Joycean Snow; Dickensian Novels

[mallorys_camera]

Snow throughout yesterday and most particularly last night was positively Joycean – meaning it fell windlessly upon the living and upon the dead, and was very beautiful – all throughout the evening I kept creeping outside to the front porch to sit on the old battered wood swing and watch it come down.

At a certain point during the day I shoveled too -- a futile task since the snow just went on falling and swallowed up the path. I also made a midday trip to the nearby Family Dollar for a bag of salt. This was a reenactment of Eliza jumping the ice floes since I was on foot, the bag weighed 20 pounds, I don't have a car right now and walking was extremely difficult. And then I had to hunt down the resident snow leopard, Mizz Meezer.

I was supposed to go to the Mall for Wrappapalooza (no, that's not what it was really called), the incredibly badly planned fundraiser Jeremy threw together that's going on till Thursday. We got exactly three volunteers for this event and when we showed up Friday, we found that mall management had stashed us in a place where no one can see us behind some shrubbery in front of Sears --

"Listen," I said to Jeremy, "we're gonna have to move this table -- "

"But we can't," said Jeremy. "I mean, this is where they put us."

"Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy," I said. "These are our two options. Either we sit where they put us, where absolutely no one can see us, and we make absolutely no money because no one can see us. Or we move the fucking table and risk the wrath of mall management – except this time of year? No one is even gonna notice because there's too much other stuff going on to micromanage."

So we moved the table.

And the Most Incredibly Handsome and Magnetic Man in the World immediately showed up. And we wrapped his package. (Ha, ha – she said "package.")

The Most Incredibly Handsome and Magnetic Man in the World was off to Italy to meet his grandchild for the first time and I kept screaming, Take me with you!!! except naturally I was screaming it inside my head and he couldn't hear me. So he didn't.

I was in an incredibly pissy mood. Jeremy's car blew up the third week he was in Poughkeepsie, so neither of us have cars right now and getting back and forth from the mall threatened to be something of a hassle. I'd spent some effort setting up a transportation option, and getting the various Pollyanna Human Services honchos to sign off on it. Which they did. Except Friday morning, someone in the chain of command backtracked – Reverend Cal himself? We can't spend $100 on your transportation.

And I just thought: FUCK these people. If I'd known upfront we had no operating budget, I would have figured something else out.

###

But I'm committed till July.

I mean, what are my options?

1. To storm off in a snit.

2. To collect my paycheck and to do as little work as possible for the next seven months and to focus on other things – playing video games, reading novels, enjoying pleasant times with Swain 1 and Swain 2, toying with writing fiction.

3. To get over myself.

Right now, I'm inclining toward Door Number 2.

###

I'd started reading The Goldfinch several days before when it became evident that Mary Karr was just not gonna do it for me -- too much work to make it through her baroque sentences. In contrast, The Goldfinch is just as preloaded with figurative language, but because Donna Tartt does not write poetry, she apparently did not suffer from the compulsion to make the novel dense. Tartt's sentences are allowed to spin their allusions across dozens of words, and this makes them much more readable.

Anyway, after it became obvious to me that the Most Incredibly Handsome and Magnetic Man in the World was not going to take me to Italy with him, I whipped out The Goldfinch again and began reading – and my God, it was beautiful, shimmering, allusive, immersive. Great Expectations recast for the 21st century. The ticking bomb inside my heart was defused. I was completely caught up in the novel and immensely grateful to Donna Tartt for turning a horrible day into a merely amusing series of unfortunate events. (I'll only mention in passing here that the bus ride from the mall back into Poughkeepsie took two and a half hours because of a multi-car pile-up on Route 9. I just kept turning the pages and enjoying myself.)


I even looked on Saturday's snow storm as the Universe's way of gifting me with an extra day to read. Although I kept breaking the forward momentum of the prose rush so many times to go off and ponder that I'm still only two-thirds of the way through the book and must return to the mall to gift wrap today. Ugh.

Not sure what I will do about Pollyanna. Once I'm done with something, I'm done. My business plan is a work of art, but honestly? Pollyanna doesn't deserve it.

And it dawns on me that every single work environment I've ever been involved in has been dysfunctional to a greater rather than a lesser degree. Including, sadly, my own Little Store because I just wasn't getting the profitability angle right. Surely, that has to be me though, right? I mean, it can't be that every human enterprise short of growing wheat in the field and milling it by the stream is dysfunctional? Surely, there are people who are doing good work that advances what's good about the world and doing it well? I mean – aren't there?

Comments

[robby.livejournal.com]

The non-profits are the most dysfunctional. Years ago, I tried to do business with a non-profit that collected e-waste, but it was impossible. Everyone there had a personal agenda, and it had nothing to do with business interests. The owner once admitted he didn't really care what happened in his facility, it was valuable as just a shell that allowed him to apply for grants, and that's how he made his money.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Nonprofits are pretty dysfunctional, but so are for-profits.

[robby.livejournal.com]

I worked for a big corporation once, often it seemed like the promenade on a cruise ship, with half the people strolling around and schmoozing. It quickly folded because it was not operating efficiently. There was a pretty young lady that sometimes inhabited a cubicle nearby. She was mysterious, without specific hours or responsibilities, but then she married a former director after the company collapsed.

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

Mother Teresa did good work and did it well, all for the sake of doing good in the world.
Most of us are lesser humans, and we do good work if we get something back from it.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, Mother Teresa lost her faith, according to letters published after her death, and spent 50 years or so going through the motions:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/08/24/mother-teresa-did-not-feel-christ-presence-for-last-half-her-life-letters/

That doesn't diminish the significance of her work, of course, but it does provide an interesting historical footnote.

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

That is a sad thought.

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

having a body and being confined to locality means we are at the whims of the immediate local environment. beyond the local environment into those external parameters... the fates are at play. only those with enough foresight to reach and see deeply into the past the nonessentials have a chance. big politicans, business people... but they too have blind spots (such as with mit romney)

as far as good goes... that's really up to society's consensus.

unless you believe hegel (and by extension marx)... that we will slowly but surly exhaust all possibility and continue to synthesize more and more difference until we reach a masterfully universal point of equilibrium. to grasp the absolute notion; the very zero sum minimal expression of godhood, from which all else arises.

this could be an argument as to why there are no immortals. god doesn't want anyone around long enough to see his secerts.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

"Good work," I suppose, is work that loans its perpetrator some sense of meaning -- although yes, in the larger scheme of things, I understand that's an illusion.

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

meaning is when we recognize a place in the world meant for us, yes. and good whatever strengthens our individual brand.