Some Poor Uses of Irony

• Irony as a way of distancing yourself from things that are implicating to you when you identify with them
• Irony as a way of criticizing or ridiculing something / someone from a safe distance, ensuring that your own positive beliefs remain invisible and therefore impervious to attack
• Irony as a way of remaining inscrutable and aloof, even around those whom you love
• Irony as a way of selfishly appropriating what is interesting to you from other cultures / movements / communities while draining them of any significant power to symbolize or signify in a way particular to the original culture / movement / community (in example: donning a keffiyeh without knowing/caring about Middle-Eastern politics one way or the other, or without being aware that a keffiyeh has historically been used by Westerners removed from the situation in Israel to show their solidarity with Palestinians)
• Irony as a way of remaining safe, in life and theater (because it is not ultimately safe, and you will more likely remain alone) 

Some Haps

• I have completed my first five days of training
• Sunday and Monday, we are moving out of this house and into an apartment
• Then we will be able to get library cards (hallelujah)
• Also we will have access to a fitness center, replete with walls of mirrors and a sauna
• Furthermore, that is hopefully when we will return to purchasing groceries
• I'm working on a better post about power and being cool 
• Great Expectations opens this weekend at Arena Theater, so if you're around Wheaton you should see it
• I'm reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, and it is wonderful. If you're into whimsy, beautiful descriptions and characters that feel more real than some of the people you know, you may find this worth your while 
• Having a job is excellent for this reason: 
• Tomorrow I actually have a day off
• I get to decide how I want to spend it
• There are many things that would be worth doing, and I may actually do them
• Writing is one example
• Possibly fiction, which would go up at my other blog
• It is called "little forays into fiction"

So I feel pretty good about where my life is today; things are going well in a lot of ways.

PS I gave up on non-sequiturs, as you may have been able to tell.

PPS My friend Tim: he is good. He understood Mulholland Drive on his first viewing. Recently we carved a pumpkin together, and a friend's dad was there, and he said to her later: "they were such a cute couple." To be clear (since this question has come up a few times, and I don't know exactly why) Tim and I aren't a couple. And if you know why this comes up so often, please let me know.

Next Step

Tonight I finished the intensive three-day training program I began on Friday. Two of the facilitators shed tears over how proud of us they were during their final words to us several hours ago (this is not a joke). So: Tuesday I start in-store training. I am excited, but also nervous. I guess this is a totally typical emotional state for someone who has recently acquired a cool job.

Also I have had five hours of sleep total in the last two nights and keep forgetting when I don't get dinner. This has proven to be a problem, when I additionally have been furnished with drinks that are not intended to be consumed with nutritional goals in mind. I am slight of stature and without food in my stomach, I am unsurprisingly sensitive to the effects of grown-up drinks, even when they are consumed in relatively small quantities. 

Tomorrow is a day off, so maybe I will be able to put up something cool. 

First Day

Sometimes you need to just pack your reservations away for a little while and will-to-drink the coolaide. It was fun, and exhausting, and it's hard to imagine two more total days like this, but ultimately it will be worth it.  

Enthusiasm exercises we did today involved: 

triumphant leaping, with yells

Chapter Two: Beginning Work

So: tomorrow, I begin the first day of an intensive three-day training program for my new job. It is going to be great! But I am nervous. It is downtown and I won't know anyone else there. I just hope I don't prove myself to be a total idiot on the first day. Or second or third, for that matter.


Also: according to the contract I signed, I am apparently not allowed to write anything about the company I am working for, and will have to take down an image I posted recently of its logo. From here on out, I will have to deal only in the vaguest generalities when I write about anything work-related. I figure that this could be pretty fun.

FURTHERMORE

Here are a couple of quotations which have become personally meaningful to me in this season of life.

"We read to know we are not alone." - CS Lewis

"What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course." - Walker Percy 

FINALLY

How would a horse in a horse trailer feel if the truck the trailer was attached to stopped at a light, and next to the horse's trailer was another horse trailer, but when the horse looked over at the other trailer the only thing the horse could see in it was a whole bunch of furniture? I will explain the relevance of this question at an appropriate time. 

Love you guys. The ones of you I know, anyway. Especially the commenters. 

On Not Being Happy But Not Exactly Unhappy Either and is it a Problem?

So. I get anxious around those whom I would uncharitably describe as the "insistently-happy." A polarizing undercurrent sets the tone for even our most casual chance encounters; it's as though I'm understood to either be enthusiastically pleased to see them and to be in the world generally, or to find life itself (and them, by extension) hateful to me,without the possibility of a middle-ground. The only possible modification on these two modes in the other's perception would be an intensification, which would permit ecstasy or sheer rage.  The experience is to normal interpersonal interactions what fundamentalism is to religion.
At some point the sentence will be released into the air between us that conceivably can be either a greeting or a very serious question. With this sort of person, it is typically communicated more or less as the former, but with an unsatisfactory response, it will transmogrify into the latter. In example:

"I'm okay."
"Only okay?"
"Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm doing pretty well."
"Why aren't you better?"
"I dunno?"
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"You know, I think I really am okay."
"Are you sure?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Okay. But if you ever want to talk about it, you can talk to me."
"Thanks?"

I am pleased for my friends for whom emphatic well-being colors day-to-day life. From my current perspective, I just don't see how it can be a reasonable expectation for everyone else. It becomes especially problematic when it's given moral weight, as if to suggest that it is wrong to experience negative emotions, even if they (appropriately) correspond to negative situations. And somehow, even more neutral emotions - feelings of "only okay" - are similarly, implicitly, condemned. These are big exclusions from the spectrum of emotional appropriateness for people living real lives in the world: be happy, or you're not "being" correctly.
But being "okay" is just that - being okay, right? It's what a "C" was before grade-inflation. Satisfactory, but with no reason to call it great. It helps to make sense of real sadness and real joy, for the difference from "okay" that both of those are. Of course, emotions are complex and this is a very simplistic way of looking at them, but I think there still is something to be said for an average state of affective affairs, when it is appropriate. In the least, I don't think "only okay" should signify that something is seriously wrong.

So, "insistent happiness:" I think it is primarily some kind of maturity issue, because I do have a number of friends who are doing really well in life generally, and who don't feel a need to force that well-being down the throats of those around them. I spent a couple hours with one of these friends tonight; she gave me the wonderful gift of listening to me talk out some things that have been bringing me down, without wantonly doling out prescriptives intended to immediately resolve The Perceived Problems. That's a real kindness - a small, good thing, in Raymond Carver's words. So thanks Emily. You're really pretty great.

Lame Excuse for a Post

So:

• I start training for my new job Friday
• I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy in one sitting a couple of nights ago
• It was terrifying but also wonderful
• I haven't seen the local turkeys for several days
• I will begin posting with less regularity on Friday, the day I start with the New Work