Even though I woke this morning at 6 am, after only four hours of sleep, I was in a stellar mood. What a great fucking day today is. Who knows where this mood came from? All I know is that I need to take advantage of it while it lasts. Perhaps it is because I’m certain I was still slightly buzzed this morning at work. At least I know my productivity increases with leftover Honey Weiss in my system. Because I finished the hell out of my work and my morning flew. And then, as I look forward to every day, I lunched with Kristin and Matt and said funny things about people and lawyers and MSU alum and literature.
Next Friday is my birthday, and I haven’t really thought about that much, other than last night, when I hoped that turning 25 could be as fun as yesterday’s random Thursday goings-on. Maybe it’s because we hadn’t really spent a night at the café recently, or maybe it’s because I had only planned on one and then driving my sleepy ass back to St. Louis Park. Or maybe it’s because Shannon and I know how to have a damn good time and our creative making-fun-of-people juices were flowing just a little extra. After all, I have all of this practice at work. I’ve nicknamed like three people in the last week. It’s hard to keep track of Dr. Hibbert and The Miami Vice Villain. This is why Kristin made an ultimate document of everyone’s names. It will eventually get so big we will have to alphabetize it. And add an index that reads as such:
Dyke Pants, Spongebob.
Del Ugly, Benicio.
Shirt 2, Dragon.
To add to my unofficial Tony Sims Band Night document, I can mention Marathon, quite possibly the most athletic muscular mass of woman I’ve ever seen on a dance floor. Imagine someone in their 22nd mile of a marathon. Now imagine someone having a seizure while standing up. Now put them together: a marathon dancing seizure. Every aerobic-like move she made was exaggerated—bend the knee, lift the leg, pump it, up to the chest, do it again, sweat like morning dew, now I’m over here, oh yeah, I’m dancing, let’s go, four miles left, oh yeah. Her thighs were as thick as a telephone pole.
There were a couple of chubby guys on the dance floor who I almost fell in love with. They had some joke-y moves that cracked Shan and me up from the rail. You know. They reminded us of us. I should’ve asked the one with glasses and flip-flops to dance. Another potential husband, just slipping through my apprehensive fingers. What a night. What a good, typical, booze-driven, well-deserved, traditional night. It really pulled me back into reality: that reality, of course, being that even though so many aspects of my life have changed, even though I’m an adult now, even though I have a real-person job: I still have Thursday nights to get a beer buzz, listen to stories of shenanigans from the TSB, sit at the rail, and listen to music that I never, ever tire of.
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I’ve been writing parts of websites and then wholes of a website this week. All fake, of course—just practice until next week when real work begins and I have to talk to real lawyers instead of mock-lawyers on the phone and ask them real questions when I really just want to ask them fuck, how do you spell lawyer again? And Hey, did you know that “lawyer” has the word “law” in it? That’s just fucking weird, huh!
Anyway, even though I still know very little, the breadth of knowledge I’ve acquired in the past two weeks is stunning. Not stunning in a conceited way, as in I’ve acquired more knowledge than everyone else, but stunning in the way that it stuns me that I have remembered all of this knowledge and that as I type I can feel the new information spilling out of my dense head onto the computer screen.
Really, though, my head is empty. I was struggling with my mock-site yesterday, and I explained it to Matt like this: Normally when I write, I have all of this experience up in my head. Books, poems, workshops, criticisms I’ve taken, former pieces I’ve written. I open the writing portal, and there all of it is, sitting, waiting to be used. Plus there’s that dash of creativity that marries all of it in a polygamous bliss, and the motivation to keep digging through the knowledge until I find the best possible way to convey whatever it is I’m trying to convey.
And when I go to write websites about law firms, I open my technical writing portal and this is what I find:
I’m drowning in my brain’s emptiness. My brain is barren. I have no pool of knowledge to draw from, no keg to tap, no “best option,” just “only option that I can think of that isn’t any good at all.” Litigation? Power of attorney? Chapter 11? I think the only term I understood my first day here was DWI. And that’s just because I went to school in Mankato.My fingers rest on the oily keyboard, which inappropriately is called the “Dell QuietKey.” (It should be called the “Dell 1996 keyboard with sticky keys that click loudly no matter how quietly you try to push them.” It’s an atonal piano.) My fingers wait for the electricity of brain to finger to work, but it doesn’t. Even with all of the notes in front of me, with millions of similar websites accessible to me, nothing comes. Well, it’s starting to come. I spend a lot of my free time reading websites of law firms. Explaining the “experience” these firms have. Everyone has so much experience! And so will the firms I’m writing for.
I am looking forward to the forthcoming challenges of this work. It’s much like writing a nonfiction essay: what is the center of this that we’re trying to achieve by both direct statement and reading through the lines? What is the core of this website? What can I pull from these pages and pages of notes and information from this lawyer to market him or her? How do I make it sound good? When writing an essay, (which I admit I haven’t done for awhile) I sort through metaphoric pages and pages of life experience. I wonder, what is the core of this experience? What can I pull from this information to make my writing important and appealing to my audience? How do I make it sound good?
The last thing I want to say about this work is that it’s a true testament to my time management/not getting off track skills. As you can see by this 4 page blog, I'm doing quite well.
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The Cub Foods by my house is shitty. It’s a shit-Cub. I absolutely despise it. I hate that the lady who checked me out last time commented on my “horrible” driver’s license photo (the driver’s license that I kept forgetting to renew and that expires next Friday—when the HELL am I going to have time for that?); I hate that this time the girl who checked me out was obviously a lesbian (that’s not the part I hate) but I hate the part where she angrily threw all of my food onto the belt (that bitch whipped it down there, overhand, I swear it) because the girl in line ahead of me did not respond to her oddly flirty advances; I hate that someone left a note on my car in the parking lot that read Learn how to park, duuuhh; I hate that they don’t carry the Klarbrunn flavored water I’ve become addicted to because it doesn’t contain Aspartame; I hate that they don’t have foccacia bread (and I hate that MS word underlines “foccacia” in red and suggest I replace it with “moccasin”). Screw you, Knollwood Cub. You super-suck. You ruin Cub for all of the other Cubs, just like the dirty floors and brown fruit and extra-chromosomed cashiers of uptown Mankato Cub almost ruined downtown Mankato Cub. Get some good cheese, you dicks.
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I’ve been spending way too much time in my car lately. I get angry at traffic. You should be surprised that I have not dedicated an entire blog to Minnesota drivers. Because I wrote one in my head the other day, all while idling on the crosstown.
The one lovely thing about the crosstown, though, is that when you first get on from Highway 55 and cross the bridge, you can see both the skylines of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I found this exciting. I kept turning around to look at St. Paul and then looking right to Minneapolis and thinking, huh. There they both are. I love these cities.
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If I ever meet a woman who talks so much I wish I had brain damage so I couldn't understand her, I'm naming her cunt force twat-ma. Like blunt force trauma. It is, quite possibly, the most misogynistic comment ever. And feel free to use that. You don’t even have to give me recognition. I spend too much time in the car. Too much time thinking of things that should never, ever be thought of.
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My sunburn is finally peeling. Everyone stop by and peel off a little piece of skin.
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