MJ Strikes Again

The only thing that made being forced to work at least four solid hours was this letter we got in the mail (the scanned file was corrupted or else you would have seen the neat, slightly cramped cursive writing that adorned the unlined piece of paper):

June 2nd

Dear Michael Jackson

I have been a fan of yours for 2 years, and have enjoyed your songs.
My favorite is "BEAT IT". I always sing it.
Your songs are exciting for me.
Some people don't understand you well, so they think
you are a criminal, but I don't think so.
You are too nice a man.
I would be happy if you had a concert in Japan,
and happier if you wrote to m.e
Thank you

G--u Kobayashi

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what is santa claus going to do?

oh, and the world in general?

North Pole May Be Ice Free for First Time This Summer

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Everything I know about sales I learned from this guy:

[The following is a recurring boutique flashback/nightmare I have. Man. Those were the days...]

Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday I hob knob with the rich and pedigreed. I sell them fancy French lotion. When my clients purse their lips in disgust I’m supposed to mirror their expression. It’s a sales technique I picked up from Andy Bernard, initially as a joke but now I actually furrow my brow and say, “Not in love with this?” with so much concern they feel obliged to smell the next scent I spritz onto the cardboard stick. When their eyes light up I turn into a real life manga character—big expansive gestures and a wide inverted triangle grin: “Doesn’t it feel like absolute silk on your skin? See how you just glow?! Your skin just drinks that right up, doesn’t it!? I am queen of the italic, the exclamation mark, and the leading question. I am their new best friend, cheerleader, stylist, and financial advisor all in one. If I bat my eyes or throw in a wink they just can’t help it: they’re sold.

I, in large part, must manufacture trust ex nihilo. I do this with bright as a button compliments. “Oh Mrs. Morrow, what a stunning x, y, or z! It’s so sleek/elegant/chic/stylish.” I’ve traveled just extensively enough to be interesting, am just ambitious enough to keep them smiling (oh how cute!) but I never let my guard down. Once a potential customer starts to feel intimidated you have only so many minutes left before he or she will write you off forever.

My job is to basically make every person who walks through the door feel like a celebrity. Unfortunately, I’m pretty good at this. The game is simple: at first I keep a polite distance, letting the person take in the lay of the land. (Otherwise the sense of mission—this shopping expedition—will be stifled, lose its sense of adventure.) This scaled down suburban version of Manifest Destiny is imperative, I have learned, to achieving the coveted post-purchase glow—that boost in self-confidence that emerges upon the promise of eternal youth and beauty in a $78 jar. And let me tell you, it’s not the jar that keeps them coming back week after week after insufferable week—it’s the glow.

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MY LIFE IS AN EXTENDED STAR TREK EPISODE

There are commutes and then there are Commutes. Yesterday I had a Commute To End All Commutes. It started out normal: briskly walk from Georgetown to Foggy Bottom (I will forever hold a grudge against those lame-bots who voted against a GT metro stop), just make the 5:45 towards Franconia, suffer through a series of stop and go's (plus the downright bad music blaring, in orchestra, from several iPods), race up the Pentagon escalator and squeeze onto the bus right as the doors were closing.

And yes, I did a fist pump. The bus driver liked that a lot, let me tell you. It took me a second to realize that the guy in the bike shorts in front of me was not going to sit down. He was not going to sit down for many reasons, the major one being the blood streaming down his legs and gushing out of his forehead. "Oh don't worry about that," he said to no one in particular (but sensing, rightly, the stricken atmosphere his mere bloody presence incited), smiling so jovially I wanted to crawl onto his lap and ask for a list of Christmas presents. But there was the issue of all that blood so I refrained.

"There is blood gushing out of your head," said a heavily accented, mustachioed man in a crisp suit, pointing.
"Ah yes, thank you." The man with the blood nodded politely. "I didn't notice." He set his helmet onto the ground and tried to clean his face off. Five real life handkerchiefs proferred from the hands of five real life gentlemen started to wave in front of him: "Take this! Sir, use this! Here! Please!" Blood has a way of making the natives restless. And this was a mess my beloved prepster neighbors needed clean, like, yesterday. [That treacherous phrase is the only way to explain the expressions of frantic "Help This Man" that creased so many of their faces.]
"I will hold your hat," said the mustachioed man, grabbing at the helmet. It was a small gesture, so endearingly wrong, that my grinch-like heart grew 5 sizes. All through this the bloody man kept saying cliches in that same, jovial voice: "It doesn't rain but it pours!" "Need lemons to make lemonade!" The bus driver was crowned with the highest honor: "Just one hell of a guy!"

By the time we got off the freeway the guy's blood was staying pretty well inside of him. We got to our first stop and heard a ponderous clap of thunder. The rain let loose right then and there; the trees looked about ready to snap in two from the wind. The bus driver turned off the bus, lumbered off, and fiddled around on the engine for a few minutes. Exasperated sighs all around. He lumbered back on and we could all tell from his face that we weren't going to like the next words out of his mouth: "Folks, we're going to have to take a little detour." He put our groans in place: "We won't have enough juice to make it if I don't."

The "juice" needed refers to the ever so slight incline of my offramp. When I say "ever so slight" I mean "virtually flat." If we didn't have enough juice to get up that bad boy, we were in sad shape indeed. The detour consisted of a feat of derring-do: instead of just exiting (a straight shoot all the way) our trusty driver thought the best move might be to go around the loop one more time, in effect building enough speed to slingshot our bus up the incline. That's right: slingshot. The man sitting next to me was getting visibly excited as he saw what was about to take place. He was practically jumping up and down in his seat when he proclaimed, to the delight of the whole bus, "I saw them do this on a Star Trek episode!"

Unfortunately, the bus got caught at the stoplight (the guy across from me said, witheringly, "I mean, couldn't he have timed it better?" as if the bus driver could stop time--or at least the stop light). We had no juice. The bus lurched and belched its way past the stoplight. Finally it resorted to a truly comical puttering crawl up the ramp. It shuddered to a stop just yards away from its usual stop. We were all laughing by this time, at the ludicrousness of the whole thing. Three hours later, when I got back from running errands, the good ol' 25C was still there. Its electronic banner flashed its rainbow pixel message: "Not in Service."

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amazing: sneezing panda and fainting goats

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MASH just gave me an awesome future:

You will marry Jason Bourne.
After a wild honeymoon, you will settle down in DC in your fabulous Apartment.
You will have 777 kids together.
The family will zoom around in a orchid race car.
You will spend your days as a receptionist, and live happily ever after.

The best part is that I'm a receptionist NOW! This is a totally feasible future for me! And adoption, right?

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As if Charlie the Unicorn couldn't get better:

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Transpacificists = Bliss

i.e. new blog! (as if I didn't already waste enough time at work...) well, actually, I wouldn't even call this a waste of time. This is probably the most productive thing I do everyday. Basically here's what was up: I desperately needed to get out of a creative rut I dug myself into (slowly, imperceptibly over the past year) so I wanted to start a sketchbook. I wanted a space where I could go everyday to see something intriguing that might help me to get my brain up and working again. So I recruited a few brilliant, wise, and lovely friends (Patricia, Lia, & Thelma--and two brand new editions: Alex & Ash Mae) to help and wham bam, thank you ma'am, we bridged the Pacific Ocean through the miracle of the blogosphere and I feel so glad I could scream!

Transpacific Sketchbook Project

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Office Lexion: Tedious at Best

If there is a single phrase in the office lexicon that I hate more than “It would be my pleasure” (it would not, it would never be) it is this: “I need it done, like, yesterday!” This was funny that one time on that one reality television show when the contestants were hurrying to do something and they needed it done STAT. It was funny—sort of—that one time my friend jokingly said it/emailed it/gchat statted it. It stopped being funny after precisely one usage when my boss said it in reference to a paper he needed in his hands, like, Right That Second. And then he said it again. And then my manager started saying it. And now it is, like, their most favorite phrase in the world.

I suppose, in retrospect, I still don’t mind the phrase outside of the office—though I am nearly 100% certain that Larval Lisa might have used it on Top Chef, which pretty much decimates the phrase for me...

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