All that remains is this thought:
“Am I portraying an excellent version of myself through this blog? Is this as true to my essence as I can get? And honestly…the women who write pieces that knock me straight out of my blogging-chair: would they consider me awesome just from reading this? Is that the thought of an impressively large narcissist?”
Because sometimes you get the urge to light your entire living space with Christmas lights.
Michael Scott.
There seems to be an aspiration among my peers to be more like Jim Halpert. I know I can’t reach that goal; heck, at this point I’d settle for Andy. However, there are moments of self-doubt where I believe I’m probably more in line with Michael. Maybe that’s why I work, for the most part, alone. I don’t want to find out that I’m exactly like him as an authority figure.
This is for the New York twentysomethings who pile into my local on Wednesday nights, the ones who never seem to know exactly what they’re looking for. Perhaps they’re ready to drink their cares away. Perhaps they think they’ll get lucky. Maybe they appeared at this particular establishment frustrated with their go-nowhere job, ready to have one too many, talk loudly, and get into a fight with the bartender who’s trying to conduct Trivia Night.
This is for my friends who have decided to teach, attempting to shape and challenge young minds, and the daily hurdles they surmount while dealing with six-year-olds. It’s also for their students, who are smarter than any adult gives them credit for (or so they think), and who always wish to be a little bit older.
This is for everyone who is lost, nervous, adrift and afraid in the modern world. If we could communicate half the thoughts I see on this website into waking life, then this world would be more straightforward. We are all dreamers, visionaries, poets underneath our skins, but no one wants to be the first to place that out in the open.
Most of all, this is for Rachel, who makes me wonder if I’m no longer young. Maybe I’m not. Maybe “young” is irrelevant as long as I’m happy.
It’s a scary mountain to climb up without a guide. Besides, we live in an awkward age…
To Rachel on the advent of her Nineteenth Birthday:
It’s The Beatles singing Happy Birthday! Directly to you! (Okay, to Saturday Club, but pretty much the same thing.)
Well, not so much a problem as a thing that happens.
You come home from a very loud and expensive bar, slipping off your shoes and putting on a more comfortable shirt, and if you’re anything like me the first thing you do is fire up Tumblr. It’s where you find the humor, the intellectual stimulation, and most importantly the music you’ve been looking for all night. Best of all, you never have to deal with that jackass in the bad suit who feels that he just has to argue with the bartender even though we pointed out that it’s Trivia Night and your stupid ass shouldn’t be SHOUTING ANSWERS, YOU UNIMAGINABLE DICKWEED.
Ahem.
Not to mention the women of Tumblr are just so much more wonderful than the crowd on a New York Wednesday Night. You’re almost guaranteed to come home to an elequent, stunning, heartfelt work somewhere on your dashboard…or at least something funny involving cats.
So I ask you fine folks: why do we still go out during the week when Tumblr is right here?
I am always disappointed when I realize that this guy on the side of my water bottles is not Joel McHale.
After all, I chose Jimmy Rabbitte when I was eighteen, and I had finally thrown The Commitments over Blade Runner on my all-time films list, where it sits today. At that point I was more concerned about traveling all the way across the country for college then I was about my future employment. After all, I knew exactly how it was going to go down: after I got my degree in cinema studies, I’d finish writing a script and get it sold and then become incredibly rich and famous.
Yeah, that hasn’t yet worked out. (Although I once had an executive at Universal deem a script of mine “inherently unfilmable.” Which was nice.)
Rabbitte became my internet alias through my identification with the character: manic, sarcastic, music-savvy, constantly interviewing himself. It may have also had something to do with the fact that I spent much of college trying to get my hair to look like his, which never worked out due to a bit too little Celt in my bloodline and a bit too much Indian/Italian/Swiss to stop it from waving like a mother. Either way, I was constantly in pursuit of this character, and adopting his name allowed me to shed all the New Wave trappings I had picked up in early high school. Sad Synth Teen was out, Wheeling Music Shyster was in, but only in terms of self-identification. It never struck me that I’d be anywhere near his life.
It took until today, working through a stack of promotional CDs, coordinating January release dates, and figuring out the best way to get a Christmas record out the door, that I realized somewhere on that line from there to here I’d ended up in charge of a label. This was almost unintentional, I swear, but I kind of like being an old-media impresario.
My name’s James Rabbitte, and I’ve ended up in the music business. Who wants to be my Commitments?
‘Tis the season for whimsical themed chocolate treats, apparently.
He was screaming (italics needed for what he was doing, seriously) at the checkout clerk for supposedly swiping his charge card incorrectly. He had been billed twice (as far as he knew) and he demanded satisfaction! When I left, the store manager was out in force, and was desperately trying to stop this Wall Street reject from calling the police. “You’re gonna see the camera behind you,” this impudent pin-striped stuffed-shirt was yelling, “and you’re gonna regret this!” As if store video cameras are there to prevent thefts by the staff rather than the customer.
As someone who still greets the receipt, change, and product at the end of a transaction with “thank you kindly” (which is half from my granddad and half, admittedly, from Constable Fraser on Due South), I was amazed to see anyone having that kind of freak-out in a place of business. In order to avoid this kind of scene, I suggest you follow Rabbitte’s One Rule of Commerce:
If it only costs $5.50, pay for it in cash.
Your Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover may stay in your wallet until the amount your purchase costs exceeds a logical amount of cash to keep in your wallet. (Televisions, Rock Band, theater tickets. Things like that.) If this guy had given the cashier a Tenner, and received $4.50 in change, he wouldn’t have looked like a dickwad in front of the Bryant Park lunch crowd.
