formerly a fearless temp

.i. interview anxiety

I have an interview tomorrow at the school where I taught last year, for the position I held last year, and I feel like this should be less stressful than most interviews but instead it's much more stressful. I keep trying to type out why that is so, but you can probably figure it out for yourself, and every time I try to write it up I end up with 87 rambling sentences.

.ii. expression theft

Instead, I am going to present you with this question: Is it just me, or is Daniel Craig's default James Bond expression in Casino Royale a modified Blue Steel? In case you are tragically unfamiliar with the film Zoolander, Blue Steel is male model Derek Zoolander's signature look in the movie Zoolander. I feel like I talked about this before in my LJ, but since I (personally) feel that one can never talk too much about the cinematic masterpiece that is Zoolander, I'm presenting it again.

Photographic evidence!



Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale





Derek Zoolander's Blue Steel






.iii. epistolic hillary

Has everyone seen the recent news story detailing a series of letters Hillary Clinton wrote while an undergraduate at Wellesley? A sample excerpt:

Befitting college students of any era, the letters are also self-absorbed and revelatory, missives from an unformed and vulnerable striver who had, in her own words, “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the star.”

“Sunday was lethargic from the beginning as I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially,” Ms. Rodham reported in a letter postmarked Oct. 3, 1967. . . .

“Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?” Ms. Rodham wrote in an April 1967 letter. “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”

I ran a poll a while back in which I had people predict which Democrat was my candidate for '08 (it seems kind of ego-centric to me now that I did that, but whatevs, such is the corrupting power of poll-making), and I think I mentioned in the comments there but not directly in my LJ that my candidate for '08 is Hillary Clinton. I admire her a lot and think she's tremendously capable, but this was the first time I've felt a real rush of affection for her, or at least her-as-she-was. Her persona is now so tightly controlled and managed (to great effect, I think) that it's hard to imagine her ever moping around all day, too depressed to go to class, struggling with her Republican upbringing, etc. I know I'm predisposed to like her, but I still think things like this are interesting, when you're given a bit of a window into the personal history of a figure usually known only from a distance. There aren't a lot of personal details in the letters (not many that I've seen), but I think what's there (in the few excerpts quoted) is more interesting - the evolution of how she thought about herself, her role in the world.

I remember feeling this way when I tried to read the recent John Adams biography and got to the part of his diary excerpts as a young lawyer. In them, he detailed how he hadn't completed his to-do list, and how he should be accomplishing so much more and isn't, and how this made him feel worthless and lame. My words, not his, but the sentiment was pretty close to that. Which reminds me, I have to finish that biography. Or maybe read a romance novel. One or the other.

OMG! I just picked up my voicemail and a friend had left a message there, and in it she said that there was new CNN breaking news! Britney Spears files for divorce!

Naturally, I was all, "OMG, GASP!" and maybe jumping up and down because I love celebrity gossip. And then my friend's message went on to say something like, "And isn't that a sad commentary on America? That on Election Day, THAT is the top news story?"

And then I felt kind of bad for jumping up and down. But not enough to not post this LJ entry. Anyway, hey, I voted! I pushed down all of the appropriate little levers (for the last time, possibly - I think NYS is going to a more high-tech method next year, and I will miss the little levers).

And now for the important PSA: New Friday Night Lights tonight! I strongly suspect the episode will include Matt Saracen being awesome and/or adorable. I will have to tape because some alternate version of myself volunteered to help the Dems on Election Night. Off I go to headquarters! I am secretly hoping they won't need my help! That's the kind of lazy American I am!

Signs your hometown roots might go a little too deep: you find yourself chatting up an interesting guy, thinking, "hmm...he seems nice, and he's a Democrat...maybe..." only to realize later, after doing the mental gymnastics required to figure out why you and he are at the same victory celebration, that yes, he is your cousin. Distantly, but still. When in doubt, just say no to cousin lovin'. Words to live by, I think.

We were not celebrating the national results, of course, but the local ones, which put our candidate for City Court Judge on the bench. I shook hands with a bunch of politicians I'd known only by seeing their name in the papers before, and had lots of awkward mingling moments where I stood within spitting distance of people I recognized vaguely but could not place, because I have a horrible memory for faces and after all this time temping in my relatively small area there's a scary amount of people out there I should recognize but really can't.

Speaking of my flakiness: I dragged my ass twenty miles out past my house to meet with R. for our tutoring session, only to realize upon pulling up the library that it was closed. Closed! Super fab tutor that I am, I totally just assumed that the library closed every night at 7PM, as it had last Wednesday (the night of our first meeting), but I was completely wrong. It closes at 5PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which is aggressively annoying because those were the two nights I'd scheduled our regular tutoring sessions to be on.

I tried frantically to call R. and catch him before he got in the car, but no luck. I ended up sitting alone in the dark in my car on the side of the road, positive I was going to be sideswiped by one of the many trucks whizzing by at 50 mph (but should not have been worried – my electric blue station wagon, hidden as it might have been in the shadows on the side of the road, still was a smidge more visible and avoidable than the sprightly deer these drivers are trained to avoid).

Note: Watch my car get nailed next time.

R. was gracious and understanding and willing to reschedule for tonight, and after chatting a bit, we both got in our Ford vehicles and took off in opposite directions, he to the country, me to the city, where I sat in an office and annoyed random people in my hometown via phone in an attempt to get them to the polls.

I was just getting to the O section at a little after eight, less than an hour before the polls closed, when my father poked his head in and told me to come upstairs with him to make calls from the office he was using. I gathered up my list with its careful notes and my half-full bottle of Diet Pepsi, ready to continue the fight from a different vantage point, but when my father led the way into the hallway, he turned right instead of left.

"But the stairs are there," I said, pointing vaguely but still following him.

"Do you think it'd be less obvious if we took the stairs?" he asked.

"Less obvious?" I said, and watched him hit the down arrow on the elevator panel. "Wait, isn't the office –"

And just as he said, "We're bailing," I realized that was what he was doing, and stood there open-mouthed in shock.

Became more open-mouthed with shock when my father announced we were going to his Upstate Independent Filmmakers Meeting (one of my father's many random activities). We arrived just in time for the last film, which was a ten-minute commercial spot for the – and yes, this actually exists, and I would direct you to the website, but it appears to have suffered a catastrophic website failure. I can't tell you how hard it was not to laugh at the stock footage from the 1970s of people paddling across a lake, set to synthesizer music so cheesy I thought it wasn't used for anything but parodies anymore. I felt evil and awful and wrong, but then after the lights came up the guy who made it confessed that he hated the music too.

There followed a lengthy, excruciatingly boring discussion of cameras which I won't go into here because I will not spread my suffering. This is the same reason I won't say more about that thing that's about to happen at 1PM.

Remember how I said that Tim O'Brien book was disturbing in the best way? Or some crap like that? Yeah, scratch that; it was disturbing in the worst way, actually. I couldn't sleep last night because I couldn't stop thinking about the stupid book. And then the cat sat on my head an hour before my alarm was supposed to go off, so I was operating on 3-4 hours of sleep today. Am at the point where it hurts to keep my eyes open, but must keep them open because have Stuff to Do! Stuff! Stuff must get done!

...or maybe I'll just sleep. Or spam my LJ some more.

Movie recommendation: 50 First Dates.

I saw this movie when it came out in the theaters, and it made me cry. Really cry! An Adam Sandler movie! I know! But oh, how it got me. Some of the gags in the movie are funnier than others, and there's some gross stuff that I don't find funny at all, but the really important thing was that even if it was stupid funny at times, it was never mean. There was a real sweetness to the movie that I loved, that came through in the Adam/Drew romance as well as Drew's relationships with her brother and father, and Adam's with his best friend. And it did it without being too corny. Now it should be noted that I have a rather high threshold for corn; still, I feel confident in calling this movie sweet but not saccharine, funny, and with an ending that made me want to clap my hands together like an overexcited four year old. I may have actually done this in the theater. I am that kind of person.

In other news: Kerry picked Edwards for his running mate. I like! Go, Dems, Go!

In yet other news: Nader was on The Daily Show tonight. Watch me flail in impotent rage!

( note to mr. nader )

And that is all.

Al Gore gave a speech yesterday that a lot of you have probably heard or read already, but I have to mention it here because I saw part of it on TV and it gave me chills. It made me stand up and clap alone in my bedroom. AL GORE did this! He was IMPASSIONED! BOLD! He expressed a lot of my rage in a far more eloquent way than I could.

It was awesome. I'm cut/pasting it here. Al, the guy who should be running things now, said:

( George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world. )

I was going to do that name meme, but I realized that it kind of began and ended with, "If you call me Jess, then you are...just about everyone I know." Except my Uncle Kevin and cousin Emma who call me Jessie, and my father who calls me Honeybunch, and my brother who calls me Sloppy Jr., and my mother who calls me Jessica when she's really mad at me. But other than that? Jess all the way.

Typing that made me realize how important it is to write things down because for a second there, I completely froze up because I remember right after my grandfather died, I used to think of the way he said my name and how it got to me just to think of it, and for a second there right now I couldn't remember it -- if it was a special nickname, or a shortening of my name, or just the way he looked when he said it. This is why I should write things other than my boring-ass job frustrations in this journal! I'm going to look back on this later and just go from entry to entry, all, "Day X. Job is annoying, cat did something wacky and/or annoying, JC is dreamy, vote Democratic. Day Y. Job is annoying, family member did something wacky and/or annoying, JC is dreamy, vote Democratic." I should use this to remember things! But I don't, of course.

For those of you wondering: it wasn't a nickname or anything; it was just the way he looked when he said it, sitting in his favorite chair at the kitchen table next to the window, paper spread out in front of him. "Heya, Jess," he'd say, always with a big smile. Always. He always called my mother Margie and my cousin John Jack, all things my uncle Kevin does now, in almost the same voice, which was unnerving at first but is comforting now.

I continue to have this low-level obsession with the whole Same-Sex Marriage Amendment and Ralph Nader, two things which I know are mostly part of my misdirected anxiety over this year's presidential election. I drove home tonight talking to myself about this, which makes me wonder if I'm a crazy person. I mean, I know most people talk to themselves occasionally (right? right? no? okay then.), but do other people ever spend, like, an entire commute ride talking themselves through issues? I thought passing cars probably thought I was crazy so a couple of times I tried to bop my head around like I was listening to music or something instead of ranting about the Federalist Papers, but that made me feel even more insane and pathetic (something I would have thought difficult to do). But bottom line, I really think everyone should go out there and read Federalist No. 10 because it's AWESOME and totally explains everything you need to know about the Constitution and why we were set up the way we are. I know you're sitting there thinking, "Jess, putting 'Federalist No. 10' and 'awesome' in the same sentence is, quite frankly, really nerdy." To that I say, "You're right!"

Come on! It's titled "The Same Subject Continued" -- doesn't that make you want to jump into the reading right there? Anyway. I like it. It comforts me. I've had a copy of The Federalist Papers by my bed for the past couple of weeks, since I dug it out of the basement after the President's assertion that a Constitutional Amendment was the proper way of addressing the public's concerns about homosexuality. Hello, no! Totally not!

As for Ralph Nader, I don't know how many people out there have seen Jerry Maguire but you know that scene between Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. in the bathroom, where Tom Cruise starts flipping out and kicking the walls? THAT'S how I feel about Ralph Nader and his supporters right now. And I know there are people on my flist who voted for him in the past and who may wish to vote for him in the future, and I'm sure you're lovely people, but much like Tom in Jerry Maguire -- I'm just VERY FRUSTRATED by the Nader thing right now. I mean, it's not like Tom doesn't like Cuba in that scene! He does! He's just very upset and confused! Like me right now, with Naderites.

And that's all I have to say right now. Except! I made one of those little make-your-own-icons! Except the hair is too long and, I fear, kind of looks like a mullet. For the record: I do not have a mullet. I did, back in 1987 or so, but in my defense, I was seven at the time. Mistakes were made. Anyway, I went with the longer hair because I wanted to communicate the curliness of my hair and that seemed the best way, even if my actual hair is quite short at this point.

Bedtime.

Obligatory OC Commentage: I described the show's premise to my mother the other night and she said, "Oh, like Fresh Prince?" and I almost fell over because dude! It is so almost exactly like Fresh Prince! Carlton=Seth! Will=Ryan! Except they're not related, but still.

In other news: I have become completely obsessed with The West Wing now that it's in syndication on Bravo and work it into just about every conversation I have. This is because (a) I can't bear not having someone to blab to about my new obsession and (b) my life has been so boring of late that there's been very little outside of the TV world to talk about.

Which kind of changed tonight! I think I've mentioned before that I'm taking a grad history course at a local university to see how I like it, and today I had to go to the school's "Welcome to the Graduate History Program!" meeting. I was, of course, SO NERVOUS, proving that the new poise I've been rambling about to people in my life is a complete fabrication. I feel like I'm no longer shy because I don't meet new people that often nowadays, what with being a lame unemployed temp who chills with the same group of friends she has for years. But tonight, having to go meet a whole group of people for the first time? Nerves! Nerves!

I would like it noted for the record that I was NOT late; in fact, I was actually very, very early. This is good because it took me four tries around the MASSIVE circle at the main entrance to the campus to find the Visitors' Parking, despite the fact that the Visitors' Parking is right off of the circle and marked by a huge blinking lit-up sign. I am not exaggerating; a huge. blinking. sign. And I did not see it! I drove around the circle so many times, and so slowly, that the students sitting in the bus kiosk on the circle stared so much at me my third time around (I was going ridiculously slowly in an electric blue station wagon with a hole in the bumper -- suffice it to say I was conspicuous) that I had to get off the circle and drive around the rest of the campus a bit before I could go back to the Mysterious Circle Drive Of Hell Or At The Very Least Major Annoyance again.

Finally spotted the massive blinking sign and pulled in, parked the car, and realized that the lot was located as far as humanly possible from the building I was headed to. This annoyed me because (a) I am lazy and (b) I was not wearing sensible shoes. You'd think after twenty-three years living in this world, I would realize that umbrellas and sandals do not mix. If you feel you need to bring an umbrella, then odds are you need to change the sandals! Why do I never realize this? So my feet got all wet and gross and I felt self-conscious about the sandals, fearing they would realize a girl who can't even choose proper footwear does not belong in their university.

Speaking of the university, I must take a moment and marvel at how annoyingly designed it is. Everything looks alike -- no, seriously. It does. It was all built at once, and it's all symmetrical and white and with intimidatingly high arches everywhere, and it's difficult to get to one area from another because there are Very Specific Ways Of Getting Places which aren't obvious at first! I kept wandering around, ending up in areas cordoned off with chains and padlocks and stuff. It was like a nightmare! I almost got to the point of throwing down my bag, screaming, "I can see it RIGHT THERE, why can't I GET THERE?!?!" very dramatically a la someone in a horror movie. That, or maybe asking a fellow student for directions.

It was totally just like a nightmare.

Anyway, the meeting itself wasn't really a nightmare, except for the part where the guy who did most of the talking was boring enough to make me come thisclose to falling asleep. I talked to a couple fellow students, found the bookstore and bought my books, and got some cheddar cheese and pretzel combos on my way out. I call that a successful meeting, myself.

Post-grad school meetingage, I drove out to meet Anna and Jo to go to one of the Dean meetups in our area, a different one from the one Anna and I went to before. The one Anna and I went to a few months ago was nice, at this cool coffeehouse with lots of young people. This one? Was held at the library and we three were the youngest there by twenty-five years easy. I felt like we'd accidentally walked into the local AARP meeting, but no! It was Dean! I was surprised how many older people are, like, crazy into Dean. As my friend Jo said, "I didn't know there were liberal old people! I thought you just got bitter as you aged." I had felt the same way, probably because the most politically active member of the senior citizen set I know is my grandfather, a man who had always been a strong supporter of the Democratic party and now falls to the right of, well, everyone on the ideological spectrum. Tomorrow he wants to dictate a letter to me about Andrew Greeley, btw. My life is so exciting.

Regardless! Loooots of older peeps. Anna and I were so jealous of Jo (in that way where you're not jealous at ALL) because the one guy in the place who looked like he could be under forty sat down next to her for a minute. Said under-forty was sporting this orange-highlighted mullet/tail hair disaster from the early eighties that was so terrible, you couldn't look away. Seriously? Worst hairdo ever. The kind of hairdo that's so awful that when someone wearing it sits down next to one of your best friends, you canNOT look at your best friend because you know -- KNOW -- that if you make eye contact, you will not be able to prevent hysterical laughter. The type of hairdo that makes you want to kidnap the wearer and take him to a cabin in the woods until he grows the hair out to a length sufficient to style differently. The type of hairdo that, hours later, is still making me cringe and feel bad for the guy.

Anyway, Mr. Hockey Hair got up after a short conference with the guy sitting two seats down from Jo, and soon we had to do the sit-in-a-circle-introduce-yourselves thing I always, always hate and had been grateful for avoiding at the grad school meeting. Public speaking sucks! Okay, so it's not really public speaking when you're just introducing yourself, but still! All those eyes on you! Nerves! I'm pretty sure I made no sense when it was my turn. The other people were interesting and in only one or two cases suspiciously crazy-acting (one guy got all bug-eyed in passion over the whole thing, and later nearly had a fistfight with another guy in the meeting over being a bad listener or something -- I missed the bulk of the fight because I was in the bathroom! How unfair is that?). It was a pretty good meeting. Don't agree with Dean 100%, but nobody's perfect (save myself, natch), and he's not afraid to call Bush out. Not to mention the fact he's getting people fired up.

And lastly, Note to self: CALL AND ORDER NEW CONTACTS TOMORROW. Have been operating off of same disposable pair for almost twice as long as I'm supposed to. Eyes are very upset b/c of this.

And now I go off to lull myself to sleep with my tape of The West Wing. Happy times.

So I went with [Anna}, my favorite pinko-commie friend, to this anti-war meeting tonight and boy, it was a trip. The meeting was endless, if informative, and I certainly got to know some interesting people. Sample dialog:

Boy Whose Clothes Consist Entirely (And I Mean Entirely) Of Patches (Patches, for Short): I don't think we're paying enough attention to Palestine.

Emotional Pigtailed Girl: I would like to echo what Patches said and say that we aren't paying enough attention to Palestine.

Redheaded Doctor: I would like to say that while I understand what both Emotional Pigtailed Girl and Patches are saying, the peace movement in America is facing a FIERCE TEST and I think we should focus on that. We are about to be TESTED! We must be FOCUSED! DETERMINED!

Facilitator Dude: Excellent point.

Patches: I hear what you're saying, but I still don't think we're paying enough attention to Palestine.

Emotional Pigtailed Girl: I would like to say that I completely agree with Patches.

[Ten minutes of pointless, roundabout discussion resolving nothing.]

Facilitator Dude: I hear what everyone's saying. How can we fix this?

Random Peacenik: I think we should make a flier.

Facilitator Dude: I think that's an excellent idea.

That turned out to be the go-to solution for almost everything, making a flier. Every time a flier was proposed, it sparked a twenty-minute discussion of who would make the flier, where it would be copied, how it would be picked up, where it would be distributed, etc.

It was a good meeting though! Very informative, and it's nice to see people being all active and stuff. Even if I did have to sit next to a smelly guy with a nervous tic who kept talking to himself. Or maybe he was talking to me? I couldn't tell. I smiled and nodded a lot.

Anyway, after that, Anna and I grabbed dinner at the local vegetarian person and I was feeling SO socially responsible, eating vegetarian and attending peace meetings and the like, that I felt the immediate need to go to the nearest massive corporate box store and thusly we went to Border's. There, Anna and I indulged our Border's Tradition, which is to go to the young adult section and pull out The Likes of Me, a book which has, I believe, the funniest back cover ever! Ever! Reproduced here for your enjoyment:

Cordelia Lu Hankins is half Caucasian, half Chinese -- and all albino. She has grown up isolated from the world, with her distant father and a giant stepmother named Babe (after Paul Bunyan's blue ox), in a remote lumber town in the Pacific Northwest. She is convinced she is ugly and that her father has deliberately hidden her away. Then in the summer of 1918, when she is fourteen, she meets the dashing Squirl. Squirl is charming and handsome, and Cordy falls desperately in love with him. But her father forbids her to go near Squirl. One day they meet on the mountain and Cordy receives her first kiss, as well as a wild ride down a log flume that gets Squirl fired.

Determined to follow Squirl, Cordy runs away. She begins an exciting adventure that takes her to the sideshows of Seattle's Luna Park, where her unusual looks bring her fame. But her journey also brings tragedy in this thought-provoking coming-of-age novel. Randall beth Platt has created an original, resourceful teenage heroine with a strong voice and a gutsy determination to make her way in the world.

Okay, so, I'm sure the book is quite good and maybe someday I'll actually read it (I tend to go for fun over substance in my YA novels, which is why I'm such a fan of The Princess Diaries and the like), but I don't know if it could ever live up to the sheer enjoyment factor of that back cover.

And now I must go to bed and ready myself for another day in the salt mines, aka the law office. But! Tomorrow's Friday! Woo!

Just read this article on salon.com after my history professor mentioned hearing about the potential Jeffords switch earlier on the news. Am now happy, excited, hopeful -- it probably won't happen, and I haven't even read a lot about it, but the mere possibility of a Republican Senator defecting to the Democratic party is just too exciting for me not to enjoy right now. A few people have mentioned that Zell Miller from GA may switch too, but I don't think he will. So, only happy, peppy, excited thoughts from me on this as I enjoy imagining Democratic control of committees and the legislative calendar.

Until now, my roommate and I have been quite guiltily reading articles about Strom Thurmond's age and infirmity. Feeling like Very Bad People. Don't have to do that today!

Woohoo!