Friday, September 30, 2011

Bad Punchline: Harvest Moon

I was on Skype the other day and someone started describing something they were trying to do and though I knew immediately what they were talking about without their having said specifically the wildly confused reaction of the other person in the group prompted me to say:

"Yeah, describing Harvest Moon in detail does make it sound like some kind of absurdest play about a guy with OCD. 'Every morning he gets up and throws his sleeping cat across the room and then after laboriously watering all his flowers one-by-one he saddles up his ostrich and goes gallivanting about the town throwing things at the townspeople he's trying to befriend.'"

Sunday, September 25, 2011

My Idea of "Fashion"

My idea of fashion, to those who actually believe in being fashionable, probably belongs within the realms of fashion nightmares. My idea of fashion is like my own brand of insanity- it makes perfect sense to me.

My ideas for shoes: I have six or seven pairs of shoes and every single pair is black. If seven feels excessive to you when they're all the same color you obviously don't live up here where the seasons necessitate different shoes depending on the weather. Three pairs of boots, two pairs of sneakers, and two pairs of sandals does not seem excessive. Why is every pair black? I'm told that black goes with everything. Also- stains do not show on black things.


My ideas for socks: I have dozens of socks. All the ones that I have purchased are black. Why all black socks? Because that way not only do I never have mismatched socks but also they don't get dingy after a while like the white ones do. I will admit I own a few pairs of non-black socks and these are of the excessively fuzzy variety and I wear them around the house in the winter if I'm cold. Most of them came from my mother or my aunt. I get them every year for Christmas. I also get at least one blanket for Christmas.


My ideas for pants: All of my shorts are black. I also own black slacks, black jeans, blue jeans, and one pair of grey jeans. I would never buy a pair of pants that has no pockets.

My ideas for undergarments: I find them to be uncomfortable and not especially useful or attractive. I tend to neglect to wear them most of the time. The few pairs I do own are black and functional. I don't even bother to buy the 'attractive' ones because they aren't.



My ideas for shirts: Shirts come in two varieties- plain solid-colored long-sleeved ones and short-sleeved ones with some kind of design or picture. My long-sleeved shirts come in two or three shades of grey, black, and two or three shades of blue. There are no exceptions. My t-shirts come in black, various shades of grey, and various shades of blue. I don't have any green ones right now but I'm not averse to wearing green. I don't buy shirts with stripes, dots, or any kind of repeating pattern. I also don't buy shirts with button collars or collars of any kind, really. I don't buy shirts with logos of any kind or wear ones that have them. There is one exception to the previous rule: I own a Dr. Pepper shirt because Dr. Pepper is delicious and I don't mind wearing an advertisement for them even though it means I own a singular maroon shirt. I don't advertise for anyone else, though. In the winter I wear my t-shirs over my long-sleeved shirts so that they are usually layered in contrast though I sometimes wear grey t-shirts over grey long-sleeved shirts but I never do this with any other color. In the summer I just wear t-shirts and no long-sleeves. I never wear the long-sleeved shirts by themselves unless I'm ill or am currently engaged in the act of washing my laundry.


My ideas for jackets: I have three hoodies. Two of them are grey and one of them is black. Hoodies are intended for chilly weather. For cooler weather I have a standard US Navy Peacoat but this is wool and therefore cannot be worn during any kind of precipitation. I also have a large winter coat that goes down to my thighs because if you live in cold weather you need a coat that covers your ass or else you will be cold.


My ideas for 'accessories': I have one pair of grey gloves. I have one black knit hat. I have one black scarf made of some kind of fuzzy synthetic. I think I still own a tie or two that I don't really wear but I used to wear them in high school a lot with inappropriately casual outfits.


My ideas for jewelry: Jewelry shouldn't be 'nice' or 'tasteful' it should be interesting. If it's not worth talking about it's not worth wearing.


So my ideas for overall fashion end up boiling down to not owning anything but complementary colors and large portions of my wardrobe consist of neutral black and grey. This way not only can I never clash but I could be struck blind and pick out my clothes randomly and still match. It's both practical and weirdly obsessive. It also means that when I get new clothes that are slightly different from my usual wardrobe people that I work with or see on a regular basis end up looking at me because they can't quite figure out what's different about me. Having strict rules about what I wear makes it easier to buy clothes because I'm not paralyzed by indecision induced by an stratospheric number of choices and it makes it easier to get dressed because I can just grab some clothes and put them on without worrying about how they'll look together. I guess there might be a reason for my insanity but you still probably wouldn't call it 'fashion'.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Job Applications? Why bother?

I haven't decided if I am just inordinately lucky or if I have some kind of super-power but I realized when I was telling someone about my new job that not only have five out of my six jobs been great jobs but I've only ever even applied to one of them.

Jobs had:
Movie Theater
Music Theater
Amato's
Data Entry for the University of Maine
Book Store
Automotive

Job: Movie Theater
Acquired: Because my mother was working there when they needed to hire someone new and nepotism is something hicks in small towns do.
Pay: 50-75 cents above the State-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Cleaning, selling tickets, doing concessions, changing the marquee, cash-up, inventory, answering the phone, talking to people.
Perks: Free movies, free popcorn, free fountain soda, cheap candy, ability to read while getting paid if otherwise not busy, Christmas bonus, time off if/when I needed it.
Downfalls: Customers who did not understand that it was a one-screen, customers who wanted to pay with plastic, customers who wanted to buy tickets in advance, the fact that the theater was sloped and not tiered and any soda spilled ran down hill, seven day weeks in the summer.

Job: Music Theater
Acquired: Because my friend was their regular light-person and he knew I could do lights (I used to for productions at our highschool where I learned by doing).
Pay: A dollar above state-mandated minimum wage at the time.
Duties: Lighting
Perks: Free dinner, free fountain soda, free shows, attractive actors to look at, ability to play Pyramid solataire (because it fit on the counter under the light board better than other versions) while working.
Downfalls: Lighting system occasionally overheated and flipped the breakers which made me have to quickly throw on the spot-lights, turn down the master some, and run and flip the breakers back on, I was not an official employee, I only worked when the regular person was off, and they tended to cancel shows without any warning even to me.

Job: Amato's
Acquired: I knew the manager and she agreed to hire me on the spot.
Pay: A dollar twenty-five above state mandated minimum wage starting out and was given a fifteen cent raise after three months.
Duties: Making food, prepping food, prepping vegetables, washing dishes, washing counters, prepping dough, taking things out of the freezer, lifting heavy things, sweeping, mopping, cash-up.
Perks: None. I didn't even get a discount.
Downfalls: Cameras, not allowed to eat food for free, no discount on anything, worked by myself primarily, did not get breaks because of the previous, was not allowed to sit down, was required to serve customers until nine but it took nearly an hour to close up and corporate got mad if I stayed after I was scheduled, co-workers, hot oven, cooking in a fast-paced situation, the grease that permeated everything, the cement floor, and customers.

Job: Data Entry for the University of Maine Acquired: The scientist my father had worked with on a fishing research project needed someone to turn physical logbooks into spreadsheets.
Pay: There was 1,200 dollars budgeted to pay someone to do the data entry.
Duties: Turn logbooks into spreadsheets.
Perks: Work from my own bedroom, task took a total of eight hours.
Downfalls: I couldn't keep doing it.

Job: Book Store
Acquired: By application.
Pay: State-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Checking in books, magazines, newspapers and gift items, putting away books, magazines, newspapers and gift items, checking inventory in assigned book and magazine sections, straightening book and magazine sections, writing blog posts, making up displays and windows, helping customers find books, recommending books, checking people out, doing back-stock, some vacuuming and dusting, doing cash-up, and watching the customers.
Perks: Reading free books, discounts on store items, and talking to people who like books.
Downfalls: Dealing with customers who have no concept of reality, living with sometimes annoying coworkers, trying to figure out where to draw the line... for everything.

Job: Automotive
Acquired: Was informed of the job by a regular customer in the bookstore, told what it would involve, and was warned that the owner was very crude. I went in knowing I was capable of meeting the job requirements and confident that crude was something easy enough to deal with after living with a commercial fisherman for nineteen years.
Pay: One dollar and fifty cents above the state-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Opening mail, using Quickbooks and spreadsheets, answering the phone, doing billing, filing, updating the website, updating the company Facebook, smiling at people.
Perks: Nice pay, relatively easy work, would make a good future work reference, have permission to read when not otherwise occupied.
Downfalls: There are no buses that go past there and I may have to actually get my license. I have yet to work here but I suspect that 'dealing with customers' is probably going to be the biggest downfall.

Those five jobs that I didn't apply for but got anyway compared to the fifteen other jobs I applied to before I was hired at the bookstore and the several other applications I sent places since then that I never even got a call back on... Well, it makes me think that filing out applications might not be worth it.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Bestsellers Aren't

As I've mentioned before I have a book-shuffling job and on sundays we do the switchover for the week's bestsellers. We use the New York Times bestseller list (published approximately two weeks in advance so at least with bestsellers I can easily look into the future) which is more or less the industry standard within the United States though other lists do exist. In an empirical world the list would be done completely by volume of sales. In fact, by the very nature of the name you would be under the impression that Best Sellers are determined by volume of sales (literally which ones sold the best). Unfortunately if you were under that impression it would be a mistaken impression. The New York Times list is based on survey samples from independent and chain retailers in the United States as well as wholesalers and other factors which are trade secrets. I'll let you think about that for a moment before I start dissecting it.

It's not the trade secrets part that bothers me too much because in the over sixty year history there has been ample data that if they used the "trade secret" bit to influence the list to their own advantage it would have become obvious by now to people who can do math. There are two things about their methodology in deciding that make me cringe. One thing is the fact that they count sales from wholesalers as part of their formula. You know when you were a little kid and "double counting" was one of those unfair tricks you accused other kids of? That's what they're doing when they count not retailer but also wholesaler sales. Because where do the retailers get their books? Obviously from the wholesalers. The other thing is the word "sample". And here is where I can draw on my movie theater background. When I worked in the movie theater every single night we got a call from not one but two companies (Rentrak and Neilson EDI) that tracked box office numbers and the theater that I worked at was an independent one-screen in a tourist town seating less than two hundred per showing and usually having fewer than ten showings in a week. Rentrak and Neilson weren't taking a "sample". Our little one-screen was not part of their "sample"- they called us because they called every theater. Now that I work at a bookstore I know we don't get a call at the end of the night asking what books we sold during the day and I work at a chain that's been around longer than Borders. So who belongs to the sample? I have no idea.

Although, if I did know which stores belonged to the "sample" and I did have a book being published and also some money I could manipulate my book into being on the bestseller list. It's been done before by some economists who obviously are capable of math and clearly viewed it as a good investment. It's been done even more times with the Amazon top one hundred list but that's another story entirely. It also turns out to not be illegal in any way though the New York Times does frown upon that sort of behavior. But only when it's an individual doing it and not a large corporation. Why do I say that? It turns out that the top ten largest publishing companies in the United States are responsible for 98% of all New York Times bestsellers. The top five largest are responsible for 80% of them. If you were standing in front of a shelf of bestsellers right now and glanced at their spines you'd probably be inclined to disagree with me vehemently. You might say: "I can see Scribner, Bantam, Atria, Tor, Knopf, DelRey, Amy Einhorn, Ballantine, Beyond Words, Simon & Schuster, HarperOne, Little Brown, Razorbill, Hyperion, Harper, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, St. Martin's Griffin, Back Bay Books, Broadway Books, Reagan Arthur Books, and that's only twenty from this week that this blogger happened to remember off the top of their head from doing bestsellers on sunday!" Well, you'd say the first part but the last part was really only to illustrate my point. All those publishers are for books on the bestseller list this week and there are twenty different ones. If you looked at all the books you'd probably find twice that many or even more. So how could just ten companies have a lockout on 98% of bestsellers? Well, if you can name which of those twenty isn't actually one of the top ten in the next five seconds before I tell you I'll give you a prize. Because when I see that list I see Simon & Schuster, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Random House, Random House, Penguin, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, HarperCollins, Workman, Macmillan, Hachette, Random House, Hachette and that right there is the top six largest publishing companies in the United States plus Workman (and if you guessed Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill you won a prize).

And those companies are the reason that bestsellers aren't. Say you work for Bantam, an imprint of Random House, and you receive this amazing manuscript from me and everyone who reads it loves it so you know it will make your company money. When you print that book you're going to want to print a lot of that book because you think it will sell well. When wholesalers buy that book you convince them to buy a lot of them because you think it will sell well and the wholesalers do buy a lot of them. The wholesalers then convince the retailers that it will be worth their while to buy a lot of them. To further this cause the publishing company likely has a contract with many retailers across the country to display certain books in a prominent position and even if those books never sell the retailer still gets money for putting them on a special display. More than likely, though, those books will sell because they're in a highly visible position and the public has been trained to buy books from these special displays because it's an easy way of finding "high quality" books without doing much looking. Then, because the publishers printed a lot of them and convinced both wholesalers and retailers to buy a lot of them and get the retailers to put them in a prominent position so they sell well they make it to the bestseller list. Once on the bestseller list not only are they in an even higher visibility spot for customers but they're now bestsellers and the consumers believe that lots of other people are buying this book and use that as a reason to buy it, thus prolonging it's stay on the bestseller list. Long story short, publishing companies basically expect something to become a bestseller so it does. A self-causing self-fulfilling prophecy.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Electronic Birthdays

The approach and arrival of the fifth of September causes a stirring in the code that is tied to my e-mail address, facebook, and many various accounts across the internet. Sometimes in advance of the fifth and sometimes just at midnight that code will execute and a flurry of electronic birthday wishes filled with generic pre-conceived text that artful scripts have stitched my identity into in a effort of personalization. The in-box of my e-mail accounts will sprout a giant crop of special birthday advertisements from all the companies that have a hold of my e-mail and know when my real birthday is like mushrooms after the rain. These messages may once have been written by some person but any meaning in them is watered down by all the hands that touched the project and the number of years it's been since the message was first hammered out. The messages are further made cold by the hard coding that executes them. There is no person at one of these well-wishing companies that knows that today is my birthday and yet through the power of code and universal time systems I get a message telling me that everyone at this company wishes me a happy birthday.

I hate electronic birthday messages. Initially I found them mildly startling but now I tend to delete them without even looking inside. Because nothing said in that message is going to be remotely worth the several seconds they take to read. A long theoretically deeply heart-felt pile of text meant to endear me to some company whose service I already subscribe to is never going to be as special as a message in person or a phonecall from someone I actually know. But unfortunately the electronic birthday messages do not stop with the execution of some scripts to send me e-mail. Because social-networking sites don't stop with e-mail. They alert all of those people that are supposed to be my friends that the fifth of september is my birthday and prompts them to wish me a happy birthday.

What is wrong with Facebook reminding my friends of my birthday? Some people don't remember things like that very well. I know that's true. My brother's phone reminds him of things like mother's day and my birthday because his memory for that kind of thing is terrible. My memory isn't the greatest either but I remember the exact birthdate of about a dozen people and roughly when the birthday of a couple dozen more people are. These are the birthdays of the only people I want to wish happy birthday to. Not that I wouldn't wish a happy birthday to anyone else I know including random customers in the store but if your birthday is important enough to remember all the time or spend hours programming into my phone so I will remember it's important enough to at least call and leave you a message about. Otherwise you're probably not going to be terribly upset if I forget. I imagine you would agree with that.

So again, what's wrong with Facebook reminding my friends about my birthday? The fact that today I will receive many birthday wishes from people who haven't so much as said a word to me, even via the medium of Facebook, since the last time they were reminded to wish me happy birthday. Congratulations Facebook, you figured out how to create human spambots. I don't count these messages as being any more special than the ones written by someone in the marketing department of a company I happen to shop at because they're all electronic birthday messages. Every wall post I get that contains less than five words and at least one of those is "birthday" is  no less of a code-execution than any that showed up in my e-mail box from my cellphone service or internet provider.

In conclusion, if you want to use Facebook as a means of remember when my (or other people's) birthdays actually are you're more than welcome to but if you see that message and only take the few seconds to assuage yourself from any possible guilt you might feel at not saying it to tap out thirteen letters and hit enter then you have effectively become a spambot. If you want to take a little more time and write something whole lines long you have graduated to human being. But if you actually want to wish me a happy birthday as a friend or relative and not merely a fellow human being and you aren't going to see me in person in the near future to say it then that requires the whole minute or two of effort to find my phone number conveniently listed on my facebook page, punch it into your phone, and leave me a voicemail if I don't pick up. Otherwise, don't waste the few seconds of effort on fourteen keystrokes and contribute to the spam on the internet.