8/20/08

Catchphrase velocity

You’re at the Vibe on a Wednesday night, you think of a catch phrase and you have to race it to the southside, if you want to drop it at the Club Whats Up in River Oaks before it gets there by cellphone.

My paying jobs, roughly chronologically

-Weeding the Creagars’ lawn
-Selling Christmas cards door to door. Forgot to collect advance payment so parents fronted and helped collect from customers.
-Farmhand. Haying, including turning bales to dry, gathering them, riding the top of the pile holding on to keep the pile together, getting them into the mow; herding cows; milking them by hand the night of the Great New York Blackout; driving tractors, weeding and irrigating truck farm.
-Camp counselor
-Construction. Unskilled truck driver with learners’ permit for fly by night contractor.
-Machine tender, plastic injection molding factory. Made milk crates, toothbrush handles, cool whip bowls and lids, tampon applicators (super and regular.)
-Food handler, college cafeteria
-Security guard, college dorm
-Paste-up and mechanicals artist,
Columbia University Journalism School print lab
-Guitar teacher
-Baby sitter
-Lab assistant for food chemist
-Canoe guide, northern Adirondacks
-Taxi driver, Manhattan, night line
-Cucumber picker, one day
-Foot messenger
-Diazo printer operator, blueprints
-Kodalith retoucher
-Darkroom technician
-Fish processor, freezing, storage, (currently a Teamster on honorable withdrawal)
-Musical entertainer
-Fashion model
-Leather worker making Coach knockoffs, selling at street fairs
-Carpenter/demolition worker
-Plumber's assistant
-Escort
-Composer/arranger
-Studio musician
-Prep school teacher, rock and roll and humanities
-Film and theater reviewer
-Videographer
-Film production assistant
-Script writer
-Encyclopedia designer/editor, the first Encarta
-Actor, onscreen and voiceover
-Video/media producer
-Photographer
-Video editor/motion graphics artist
-Media consultant
-Trial/Jury consultant

Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit Greater Goethe

I've lived in this new neighborhood for five years and all that time I've been puzzled by the local politics. There are a couple of people in the neighborhood association who part of the time act like scoundrels. They lie and cheat and not in the subtle ways of politicians, but on the record, in really clumsy public ways. That's not the puzzling part. They're just hapless and unreflective and they're doing it for political power and money.
But the rest of the neighborhood seemed not to react to it. That was puzzling. The rest of the people are polite, even courtly, and they were behaving themselves. But no one said word one about these bad actors.
Had I stumbled into a morality-free zone, the only one I've found in my experience of all levels of society in Manhattan, Salina, Kansas, New England farm community, Switzerland, Nepal, the French Riviera, Seattle, etc.?
This morning at 4am I realized it's not the moral judgment they're ducking. They think these guys are doing wrong. It's the open conflict that they avoid!
Okay, cool.
Next question, how do they deal with bad actors? They must have some normative or coercive sump'n.
I hope I don't have to wait another five years to learn that.