Bizarro Danielle
N.B. A friend read this and emailed frantic that I’d quit my job. My answer: God no. Any editor want to point out where I can make that clear?
Now that Magen and I are expanding our august academic institution’s blog presence, I often tell people blogs are easy to start but hard to maintain. Then I point to the good ol’ Daily Reason. The challenge isn’t time or ideas or inspiration: It’s maintaining the appropriate personal-yet-professional demeanor. Dull topic, makes me sound like I’m wearing a skirt suit walking in Reeboks with a pair of pumps in my Le Tote.
—just did a million other things on the internet, frozen by the demands of personal essay self-presentation—
Persistence has never been my problem. Perhaps it’s the opposite of a strong suit. I stayed with my first boyfriend for nearly five years and with my first employer for nearly eight. For good reasons, of course. The boyfriend was a superlative gentleman who liked recipes and Russian novels. The workplace, at a state university, let me create my own job and offered so much time off I worked for WBUR one day a week for eight/nine months still earning full freight. Didn’t leave that job until I had an A-plus replacement. (Which wasn’t the case w/ leaving that relationship, I’m proud to say.)
Today I walked back into those offices armed with a freelance assignment for the state university paper. Overwhelming echo effect. I didn’t realize until that moment how completely I’d put that job behind me. Which is bizarre when you consider that I spent my entire twenties minus two weeks with the same co-workers, the same boss. My constant amidst changing addresses and relationships.
They didn’t expect me to leave. That surprised me. Because towards the end, the last oh three years, I was awfully unhappy. Perhaps they thought I was constitutionally a crab. And it was a golden-handcuffs kind of place. (Sorry to draw out the comparison, but the boyfriend was too. No, not that. Stop that. So objectively good that it’s hard to break away.) Saying hi and catching awkwardly up added a full half-hour to the interview time.
I have the same apartment as I did then (THANK GOD). Same cat. Same superlatively comfy couch one of those co-workers gave me. I looked at the Public Garden through the big boss’s window. Yellow leaves, Red Line. I loved that view. Flipped a coin with my years-long officemate Jeff the Web Guy for it and won.
Two weeks’ notice after nearly eight years. Two days’ notice after nearly five. Good at sticking, good at moving on.
xx
djd
p.s. Learned via verbatim that Rosanne Cash doesn’t like her dad’s “Sea of Heartbreak.” (I spaced during that part of the interview.) What is wrong with that woman?! Does she not know that Benmont Tench is the man?! That whole album (Cash’s second with Rick Rubin) is perfect listening for a dark February night cat-sitting in a cold, no-internet apartment two weeks after you broke up with your first and only boyfriend.
Filed under: my brilliant career | Leave a Comment
In just over six hours, I will be (asleep) on a plane to girl it up as a bridesmaid for my oldest friend—a woman with whom I shared Monty Python references, L.M. Montgomery books, and Bat Mitzvah family parties (oog). Last weekend I was also a bridesmaid, for a wonderful and treasured college friend whose now-husband rocks*. 2.5 months ago, I was my only sister’s maid of honor.
* He volunteered to follow her career to Norway should one opportunity come through, adding that if he couldn’t find a job in his field he just KNEW that town needed a good back-alley barbecue joint.
And you know what? I apologize to them all (one in advance). Because I love my friends, I’m happy to see them get married, I like a good party, but:
I am a bad bridesmaid.
Why?
1. Being a writer, I am invariably short on a. money b. time.
2. Formal wedding etiquette requirements are to me as Linear A.
2a. I don’t care enough about formalities to pick up on elements other people consider self-evident.
3. I’m a total selfish and cranky jerk.
Examples, gaffetacular:
- Four days later, it occurred to me that a bridesmaid is probably not supposed to leave the wedding 45 minutes early.
- Pre-wedding spa weekend for the girls or the couple? Let’s all meet up in some central geographic locale? Big night out on the town? I throw buckets of cold water on all such ideas. This earns me disapproving e-glares from the bridesmaids who feel no budgetary/time constraints (and live in cheaper housing markets [!]).
- Rehearsal dinner calls for “casual dress”. . . but it’s in Texas. Please, does that mean I can wear a cotton dress and Chucks?
- Which, by the way, I had no clue would not be appropriate attire for a Westchester bridal shower. Fortunately for my mother’s sense of propriety, she alerted me in advance. To be exact, I asked about dress code and she said “well of course it’s not like you were thinking of wearing your funky sneakers with your dress.” Um. Of course.
- Oh God not the curling iron not the curling iron!
- It didn’t cross my mind for a moment that a member of the younger generation would be expected to bring a gift to the shower. Thank you, big chain bookstore, for opening early on Sundays. (Don’t get me started on wedding gifts.)
- No clue what to do with this waffle-print, strapless, hot pink cotton robe that fastens above the boobs and features my initials monogrammed in a personalized font.
In short, if you want a bachelorette party that consists of sitting on the couch consuming fancy chocolate, cheese, and beer, I’m your woman. With leaps, bounds, insomnia, and enthusiasm I will happily make your entire wedding cake, drive it an hour south, and decorate it with roses to hide its figure flaws. I will even listen to a dozen music samples to help choose the wedding band. But dang, put me in a matching dress and I will surely let you down.
xx
djd
4. Instead of packing, I write on the internet.
Filed under: grouching | 4 Comments
Yeah, you.
You know who you are. You remember Reagan, life before the internet, and “college rock” being hard to find. Thank God LiveJournal didn’t exist when you were in high school. Enough 23-year-olds whining about how they’ll never find true love: let’s hang out and whine about how we’ll never afford real estate.
No one under 30 allowed, no matter how jaded they feel (young offspring excepted). I propose Thurs. 10/22 or Sun. 10/25, 7 p.m. Location either at someone’s house or at The Bar f/k/a the Abbey. Come, or don’t.
xx
djd
p.s. On boston.com/somerville: my profile of Luis “Tony” Morales, the city’s second-ever Latino candidate. Let me know what you think.
Filed under: good stuff | 2 Comments
I finally wrote about the Somerville parking fracas, for boston.com/somerville.
Being a reporter who followed the budget negotiations closely—and a lifelong color-within-the-lines apple-polisher who averages one parking ticket per year due to obsessive attention to signage—I have perhaps more sympathy than most for the city’s financial dilemma.
However, I have also learned a trick or two. Perhaps one day I will write a column entitled “Beating the System: A Driver’s Guide.” Free samples at your service:
- Sign up for the boston.com street cleaning alerts and the city’s snow emergency alerts.
Note: City spokesman Tom Champion tells me that improvements are coming for the snow emergency signup, which currently is confusing. You can also just call the city and ask them to put you on the list.
- If you get a ticket saying you’re on one side of the city line when you were on the other, take pictures of your car in the spot so you can prove it. Should you happen to have already moved your car… they won’t know if you move it back for the photo shoot.
- When all else fails, and you can’t move your car for street cleaning because it stopped working and you’ve been on the phone for six weeks with the American Kidney Foundation asking where they are and your roommate hates you and you have to move and you only bought this car to visit the guy who just dumped you… cry.
- If you buy a car for a guy: Buy a decent car.
xx
djd
Filed under: colorful surroundings | 1 Comment
Tags: boston.com, parking, somerville, yourtown
Sunday 10/4
- Mission of Burma at MIT 2–6 ** no bags **
(img. from the Phx)
- Boston Tweed Ride same time, damn it
No lycra.
- Zuzubar.com launch 10 p.m. w/ my buddies TD and Johnny Allen DJing, plus some soul guys.
FB event.
Also
- Somerville Arts Council has a call out for winter craft show vendors and Union Square public art-creators.
Info.
—
Halloween (excerpt)
She arrived at his Inman Square triple-decker falsely bloodied and bruised, with a torn white T-shirt and Goodwill jeans she’d accidentally cut too short.
“I’ve been fooling around in the woods under the opening credits,” she said, “and then I look up from under the guy and see the axe just as it splits the dude’s head open. I run through the trees, scrambling and falling in the leaves, but of course there is. No. Hope. I don’t know, I think I need something more.”
He cocked his head. Definitely unconvinced. Slowly he wrapped her wrists with electrical tape from the hall table. Found his hatchet and cut a slit in the shirt to match. She rubbed red makeup on the shirt and her waist. “I’ll be your killer,” he said.
She drove, couldn’t afterwards remember how given the electrical tape, to the party out in the sticks. Picked up his bandmate, waited while they bought pumpkins, tried to talk in the car to block out the dread, a bass bell sounding in her ribs: X. hadn’t asked to meet up afterwards. They’d fought the week before. There was no way this could mean anything else. Her guts sagged leaden. It didn’t work; it never does.
Out of the car with the tidy houses all around. She shivered hard. He looked at her appraisingly.
“Almost,” he said. And grinned, with the quickest possible crazy gleam. His weight slammed against her. She pirouetted to the ground and started laughing, a little hysterically. He pushed her back on the cold grass and rubbed her back against the leaves, sat up and rubbed leaves into her hair. He got up. She couldn’t stop laughing.
One hour into the party she curled up on the couch to watch the playoffs and let herself fall asleep. Someone pulled a ratty afghan over her clenched limbs. At some wee hour she drove everyone back home, drunk bandmate chattering all the way.
No pictures survived of herself at this event. Five days later she had X. over and told him to get lost. Which was not, at the time, what she wanted.
–
xx
djd
Filed under: colorful surroundings | Leave a Comment
Tags: art grants, big digits, events, mission of burma, poncy literary woozing, somerville, tweed ride, zuzu
Things that are awesome
1. The Somerville Journal’s SpeakOut column, home to the complaints and concerns of anyone brave enough to call into the hotline. Sensibly, the paper does not make this available online: It is a key reason to subscribe (though you can hear it on MIT radio station WMBR). My favorite recent item:
Someone help chip boy
To all the people of Somerville: a good kid is dying. He has a chip in him. Who knows exactly what that means? And he’s young. Now he’s dying young. Someone needs to stop this as soon as now.
Who, indeed, knows exactly what that means? The clipping bears a place of honor on my fridge.
2. The Sherman Market, open this Saturday perhaps. My favorite cafe is opening a grocery store… semi-helmed, pleasantly enough, by Homeboy.
3. My new old Tupperware lunchbox. Which is making me so happy! Nothing lightens the grouchiness of going to an office like a cute lunchbox with little tidy containers that nest inside. Practically speaking, it finally solves the dilemma of how to keep lunch from leaking without going through a billion Market Basket bags. Eternal thanks to the blogger who enlightened me. Hey, you can buy one too.
As a side note, every local journalist on Twitter who is NOT me appears to eat many meals at restaurants.
4. My new boston.com column on all things Somerville. Send ideas.
xx
djd
p.s.
5. My 2008 trip to Texas, which will let me deduct $2000 from my taxes on mileage alone. And some people thought Nickledean’d never make it….
p.p.s. Yeah, I’m still doing my 2008 taxes. What’s it to you?
Filed under: it's what's for dinner, my brilliant career, my brilliant friends | Leave a Comment
Tags: boston.com, globe, kitchen kitsch, sherman cafe, somerville speakout
