Category: ultrapersonal

I just noticed that my passport is due for its first renewal next year, which got me thinking about the dents I’ve put in it over the years:

1. England: I had to go for a last-minute work trip, so I took off for my first week out of the country. I spent that first trip in a snazzy little hotel in Knightsbridge, going to work in the day and zipping around at night on the back of my friend’s motorcycle (proving to myself that I wasn’t as terrified of motorcycles as I always thought I was). I’ve been back to London twice, and consider it one of the few cities besides New York I could see myself living. The last time I was there I finally managed to get up North to Lancaster, Blackpool, and Carlisle, much to the snickering of the Londoners I saw the rest of the time. I loved it all, though.
2. Japan: This was just a layover, but I still count it because I spent the night in a Japanese hotel on the way to and from…
3. China: Two-and-a-half weeks helping my friend take care of a tour group. While rain poured for most of the trip (ruining about half of the 32 rolls of film that I shot), we herded our group on and off buses, planes, trains, boats, and the Great Wall as we visited Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Guilin, Guangzhou, and pre-Handover Hong Kong. A-freaking-mazing, all of it.
4. Jamaica: The launching pad for another tour-group trip, but this time we didn’t have to do much more than get the group onto a cruise ship. The trip was more fun than I would have guessed, in part because of (rather than in spite of) it being so cheesy in so many ways. Still, it was a great way to score a free trip to…
5. Colombia: We spent a day wandering around the old part of Cartegena. I discovered that I retained much more high-school Spanish than I thought.
6. Costa Rica: We spent an incredible day hiking through a rain forest. I’m still very eager to go back and see more of the country.
7. Panama: After a totally cool trip into the Panama Canal and back out, we went swimming at a very Gilligan’s Island-esque archipelago off the coast. No screwball hijinks prevented us from getting off the island and back to the ship.
8. Iceland: I’ve been through Reykjavik on two different trips now, but I’ve still never left the airport, which has always reminded me of Moonbase Alpha. I’m still eager to see parts of Iceland that don’t look like the Moon.
9. Brazil: I spent almost a month in Rio with a friend, visiting her friends and family for Christmas and New Year’s. It is a sexy, sexy place, and to date the only place where I have appeared in public in a Speedo without thinking twice about it. This is also where I met my beloved friend João, when he and I picked each other up in a bar my last night in town and remained fast friends afterward.
10. Italy: My first trip to Italy was yet another trip with a tour group, this time to Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast. I was smitten with the place. And after going back for another two weeks, I find that it’s hard to think of any other place I’d like better.
11. Belgium: A rainy cold, grey afternoon on the way back from Sorrento, trudging around to look at the Atomium and that kid taking a piss. I have no desire to go back for more.
12. France: The only time I led a tour group without help, so I was lucky that this was a trip where the group was left to wander on their own for a week, rather than be led anywhere by a local guide. It’s a magnificent city but my love for it is mitigated by my hatred of the sound of French.
13. Canada: I’ve been to both Montreal and Vancouver so far, but I’m pretty convinced that Canada is just as polite and pretty and liberal as I’d hoped. I think I could very happily live in Canada if I were forced to flee there to escape our own government.

I was so relieved the first time I had enough relevant experience in the career of my choice that I was able to strike from my résumé all the menial retail jobs I’d slaved at over the years. At this point, I’m even able to gloss over the less glamorous professional work I’ve done. Such, I suppose, is one of the benefits of age.

But what would the whole record look like at this point? See for yourself:

1. Babysitter (1985–1988): I picked up the overflow of my friend Lynn’s lucrative babysitting career. When I watched Lynn’s brother and sister I would get a handsome bonus if I did basic household chores for her mother.
2. Receptionist (1987–1988): On Saturday afternoons I would answer phones and occasionally run the gift shop at a Catholic retreat house in Staten Island. I mostly did it for some pocket money and a certain feeling of obligation to my mother, who was involved in a lot of stuff there. Boring as hell. I hated it.
3. Camp Counselor (1987): Lynn and I scored cushy jobs one summer runnning the day camp at a private compound of beach bungalows on Staten Island. The kids were fine, we got a two-hour lunch during which we watched The Young and the Restless obsessively, and it was less gross to swim off the shore of Staten Island than you might think.
4. Prospector (1987): Worst job I ever had. For three weeks I worked for a huge financial company three nights a week after school. I would get a stack of index cards with telephone numbers on them, and I would have to call those people at home (at around dinner time) and try to get them to stay on the line long enough for me to transfer them to someone who’d try to sell them stock. I’d get yelled at by some 25-year-old dickhead broker if the person on the line realized he was getting a cold call and hung up while I transferred the call. I developed a loathing for the stock business that I’ve never shaken.
5. Salesperson (1988): I worked in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s satellite gift shop down in the Mid-Manhattan Library during the summer after graduation, and the Christmas break of my freshman year of college. Totally fun job that came with great perks: free, 24-hour access to the Museum itself (I would only visit it with friends at night all summer long) and all the free damaged merchandise not claimed by co-workers with more seniority. I scored at least a thousand dollars worth of posters, and about 500 bucks worth of art books. Plus, it’s where I met Björk and her infant son, shortly after the first Sugarcubes album was released.
6. Saleperson (1989): Tower Records in the Village during the summer after my freshman year of college, and then up in Boston my first semester of sophomore year. Boston was part-time and dull, but working in the Village that summer was great. Great people watching, and lots of celebrity run-ins. The security overview we got during training effectively taught every employee the best ways to shoplift from the store.
7. Usher/Concessionist (1989–1990, 1991–1992): Worked in a movie theater in Boston for two of my four years of college. A totally zany cast of characters working in the days before a big company-wide crackdown on quirkiness. Enough fun stories to fill a book.
8. Salesperson (1990): Pearl Paint, summer after sophomore year. Totally fun, but physically arduous. I once explained to John Linnel how to make casts of his own face. I also had what I would later realize to be a HUGE crush on the assistant manager of my department.
9. Designer (1991): Summer after junior year I got a job as a paste-up assistant at a magazine, and as the sole designer for B.U.’s yearbook. A completely great experience in doing things the old-fashioned way before that way became old-fashioned. Last-minute type corrections for both the magazine and the book were made with surplus type galleys, rubber cement, and an X-acto knife. The yearbook contained 280 pages, all of which I laid out by hand on paste-up boards with typeset galleys, rubber cement, a proportion wheel, and a mechanical ruling pen.
10. Designer (1992): A part-time freelance gig at the studio where a professor worked turned into a full-time freelance gig as soon I graduated. The designer I assisted became my first boyfriend. I was let go, unfortunately, for a mishap involving a poor paper choice for a brochure. I never made a fuss about the fact that it was the paper my boyfriend/supervisor told me to use before he left for vacation.
11. Typesetter (1992–1995): This is where I really developed the pedantry my peers have come to know and love. For almost three years I learned the ins and outs of setting type properly, paying attention to detail, copyediting, and printing. Sadly, this also set the stage for the conflict between design work and technical work that has dogged me ever since.
12. Party Clown (1995?): At some point during the Boston years, I dressed as the genie from Aladdin one afternoon for a kid’s party thrown by one of Zubby’s bosses. It was summer, I had a fever, and kids like to punch cartoon mascots in the nuts. It was still better than the financial job I had in high school.
13. Bookseller (1995? 1996?): I worked part-time for a couple of years at a huge, swanky bookstore in Boston. Zubby and I got the job at the same time through a friend who was assistant manager, and it was even better than working at the movie theater together. The staff was a great big (mostly) happy family, and we were even treated with respect and allowed to curate our own sections of the store. After a few years of having professional duties, it was also nice to have someplace to go at night where I had no actual responsibilities. The friend who hired me was the one who started calling me Sparky, and so that’s how he introduced me to everyone there. As you might have guessed, it stuck. The store burned down at one point, and it never really got back on its feet afterward because the owners got nervous about this aggressive expansion that Barnes & Noble was starting to make, which prompted them to stamp out all the individual character that made out store so lovely in the first place.
14. Studio Technician (1995): After the typesetting gig, I set out in search of fortune and glamour at this job working for a publisher of respectable children’s books. I got to design a few book covers, ran the computers, and politely fought with the evil-grandmotherly office manager. I even got a chance to go to the head office in England for a week, where I made one of my dearest friends and discovered that I like being abroad almost as much as I like being in New York. Homesickness for New York caught up with me soon afterward, and I quit the job and left Boston for good.
15. Freelance Designer (1995 onward): I financed my move back to New York by doing some freelance work at the place where I used to set type. When they asked how much it would cost for me to do one last project after I got to New York, I jokingly suggested they double what they were paying me. When they agreed, I realized exactly how much I had been underpaid all those years. I’ve been doing freelance work of some kind or another ever since, even though I have almost no ability to deal with the financial complexities of doing so.
16. Designer (1996 onward): On my first interview with a temp agency in New York, I was placed at Channel Thirteen, New York’s PBS station. A six-week gig turned into a year-and-a-half gig, and after a rest period I worked for them directly as a quasi-freelancer. By far the best place I’ve worked, where I made some of my dearest friends, had a lot of fun, and got paid squat.
17. Publishing Technologies Analyst (1997 onward): I got a call from a woman who heard there was someone in New York who was already trained on this little-used, totally robust typesetting system that I had used in Boston. I went to do some typesetting for some engineering books while Thirteen waited for my contract with the temp agency to expire. Working for the engineers was lucrative, intellectually challenging, frustrating, and often dull. I’ve been straining against the golden handcuffs of my work for them ever since I’ve been part-time, full-time, freelance, part-time, full-time, and I’m stil trying to decide what to do.
18. Designer/Principal (1999?): At some point, I got really sick of trying to deal with freelancing all by myself, so two friends in DC and I started putting together our own company. Our only real client decided halfway through her project that she was dissolving her company and getting a steady job again. The three of us had to scramble for other work to pay our bills, and the comany never really came back together again. Which is a shame, because we worked well together, and I’ve always wanted to run a small business with some other people who compliment my skills properly. (Hint, hint.)
19. College Instructor (1999–2000): I taught a bunch of evening classes at Pratt, before and while I was a grad student there. Most of the time I taught a class that showed people who had barely touched a computer before how to do basic graphics stuff on a Mac. It was a startling way to learn how much general computer knowledge I take for granted.
20. Support Specialist (1999–2000): During one of those breaks from the engineers, I spent six months working for the company that made the typesetting system that I’m so good with. They were going to need me to go out to client sites eventually, which is why I started learning how to drive once and for all. After two failed road tests and six months of commuting from Brooklyn to Darien, CT, every day, I gave up on the whole thing and went back to splitting time between Thirteen and the engineers.

(All dates are approximate, because I’ve been trying to suppress them for so long now. I should also mention that I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but someone else beat me to the punch, and I figured it was time to get crackin’.)

I was in Orlando last week, but work has been too relentlessly overwhelming to get a chance to relate the tale. (There was off-duty time since I got back, yes, but that was usually spent sleeping like the dead or sitting slack-jawed in a haze of mental fatigue.)

My personal hell the eternal prison of endless torment to which I may one day be condemned if the religious Right has its way will not be so unlike Orlando, I’m sure. My god, if this is what people seek out for vacation and pleasure, our society is in more trouble than I thought. (And I was already worrying, trust me.) That place feels like the entire universe got gobbled up by a theme restaurant. The landscape is just a bleak, seemingly endless branded sprawl broken up by carefully planted shrubbery. In its way it’s no more or less artificial than the landscape in New York, but I think that what bothered me the most is that New York is made and then left to evolve, and Orlando is carefully decorated and managed. New York is a built city, and Orlando is contrived.

(Before the e-mails come, I freely acknowledge that I didn’t see any of the regular city, just the tourist sprawl between there and Disney World. In fact, I don’t think I saw a single place where actual people live. I hear the city’s nice, if you like Florida. )

But I survived. The highlights:

I’m being all mature about it and everything, but in my gut I still feel a little flip-flop and wince of pain when I see or read the word “Yale.” (I can reveal the truth, now that there can be no further threat of jinxing.) Having focused like a laser beam on my application package for their grad program for so long, it’s a little hard to let go of my daydreams of slaving away in their design studio, or working my way into Skull and Bones to procure incriminating Polaroids in case any future administrations need toppling.

There hasn’t been any actual wallowing since the first week, thankfully, because the soul-crushing possibility of being stuck in my current job for another year was too horrible to face without setting any emergency plans in motion. Emergency Plan A (formerly referred to as grad-school Plan C) is underway, after I hustled enough to ship one last application package overseas to a school I originally ruled out for being too impractically far away. While I wait to hear anything from there, I’ve set Emergency Plan B in motion, which involved making a case for my current job to transform into one that’s much less nerdy and much more art-directorial, since that would dig me out of this hole I’ve put myself in over the years. Emergency Plan C is not so much a plan as a vow to put up with a pay cut and find another job altogether next Fall, but that would be a rock-bottom last choice for a number of reasons (financial issues, career issues, school-application issue, blahbedy blah blah blah).

Going to school abroad would be nice, but hard. Being an art director (or something equivalent) where I work now would be nice, but hard. Hell, just knowing one way or another would be nice. With all that anxiety about the future freed up for a spell, I might even have time for fun once in a while.

I treated myself to a second viewing of Les Triplettes de Belleville the other night. (I went with Jenny Lee, the comic-book editor and all around sass queen who I have such a nonsexual/friendy crush on its almost embarrassing, but that’s another entry altogether.) The movie is an even richer pleasure the second time around, when you already know the story and can just enjoy the details and the tone and the animation that much more.

Just like the first time, though, I left the movie feeling profoundly sad. Madame Souza and Champion’s pet Bruno is such perfectly observed distillation of a typical family dog that he provokes the most awful pangs for Andy, who shared (and somewhere, must still share) Bruno’s barks, wheezes, and simple devotion to the prospect of snacks.

Ah, my dear, excitable, beloved, irritating, comforting Andy, who I still miss a little every day (and who I tend to miss even more whenever I have to interact with the cats, who I just haven’t been able to warm up to), even though I know we found a much, much better home for him than the one we were able to offer. Andy was a handful, but I loved him like crazy, even when he was jumping up on my tender parts or whining to go outside when it was rainy and cold. He was funny, cuddly, sweet, and my pal. I had the time and opportunity to develop with Andy what I never got the chance to with Buster, the dog Mark got back in the Bushwick days, who I really love, but was never really mine to bond with.

Sadly, the same reasons it was hard for us to take care of Andy properly are the same reasons it would hard for us to get a dog again. With the prospect of me leaving town for most of two years, it would be an even worse idea. Still, I find myself thinking about it regularly. Not with any intention, but just a certain longing for that li’l doggy vibe that I loved about Andy, Buster, and Bear. I don’t want to rag on the cats too much (well, I do, but I won’t out of deference to the other member of the household who’s quite fond of them), but they just don’t provide the same warm, fuzzy happiness.

This 1950 ad for the Rosicrucians (who I do not endorse in any way) serves as a very convenient shorthand for all the content you do not see on UltraSparky these days.

I’ll confess once and for all, to all my friends, loved ones, and fans out there: I took last year off. What started as a post-meltdown instinct for self-preservation slowly became a conscious policy of getting my personal crap in better shape once and for all. I siezed the inertia that came along with cozy domesticity and began turning down invitations, paring down my possessions, avoiding freelance work, eating in, and staying at home. Basically, I chose tranquility (a certain go-go New York tranquility, mind you) over distraction and obligation, the two monkeys usually found on my back.

It was the right thing to do, despite the periodic guilt and hand-wringing about whether or not I was actually making people feel neglected. I shaped up my ship in a lot of ways: saved a ton of money and paid off a significant chunk of debt, sorted out my goals about work and school, learned a little more about finding the sensible middle ground between loving someone a whole lot and losing yourself in someone else, and shed a lot of neurotic habits. I wish I could get my HMO to pay me back for that kind of therapy.

You may not have seen much of the evidence, but I’ve really become more introspective and relaxed. (And in those many, many moments when relaxation doesn’t really come, I at least manage to substitute it with focus.) For the most part, though, the blog hasn’t been the place to work it out, like it was during the meltdown. Slow and steady progress, it seems, doesn’t quite need the same kind of feedback and hand-holding.

But enough touchy-feely nonsense. Basically, it’s two-thousand-goddamn-four and I’m calling off the moratorium on interacting with the world at large. I’ll warn you all now, though, I’m not going to try and convince myself that I have the time or the energy to be the man about town I once strived to be. I’ve got a husband to look after, work to do, and sleep to get. But I miss a lot of people a lot, and I hope no one took my prolonged hiatus too personally. I’m officially making an effort again.

You know, as long as I can do it before bedtime, and without spending too much. I still have to keep my nose to the grindstone, after all.

Sunday night’s Kiki & Herb Christmas show was, as always, a tremendous spiritual and emotional cartharsis. I cheered and hollered, I laughed, and I shared the experience with many old pals, reinforcing my recent vow to ease out of my year-plus period of hermitage.

The evening was not just a catharsis of the soul, however. Before, during, and after the show I suffered through a process of crampy, gooey, physical cleansing before the following day’s appointment to have a tube-with-a-camera sent up my butt for a look at my innards. While maintaining a brave and cheerful face all night, I secretly cursed the state of modern medical science for its failure to think of a better way to get me ready for my close-up.

After a rough night’s sleep and a few more hours by the toilet the next morning, I was clean as a whistle and off to St. Vincent’s for my intimate encounter in the endoscopy unit. As usual, I charmed the nurses with my bon mots and good cheer, having learned long ago that in both medical procedures and anal sex, the more relaxed you are the better things will go. In the end (every pun intended), nothing looked out of whack in my colon. Although I was awfully glad to discover that I was not riddled with cancer or anything, I’m still frustrated about the ongoing trouble that’s been dogging me for months now.

So far, my crack team of medical experts has ruled out ulcers, polyps, and pregancy (although the ultrasound did turn up a little lesion on my liver that is apparently not cause for the kind of concern that a word like “lesion” would suggest). Maybe it’s a reaction to some of my medicines or maybe I’ve developed a food allergy or something, but there doesn’t seem to be much else to do about it right now except tough things out and looking out for suspicious dietary culprits.

On the positive side of all this, months of gastric distress have done wonders for my figure! I can fit into the snappier items in my wardrobe again, which will save me a costly winter shopping spree to accomodate what was quickly becoming a very fat chassis.