pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HARD-ASS TEXTUREGRRL, IN OFFICE 24. My weaver colleague just called me Texturegrrl and rubbed her hands on me—I think because I am wearing cool nubby slacks that are three tones of brown woven in a tiny pattern of interlocking squares, a mossy mini-wale corduroy shirt, a taupe silk jacket that the Ginger's mother gave me that has a huge cylindrical shell for a button, green polka-dotted socks, and my favorite Joseph Siebel shoes with thick double leather straps. Today I should win a hard-ass award for the grilling I just gave an interviewee. Lawsie! I know people are nervous in interviews and try to be accommodating, but this boy meandered around his answers so much that I and the other four interviewers had to interrupt him and repeat our questions in an effort to pin him down. This told me what I needed to know right away and I wanted to end the interview after thirty minutes, but no, my colleagues went through their entire list of questions for another hour and fifteen minutes. So here is good advice that I will just throw out to the universe: if an interviewer asks you what operating system you support on the Macintosh platform, don't begin describing every iteration of Mac you have owned since 1984 in excruciating detail. Yep. He got through his second description before I realized that he was actually going to do this, and so interrupted him and said "Please focus your answer on what OS you can support TODAY"—which is a good thing, since his answer revealed that he didn't know the current OS at all and was trying to bullshit his way through an answer. Arrgh! Meanwhile, the IT director turned me on to a question to ask potential IT hires: If I went to your office right now, describe the organizational file structure that I would see on your computer and the set-up of your office and explain what these systems say about how you perform your work. So now I am looking around my office. My gazillion levels of neatly organized sub-folders speak for themselves, but I've decided that items in my office probably reveal that I'm created and a jaded optimist. The coolest thing in my office is my shelf of multicolored river rocks that I have hauled back from Pacific NW for years. The small crystal vases I placed among them make them appear to be underwater and stressed-out colleagues have come into my office more than once to ask if they can have a few minutes alone with my rocks. My large Mondrian-style rug comprised of squares and rectangles of various browns and oranges and dusty pinks is pretty cool too. My window ledge contains an orchid that doesn't look particularly healthy and a concrete sculpture of a Borglike man that I made a few years ago. One of my large Pollockesque paintings hangs on the wall facing my desk and there's a Mexican tile table and two black chairs beneath it. The chairs have red wool horse blankets from Texas on them (since my office gets so cold in the winter) and twenty-four dried white roses in an orange Mexican glass pitcher sit on the tile table. (I carefully taped the date of every month that the Ginger and I had been together on the stems of those roses for our second anniversary and attached a beautiful paragraph about love and white roses (that I had extracted from Jeannette Winterson's Written on The Body) to the vase. Then, when I broke up with her (after discovering her first affair with a live-action role-playing guy playing her fantasy lover), she grabbed the roses and threw them into the trash can with a level of drama that can only be achieved by a crazy red-headed actor whom you just knew would be storming out of the house next.) Anyway. So yeah, I salvaged the roses with their little dates taped to them and stuck them in my pitcher at work. Bookshelves cover two walls, and a large seven-foot cork memo board leans against the wall with the window. There's all kinds of interesting stuff on my memo board: A large, chunky piece of sky-blue foam construction insulation with building codes written across it in large black letters that I consider a modern-day oddly shaped fossil • a flyer advertising an Anne Sexton poetry reading at Harvard • a silhouette cutout of MLK with his arm raised • a blue poster of Gandhi with some of his wisdom written in the background • Nicanor Parra's poem Sentences scribbled onto a piece of gray paper • several magic-marker drawings from my nieces and nephews • two photographs of brightly colored Storybook People sculptures that I took in a shop near the Rhode Island School of Design • a CD that I wrote the Marge Piercy poem Song of the Fucked Duck on • a photograph of a billboard that says what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.‚—Charles Bukowski and a Guerrilla Girls poster listing all the tongue-in-cheek advantages to being a woman artist No. 3: Having an escape from the art world in your four freelance jobs. There's also a Rilke quote • a poster-size photo of the head of the Shoney's Big Boy • a short story that a friend's child wrote entitled The Mostr (Monster) • a photo of Holocaust prisoners with the words "Never Again" scrawled across it • a poster that says His toughest teacher has always been poverty a scrap of paper that says Now we know why guppies eat their young and another that says A truly great sentence has music coming out of it.—Rhoda Lerman. Then there's a postcard that asks How Will You Know When You Have Enough? • a picture of George W. Bush as Uncle Sam saying "I want YOU to attack Iraq while I sit on my well-exercised ass"—and, finally, a large curling strip of metal that peeled off the roof of a semi when a distracted driver drove under a low railroad trestle near my old job. Okey-dokey. Musicgrrl is finally done teaching her session, so now we are heading to my house to hang out and work on the 1,500-piece puzzle that I brought back from Montana for her. See ya. 5:59 p.m. - 2005-03-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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