The Life and Times of Elliot Pike

For those who know me, this will (sadly) be news and cause for celebration: I actually went on a date last night.

For most of my life I’ve been chronically (and sometimes I worry terminally) single. With brief exception, during the last four years in Los Angeles I not only didn’t have a boyfriend, or dates, but I wasn’t even getting flirted with. Actually, there’s even something worse than not being flirted with: it’s when guys who have no self-confidence look you over with the obsequious look of “He’ll do; he’ll suffice; maybe he’ll like me.” in their eyes. Most often these guys are way older than I am—like 15 or 20 years—but sometimes they’re not too bad except that they have… this is going to sound really nasty to say, but they have no soul left.

So I would go out and the only attention I would get would be from these vulture-like guys, which is depressing because it means that I qualified as carrion.
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Dream time. Last night was a little strange. Actually it was downright creepy. On some wall—I have no good details about the exact location; I think it was some hallway—about waist-heigh (3 feet from the ground) there was a hole in the plaster revealing an eye.

The eye was wide, looking perpetually terrified. It seemed to tremble a little bit, the pupil was always very small. It would look at me or anyone nearby, darting around nervously. The skin around the eye and the eyelid was a strange dark olive color—not any typical (human) hue you ever saw. (Actually, the movie poster for The Grudge had some sort of ghost or specter that had that same olive tone. My subconscious isn’t all that original.)

No matter what I did there was no way to find out any more about this eye. I couldn’t tell if some poor unfortunate person had been somehow embedded in the plaster, only his or her eye showing through the hole, or if this were some supernatural free-standing eye. I would try to communicate, yelling for it to blink if it understood me. I tried holding hand-written notes for it to read. There was no sign that the eye comprehended me, only that it “saw” me and always seemed terrified.

I tried to get on with my life, but always there would be this damn eye in the plaster that I would pass by every now and then. (Throughout the night in my dreams I would be interrupted by the reminder that this eye was here.) I began to get irritated by this nagging eyeball, almost feeling an urge to stab it, or to try to chip away at the plaster around it. Of course I didn’t do any of these violent things, but I could feel the irritation and agitation building in me.

There was no resolution to this dream. Eventually morning came, I woke up, had coffee, sketched the eyeball and started with my day.

Has anybody else noticed something strange that happened in politics a couple weeks ago? I hate to attribute this to the Foley scandal—to a large degree I think that thing has been overblown. Okay, I’ve enjoy the sick thrill of watching the Republican leadership dig itself deeper and deeper into a hole with all those lame denials and finger-pointing. But no, there’s something else that has changed recently.

As long as I can remember, since the first days of Ronald Reagan, it was always “cool” to be a Republican. I associated Republicans with the meat-head school jocks who weren’t very nice or smart, but were popular and got all the girls. (Funny note: in High School my classmate Dennis who was totally “Mr. Republican and Proud of It” turned out later being gay. I always get a chuckle over that. But I digress.)

Nobody would hate me for being a Democrat, but it was such an un-cool position. Having lived my life a total misfit geek that didn’t really bother me. I knew I would never lose sleep wondering if I would ever be popular. That one was answered easily. My point is that for the average kid I think it was far far easier to just call yourself Republican and stop worrying about politics. It was easily the path of least resistance, and while you were cheering for the winning team you could sip your White Zinfandel and enjoy being part of “the right”.

I’ve always felt like this simple fact—that the ‘cool by default’—aspect of the Republican party was always a huge silent disadvantage. Well, something just broke, and I don’t know why Foleygate caused the tipping point but I think it’s happened:

It’s no longer cool to be a Republican, I swear for the first time since Jimmy Carter was in office. If you want to hold that distinction you now have to have a good argument to back up your position. You have to have the conviction to stay on the sinking ship. You really have to believe in their objectives, not just their pithy slogans. (And when most Americans examine the true Republican agenda that mostly favors the rich and the oil and drug companies, they have a difficult time relating.)
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Okay, anyone who has experienced anything like this, write a comment.

Have you ever felt like all of a sudden part of your brain started running a different program? Or that it was just processing information differently? Are you aware that your brain—specifically how it processes information—one day is significantly different from how the information was processed a month, a year, four years earlier?
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I feel like a kid staring in the window of a candy store, but the store is closed. Since Friday I’ve had a cold. It’s not a bad one (thank God) but I’ve got a pretty strict code of ethics and hygiene that says I don’t go spreading my cold to other people if I can help it. So although I’ve been dying to go out and carouse in these first evenings in New York City, I’ve been stuck in this apartment.

I’m so antsy though, and I’ve got reason to celebrate. My condo in L.A. finally sold, three weeks late, and I’ll be seeing that money soon. And from the previous entry you can see I had my first exciting job leads. Now just give me some flirtation and romance and I’ll be in heaven! Well, the cold is mostly over, so I’m going to go see my good friend Dale host his comedy show Super-Ego tomorrow night.

What makes in incarceration in this apartment even worse is that the Internet access is just barely usable. It’s Time Warner Cable and outages happen about once an hour and at least 1 in 5 web pages I try to bring up die of communications errors before they can load. Bob (my friend on whose couch I’m crashing) has called Time Warner and they just say that the circuits in this part of the city are overloaded with too much traffic, and they are desperately trying to beef up the infrastructure. So for $60 per month we’re getting something that’s more or less as good as dial-up? I tell you I’m in pain here.

I’ve found DSL service that’s about half that price, and today—by the grace of God—I hope I’ll be able to find a cheaper and more reliable replacement. The phone company guy came by last week, but Bob didn’t have access to the phone box in the basement so we had to reschedule for today. (And that was a hair-pulling experience that took I-kid-you-not 2 hours of being transferred to different calling center people, wading through automated computer menus, etc.) Please, today let me get reliable broadband access going. Please!

There is a reluctant bright side to my little incarceration here. I do have a lot of work I need to do. I have to get a huge “co-op board application package” together by Friday if I want to be able to interview with the board on the November 1st meeting to apply to buy the apartment I want on 22nd street. For most people out there that last sentence will make no sense. Suffice to say buying real estate in New York City is the most complicated process you’ve ever heard of and leave it at that. The crux of the matter is that if I don’t get this package together by Friday (which requires I get 5 letters of reference written by friends and employers and work colleagues and my CPA, among other things) then I wont be able to interview until December 1st which would mean I probably wouldn’t be able to buy the place before the New Year.

The other thing I have to do is my “homework” for my career coach. At the suggestion of some (rather well-informed) friends, a person in my level of experience can really benefit from hiring a professional to write my resume. At first I thought this was about spending a lot of money (and it is a lot of money for the professionals) to have someone format a Word document, but this is actually a hugely involved process where I work on articulating my strengths, creating a “personal brand” to set myself apart from others in the job market, creating a value proposition (I’m doing that next) and much more.

I’ve been working for a week now on a rather painful experience of writing up my “Top Achievements Per Job” document where I dig out every remarkable thing I did at every job and translate it directly into bottom-line statements of how I brought the client or employer value. It is a painful experience, and to a great degree it is a nit-picking exercise in marketing, but you know what? I’m not even done with the exercise, but if I went into an interview tomorrow with a potential employer I would be completely prepared to talk about the achievements I’ve had at previous jobs and how I brought the employers and clients real solid value. Had I not done the exercise I’d have mostly forgotten the details of these past jobs, all the valuable anecdotes lost in my hazy memory.

Can you tell I’m trying to keep a positive attitude about all this? I am. I’m not going to kid you: I have that cynical voice in my head that is laughing at all this double-talk and telling me that I’m wasting a lot of money. After the past several years I’ve felt so battle-worn. From the wonderfully jobless Bush economy to politics to the painful painful L.A. condo sale I just experienced, it can be really hard to stay chipper.

But I’m looking at all this quite simply: what do I stand to gain and what do I stand to lose if I do or don’t keep this (positive) attitude up? The up-side of staying positive might be landing a really good job that pays wages I haven’t seen since 1999 before the Dot-Com computer industry crash. The down-side would be looking like a fool. (And wasting some money on the career coaching.) The up-side of staying cynical? Well, I could not get a good job and feel smug about how right I was after all.

See? I’m trying to prop my spirits up with a half-decent logical argument. So I’m going to keep up that suspension of disbelief as long as I can.

I’ll be anxious to do a post-mortem on this entire experience once it’s all over. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the famous Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) getting By in America has recently written a new book called Bait and Switch : The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream where she exposes all the career-coaching scams that prey on desperate job hunters, and how there aren’t any white-collar jobs in the marketplace or how the employers are trying to constantly screw applicants.

I’ll concede now that there do appear to be a lot of predators out there. Had I not had a personal referral for this particular coach from a friend (who got real payoff from the experience) I would have never spent the money. Oh and by the way, I do think Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed was a really good and insightful read, if not a little depressing.

Well, enough rambling. As I said, I’ve got a lot of work to do today as it is, and the stakes for not getting it done are rather high.