Life is Hard, Then You Blog

I've been really feeling the strain from covering two jobs at work for these past three months. Haven't really been able to have much of a life outside work. Get home around 8 p.m. or later some nights. Get a bite to eat, often a slice of pizza from down the street, read some e-mail, maybe watch the news, then try to get to bed at a decent hour, which is often hard to do when I eat late.

But there's light at the end of the tunnel. We interviewed a candidate for the Junior Copywriter position, and I think she'll be perfect. Fresh out of school and eager, and her writing skills are very good. She's obviously a natural writer and truly lives in the world of the word. And I'm sure she's bright enough to catch on quickly to all the other stuff that comes with working in an office, and having the pressures of production deadlines, etc. I sat in on the her initial interview on Wednesday with our HR guy because my boss was at an off-site meeting. I recommended that we should bring her in for a second interview with my boss. So she came in again on Friday, and my boss loved her. So we were excited that we'd finally found someone to fill the position, someone who seems perfect. Only problem is, as I found out on Friday, the company has just this week put a hiring freeze in place. And this comes after some of the other departments have made several hires in the past few weeks, making their staffs larger. We're just trying fill positions from staff we've lost.

So it's pretty frustrating, especially since it seems to me that there's been some foot-dragging in getting this position filled. All I hear is that there's lots of competition out there for jobs, especially for writing jobs, hundreds of resumes stacked up on HR desks. And we've interviewed a grand total of three people over a period of two or three months? And now we've finally found a perfect hire, and they announce a hiring freeze! I'm told that the freeze will only be in effect for the next two or three weeks though, which is strange in its own right. But my boss says she's working on the higher-ups to try to get things moving sooner, so we'll see how it all shakes out.

The good news is that we are going ahead with bringing in a guy on a short-term contract. He's a former copywriter there, just before my time. We'll bring him in to do some direct mail projects and he can also help me out in the interim. So there is relief in sight. Ideally by the time the new junior copywriter is on board, the contract guy will be able to shoulder some of my load while I spend some of my time training the newbie, and then once she's up and running, I can actually take some time off. What a concept! I dearly need some chill time. You know you need some time off when you're sitting at your desk, staring blankly at the computer screen, whispering Peter Lorre imitations to yourself.

"I am prepared to pay five thousand dollars for the figure's return."
"Reeck, Reeck..."

Yes, it's come to that. Life outside of work hasn't been much better. When the weekend rolls around, I'm usually too burnt-out to want to do much. Just sleep in and then chill out at my own pace. Been spending my weekends mostly in my own little cocoon. Hardly even venturing out during the day. The exception was a few weekends ago when we had a beautiful Sunday, 20-some degrees and sunny. People were walking about in T-shirts...and, thankfully, pants.

The day beckoned, so I took a walk up Kingston Road, and, on a whim, decided to turn down a random side street and wander through a Beaches neighbourhood I had never walked through before. I walked southward, making my way through the mostly large, beautiful and certainly expensive houses. I ended up on a street that ran south towards the main strip of the Beaches on Queen Street. On the left was a wooded ravine with a walking trail that followed the course of a stream. One of the nice things about Toronto is the system of ravines that runs throughout the city. Lovely to have access to nature in the middle of a city. Gotta stay in touch with the Mother. I saw a stairway of sorts carved into the hillside, so I descended into the ravine. It felt great traipsing through the shady coolness, hearing the trickling of the stream, the rustle of leaves in the trees, sensing the awakening of spring.

Today is another such day. Twenty-three degrees and sunny. People walking around in t-shirts. And pants. I probably won't get out today though. Gotta do my taxes. And my laundry situation has gone Code Red. I'm down to the third-stringers in my underwear-and-socks drawer. The bench-warmers that never get to play in the big game because I rely on my quality guys to carry me through. As they call it in the hockey world, playing a shortened bench. But now I'm calling upon socks I don't even remember owning. Underwear that now prompt me to question my initial purchase decision (ultra-briefs? What was I thinking?).

Anyway, I'm feeling a bit too cerebral to indulge in the simple pleasures of a sunny day. Not that they're mutually exclusive, but I just feel the need to write and cogitate. It's been a rare feeling lately. And I've been feeding my head with some good things. This past Tuesday was the "company store" day at work (a phrase that tickles me to no end: "You take 16 DVDs and waddya get..."), where I get to redeem the voucher that accompanies my pay cheque once a month. They set up a corner of the warehouse with about a dozen large tables of returned product, mostly DVDs, and we get to pick one DVD or two CDs. This time around I chose a 2-disc deluxe edition of the "Magnolia" DVD. I try to pick films that I'm likely to want to revisit at some point. That's my philosophy of having a DVD collection. Why have a bunch of films you'll watch once and then they just sit on your shelf? For those kinds of films, there's rental. I guess I see DVDs more like CDs than books. Oddly, I'm okay with having lots of books that I'll read only once and then they just sit on my shelf. Perhaps that's an issue to be more fully explored at some other time, but maybe it has something to do with the perception that books are more "permanent", an older technology. Or maybe it's that I've grown up conditioned to accept the logic of libraries, with no similarly popular concept of film libraries?

Anyway, I watched "Magnolia" Friday night, staying up way too late to do so. In fact, I couldn't finish watching it because I was just to tired, it was getting on to 3 a.m. or thereabouts--it's a long film--so I watched the last 45 minutes or so last night. It's the first re-viewing of the film for me since I'd seen it in the theatre, and it certainly is one of those films that rewards multiple viewings, if only just to get a clearer picture of all the characters and their various relationships to each other--literal and metaphorical.

[I interrupt this narrative with an announcement. I have decided to forgo doing laundry until tomorrow! I'm working from home tomorrow, so I'll be able to get that done while I work, just as long as I get it done before I have to leave for my dental appointment in the afternoon. Getting a crown done. Yay. So it looks like maybe I'll be able to get out and catch some of the Sunday sunshine after all. Me and my third-string socks and my ultra-briefs. And pants.]

The bonus disc has some interesting stuff on it. A bunch of outtakes which are quite funny. Some scenes that didn't make it into the movie. The complete T.J. Mackey seminar that Tom Cruise delivers ("tame the pussy!"), as well as the T.J. Mackey infomercial that plays mostly in the background on television during the scenes with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jason Robards on his death bed. There's also Aimee Mann's video for "Save Me" and a making-of documentary that chronicles the process as the film goes over schedule and over budget, and then wins a bunch of awards and film-festival honours.

I'll say this though: Paul Thomas Anderson is one hyper dude. Made me wonder what it'd be like to be in a room with him and Quentin Tarantino. Give them some speed and then watch them explode like frogs in a microwave.

"Yesbutitreallyharkensbacktofritzlangsmetropolisandntherereallyhasntbeenapropernoirstoryline
sinceimeanimeanlikelookatdarkcity..." *BOOM!*

Odd thing was, as I was about to pop in the DVD to watch the last bit of "Magnolia", I channel-surfed across "Six Degrees of Separation", which had just barely begun. I had never seen it before, and it captivated me, so I settled in to watch that. A fascinating film, though it didn't take long to realize that it was adapted from a play. Great dialogue, but I find it detracts from the effect when you can practically see the playwright writing the words, watch the actor on screen turning into a mouthpiece for an offscreen presence. Stage dialogue doesn't always survive the transition to celluloid, no matter how brilliant it may be. But it was brilliant writing. Will Smith's discussion of his thesis on the death of the imagination was spellbinding and inspiring. But I say it was an "odd" thing to stumble across this film on TV because it certainly has some thematic commonalities with "Magnolia", chiefly the interconnectedness of lives and stories.

And then, today I finally got around to listening to Ryan Adams' new CD, "Cold Roses". I dropped the laser on the first disc without even looking at the names of the tracks, and the first line I heard was "I want to go to Magnolia Mountain..."

And the Narrator from the movie says...
And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that this is not just "Something That Happened." This cannot be "One of those things..." This, please, cannot be that. And for what I would like to say, I can't. This Was Not Just A Matter Of Chance. Ohhhh. These strange things happen all the time.

I think I'll go take that walk now. Twenty-three degrees and sunny. Chance of frogs.

I'll leave you with some more memorable quotes from "Magnolia".