Tendering My Resignation

I quit my job today. Here is the letter of resignation I gave my boss:

Please let this letter signal my resignation, effective immediately, from Jaffe & Nohavicka / Country-Wide Insurance Company. A number of factors have necessitated this change. First, it has become clear that the legal field does not suit me. There is a degree of futility within the No-Fault framework, and within Country-Wide itself, that is simply hard to abide. Further, a simmering antipathy between management and support staff as well as an overall dysfunction of communication has rendered the work environment unpleasant.
While my resignation may seem abrupt, I am merely providing the company with the same courtesy it provides to those it terminates, regardless of whether they’ve served 10 years or 10 months.

I thought it wasn't half bad.

The Top One Thing I Hate About New York

Now, I didn't think I was an especially short girl until the good people at Gap and Banana Republic informed me that the average lady is either 5'10" or wearing 6" Louboutin stilettos. Either way, as a sneaker-wearing munchkin, the cuffs of my jeans tend to drag on the ground. This why I hate hate hate the doormen on the UES that wash the fucking sidewalks every morning in the summer.

All so the good citizens of the York River House don't have to trudge through the same sludge as the common man...at least for the duration of ONE block. What do they do when they cross the street? Are there UES Booties like the ones that surgeons wear in the OR? If so, I would really like to get a pair, so that my feet will stay dry on the walk to work.

New York is a dirty place, and I certainly encourage everyone to grab a broom and slap some shine on their little piece of heaven, but these guys stand in one place and pump thousands of gallons of water over the sidewalk and for what? So it will dry ten minutes later? This practice violates so many tenets that I hold dear, namely dry pants. A restaurant in Manhattan has to pay for a permit for sidewalk seating but these yahoos can use a valuable community resource to ensure my feet are wet? I am no hippie but come on, how wasteful! How purposeless and lazy! And socially, there is something about having to wait for them to notice me, and turn the hose away that is so prohibitive and rude and infuriating. It's enough to make a girl want to quit her job and move away.

Honorable Mention: Those goddamn HPV commercials, but really, they epitomize everything I hate about everything. Who knew about HPV? Me, that's who. Me and every other woman I know. And most of the men too. I can see you Merck. But trust me, that a rant worthy of a couple beers.

The Goodbye Rosemary Song

Sha La La
Rosy, I love you!
Sha La La
Rosy, I need you!
Sha La La
Rosy, I'll miss you!
Bay-Beeeee

Sha La La
How will I work
without you
Rosy?
To whom will I bitch
and moan?
I'll be standing alone
during the fire drill
honey
it's so sad to think of you gone!

Sha La La
Rosy, I love you!
Sha La La
Rosy, I need you!
Sha La La
Rosy, I'll miss you!
Bay-Beeeee

George Monbiot

Always a good read.

The O.C.

They killed Marissa. How horrible! How sad! I mean it, I actually like this show. Check out the byline on this Yahoo article though. Do they really have a "Sandy Cohen" on their staff, and if so, does he have to write all the O.C. stories?

Remarkable

This fascinates me. Is it the absolute nadir of literature, or the most accurate representation of reality's dullness ever put to paper?

There was a rapture

Greg Dulli, subject of my essay "Beauty Black As Night" in Bird Brains Issue #Zero, released a new album today under his Twilight Singers moniker. It's called Powder Burns and while it's a bit early and I'm obviously biased, I already count it among the finest albums of the year. If you like dense, cinematic, soulful music about the dark side of life, I highly recommend picking it up.

Mission impossible III

1. retired hero lives a happy normal life after finding the right girl
seen it before-but this time it is more nauseating than usual
2. kidnapped girl rescued from abandoned factory building
seen it before-boring
3. helicopter chase through a windfarm
awesome idea-I'm sure I'll see that again
4. evil rich person is kidnapped from posh party by heroes diving through the sewers
seen it before-boring
5. hero roughs up evil rich person to get information needed to save the world
seen it before-boring
6. prisoner transport is attacked by fighter planes on bridge and evil rich person is freed
seen it before-but well done
7. hero's supervisors turn against him and he needs to go underground to save the world
Tom Cruise disguised as a Czech hippie-priceless
8. hero jumps between skyscrapers in Shanghai
straight out of Spider Man-ridiculous
9. hero almost looses doomsday-device in traffic; then car chase
seen it before-boring
10. hero has drug-induced sexual fantasies (he married the girl between 6. and 7.)
seen it before (many times)-but again it seems particularly sad here
11. hero's wife shows up, rises to the occasion, and saves the day by killing evil people
another Friday afternoon well spent!

11 New Radiohead Songs!

Here.

From their show in Copenhagen on Sunday. A bittersweet mp3 haul to be sure, as it makes you want to go to the MSG show even more.

So far, the songs are amazing.

What do y'all think?

Local artist makes good $$

Add Duane Keiser to the list of lucky bastards with ingenious get-rich schemes that actually work. Though not quite as lucrative as milliondollarhomepage.com (another lucky bastard, assuming hackers don't throw a wrench in his plan), this Richmond-based artist's "postcard paintings" have netted him at least $20,000 and ZERO negative publicity, as far as I can tell. Keep up with his paintings at duanekeiser.blogspot.com.

The Ticketmaster Preterite

Well, no Radiohead tickets for me, despite a multi-pronged attack by my roommates and I. It took 9 minutes for them to sell out two nights. I so rarely use Ticketmaster anymore, or go to Big Rock Shows, it reminded me of being a kid, desperately dialing and redialing the order-by-phone number, hoping that good fortune would befall me rather than someone else out of the thousands and thousands of other seekers. I usually had pretty good luck. Not so this time. Oh well. Seeing Radiohead is like going to church for me, I guess I'll just have to continue my slide into wickedness this summer.

And there's still Mogwai next weekend. Anyone going?

Inflationary Shame Cycle

I don't understand economics too well, but I do recall when Subway and pizza were reasonably cheap lunch options, and I'm beginning to wonder if eliminating the gold standard was one of the worst decisions in US history. Inflation is simply the accepted progression of our currency, and and to what end? Will we be paying $5 for a slice in 5 years? 79 cents for a stamp? And with wages stagnant, how long until the basic essentials become too expensive for the average earner? (They already are out of reach for the poor)

Even more irksome - concurrent with the decline of real money value is the proliferation of high-end consumer tech gadgets and their taunting illusions of connectedness and convenience, just begging you to get further into debt for the sake of staying with it. It's just so funny to see the lifelong waking dream of the capitalist enterprise work so perfectly. Case in point - I desperately want an iPod, but can't afford one.

On a related note, I rode the L to the 4 to get to work the other morning, and I noticed that a vast majority of L riders, when transferring at Union Square, get on the uptown 4, leading me to believe that they work near Madison Ave. and are therefore much more complicit in the destruction of culture than they'd ever let on.