums, I traveled through Ireland. It was nice.

And then I got back and didn't write about it. Sorry. My bad. I just couldn't sit and get through all of that. Perhaps I'll still manage to get enough scraped together for a future post about it. Arg.

Now I'm in New York City. Moved. In a room that I have claimed as mine, sitting on a bed that is mine, looking for a job.

It's an okay room. It's loud and small and expensive but this is New York City and I knew that it would be all of those things when I moved here.

I've realized that I don't do well without structure, but I can build structure and repetition into my life until I get a job. Grrr.

And that's about it for now. More to come, I promise, and I'll try not to wait until I have a job.