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May 22, 2001
Yes, you get used to it: the office. The getting used to, our remarkable forte; our grievous loss. At one desk a man, who physically resembles the great Irish political hero Charles Stewart Parnell - and apparently shares some of his personal problems - is conducting his divorce and custody battle in hushed tones over the phone. This renders the xerox machine dangerous territory and I feel both thrilled by the voyeuristic opportunity and embarassed that I am partaking, however peripherally, in the denoument of this man's family life.
Punctuation marks of brief pleasure provide fuel for enduring the day and the week: lunch at the coffee bar of Sant Abroeus on Madison Avenue, standing, to counteract office bottom. The best cappucino in town, mouth manageable sandwiches, and the illusion that one might be in a European capital. The five o'clock escape, the Friday escape, interregnums made bliss by the desert of office life. The Upper East Side, the diametric and diagonal opposite of the Lower East Side, here one is rendered a perpetual tourist by the availibility of museums, the park, a variety of cocktail outlets, consumer items completely out of one's league, and the potential for chance encounters with benign strangers.
Later, May 22, 2001.
In trying to assess why I was reduced to a sentimental heap after an evening in the company of an old friend visiting from Dublin, I began wondering about the nature of those old friendships that are no longer sustained by intimacy and long periods of time spent together but that still take up huge shelf space in terms of emotional volumes. B. and I spent the wildest and most gleefully hysterical years of our girlhood together. Our estrogen fuelled adventures began over an influenza epidemic in boarding school at the age of twelve. We were the last to contract it and spent two weeks with raging fevers entertaining each other with stories of our families. It appeared that we shared certain peculiarities as far as family went, an odd mixture of the Bohemian and the Victorian that was markedly different from our other contemporaries who were the daughters of farmers and doctors and other pillars of a dwindling Irish Protestant society.
I don't recall that we laughed when we met last Saturday. We were notorious for our laughter, likely to implode at the most inconvenient of times, indeed suffering many punishments for our shared indulgence. We were able to transport ourselves into a state of breathless intoxication merely by looking at each other. We also enjoyed similar bouts of intoxication on witnessing a good sunset.
Maybe I just miss her. Or miss being a girl. Or both.
May 09, 2001
Flo used to say to Clive, "Oh, that awful woman in the blue dressing gown was here this morning." Flo was about ninety and Clive was about thirty. Clive and his boyfriend lived in her house and took care of her until she died and now they live in the house. What she didn't, or perhaps did know was that the awful woman in the blue dressing gown was Clive: pre-cigarette, pre-toast (served with a toast rack) and tea and the vague laundering of the self that takes place in incredibly cold English houses. Anyway, I thought of the story because I feel like I have been the awful woman in the blue dressing gown all winter. She appears to have left.
May 01, 2001
Mostly clear in Central Park. Have self-prescribed three walks in it a day to counteract the "work": pre-work, lunch and post-work. The Park is in a splendid state just now and its proximity to work is going some way towards eroding my irrational and long-held dislike of the place. I like a cruder form of nature, but it is preferable to the confines of the robber baron office. Whatsmore, one can't help but conjure the presence of Mr. Wilson when strolling there, is he behind every blooming thing?
It turns out that the acoustics of the office, which disallow any private utterings, derive from the fact that it was once a music room. Where we ply our keyboards they once played clavichords.
Apr 27, 2001
Spring must really be here. Today I saw David Bowie ordering take out food in a pink suit. He had a bad dye job. Many people in New York do have bad dye jobs. My theory is that it's an attempt to make ourselves more vivid in all the chaos.
I promised myself not to work in an office again. I don't remember my first day at the Institute of Irish Studies, or Morrison and Foerester, or O'Keefe and Duffy, or Puffy and Stuffy, or Mackie and Wacky, or at Girth, Mirth & Worth, but I do remember my first day at the Fund. Because it was Tuesday, this Tuesday. And because it was sheer horror. Struggling with PCs that seem designed to obfuscate the task at hand; forced to call on the computer guy who looks like every prime suspect in every British murder mystery; bleeding like a stuck pig with cramps that remind me of Paradise Lost (the serpent gnawing on the bowels bit); editing Kafkaesque documents designed to improve health care in the US (did any of these people ever go to an Act Up demonstration, why not just have a revolution?). Something in the structure of this robber baron mansion, where the Fund is housed, makes every sound travel and retains every degree of heat. Hence no opportunity to make a decent personal phone call and rank arm pits by 5pm. Lunch is served in the basement but it's too reminiscent of boarding school so I bolt for the park and an overpriced sandwich. The blossoms are insults; lunch will end. Data imput eroding the nerve myelin and the imagination. I keep wondering about the others. Are they less miserable than I am for the eight hours that must be endured a day or just inured? What presumption on my part. I hope that I can keep on presuming that there is an alternative.