Lunch Hour

Stole away from work for an hour, and am home in the cool and quiet. I need to get back out there and into circulation but am finding it impossible to move. There is bad news today. The other sales manager at my property, T, is giving his notice today, and in the world of hotel sales managers, that means he'll be "walked" -- or told to clean out his desk and be done at the end of the day. Giving notice turns you immediately into persona non grata -- you might steal clients if we give you the basic two weeks! -- hence the washing of hands, the near instantaneous abandonment, the tossing of the sales manager into the cold and lonely world.

The ramifications for me are pretty obvious. I'll be taking over whatever deals, clients, or groups he has out there, and in addition will be responsible for responding to everything that comes into the office. I will, of course, still be responsible for my own deals, clients, and groups. There will be just me, the Director of Sales and the Catering Manager. This will go on indefinitely, or until they hire another sales manager.

This is a worrisome proposition, the waiting for a new guy/gal to get hired. It took them fully two and a half months to hire T, during which time I was not only new but also alone at my hotel. Let's just say this can't happen again.

Aside from the workload, there is the morale factor. The Director of Sales has created a singularly dysfunctional department and this puts me right back in the position of being the sole prop for her lunacy. At least when T was here, we could bitch about things together, and could strategize ways to mitigate the bullshit, or to detour her idiotic roadblocks. Without an ally, we'll be back to square one: inexperienced me having to rely on her ad hoc regulations and muddy thinking to somehow fill the hotel.

But lastly is the sense that he's just the first guy to jump from the plane successfully. I'd be lying if I weren't looking around, too; he was just ready to make the leap first. But my leads to date aren't panning out like his are, and I have to keep making money first and foremost. Hence the frustration and the hastily grabbed lunch hour. I'm honestly jealous and freaked all the at the same time. Either way we can say that the next month or so is going to be a lot more hammer-and-tongs than expected.

Some Salient Facts

I don't have much to say, but typically that means that there's too much to say. If you know me, you know that silence isn't my natural condition. I'm my Mother's child; like her, my brain is like one long playground slide. Ideas start at the top and don't stop till they've flipped out my mouth, sometimes at a speed that defies actual articulation. With luck, I'm glib and a bit of a charmer; without it, I'm a mush-mouth idiot.

I'm three and a half months on from my last post, and you'd think a mangy blog like this would've crawled into the corner and starved to death. Blogger doesn't pull the plug, though, like I thought they might, and lo and behold, Bark:Bite is still here. And lo and behold, I'm back at the keyboard thinking -- knowing -- I should be typing something.

So what you should know before we go on is that three and a half months of things have happened and we won't be able to go on until you understand that:

• I'm still employed at the same hotel but only moderately successful at my job. I'm currently chalking this up to the utter failure of my employer to offer any reason whatsoever that I am any more than interchangeable with any other moron out in the world. I'm also currently ignoring the suspicion that this is both a dead end career and I'm meant for something entirely different.
• Who knows what that is.
• I finished the OKC half marathon in under two hours. 1:57 to be exact. I was so nervous I forgot to take off my warmup jacket and track pants. I beat the time I'd set out to run, so consider it a great success. Enough of a success that I decided like a fool to sign up to run the Chicago Marathon in October.
• And promptly injured myself, though it took me a good month for the symptoms to catch up with me enough to keep me off my feet entirely. And it's taken me another three weeks to pinpoint the problem (part of the left Achilles tendon structure) and to start working it out. Meanwhile, time marches on, and my training schedule gets farther and farther behind.
• What that means is, I have to heal my sorry ass and start running seriously again.
  
• Barack Obama is now the Democratic nominee-elect, and if we're lucky the next goddamn President of the United States of America. Ron Paul, it should be noted, is nowhere on any ticket. I still think he was a true gentleman, though, to encourage me to vote my conscience way back in March.
• Tulsa is demoralizing in myriad large and small ways. Almost every day there's something new and dispiriting to absorb -- whether it's the weather, the backward geography, the provincial and small minded people, the ironfisted fundamentalism that seems to underly almost everything that's done here; the redneckism, the head-in-the-sandism, the little-c-conservatism. It's a neverending suburb, is our Tulsa, but tragically is only the third best Vanilla in the store. Even other places do suburbs better.

I suppose that's enough to start with, but there's always more than one reason why things are the way they are, and the way things are today will need some explanation still. Be warned: this list will grow.



Also: hello again.

Stuff White People Like

I'd like to invite you to check out Stuff White People Like, browse around a little, and help me come up with a better title to the web site. Something more descriptive, like Stuff White Middle Class Urban Dwellers Like. But help me, though . . . there're some important adjectives missing.

In case you're wondering, here're some things this White Guy likes the most (and yet now feels strangely uncomfortable admitting) are:

#63: Expensive Sandwiches

#50: Irony

#48: Whole Foods and Grocery Co-Ops

#30: Wrigley Field (Cubbies, woo! Cubbies, woo!)

#8: Barack Obama

This is no means exhaustive. These are just the first five that jumped out at me. There are oh so many more.

Fellow White People, what Stuff do you like?

What I'm Doing With My Evenings

I don't think I told you, did I, that I'm training for a half marathon. That would be the Oklahoma City Marathon half marathon, which occurs a little over a month from now, on April 27th.

For those of you not up on your mileage calculations, a half marathon comes out to be 13.1 miles, while a full marathon -- you guessed it -- tops out at 26.2 miles. I've been concerning myself with the former, though, figuring that one should ease one's self into what my wife calls the Thunka Thunka Lifestyle. (Thunka Thunka being the continual and neverending sound of one's soles on the pavement/treadmill/insides of your brain as you sleep; it's the runner's equivalent of the Buddhist Ohm.)

Training goes like this:

Monday run. Tuesday run. Wednesday "crosstrain on your own" . . . which means rest on the couch and nurse your sore calves. Thursday run. Friday run on your own. Saturday run a long long way. Sunday rest.

That's a goodly amount of Thunka Thunka.

I was telling one of my fellow runners yesterday that when I was a little chubby band geek in junior high, I had no good concept of what being athletic meant. Physicality was so tied up in the seventh grade caste system that I not only didn't participate, I discarded the idea of being active completely. It was for either the King and Princes of the homecoming court or the guys who rumbled in the parking lot at lunch. Neither of whom were part of my group. I played percussion, and on the weekends played D&D. That's a lot of sitting in chairs and thinking about things, but not a whole hell of a lot of moving around.

So you grow up not believing your body. What it tells you and why, beyond some rudimentary indications (I'm tired, I'm hungry, I'm drunk, I'm horny, etc) is almost always unrecognizable. At the same time, when called upon to perform in some specific way -- like football out in the yard in the summer, or onstage practicing your pratfalls, or trying to remember the steps to you and your wife's first dance -- I can tell you that there is a fervent moment of prayer: Body, don't fuck this up!

At that point, trying to throw the spiral or not cracking your skull on the parquet is more about risk than habit. For the D&D band kids, it's the risk of social humiliation. For the Homecoming King and Princes, it's really just habit born of hours and hours of practice.

All this means is, to discover that you can communicate with your body outside of simple declarative sentences is really kind of astonishing. And in your thirties, when all the blitheness is finally gone and you're more aware of what's coming down the pike than you might have been (and what's coming down the pike is your 40s!), it's the right moment to hear what a deep breath sounds like, or to feel each muscle in your calf after running five miles up and down hills. And after that long weekend run, to come back, eat a huge breakfast, take a shower, pad around the house in your sweats and feel one limb after the other loosen up and sag until you're asleep on the couch.

It's astonishing, because who knew I could do this. This isn't about achievement, not a "look ma, straight A's on my report card" kind of not thing. We're not filming Chariots of Fire here. It's more, look at what this vessel that carries around my brain is good for! Look at all the new gears I just discovered, and look what they do!

Is it impolite to say that I just got a new toy, and the new toy is me?

If Celebs Moved to Oklahoma

I've been working really hard. The other sales manager was hired away from us by a competing hotel on my third day, and so now I'm the only guy answering the phones. Catching up on all the stuff that the last two managers put in the pipeline and responding to inquiries. Somewhere in there, training. I've only been there seven days and I'm driving the ship. Go figure.

In lieu of an actual post -- which I've been itching to do, incidentally -- I offer you the magic and the mystery of If Celebs Moved to Oklahoma.

In which the business community of eastern Oklahoma relents and provides our hero with a job.

This is a slightly retouched photo of the building that houses my new office. I've taken the logo off the crown of the building to preserve a modicum of corporate anonymity. You can't see in this picture, but I'm on the ground floor under the cupola down in front. I have one very busy window I can look out of. There's a good deal of coming and going outside.

It's a hotel, if you couldn't tell, and I'm one of the new sales managers. This means I sell the meeting space, and I also sell blocks of rooms to groups who are passing through town. If I can combine the two things, then so much the better. I wear a tie, sometimes even a suit, though things here are generally much more casual than at some of the bigger hotels and in some of the bigger cities, and I can get away with much more. The occasional open collared shirt, for instance. Perhaps khakis.

I was hired on Monday of last week, and started on Wednesday. It's a salaried job, rather than based on a commission (thank sweet jesus), and comes with amenities like a 401k, insurances of various stripes, the requisite vacation days, and free food in the restaurant. I get to order, tip, and just sign my name on the final bill. This is -- almost as much as the regular salary part -- the best part of the job to date. I'm expected to treat clients to lunch, if possible. They expect me to do this.

Now that I've landed on a relatively steady island of employment here in Oklahoma, I can look back and actually count the days I was adrift. Considering that the last day of my job in Chicago was October 19, 2007, and I was given the offer here in OK last Monday February 25, that adds up to four months and one week of sporadic employment. The "sporadic" designation comes solely from the generosity of my former employer, who payed me to do consulting work on the web for them in dribs and drabs.

I think you can agree, though, that 4 months+ is a fuck of a long time. It sure felt like it from here. It wasn't for lack of trying, though there were times that I'll admit that sometimes a day or two would limp past and I couldn't even begin to think about tweaking or retweaking my poorly functioning resume. Or overwriting my letter of introduction --again -- into something either far too formal or insultingly familiar, just for variety's sake. Or shuffling through the local paper's appalling job database and hoping against hope that my queries would bring back something less depressing than "call center representative."

I'd had so little success here that I was beginning to think that the proverbial job market was telling me that I wasn't marketable at all. Or rather, that my rather rarified set of skills (independent film producer? check. long-time barkeep? check. Client Services Manager at a . . . whatkindofplaceisthat? check.) was, in the end, unexplainable to anyone who didn't already know me. Which is the entirety of our new fair city. I'd begun to get this sick feeling that my worth as a worker had been grossly inflated in Chicago, and here I was getting a sense of my true value, which was essentially bupkiss.

But someone at my hotel made an obviously rash decision and took me on. From their point of view, anyway, it looks rash and risky. From my point of view, they gave me a hell of a break, and hence well get my sustained best efforts. That is, until I can be convinced that I'm a touch more marketable here than when I started out.

Mashup Candidate

My wife found another one. A piece of viral weirdness out there in the Netiverse about Obama. I have no idea where it came from but it's jaw-droppingly weird, and strangely uplifting at the same time. Take a look.


On one level, it's really not much more than your standard web artifact. It could be any DJ playing around with Garage Band and Final Cut Pro, sharing via the newest app for sharing, and getting some feedback. The pallette is pretty familiar.

Of course, we'd seen another mashup not more than a week or two ago, this one from Will. I. Am. It was such a strong web meme that it spawned a sharp satire of the McCain candidacy by a poster called John. He. Is.


There're other images out there, too. For instance, the one done up by the OBEY GIANT people:





Here's a poster that I saw several times in Chicago, one that I've started to mentally call "The African School Teacher."





More cribbed from around the web:




There's even ObamaofDreams.com which has come up with some compelling sportswear for the Obama-supporting baseball fan.



Of course, it's a Presidential election. Image controls the country at this point, and it's certainly no surprise that Team Obama has piles and piles of media out there for consumption. Hillary and McCain are also undoubtedly right there with him, their own printing presses going full steam to churn out the message, minute by minute.

What's becoming apparent, though, is that Obama has achieved meme-hood. He's a presidential candidate, of course, and the reality of his candidacy is its own thing and exists in its own political world. But his branding is so strong and his core message is so solid, that he's now not simply political, he's societal. He and his candidacy are a thing in themselves within our culture, separate from the race for the White House.

What this means is that his image is free to be mashed up. He's deconstructable, reinterpretable. Illustrate him as Che Guevara, illustrate him as Steven Biko; illustrate him as FDR, illustrate him as Malcom X. Do a little spoken word song with his speech in North Carolina. Put him in his own Bollywood video and chop up videos of his speech so he's singing in Hindi.

While there's no straight political line from Bollywood to FDR, the conclusion might be that Obama is already so deeply embedded in our culture that he signifies something else as well besides the next 4 or 8 years. That there's a Platonic ideal forming out there, The Candidate Obama, that we can refer to going forward, and to which the actual real life individual, Senator Barack Obama, and his historical trajectory might not always compare favorably to.

A stretch? Perhaps so. He's not been around long -- I know, I know, no need to remind me -- and on a cultural scale, not to say political scale, he's been around even less. He's got "phenomenon" written all over him, and we all know that that can lead to nowhere but eventual disappointment (cf. Bill Clinton). But looking at the things that people are creating around him -- and because of him -- makes me really wonder whether he's hitting a vein of something for which he alone among the candidates seems to have the correct shovel.