No, not like that. I still plan to leave. But this week, it finally happened, as layoffs swept through Macromedia. In what seems to pass for the new corporate mindset, no one knows how many people were laid off, or from what teams, because I guess that would be bad for morale. Of course, not telling us stuff is just bad for productivity, as nearly every person on every team stops you and wants to get the scoop.

“Anyone laid off on your team?”

“Yeah, the person who did XXX. What about you?”

Our team got by with one layoff, my friend JoAnn, although I was really hoping it would be me.

I mean, saving my money is nice and all, but… I’d be just as happy finishing my book eating ramen and cashing my government unemployment checks.

I’ve even been especially ornery at work, because I knew they were coming. I wanted to try and be the perfect candidate for a layoff. The obvious one.

“We have to cut one person? Easy! Jeff!”

But, the problem with creating your own job that is not duplicated by anyone else on the team does have its downside, which is… if I get laid off, everything I do would most likely become a small burden for everyone, instead of laying off someone whose tasks can be more easily doled out, absorbed by the hivemind with less interference.

It will suck with Jo gone, though, as she was one of the last breaths of sanity there. Only one left. The rest are good, but they waver, some days they will complain, but the following day, any trashtalking of Macromedia just doesn’t fly. Jo was someone who knows that what we do isn’t important in the grand scheme of things. Now, I don’t want people to read this and think I’m making some blanket statement about technology is bad (which I do believe, in a lot of cases), but just that what I specifically do has little point. The majority of it is writing press releases, although a new level of delusion has been creeping in, except it is not delusion.

Basically, I feel like someone who used to work for Clinton having to perform my same job for Bush-Cheney.

“Can you write something about the Clean Air Act?”

“Sure. Umm, but this basically guts the EPA and relaxes safeguards about releasing dangerous pollutants into the air. Where’s the ‘clean’ part?”

“No, it has a rebate system and encourages businesses not to pollute through tax breaks.”

“But this company pays no taxes already.”

And on and on and on…

I guess what I’m saying is that I wish I worked somewhere where they just said, “This is messed up, but it is what we need to say because of X, Y, and Z.” Instead, it is what we get now with Bush, which is the same spooky message, but that only makes it worse because you get the sense he really believes what he’s saying. I guess I’d rather lie than be stupid, basically.

Trying to not be specific here, so that when this is published, I won’t have Macromedia freaking out about anything. Although, the amusing part is, my team is the one that will deal with it if there is somethig objectionable.

So, with my next paycheck (mid-March), I will be debt-free, and getting on a tight budget. The company stock has been on a slight uptick lately, and I’m curious as to whether I should start dumping stock. My lowest valued shares JUST started vesting this month, so I think I’m getting like 100 or so of them turning around regularly, and the yield now is like $8.50 per share, but figure $2 and change of each share goes to the government, so they can pay to teach straight people about the benefits of marriage.

I will be working with my stepfather on that, though, because if I am selling stock to hit my “I can quit” amount, I will need to know how much of that money is actually mine, and how much I’ll owe the government, because I want my savings to be free and clear of a HUGE tax hit next year, if possible.

Not much else happening, just a nice nervous energy about the book coming up. For a while, i thought I would publish a book on my deathbed entitled “20 Perfect First Chapters,” as I preferred tinkering with something and making it perfect, which is probably just a form of procrastination anyway, to actually finishing it.

But, can’t stop now, I want this sucker done. I want it in stores. I want my friends to read it. I want someone on Amazon to tell me how derivative and boring it is. Because there is no middle ground, you just have to hope the love outweights the hate. Or, that the sales outnumber the remainders, at least.

The word blog doesn’t really appear here, so I don’t feel compelled to write something on the odd chance people are visiting, but as soon as you do anything approaching a journal or blog online, people ask what happened with the updates.

Basically, for the past few weeks, my hours home in front of the computer have been spent transcribing all that I wrote longhand in Thailand into lovely little Word documents, one per chapter.

Wednesday night, I was getting close to finishing, too close, so I stayed awake until after 2 a.m. to finish it off.

Now, the reason it took so long, aside from this being the most boring task possible, is that I didn’t want to be reading it. I just wanted it to be in the system. Inputted, not reviewed or read.

So, on the widescreen iMac, I had half the screen as a Word document, and the other half of the screen was either a DVD movie, usually action or thriller, and I would just type “and then he went,” and listen intently to the movie, be sure to watch the action on the screen, before diving back in for “down the street.”

After a few weeks of this hell, it’s all in. Upwards of 50,000 words. Paranoid that this was some small novella and not enough to pass off as a novel, I thankfully checked and discovered that Fight Club is 48.982 words (although both my word count and chuck’s include “chapter ones” and the like).

So, I’m starting to get the weird feeling that I did it. Not that I’ve written a novel, because that is the term I only ascribe to the finished product. But I definitely have a workable draft. And, unlike previous times, this isn’t a “well, I have to rip that whole thing out, and move that, and change everything related to that” draft. It sort of seems to work.

Again, I’ll know more on Monday, as that is when I sit down on the couch with the printed-out version, and just read it end to end. A warts-and-all reading, no red pens, no notepad to see what is wrong and on what page. That will all come later, and on a chapter by chapter basis. I can’t be lugging some 160+ page unwieldy thing around with me everywhere I go.

The question now is how to polish it. My favorite music is stuff like the White Stripes, where they leave it sloppy, because the more you polish it, the less energy it has. Of course, by the same token, you have to know when you are nailing it and when you are just being sloppy and lazy. And, when the White Stripes record an album in 10 days, it doesn’t mean they went in without chords and lyrics, or having played the songs in concert before.

But that is barometric fun for the coming weeks.

I just figured I should check in and say what has been happening, since I’ve been a bit absent.

Not sure editing the draft is going to make me much chattier. I don’t know about you, but I rather when I am sitting here working on my book, than posting to my site about the book.

I won’t be locking myself off from the world this time, though. I’ll be going out, hanging with friends, and all of that good stuff, in addition to the day job and the book and everything else.

I can’t wait.

This is an amazing example of more clutter than I have ever seen in one place. I keep trying to shrink down what I own to fit my apartment, but this… this is just insanity. You must see it to believe.

Hmm, haven’t really been doing anything blogworthy lately, just a lot of little things around the apartment (moving all my CDs from jewel cases to case logic cases, shelves in the pantry, etc.). Plan to start in on the next (final?) draft of the novel next week, so just trying to get everything ready for that, which sounds odd, but I know that things have to be a certain way for that to take place.

This past weekend, before I came down with a weird headache/fever/sore throat combo that has had be laid up for two days, I went to a Starsailor concert at Slim’s, and I am ready to call the best concert of the year, even if it only early February. I had high expectations for the show, which seemed to be tempered by no one knowing who the hell Starsailor was when I mentioned them, as well as wondering why it took them so long to sell out Slim’s, which is a small venue.

It was just a perfect combination of amazing songs, perfect execution, and a beautiful self-effacing spirit. Normally when I go to Slim’s, I like the intimacy of the venue, but sometimes it also defines the experience, that you got to see a band you like in such an intimate space, but Starsailor were the first band I ever saw who turned Slim’s into a concert arena. Even before they took the stage, they seemed to have too many lights on stage, four huge remote controlled spots on the floor that could point in any direction.

They opened the show with “Shark Food,” the first half of which is a recorded track, and then they jump in halfway with the opening lyrics of “We’re stepping through the door/We’re shooting from the heart/And if we get it wrong/They’ll feed us to the sharks.” No worry of that happening.

The band’s new album “Silence is Easy,” has only been out for two weeks, so I wasn’t as versed as I would have liked, but their first album was played nearly in its entirety, and I every time I thought every song of theirs I loved was played, there were more songs about which I had forgotten. While they haven’t had that amazing, breakthrough hit yet, their catalog is very mature and will serve them well once their hit occurs.

Two tracks on the new album, including the title track, were produced by legendary Wall Of Sound producer Phil Spector, and he’s still got the chops. His production occurred right before his recent run-in with possible murder charges.

James Walsh, no relation (to my knowledge), is the band’s singer, and he played an acoustic version of “Angel of Harlem,” which he said was the first vinyl he ever purchased, although his first cassette, he admitted, was by Erasure. He had handwritten lyrics taped to his microphone and messed them up halfway through, but just started over from the beginning. Walsh always throws down the U2 props, apparently, as recent shows have also had him singing “Where The Streets Have No Name.”

But, mid-concert, I felt like I was near the stage of a U2 concert. The small venue disappeared, and it seemed they were playing to a much larger house (which, of course, in Europe they do). They are used to playing under much higher rafters and had no interest in reeling it in because of reality. The synchronized spotlights were beaming up and blinding the people in the third balcony, not just hitting blunt ceiling 20 feet back. Everyone at Slim’s believed it, so it became true.

The out of body experience sustained throughout the entire show, as the band returned for an encore containing even more songs I loved but had forgotten. In the space of evening, Starsailor moved from a band that I like to one of my favorite bands. I’ve been playing them all weekend and, despite the notion that seeing them at Slim’s would remove the need to see them at a larger Fillmore/Warfield venue, I’m not sure I will be able to follow through on that.

Basically, Starsailor showed me how easy I am to give musicians a pass in concert. But seeing a truly electrifying show is really going to make any other upcoming shows even harder. My expectations are really set high right now.

Do yourself a favor, get their albums. Both are amazing.

This was initially written as a more essayish entry in a hidden blog. But now that I’m unemployed, ya’ll can read it:

Dan is bringing our food, and I want to say hello to him, ask him how his holiday was, see what he’s been up to, but my dinner companion never stops talking.

I’m waiting for the pause, a silent beat that never comes, and despite our eye contact ready and locked in for conversation, Dan eventually has to pull away and do his job elsewhere, an eye flutter and smirk as he moves on. The eye flutter always gets me. Dan is so cute.

A few minutes later, Dan is refilling my iced tea, the one he always has on my table before he ever comes by to take drink orders, the one he never charges me for, and again, I get in a thank you while he does it, but my friend keeps talking through it all.

It doesn’t take long to figure out. When I see Dan, I see someone who is becoming a friend whom I know from his recent thrust into being single after being in a long term relationship, his career shift from doing product design to being a waiter trying to start his own T-shirt business. My friend sees that his drink needed to be refilled.

And, in that one meal, I know I’m in for a lot of change ahead.

*

I’m an unlikely bartender.

Actually, let me rephrase that, seeing as I am not even a bartender yet. I am an unlikely person to want to become a bartender. I’m not really into mixed drinks unless they are fruity and contain rum, I tend to dislike going to bars because of the loud music, high-priced drinks, and the required social skills that I’ve underdeveloped. I don’t appreciate alcohol, as far as wanting wine with my meal, or to pair an amazing dessert with a sweet luxurious wine. I never had a beer, aside from one I somewhat ingested once to shut someone up. To show that I wasn’t afraid of it. I just knew I wouldn’t like it.

But within the next six months, the plan is to leave my high-paying, soul-scarring job writing marketing materials for a software company and become a bartender. Even within my family, the career move has been reluctantly accepted, the ifs and whys now just becoming whens, although candles in Pennsylvania churches are still being lit on behalf of my planned career move.

And, don’t get me wrong, it is a spooky move. I don’t know how to be a bartender. I will be sacrificing as much as $60,000 a year in the process. I will have a job that causes me to be sore instead of bored. My cube-dwelling, pampered hands will callous. There are dormant arm muscles I’ll need to constantly pick up bottle after bottle after bottle, and they aren’t developed yet. There will be petty dramas over schedules. I will have to work on days when I have better options. And I don’t know if I will make enough money to live anywhere near the standard of living to which I have become accustomed.

The worst part is right now, though. The waiting. It’s like a hot guy I’ve been chasing telling me we’re going to have amazing sex three months from now. You can’t really do anything in the meantime.

Somehow, despite having amazing amounts of money and obviously not putting it into furniture, clothes, vacations, stocks, or anything tangible, I have credit card debt. At the time of this writing, it is almost gone, after which I will need to start saving money. I want to start a new life, but not without some safety net.

But, the thing about saving money is… it’s boring as all hell. I just basically go to my job as per usual and twice a month, I keep so much money to live, and put the rest on a credit card bill. And then I go back to working for another half month, and then repeat the process.

Like a good yuppie, I have tried to overeducate myself on bartending. Not by actually learning how to mix drinks, of course. Just reading memoirs of bartenders. Everything I suspected is true, and really, why would I expect to be surprised? Long hours. Grueling work. Bad schedules.

This might be a romanticized notion, but I can’t wait to come home sore from work. I’ve done factory work before, so I know what it feels like even though it’s been a while. Just having a job with some physicality, as opposed to sitting in a cube getting softer each year, really appeals to me. Lifting boxes of beer. And just pushing myself into some zen-like state through peak times, once my muscle memory learns how to make drinks, and just reaching out in some perfect rhythm and barely registering what I’m doing. I can’t wait until that happens. There is no middle ground as far as how people view bartenders, you are either good or suck. All of which is based on how you are handling their drink needs. Swamped doesn’t matter. Everything is egocentric in a bar. Everyone wants their drinks now so they can get back out and interact with friends or someone they want to befriend that night. You are the help. The cog between them and inebriation. The provider of social lubricant.

*

I found myself being rather classist about the whole bartender thing when I first got on this path. It was mainly information gathering, but now I see that the questions would have come across as belittling. I had wanted to use them on some waiter and bartender acquaintances, but thankfully never got the chance before I realized how they would sound.

I wanted to get a sense of how many hours you’d work, how much you rely on tips, how much more bars paid, but the overall thing I was trying to decipher was ‘can I afford to live doing this?’

It still bothers me when I think how it could have been interpreted, because I would be asking people who make their living in the service industry whether someone could make a living in the service industry.

The question is only valid up to a point, after which you aren’t asking whether a living can be made, but how much will be lost in the process.

How much of how I defined myself through money will have to be cut off? How much unlearning will need to occur? How much will I need to learn? Will I still be able to do this, see that, taste these?

In a nutshell, will I still be able to live like me, or will I have to learn to live like you?