Read E Unibus Pluram.

From a great 1993 essay by David Foster Wallace:

In the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.

Fuck Dunkin’.

After years of toiling in my chosen profession I’m finally living the dream: working part-time in a Brooklyn cafe as a plate-cleaner, food-runner, order-getter, trash-remover, ice-breaker, heavy-things-lifter and general barista-in-training. The pay stinks but I haven’t been so happy in many, many months.

It’s a small, 15-chair cafe, independently owned by a former private chef (so the food is great–I used to come all the time even before I considered leaving my publishing gig). It’s also the only place of its kind in the area (Bed Stuy), and I think there was really a hole in the market here,* because it’s  packed for most of the day. A lot of Pratt students, but plenty of locals, too.

I haven’t trained on the espresso machine yet–we shop the lessons out to a local bean guy from whom we get our coffee–so don’t ask me yet if I know the actual definition of a caramel macchiato or just the Starbucks definition. (OK, that one I know.) But I’m sure I’ll be making my own foamed milk floral arrangements in the full-moon canvases of cappuccino mugs before I know it, rolling my eyes at every ridiculous flavor shot request.

My second week in, I’m growing less overwhelmed at the constant multitasking required in a barista. I’m definitely a novice, and still fuck something up every hour, on the hour. (I made at least 3 distinct health code violations today, all of which merited a strong reprimand from one of my supervisors. Joy.)  Everyone is very patient with me and the other new hires.

But I am now, at least, able to know what I should be doing at any given time, checking regularly on the status of our pre-made beverages (iced teas, iced coffees, juices), our milks, sugars, table availability and cleanliness, clean cutlery, what food goes where once it’s ready, pick ups and deliveries, 86s, food we need from basement storage, trash that needs taking out, answering the phone, taking drink/food orders of course. The hardest part of the job, I think, is just building that checklist in your head so that you can be constantly going over it as you do busywork.

I can tell that the experienced baristas–in addition to their ability to stay calm under line-out-the-door pressure–are great at what they do because they have automated a constant revolving checklist of Things to Do. It’s easy to get sucked into folding napkins and not notice the dishes piling up on the table, or that while you’ve been juicing oranges a panini has been sitting in the order window. You have to learn to keep your mind focused, but ready to attend to a more urgent task.

I like that the experienced baristas seem to have a very Zen-like approach to managing all this, and I’m looking forward to learning it as well. (And I mean Zen in the totally-co-opted-by-Robert-Pirsig-and-fellow-white-goons sense of the word.) In addition, all the counter workers I’ve met have been very low on ego (a necessity, I’d imagine), and none is a coffee snob, which is refreshing. Most Brooklyn cafes I’ve been to have suffered from a little of the hipper-than-thou syndrome.

* (About the title: a few months after my cafe opened, a Dunkin Donuts opened practically kitty-corner to us, and as far as I can tell is the closest thing we have to competition. So yeah, fuck ‘em.)

LAST DAY OF WORK

I’m out.

It’s not the heat, it’s the humanity.

Now you know, Barry–don’t get conservatives riled up in August.

Now that I’m on my last week of work, my thoughts are turning to health care in a very immediate and non-abstract way. Who cares about socialism, I’m about to lose my meds! My $15 co-pay!

I was on an excellent group plan paid for by my employer, a plan that ends this Friday, but which I can opt to stay on through COBRA, for a breezy $825/mo. (This is 10% more than my monthly rent, if that gives you any indication as to my ability to pay such a cost.)

The only plan I can realistically afford long-term is the basic, no-frills Empire Blue Health Blue Shield, at $151/mo. It provides nothing in the way of physician visits or pharmaceuticals. It’s basically coma insurance, or if-I-get-shot-or-hit-by-a-car insurance, or damn-he-was-awfully-young-for-a-stroke insurance. In car insurance terms, it’s catastrophic.

If I were to be uninsured and something were to happen to me that would require long-term hospitalization or surgery, it would effectively bankrupt my family, the people who, for all my intentions of being financially independent, would end up bearing the cost of my health. Because they’re family.

When you’re a young person with financially comfortable parents or family members, there’s no such thing as being uninsured. You have traditional health insurance or else–like it or not–your parents are your insurance. You don’t have the option of waving them off from the hospital bed.They will go broke saving your stupid, short-sighted life.

One of these insurance options costs you $150 a month. The other is cheaper, but requires that you not think too hard about how selfish and reckless you’re being. That’s why it frustrates me that so many of my “starving artist” friends go uninsured. They think that it’s a choice that only affects themselves, and some of them really do think that they can’t afford it. But in reality these are just children playing at being bohemians in the big city, and by not taking care of their lives’ contingencies, they are insuring that their parents will still be cleaning up their messes.

So please, America, stop being insane. For the sake of your retirement fund and your stupid uninsured sons and daughters, make health care affordable.

Good movie preview, part 2

There’s no way, and I mean absolutely no fucking way, this movie could possibly meet the expectations raised by the trailer, which every time I watch it sets off pleasure neurons in my brain I didn’t even know I had. Sorry Eggers, Arcade Fire, along with Jones and his editing prowess, has set you up to fail.

Here’s the second trailer. I have no snark. I am snarkless.

On quitting: an open letter to my employers

Dear bosses,

What is the purpose of work? I suspect that this is something you learn not to ask yourself when you have a 9 to 5. But I’m a slow learner, always have been. Just look at how long it took me to do what I’m doing now (which is quitting, by the way).

Is a job just a job? Is just being able to work, to earn money and produce goods or a service an end goal in itself? Or is there something to be said for loving what you do? Or, and this isn’t necessarily the same thing, in following your dreams, or pursuing artistic goals? How happy vs. miserable do you have to be to just need to leave, to move on? What is the parallel–if any–of that last question to the whole frog in boiling water scenario that has of late been obsessing me, you might say, while I’ve been plunked in my office chair for 8 hours a day?

I’m not sure. I’m only 24, and these are tough nuts even for people with decades of experience in the Working World. For the past two years I’ve treated these WW nuts–the big questions about Work as a Concept–as I would have treated any big question in college: that is, as a philosophical conundrum. (By the way, thanks again for hiring an English/philosophy student–way to buck the national trend and stun my scientist parents.) Now, for the first time and in the family tradition, I’m treating them as the roots of a testable hypothesis.

I grew up in a household where there wasn’t much talk about loving what you do.  You worked because you were a productive member of society. (I’m not sure that that specific phrase was ever used, but definitely there was the sentiment of: If able, Then work. A priori.) You did not like your job every day, or every week. Not all jobs were created equal, but the difference between any two jobs was dwarfed by the comparatively galactic difference between any job and no job.

It’s funny, considering the emphasis they placed on the WW, that my parents always supported my writing and my acting–pretty unsustainable activities, both–even when artistic inclinations started to shape my direction in university and then in my career goals. (It may be related to the fact that they were both raised in California, where there seems to be kind of a higher acceptable threshold for non-work-centric lifestyles, and for talk turning to leisure, artistic or even spiritual activities. And this was the 60s, no less, when they were raised. I can see why they moved out east to raise kids). I suspect they trusted their parenting and my ability to find work despite my self-imposed handicap, though probably not in my chosen fields.

There was never any question about my getting a job right out of college. It was less a lesson in supporting myself–that lesson never needed to be stated explicitly, as it was well understood from 18 years of experiential lessons in the Mauk household–than a drive wholly ingrained in my psychology. Like a bird’s migratory instinct, my brain’s job-drive shuttled me from interview to interview without much conscious thought, my head was still warm from May’s mortarboard.

At the time I didn’t even think to question that drive. I don’t know that the  “unexamined life is not worth living” thing was totally lost on me, but it did strike me as a little selfish in light of my family’s emphasis on the Protestant work ethic. And come on, am I about to listen to a man who sat around chatting up guys his whole adult life, not lifting a finger even to bother writing any of it down, and who would rather kill himself than give up his cushy, largely oppression-free lifestyle? Why Plato would want to work for a guy like that I’ll never know. And anyway, I think a new college grad entering the job market for the first time has a finely tuned awareness of his own ignorance, thank you very much.

Now–and this is the part that might surprise you–it didn’t take long for me to learn that this job wasn’t for me. A couple months, tops. Actually, that’s unfair. It wasn’t even the job itself. Its duties and responsibilities–writing, editing, being published on the regular and having a fair bit of creative control, thanks to the small size of our publishing company–were more interesting and rewarding than those of just about any of my peers in the field.

Rather, it was the whole world of white-collar ennui, once kind of a mirthful stereotype in my head, a Dilbert/Office Space figure of fun. I hated becoming that sad jester, and I hated more the triteness of it, the understood but unstated despair of every twentysomething at the table during a staff meeting, and the feeling that this was so shared a sentiment that it could not be talked about, was instead the undercurrent of every conversation, regardless of ostensible topic. Then the feeling that I had to believe that this was shared, this despair, that it was universal and universally suppressed, because otherwise it meant that I was the odd man out, the one unfit for duty. What worse disappointment for my parents than for them to discover I was not, in fact, a productive member of society, and therefore was under no causal conditional requirement to work.

I have a couple theories about this needy generation that itches for more–more recognition, more handholding, more control–one of which I call the Refrigerator Syndrome. (As in, as a toddler, your art on it, praised, regardless of quality or intent to please.) I don’t know. I only know that I felt immense relief when, on telling my peers of my intent to quit (at long, long last, after many false starts and cowardly retreats), the response was a kind of projected elation. Of congratulations felt wholeheartedly, not because I was moving on to some great new thing but because I was leaving this thing, the WW, behind. And plus an envy that was admitted by them, just as I had, in the past, admitted my own envy to those who had similarly left the WW to have a go at something else.

Which brings me to testable hypotheses. These are pretty easy to state now that I am quitting, though they had been difficult to nail down beforehand. They are the positive answers to questions like: Can I support myself with my own talent, rather than with my obedience and constancy to an employer? Do I, in fact, have those talents I have long professed to have, or if not have at least have practiced in the hopes of one day having? Is a life in pursuit of a nonstandard sort of work tenable in any kind of real-world, financial sense, for me, a guy who doesn’t know much about it one way or the other? And, perhaps most importantly, is my happiness in work tied to the nature of that work, or I am I flawed in some societal way that would break my poor mother’s heart? Will working toward becoming a writer make work, if not effortless, enjoyable? Will working as a barista in a local cafe fill some dearth I’ve developed from lack of manual labor and of making something physical?

Here, analytic philosophizing provides some easy answers. Sitting in an office chair for 8 exhausting hours a day, it’s easy to say yes, yes, were I but free of these shackles, these bonds of Dilbert that weigh down my artistic, talented soul! It’s easy to reason out an ego-massaging answer that doesn’t risk anything. But that’s not the way my parents raised me–parents who, for all their silent examples of work for work’s sake, were nevertheless scientists at heart, with the scientist’s even more deeply ingrained notion of curiosity for curiosity’s sake–and if I do fail in this, I will explain to them that failure, too, is a natural part of the experimental life (which, incidentally, is the only kind worth living).

Sincerely,

Ben

Evil city of twins is evil: Report

I know the thought of a town in India that is “home to as many as 230 sets of twins … in [a] village of 15,000″ is a little X-Files-ish creepy, Reuters, but did you have to pair an innocuous ’science oddity’ story with the most ominous photo this side of a promotional poster from The Shining?

(via.)

Nicholas Cage redux

Gar! Nathan Rabin, you say the same things I do about The Cage, just more eloquently and two days later!

A lot of people dislike Nicolas Cage because he makes so many terrible movies and does things like name his son Kal-El. I, on the other hand, love the guy. Think of all the gutsy, unforgettable performances he’s given through the years in movies like Valley Girl, Rumble Fish, Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, Red Rock West, Leaving Las Vegas, Face/Off, Bringing Out The Dead, Adaptation, Matchstick Men, The Weather Man, and Lord Of War. That’s lifetime-pass credentials for sure. And his Werner Herzog Bad Lieutenant movie promises to be great, wonderfully terrible, or both.

Like R. Kelly, even when Cage is terrible, he’s pretty terrific. You could even argue that when he’s terrible, Cage is especially awesome, on multiple levels. He’s a legitimately great actor. He’s also a great bad actor, a great crazy actor, and a great over-actor.

You may be a famous movie critic-cum-memoirist, but I got here first Mr. Rabin. Although I thank you for alerting me to a few crazy Cage-ins I hadn’t seen (Zandalee included).

Bobby McFarrin blows your mind.

Perceptual expectations got me into cognitive science, the field that shaped much of my college education and definitely my past two years as a science writer and editor. It’s notoriously difficult to write well or even convincingly about perception. When it is done well it is usually through examples that reveal our perceptual and cognitive limitations. (Here’s a famous–now internet famous–example. Don’t read the comments.) Videos like the one of this World Science Festival lecture make me want to throw in the towel. Indescribably awesome:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Bedroom gallery 3

Ithaca, October 2006

(Wow, just now figuring out image-link-to-full-size. Hello Internet, my name is Ben.)