the personal diary of

Although I rid manufacturingmystique of 2003’s ambitious “JobLog” years ago, it turns out blogger.com saves posts. Even really old ones! In fact, I could actually republish JobLog with blogger.com’s software. But I roll with Wordpress now. So, in lieu of keeping a JobLog now, I am instead repurposing the JobLog from five years ago.

This weblog’s heroine is a thin, pretty college student. It is the summer before her senior year of college, and she is spending it in sunny Evanston, Illinois. In two months, she will turn 21. She is completing a throwaway English lit degree; in her mind, she is overqualified for every summer job ad she’s found. Until recently, she was pounding the streets for Illinois PIRG, clipboard in hand. It was humiliating, and she lasted three whole days.

June 23, 2003
The story so far…

After I voluntarily left my job — a goodhearted job that I wholly recommend to twentysomethings, provided that they are excellent salespeople with ginormous bladders — I typed up a resume and happily delivered it along with an application to Video Adventure, my favorite video store.

That was four days ago.

“Perhaps,” my friend Tim suggested to me, “it was a bad idea to submit a resume?”

“How do you figure?”

“They’re not looking for ambitious, prissy university students. They’re looking for a kid to rent videos.”

“Ah.”

June 24, 2003

My roommate Dave is also unemployed, except for the job he successfully landed, in which he donates his living body to science. Today he was supposed to interview for, ironically, a spot at my old job. He’s also interviewing for a job at the Northwestern library, which my aunt has been telling me to get for months, and he is also considering applying for a job at my all-time favorite establishment (after Steak-n-Shake), Thee Fish Bowl.

Dave told me he hasn’t yet applied for a job at Video Adventure, because he doesn’t want to hinder my chances of being employed. Ha! Ha!

I don’t know where to go next.

Here comes the best of the three!

Hello! I’m fresh back in San Francisco — I’d been in New York City for well over a month — and it took me days to fly home. On Wednesday, Continental bungled my ticket, which resulted in an epic phone battle; only a good samaritan at Expedia could talk any sense into airline representatives. Thursday’s travel plans were riddled with storms, mechanical failure, and other delays. It is nice to be back at home, except that I am now finding things that I forgot to throw out before I left (bread, a pot of coffee, an old pizza). Looking around my apartment, I can see I was also still high on the then-recent Bay Area Maker Faire. Apparently, the last book I was reading was called Creative Kinetics: Making Mechanical Marvels in Wood.

I have been blogging a lot more at infinite lives .net for the sheer hell of it. I actually started to post this over there, and then I decided I didn’t need to apologize — on an unprofessional videogame blog, no less — for vanishing for four days. (I was working on this, partly.)

Last night, I dreamed I walked into a kitchen. A lot of people were sitting around a table.

Then one of the cabinet doors near the ceiling opened. A girl was curled up inside one of the cabinets. She craned her head out, somehow unfolded her legs, and easily jumped down to the floor. This all reminded me of a ghost from a Japanese horror movie, except that her face was obscured by long blonde hair instead of by black hair.

She stood in front of me and lifted her head. She was wearing glasses, and she was very thin. I stared back at her: she was me at sixteen.

She grinned at me terribly. She reached behind herself and, I guess, pulled something out of the waist of her pants. Then she moved toward me, stopped right in front of me.

I recoiled at my double. But she wasn’t my double, really; she was young and unruined.

She lunged at me, stabbing me in the heart with a stiletto. By this I mean to say that it was like I was a human-sized voodoo doll, and she had plunged me with an accordingly proportionate voodoo needle.

I sank to my knees and begged to know why, why. My words sputtered blood.

The night before last, I dreamed that I was playing a lost Zelda game, a video game forgotten by time. I’d brought the game out to impress somebody, and the game ran on some mythic disc-based console. I was playing as Link, and I was in a dungeon, fighting zombies.

Then I really was Link — in my dream I was suddenly dressed as a nimble, green boy-elf, in a squarish dungeon & trying to make it forward to the doorway — and a very tall knight appeared next to me, and he also began to fight.

Thanks to him, only a few zombies were left. And that was when the very tall knight lifted his sword and slashed me across the face.

I blinked and looked at him, wondering whether this were some sort of an accident. Then he ran me through the abdomen with his sword.

Then I was staring at a Sierra-adventure-game sort of Death Screen (Restore, Restart, Quit) with a pixilated, animated sprite of the Tall Knight talking, and a scrolling soliloquy.

The only part of his soliloquy I remember is:

“…and in return, I asked him to make me tall, enormous, the biggest sheep of all the sheep. And I was enormous, and I looked down at all the tiny people, and I realized I almost loved them, the babies, I love you all for being big, broad BABIES!”

A few nights ago, I dreamed that I was trying to figure out how to travel back in time, to a moment exactly ten years ago, so that I could retrieve my great-aunt and great-uncle and bring them to the present day. I was trying to figure out whether I would ruin the fabric of space and time. Probably yes.

So I decided to try something else. The dream switched; now I was kidnapping myself at 20 and bringing her to 2008. She struggled, but I stranded her in the present day. She wanted to know why. That was when I told her the plan: I needed her to poison me and take my place.

Yesterday, Kaitlen and I went to see War, Inc.

I took the train to the apartment and told Seth I was back from the movies, and he said he wanted to go to the movies, too. So I changed clothes and we went back out, and this time we saw Take Out.

During Take Out, I had one short crackle of thought and feeling. I am no one, unwritten, atoms made of empty space. When you’re sitting in the movie-dark, you don’t need a sense of identity or purpose because it’s all written out for you. I am not especially wise or thoughtful or even kind — I am just eyes and ears (and sometimes, unfortunately, a mouth). And if anyone will ever love me, it will be for my powers of observation and nothing else, since I am an undefined receptacle of experience: experience, seeing everything, nothing learned, a ghost in the same way history only lives halfway.

In the meantime, in a time zone three hours removed, Nik went to the Found Footage Festival. During it, they showed a trailer for a movie called Dirty Country, which looks pretty good.

Nik mentioned something else about the festival and I realized that he had been at the film festival in San Francisco, and for some reason I’d momentarily thought he was talking to me from Chicago.

And I said, oh, I’m sorry. For a second I thought we still lived in Chicago.

And it sounded totally insane and I think Nik was a little startled. And that made me remember getting my hair cut very short in 2001, but at night, if I were present in my own dream, I’d be a girl who still had long hair. Now, though, when I see how long my hair is again, I wonder how it happened.

Seth moves at a much faster clip than I do. His anecdotes are quicker, his dance choreography is timed to exactly one minute, and I am always several steps behind him on the way to the grocery.

On our way to the grocery, Seth asked me very knowingly whether I knew what the two most valuable pinball machines are.

“I’m not sure,” I said very slowly, because I hate being wrong, “but if I had to guess. I’d say one of them is Cactus Canyon.”

Seth stopped dead, so I was able to catch up.

“How did you know that?” he asked me.

“There was a burger joint in Corpus that closed down. Cassie and I would go there and eat burgers and play Cactus Canyon, our favorite. Cass was thinking about buying a machine, so she did a little research, turned out you can’t find one anywhere now. I guess because it was made so late.”

(Indeed, it was the last WPC system made — what? What does that mean, even? — and production “stopped short” to make way for Williams’ newer Pinball 2000 -type machines. I’m no expert, but it looks like the hi-tech, video-y, modular Pinball 2000 system was intended to, well, save pinball. Hmm. Looks like I’ll have some questions to ask Greg.)

But what’s this? A re-release? Looks like I missed the pre-order. Is this legit?

jennatar posted a video:

We are just testing out a camera's video possibilities. I wanted to demonstrate my air guitar chops, but Seth recommended I simply blow a B'Loonie instead. Why is that?

This video feels more illicit than it is.

It was 11:50PM, and I just wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t find any Neosporin or aloe vera or burn cream, not even gauze; the best I could do was ten bandages, five Advil. They were out of Camel, so I bought Parliament. I haven’t been able to eat since Sunday afternoon, so I bought Gatorade, too. Fifteen dollars: I’d have to use the ATM.

I was leaving the bodega — it’s just a half-block to where I’m staying — and I was working through what I’d say when I got upstairs. “I can’t find Neosporin anywhere,” that is what I’d settled on. What a bust, right? I didn’t even want to go out.

I went inside the first glass door, and I punched the code into the keypad at the second. The door clacked and I tugged the handle, and I backed right up into the man hunching behind me.

“Shh, shh,” he said.

I dropped the door — trapping myself in the lobby with him — and looked at him.

“Don’t say anything,” he whispered. I realized he was holding the collar of his shirt over his mouth. That seemed strange.

So I started to say something, of course. He said to me, “Don’t scream or I’ll blow your fucking face off.”

And OK, he’s got something under his shirt, and it’s pointed at my heart. And I want to ask whether that’s real, because it looks like the old Butterfinger trick. And when he explains, your money, your money, I start to protest, but I’m going into my purse for my money, my money. And my rummaging freaks him out, and he lets go of his collar and grabs the purse strap with his free hand. And we’re actually fighting for it.

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A long time ago, I went to a sleep clinic to discuss my inability to stop dreaming (among other things). On Tuesday morning, I had become a perpetual dream machine.

I’d had another zombie dream, and in it, there was a gate with two Cerberus…es, each shaped like a stone cube, intricately engraved. And when they came to life, the carvings would begin to glow, and all the heads and limbs would unfold out of the cubes in this spectacular way, and each Cerberus would unfold and rise to its feet.

In this dream I saved the day, and I stood victoriously, holding a spear. And my friend Mike — who was in my last zombie dream and has no idea I have been dreaming about him incessantly — said, “What a hero you are! You are selfless and incredibly generous and expect nothing from anybody!” I woke up, and I was embarrassed. What would he think if he knew that, in my dreams, he is so darn supportive? Honestly, in real life we barely speak.

In another dream, a close friend said to me, “You’re no showman, you know, you’re no Mister Rogers,” and I woke myself up laughing. Once, I woke myself with the sound of my gnashing teeth.

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I haven’t eaten in thirty-three hours. I don’t think I’ll ever eat again. Edit: Forty-five?