Today's headline: Attempt at a Life Stymied By Bad Sandwich

In my attempt at establishing some sort of getting-out-of-my-one-room-apartment routine (aside from grocery shopping and getting my hair cut), I thought today, with its absolutely gorgeous crisp fall Austin weather, would be a perfect time to walk to the cafe about 3/4-mile down the street for the first time and get a sandwich and pick up the local weekly paper (with the idea of making this a regular fun Thursday treat for myself). I'd been eyeing the place for the past 4 months, since I've moved into this neighborhood. It looks funky (the kind of place I used to like to go to), and it was neat that there was outdoor seating, where I always saw people hanging out.

Why didn't I check it out before now? Oh, a combination of heat-lethargy and depression and poverty, basically! But today the weather was 70-ish, I'd been working hard on a good-paying freelance job all week, I was feeling mildly sassy...

When I got inside the place, it smelled and looked great! I love the smell of coffee (though I don't like the taste of it) and I love wood floors, and band flyers in the windows, and the local free rags stacked up just inside the door. It was about 3 in the afternoon, not a peak hour, but the cafe was about half-full. A few couples, some people singly on computers.

And, I noted for future reference, they sell beer and stay open 'til midnight! About 9 years ago, I wrote almost my entire screenplay at a similar cafe, now closed, that used to be located just a few blocks up the street. At the former place, I'd go early for their poetry readings one night a week, notebook in hand, then stay after for the next 4 or 5 hours writing furiously, pumped up by the reading and Heineken and atmosphere. I didn't feel weird sitting there by myself because I was busy WRITING... (Not just for affect, I was really doing work!)

I'll have to keep the "future reference" in mind. Maybe night-time drinking and writing will be nice there, but... That sandwich I got there this afternoon SUCKED! AND it cost over $8!!

I wanted roast beef, but they were out, so I just got a chicken on focaccia bread... Which looked NOTHING like the picture I have up here! The smushed-bread completely dwarfed the from-a-frozen-bag-of-chicken-wedges-tasting meat... I'm serious: That couldn't have been fresh chicken. And every bite I took rendered up mainly bread, very little chicken. (I finally opened up the sandwich to look: I think there were 4 "chicken" wedges in there.) It was nasty. Worse than a shrink-wrapped bologna/American cheese/wilted iceberg lettuce sandwich you'd pick up in the fridge of a convenience store. The only difference being, the convenience-store sandwich costs $3.95 and you already know that you're in for crap, but you're just buying it because you're desperately hungry at that moment and don't have access to any other source of food. PLUS, you certainly didn't go to the convenience store looking to TREAT yourself!

But $8.00 for a crap-sandwich (and a little one at that)? Somethin' just ain't right! To put this $8 sandwich in context: A BIG, fresh, fully-packed sandwich at the famous Katz's in NYC (Katz's also has a branch in Austin -- the owner lives here now) costs $7.95. A BIG, fresh, fully-packed sandwich at my local Weehawken, NJ, deli costs $6.95. And by "BIG" I mean TRIPLE the size of this local indignity!

In a similar vein, just a few blocks away from this cafe, a little trailer set up shop in a parking lot about a month ago, offering burgers and steak sandwiches... In my quest to participate in local fast-food cuisine (and mainly because I don't have a car to go anywhere else), I stopped by last weekend to get what I thought would be a good, greasy burger combo... Burger, fries, and can of Coke. Out of a trailer in a parking lot. $7.50. Yes, $7.50. (Let me again put this in context: In NYC, one of the most expensive cities in the world, the same combo served up in a million greasy spoons, costs $5.95.) OK. I paid the $7.50, got home, bit into the burger... Aside from being really low-grade hamburger meat and not tasting like anything, it was frigging pink inside! I had to pull the meat out and go broil it before I could even eat it.

WTF. Seriously. And here's exactly what I think the "F" is: Austin prides itself on being "hip." And one aspect of being "hip" is "eating from trailers in parking lots and at funky cafes" and then telling everyone how GREAT the food is there. You know, if my sandwich or burger-combo had cost $4 or $5, I probably wouldn't be mentioning it here. As with the convenience-store shrink-wrapped bologna sandwich, I'd just shrug it off and think that I was desperate for food at the moment and I got what I paid for. But what I cannot fathom, and cannot stand, is the local ethos of bragging about eating at "funky" places whose food actually sucks. And paying $8 for the "privilege" of being able to say you ate at the crappy place. Emperor has no clothes, man.

I experienced the same insane psychological phenomenon when I lived in San Francisco, attending grad school, in the mid-1990s: The college refused to allow corporate (cheap) fast-food restaurants like Wendy's, McDonald's, etc. in their food court. Instead, local food servers provided lunch. Their food was awful (worse than corporate fast-food chains) and cost, even back in the '90s, $6 or $7 for a meal, but, hey, at least it was local. I suppose, if you were PC enough, you could feel superior, in a ridiculous way not based on any actual gastronomic or economic criteria, for eating it...

Here's what I like about New York/New Jersey: You pay $7 for a sandwich, you get a fuckin' big, good sandwich. If $7 seems a bit much, at least the food was good and you're full for the next 8 hours or so. If you buy a gyro combo or a burger combo from a street grill or a greasy spoon for $6 or $7, it's edible and, with the gyro/rice/salad at least, you get enough to last you for 2 meals. It's not this sucky "small portion/high price/bad food/but we feel we should say we like it" scam. Ugh.

OK, so my attempt at an addition to my meager "routine" failed! Cute place, terrible sandwich, won't ever eat there again on a Thursday afternoon. Too bad. I was looking forward to liking it.

The Sandra Theme Song

The Mavericks - O, What A Thrill

"Words fail me... I want to console you..."

Staples

I'm kind of a disordered person who, nonetheless, has an admiration and need for order and who can be extremely "ordered" when the occasion calls for it. (A prime example is my Joan Crawford website -- I'm obsessed with gathering as much info as possible AND organizing it in a logical manner. Another example is when I had to pack up all my stuff and move back to Austin from Weehawken: I actually wrote out a schedule of what I would get accomplished my last week -- aside from "packing days" and "toting stuff to post office days," I also wrote down exactly when I would pay my last visit to NYC, when I would get my last slice of pizza at my Weehawken pizza joint, etc.)

Right now, with my random freelance work that I do from home, I never have a set spending budget that I can plan against. Or a set time schedule to do anything. I definitely don't mind being able to stay up as late as I want, or sleep as late as I want. But the downside is: Without hours of "duty," then the hours of free time don't seem as sweet, and are also infused with an underlying layer of anxiety -- "When will the next work come in?" etc. And with no set budget, I feel that I can't ever spend ANY money.

In my 4 months at my one-room apartment subsisting on freelance work, I have, however, established TWO "rituals": One is getting my hair cut every 6 weeks. The other is going grocery shopping every 10 days. The "10 days" is based on when, smoking a pack a day, my carton of cigarettes runs out! (A carton is $56 at the grocery store; $5.60 a pack. If I buy a pack at the nearby beer store, it's $6.50. I'm not a horrible cheapskate, but a whole extra dollar a pack seems incredibly wasteful.) The "every 10 days" also turns out to correspond pretty neatly with how much food I'm able to carry home via bus and on foot from the grocery store. About $50 worth.

The staples that I always seem to end up getting every 10 days:

hamburger meat (I usually fry up 2 burgers and use the rest to make tacos)
tortillas
cheddar cheese
Borden slices of Swiss cheese
1 can refried beans
1 can tuna
sandwich meat (turkey pastrami)
head of lettuce/onion/radishes/tomato/2 avocados/2 baking potatos
bananas/apples
Minute Maid orange juice
2 Red Baron "Pizza by the Slice"
1 El Charrito Queso Meal
1 Banquet Turkey Meal
1 Stouffer's Turkey Panini
1 Lean Pockets Philly Steak & Cheese
1 can of soup (Campbell's bean bacon or split pea)
tortilla chips

And then there are variables that I might get every other time: bagels, cream cheese, boneless chicken breasts, broccoli, Beenie-Weenies, hot dogs or corn-dogs, various condiments, white and rye bread, Ranch Style beans, black beans, Ruffles or Chee-tos, Stouffer's lasagna, Michelina's mac-n-cheese, frozen fries or tater tots, pickles, cereal.

Reading it over, it might initially seem like a stupid diet, but it's actually pretty good and varied for me, a non-cook on a non-eating-out budget! It's turned out, shopping every 10 days, to be $150 a month for food -- $5 a day! The only thing I did differently back when I had money (pre-2008) was eat out a lot more, and let my fresh meat and produce go to waste. In my cost-conscious state now, I'm intentionally making an effort to eat the damn hamburger meat and fruit/veggies before they go bad. Treats: Ordering out for a pizza one time a month; walking to get a breakfast taco or some fast food once a week. (Not having a car makes not getting fast food constantly easy.)

In NYC, I ate a lot better. There were so many delis around with full salad bars and a variety of chicken and fish, it was easy to walk a block or so and get some nutritious food every day for lunch or dinner. Here, I'm home all the time and have to make a conscious effort to PLAN to get some healthy food and vitamins in me! (i.e., if I eat a frozen meal or a fried hamburger for dinner, then I try to have had a salad for lunch or some fruit for breakfast -- doesn't always work out like that, and my body can tell the difference if I've just eaten crap all day)

Signs of Sanity

Peace Train vs. Crazy Train

At the Stewart/Colbert "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear," October 30. The cleverness made me so happy! :)

Wham! - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

Really good feelings for a 19-year-old girl in '84! :)

George Michael - Faith (US Version - 1987)

In my head for the past 2 days...

Sweeter words...

...were never uttered:

"We are going to start getting first-round proofs... Will you be ready to help? Work should be pretty steady for the next two or three months."

Yes, please! :)

Geez, it's sad to be grateful to a potential employer like you would be to a potential lover! :)

p.s. Thanks to news sources for pointing out that the actual unemployment rate in the US right now is much closer to 20% than the official government version of 9.7%. The 9.7% refers to those filing Unemployment claims every week. You're only allowed to file the claims for so long. In my case, based on my New Jersey work, I got benefits for 6 months, then I was cut off. While I still can't find a full-time job and scrabble for free-lance work, I'm also no longer considered "Unemployed" according to the US government stats. Just to point out that the "9.7%" is completely false. This country's unemployment rate is actually at Great Depression levels.

Happy Birthday, Sylvia Plath (October 27)

With a love poem from her husband:

CHAUCER

'Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote...'
At the top of your voice, where you swayed on the top of a stile,
Your arms raised -- somewhat for balance, somewhat
To hold the reins of the straining attention
Of your imagined audience -- you declaimed Chaucer
To a field of cows. And the Spring sky had done it
With its flying laundry, and the new emerald
Of the thorns, the hawthorn, the blackthorn,
And one of those bumpers of champagne
You snatched unpredictably from pure spirit.
Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester.
It must have sounded lost. But the cows
Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.
You went on and on. Here were reasons
To recite Chaucer. Then came the Wyf of Bath.
Your favourite character in all literature.
You were rapt. And the cows were enthralled.
They shoved and jostled shoulders, making a ring,
To gaze into your face, with occasional snorts
Of exclamation, renewed their astounded attention.
Ears angling to catch every inflection.
Keeping their awed six feet of reverence
Away from you. You just could not believe it.
And you could not stop. What would happen
If you were to stop? Would they attack you,
Scared by the shock of silence, or wanting more --?
So you had to go on. You went on --
And twenty cows stayed with you hypnotized.
How did you stop? I can't remember
You stopping. I imagine they reeled away --
Rolling eyes, as if driven from their fodder.
I imagine I shooed them away. But
Your sostenuto rendering of Chaucer
Was already perpetual. What followed
Found my attention too full
And had to go back into oblivion.


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

And a death poem from her husband:

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

At your sixtieth birthday, in the cake's glow,
Ariel sits on your knuckle.
You feed it grapes, a black one, then a green one,
From between your lips pursed like a kiss.
Why are you so solemn? Everybody laughs

As if grateful, the whole reunion --
Old friends and new friends,
Some famous authors, your court of brilliant minds,
And publishers and doctors and professors,
Their eyes creased in delighted laughter -- even

The late poppies laugh, one loses a petal.
The candles tremble their tips
Trying to contain their joy. And your Mummy
Is laughing in her nursing home. Your children
Are laughing from opposite sides of the globe. Your Daddy

Laughs deep in his coffin. And the stars,
Surely the stars, too, shake with laughter.
And Ariel --
What about Ariel?
Ariel is happy to be here.

Only you and I do not smile.

What $1,000 will get you...

In real-life financial terms, when you have no constant source of income, a gift of $1,000 gets you a reprieve from fear for one month. This $1,000 from my great aunt just paid for me to live (rent/bills) for the month of December, which I'd been worried about. (I'd figured out that I was covered for the upcoming-in-one-week November rent.)

In the short term, the fact that I'd just received $1,000 also enabled me to go to the drug-store to get a few "luxuries" that I'd run out of over the past few months and hadn't replaced because they weren't really "necessities":

(1) Reading glasses. The glasses that my mom gave me a few months ago look like shit. I kept thinking, "What if I actually get hired somewhere and want to look decent??" So I splurged on a pair of drugstore reading glasses, with case and cord: $14.99.

(2) Lotions. I like Eucerin for my face, Cetaphil for my body. Have been living on the dregs of the old containers and cheapie substitutes for months. Finally today was able to buy new.

(3) Whitening mouthwash. Total "luxury" that I'd done without for the past 6 months. And bought again today.

The unexpected gift of $1,000 was worth about $25 in actuality, as far as my beloved products went, but about a million psychologically.

A Letter

I got a letter in the mail today. In a small envelope, hand-addressed. I didn't recognize the sender's name, but the return address was from my dad's home-town. My initial crazy thought was: "My father is dead. And his East Texas relatives didn't know how to reach me, so they wrote me a letter."

(Who sends letters today? In "The Olden Days," there'd occasionally be a letter from someone you cared about in your mailbox among the bills. Getting the mail used to, thus, be somewhat exciting!)

In this case, my father wasn't dead. The letter was from the sister of my grandmother on my father's side. I still don't know how to spell what I called my Texas grandma: Me-ma. Meh-ma. (It's pronounced "Meah-ma.") She was always nice to me. (I remember crying after the one time I got to spend a whole week with her -- when I was 8 -- and then had to go back home to my parents...) At the time, back home, I couldn't figure out what it was that was making me cry about being away from her. What it was: Me-ma was just nice to me. There wasn't tension around her. She listened and responded to my 8-year-old conversations. (Even at 8, my own parents constantly made me feel like shit. Even at 8, I completely recognized the difference between how my parents acted toward me and how my grandma acted toward me.) I could talk to Me-ma.

And I thought her costume jewelry was very pretty. Boxes of it that she let me sift through and try on. And she gave in to the pleas of me and my cousin who lived down the street from her and who hung out with me that week to buy us both MOOD RINGS, please Me-ma! (They were so trendy in '73. At the time we 8-year-old cousins got them -- me picking the oval one, my cousin picking the round one -- my mood ring was too big for my finger, so I had to tie yarn around it so I could wear it. I still have it and wear it today, 37 years later.)

The one moment of discord: We -- Me-ma, my cousin, and I -- were sitting outside of a drugstore, and I started to recite something I'd heard from my step-Grandpa (my Me-ma's second husband):

Beans, beans, a musical fruit
The more you eat 'em, the more you toot
The more you toot, the better you feel
So why not eat beans every meal!

Me-ma told me I shouldn't talk like that! :)

The letter I received today was from my Me-ma's sister, now nearing 90. She'd invested money in the past and, having no kids of her own, wanted to now distribute earnings among the grandkids-slightly-removed. The letter held a check for $1,000.

A check to me for $1,000.In the middle of my sporadic free-lance jobs, my scrabbling about for anything to pay my bills... I'm in shock at her kindness and remembrance of me. And at my utter out-of-the-blue luck.

Thank you, great-aunt Edna. Thank you.

Timothy Donnelly poems

CHAPTER FOR BEING TRANSFORMED INTO A LOTUS

The comparison only went so far: the suffering
from which we had come to expect so much
remained mere suffering; the swamp due south

to which we had thought to compare it in our youth
stayed water choked in excess life, its voices
thoughtlessly forcing the same plump syllables

across the distance into windows furred with night.
But here in the room where we sit thinking that
if suffering had to enter our house, it should have

been the kind that sang, or else the kind from which
small shapes would zoom and circle the light
hanging in the middle of the room like a thought

whose fifteen petals open and whose opening we become
custodian to, here in the lotus of half-sleep, I am
beginning to forget where a comparison falls short.


----from his new book "The Cloud Corporation"

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

from FUN FOR THE SHUT IN

Demonstrate to yourself a resistance to feeling
unqualified despair by attempting something like
perfect despair embellished with hand gestures.

[…]

Take notice of the slow, practically imperceptible

changes always underway around or inside you like
tooth decay, apostasy, the accumulation of dust,
debt, the dead, and what the dead are preparing to say

if offered a seat at the table.

[…]

Offer the dead a seat at the table. Now take it away:
just pull it out from under them. Hypnosis is like deep

focus with a sleeper hold on self-critique.

[…]

Soon one of the dead will conduct an infinitely slow

white envelope across the unlit tabletop, a human sigh
through a wall of exhaust. The letter itself will be left
unsigned, but you’d recognize that handwriting anywhere.


----Columbia Poetry Review, No. 22, Spring 2009

Facebook Credentials

I was looking up a couple of my old lovers online tonight.

Found my first ('89 - '91) on MySpace and Facebook, with moribund entries that contained little more than her current age (57) and her "single" status. Though on Facebook, she added a little bit of description of herself: "El Jefe" (the chief) and "black sheep."

The last time I saw her was in 2000, on the 4th of July; also the last time I slept with her. We ate hot-dogs and went swimming at her apartment pool. She had a paunch. We went to watch city fireworks. She bored the hell out of me all evening with boring talk that I can't remember now, other than that I remember to this day that I felt like I was about to scream with how stupid she was. Yet when she didn't call me for a week after, I was pissed. Called her a couple of days after the 4th and left her a long-winded message ("What do you WANT out of this relationship?"). No return call. My birthday was in mid-August; she called a few days late. I never returned her call. The end of that. The REAL end of that.

Her Facebook and MySpace entries that I looked at now made me sad for her. "El Jefe," indeed. She had a certain cache in the gay club world at the time I knew her ('89 - '91) because she was a dominatrix and had slept with many, many people (female and male, gay and straight), and had "dominated" many gay boys behind the scenes, but she was also kind of a joke, even at that time. The weaker people in that crowd might have considered her "The Chief," but the more intelligent people thought she was an idiot (as I did, but didn't want to admit at the time -- the "dominatrix stuff" was initially fascinating, but ultimately incredibly stupid).

The other former lover I looked up is now a filmmaker living in Hollywood, having won legitimate awards for her film shorts. Her Facebook page was chock-full of information about her current professional goings-on. When I knew her, in '92 or so, she was attending the local community college (but would, as I found out, later go on to be an assistant professor in film studies at UT); she lived in a one-room rooming-house apt off Guadalupe in Austin, with the bathroom down the hall... We dated for about 3 months; usually whenever I was drunk I'd call and go over. She was a tepid lover overall (not to be disgusting, but there was also a problem with her bodily fluids)... But sometimes late at night, it felt good to call someone and have somewhere to go...

It's funny. I don't in any way desire either of these women any more. But the first lover, whom I was seriously obsessed with for 11 years, I tonight felt sorry for because her Facebook entry had nothing at all to show. The second woman, whom I quickly got over at the time, I tonight found impressive because of her "Facebook credentials."

"Did you find everything OK?"

The checkout girl at the supermarket asked me yesterday if I'd found everything OK.

"No," I said. "For the past 3 months I've been buying Oscar Meyer Turkey Pastrami here, but today there wasn't any anywhere. The label for the pastrami was on the shelf, but some other kind of meat was in that spot."

Girl: [looks at me blankly]

Me: "Do you need to write down the brand and type, to let the deli manager know?"

Girl: [looks at me blankly]

Me: [gives up]

Joel Burns tells gay teens "it gets better" www.joelburns.com

Joel Burns is a Fort Worth, Texas, city councilman. He made this speech on October 12. And got a standing ovation from both his fellow councilmembers and most of the audience. (I'm so amazed, and so proud of Burns, Fort Worth, and Texas.)



For those of you who aren't gay, you have NO IDEA what we've had to go through. Especially for Middle America kids, like myself. (You urbanites have, I think, had a much easier time of it.) Burns spells out his (and my) rural Texas childhood, and the shit we've had to face. I'm glad he came out OK on the other end of the emotional abuse. I haven't yet.

Fuck all the straight (and closeted gay) men who gay-bash.

Fuck all the straight/"bi-curious" women who come on to gay women for "fun."

Congrats, straight people, for imposing your own psychological damage on others. I don't know, quite, which is worse: A gay man who gets beaten by a straight guy for revealing his sexuality. Or a gay woman who gets led on by a straight woman, then is immediately dumped when she (the gay woman) responds. Oh, of course the physical abuse is worse. Gay men DIE because of straight men. Gay women don't die. They just get repeatedly damaged emotionally.

Again, congrats straight people for your game-playing. In truth, the "problem" has never lain with "gay marauders out to corrupt your youth." Gays are just gays, and usually keep to themselves, like cats. Instead, the problem lies with sexually confused people (claiming to be straight) who are sometimes attracted to gay people, then get all disturbed and defensive when the gay people that they come on to respond to their advances. That's when the murders take place. That's when the emotional abuse takes place.

Like I said above: Fuck you, in-the-closet "so-called straight" people who turn out not to be so straight after all. You're worse than any Republican right-winger who believes that homosexuality is wrong for crazy biblical reasons and so doesn't interact with gay people. At least with the latter type of people, you know where you stand.

The Proclaimers-Sunshine On Leith

I'm trying to make a living, people!

Oh for pete's sake! Any readers remember my post weeks ago, being so excited about all the companies I was about to be doing freelance work for? Well, seems like there's a little catch...

One company pays 1 cent a word. OK, I thought at the time. I'm sure it'll be light stuff that I can just crank out in no time at all... WRONG. All the stuff I've gotten so far has been densely written AND riddled with errors. I've been keeping track of the time I spend doing each assignment, and it turns out that I'm making between $7 and $10 an hour!

The above company's a small one, so I thought: Fine, they're small-time. I'll just do the random assignment here and there, just for some pocket change, and concentrate instead on doing more work for the bigger national companies...

One of the "biggies" gave me a project that paid $1 per page. OK, I thought at the time. I'm sure it'll be light stuff that I can just crank out in no time at all... WRONG. A typical page has around 500 words. And I'm not just straight copy editing, but also proofing against another text, and checking design elements, and making sure definitions in boxes appear properly in the text, and looking up constantly-misspelled pop-culture names, and checking folios, footers, endnote numbers, etc. I just finished doing 80 pages. Time spent? 16 hours. That's a whopping $5 an hour!!!!!!!

The US MINIMUM wage (for, like, kids and high-school drop-outs working at McDonald's) is $7.25 an hour!

When I started copy editing back in '98, I made $17 or $18 an hour. The highest I ever earned was in NYC in 2007/early 2008, before the recession hit: starting for one company at $25 an hour and within weeks getting a raise to $28 an hour. After the recession took hold (and the above company closed), I was getting around $20 an hour doing various temp legal proofing jobs, and on one job for a newspaper (before it, too, closed). My boss at the latter actually apologized to me for the "low" wage he was able to offer!

Now, recession or no recession, outsourcing or no outsourcing... I KNOW that my time is worth more than $5 an hour! (Even the US government doesn't allow less than $7.25, for pete's sake!)

Conclusion: These "per word" and "per page" ideas are financial scams, pure and simple. For a little, obscure company to operate that way? OK, I can see it. But for a major national company to do so? That's just preying on people who are desperate for work. Though, RE the latter, I did inform my contact person about what the hourly wage was working out to be; she didn't express that the pay outcome could/would be amended, but did say that she'd let her supervisor know about the situation... I really want to work for this company -- among other reasons, they have a branch in NYC -- but, though I signed a contract with them, I'm going to bow out after doing one more chapter if the pay situation doesn't improve drastically.

In more positive news: There is one company I've been doing work for that does pay a fair wage for the field! ($26 an hour) They've been light on work the past couple of weeks, but I just got word that they're gearing up for a new project and want me to be a part of it... YES, PLEASE!

Damn. I'm just trying to make a living!

Dust

Sexy