part of a colloquy

TWO POINTS IN SUPPORT OF THE NOTION THAT I HAVE A LIFE OF SOME KIND

First thing: my rambling days are over and done. No more waking in hotel rooms and wondering where I am (although that stopped happening somewhere in the Philippines or Australia), no more waking in my own bed from nightmares of being stranded on a back road somewhere in the western Alps. No more discarded paperbacks and foreign languages. Goodbye tidy towns and cities of filth. Goodbye to all but my own, I mean. I’ve been booted up the career ladder to the job of producer.

What does this mean? Well. Money. And stillness. I’ve been given more money to sit still, under the operant premise that still people do more paperwork, and that paperwork requires signatures, and signatures – on timesheets, contracts, cost reports, purchase orders, review sheets – are bought with ever-increasing sums of money. It also means horrible stress and the unique aerosol poisons of office life.

It also means an office with a whiteboard of my very own, several walls to shield me from others, and a view of the VIA stockyards. Yeah, that’s premium office space, people.

Second thing: In keeping with the twisted ways in which modern couples communicate, my wife is telling me how she feels about having a baby by writing about it on her website. It’s as if hundreds of people per day are crawling into bed with us to listen to our pillowy talk. Don’t get me wrong – any way that she and I can keep our lives moving on track together is fine by me. After the last year of being constantly on the road, I’ve all but lost the skill of coming home to the same person, the same bed every evening. Now that I’ve traded in my field producing job for a producer job, I have to sharpen my space-sharing skills. And by that I mean I have to wash those dishes.

THE SUCCINCT REFUTATION OF THE NOTION THAT I HAVE ANY LIFE AT ALL

We spent last weekend doing absolutely nothing but watching movies. Wait – The Lotus designed some miniature banner ads for her friends’ weblogs. She also read some fine literature by noted contemporary authors. But I did nothing except watch movies. Solaris (again). The Third Man (again). Before Sunset (again). Napoleon Dynamite (twice). I also ate some grilled eel, which really does not speak well of me.