NaBloPoMo 2008

I loathe job interviews. They are, in fact, the thing I am worst at: selling myself.

I’m not sure if I’m bad at this because I’m an introvert (yes, I know, all evidence to the contrary) or because I am, at base, somehow convinced that I’m ATAABOC and just don’t understand why everyone else doesn’t immediate perceive that and judge me based on my concrete achievements rather than whether or not I hold up well under direct questioning. I’m going to go with some of both, heavily weighted toward the introvert explanation.

The thing is, when a job interview goes really bad, I can usually tell. Like one I had a couple of years ago where the department supervisor asked me how I would handle on a Monday morning the work flow on:

• a press release for a press conference happening that afternoon.
• a request for a web site update from a department that hadn’t updated their content in 6 months.
• a change request for something that was incorrect on the site.
• a request from a senior manager for training a new staff member.

If I didn’t know it was physically impossible I would say that a sign lit up over my head that read “I’ve got 8 years’ experience in my field and you’re asking me how I’d prioritize these tasks. You’re shitting me.” Regardless, that was the moment that I not only blew my chances at that job but also decided that I didn’t want to work there anyway.

How today’s went, I don’t know. I just keep reminding myself: I am interviewing them as much as they are interviewing me and anyone who hires me is lucky to get me. I’m not perfect (no one is) but I’m damn good.

I’ve had house guests since 5:05pm Friday night.

They were an hour early.

I had to get up at 4:45am today to get any privacy…in my own house.

And look, Thanksgiving is just around the corner: Thanksgiving which means socializing with my entire family for a whole day.

I feel like someone has been hitting me with a stick for three days.

On a brighter note, I spent Saturday doing the tourist thing downtown which is often nice. It makes me see my hometown in a different light. It also makes me realize that I take a damn fine postcard photo. A brief photo tour of the Mall…

I like language a lot. It’s flexible and mutable. Really, language is a living thing influenced by time, place, and context to a degree that almost no one comprehends while they’re actually using it. But a letter I got in the mail Friday got me to thinking about the limitations of language and how we use it. Take sand.

Because we don’t live in Dickens’ circumscribed world all a writer has to do to give you a picture of sand is use the word sand. Chances are even if you’ve never been to a beach you’ve probably seen a picture of one or seen one in a movie which means the word sand has, at least, denotative meaning for you. Sands of time, sands through the hourglass, sandy shores, all of these are idioms that conjure up what Merriam-Webster rightly and rather blandly describes as “a loose granular material that results from the disintegration of rocks, consists of particles smaller than gravel but coarser than silt.”

But what color is it?

See, here is where how we use language gets interesting. One of the denotative definitions of sand is “a yellowish-gray color.” Except that depending upon your experiences sand can be black, red, white, green, or pink.

What I find curious is not that we limit the word sand to a single color when the actual article the word describes manifestly comes in more hues. We limit the definitions of words all the time – obscene and p*rn*gr*ph*c to pick the two most egregious examples. No, what peaks my interest is why we limit definitions.

Is it because the other instances of a particular thing – like a black sand beach – are so specific and rare that by the time someone found one sand was being used to describe the most common sort, you know, the kind that comes in varying shades of tan, that the only thing to be done to describe this new place was to prepend a color to the word sand?

Or do we limit the definitions of words because this great thing we invented to communicate with each other actually outstrips our abilities as a species to use it to communicate? Are complex ideas starting to exceed our capacity to understand them?

I like to think my facility with language is on the high end of the scale for my time and place. I certainly can’t compare to some of the giants in the field who spend their lives studying words, using words, and sussing out what words mean in different contexts but that doesn’t keep me from being interested in how we use them.

And just for your amusement I provide the following: “Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy; Stunning Break with Last Eight Years“

Someone please tell me why I should spend one second being tolerant of Islam or give a shit about Africa?

From the November 21, 2008 edition of The Week “The World At A Glance…International” :

Kismayu, Somalia
Rape victim stoned to death: Islamic fundamentalists brutally executed a 13-year-old girl who was convicted of adultery for being raped by three men, the United Nations confirmed last week. Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was visiting her grandmother when she sought out the rebel militia that controls the city of Kismayu to report that she’d been raped; that amounted to a confession in the eyes of the sharia court. “The evidence came from her side and she officially confirmed her guilt,” said the presiding cleric, Sheikh Hayakalah. Duhulow was reportedly dragged screaming into a soccer stadium in front of crowd of 1,000 people, buried up to her neck, and stoned for more than 10 minutes by 50 executioners. Militia members fired on a few people who tried to intervene, killing an 8-year-old boy. The rapists were not arrested.

Yes, I know Christianity’s history is not unblemished with similar crimes. This just encourages my belief that organized religion is the least beneficial thing human beings have ever invented.

And yes, I understand academically that the only way to make change is to make change, to try to educate people, to try to help those whom others would hold down, but what’s the point at which it’s OK to just throw up your hands and abandon people to their own greed, stupidity, and well, evil? At what point to people just become beyond reform?

Today is one of those days when I agree with Ellen Ripley: Let’s take off a nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Consider death for a moment. Americans have this tendency to view death as tragic without really thinking about why we shake our heads and make that soft clucking sound in the back of our throats while our eyes refuse to light anywhere because actually making eye contact might force us to acknowledge another human being’s raw feelings.

I think that a lot of times someone’s death is seen as tragic because we dwell on the cessation of the deceased’s experiences – that the 16 year-old killed in the car accident will never grow up to find love and live a a full life; that the child died before she got a chance to mature; that the middle aged woman will never see her kids grow up to do all of those things that we expect parents to be proud kids do (Random question: How come no one ever says “Thank God Linda died of cancer before she could see little Billy become a junkie with AIDS?” ’cause not every kid is going to grow up to be president and sometimes that’s pretty damn obvious…but I digress).

We fail to realize that death is the natural end of the cycle. Jim Morrison may have been a narcissistic lush but never a truer line was written than “no one here gets out alive.” Or, as Chuck Palahniuk wrote, “On a long enough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” And while I’m not saying it’s wrong to grieve the deceased’s lost experiences, there is an unspoken thread there, a fear so primal that I think it takes years, if ever, before any of us realize that it’s there.

Though I was first introduced to it as a concept of Judaism it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that other religions incorporate the idea that a loved one isn’t really gone as long as she’s remembered by someone still living. It’s a comforting concept that just by cherishing your loved one’s memory you carry a little piece of that person around with you for as long as you live anyway. In many ways it mirrors the reality of our experiences; the people we care for, whether we loved them or hated them, influence our decision making processes and our outlook on life in ways many of us don’t understand and most of us don’t bother to investigate. Sure, it’s obvious when someone has daddy’s eyes or mommy’s chin or when you suddenly look in the mirror at 50 and realize that you’ve got the same sagging jowls as your paternal uncle, but the influence someone can have on the way with think and act reaches far deeper than that.

And if you’re at all aware of that influence, it’s quite likely you find yourself wondering just how that person would react to something. When it’s someone you loved there’s a little bittersweet wave of sadness when you come upon something she would have enjoyed. When it’s someone you loathed there’s often a feeling of self-righteous indignation that manifests itself in that “ha! showed you dad, didn’t I?” strain that is so common in American culture.

My Grandmother died at 79 years old and I bet I’m the only one of her grandchildren who ever got to hear the story about her and her roommates splurging a month’s salary in 1939 to buy a piano so they’d have something to do in the evenings in their tiny little fourth floor walk-up in downtown DC (the story about the piano men delivering it is something that still makes me grin 25 years after hearing it). Thing is, even though I heard that story, even though I could tell my cousins that story, the essence of the experience is at best diluted.

The unspoken, unacknowledged fear is the one that stems out the real tragedy of death: that we might have no idea how someone would react because we didn’t really know them well enough to begin with. Once that person we cared for is gone not only is all of their first-hand knowledge and experience lost we have squandered the opportunity to dig deep, to get the stories that make that person worth knowing and loving, to absorb the sum of their experiences and attitudes in a way that allows us to truly know someone. We count on having time to do this and even if someone is lucky enough to have a “natural” lifespan we often don’t.

The real tragedy of death is that we squander the time we have with the people we love on fripperies and effluvia. I’m not saying that every moment spent with someone you care for has to be packed with meaning, full of discovery and knowledge sharing. That would be too hard (after all, sometimes you just have to talk about the designated hitter rule). But maybe we need to find a balance, to find a way not to try and pack so much meaning into someone’s last weeks, days, or hours so that the actual process of dying might be a little easier on the person who is doing it.

My uncle would have been 63 today and I have no idea what he’d think about the state of the world right now. I wish I did.