Noise in the Shape of Writing

Whewwwww!
(sound of Pat wiping brow with relief)

I finally got the salaried position I was hoping to get. I can now pound away at eBay and Amazon with impunity in a brief flurry of celebration I had avoided for three-quarters of a year! I can upgrade my celphone! I can eat at Tony Roma's! I can buy a box of Magic cards!

For a week or two any way, til the realization kicks in that money isn't everything...

Aaargh! Now it's time to send out thank yous to my network of carreer consulants (all of you who helped).

Thank you!

Your check is not in the mail, but at least you can rest easier knowing that an email from me is no longer necessarily a request for job posting possibilities!

Pat.

If I could make games for a living I would.

The smell of card laminators. The skrish of a paper cutter. The sound of little cheap color printers printing away. Imagining how Rich might argue the basics of game theory even though it's a silly card game.

I could do this full time, instead of just in the wee hours of the night. If you're going to HellCon, you might get try it out.

- - -

Not exactly a game, but sometimes it feels like it..

I made a counter offer at work. It felt strange. I hate money. Can't we all just get along and barter with pieces of bark and back rubs? If I have to accept their original offer and smile like Stephen Root from Office Space... why I... grrrr. Not gonna happen. La la la. Think happy worker bee thoughts.

- - -

Tried to buy Amazing Stories today. It was not at Borders. Cute helper chick had never heard of it. My hypothesis... it's so damn amazing it flew off the shelves.

I have not yet perfected the art of negotiation.

If I like a company and they offer me more money than I was making ay my last job, 9 times out of 10 I will say "yes, thank you!" and smile like that sucker in the catbird seat.

Today was no exception. My personal career advisor (yes, they exist; and yes, I have one even though they cost an arm and a leg... for some reason he let's me bug him about my endeavors even though my last company stopped paying for him LONG ago) will probably scream and slap me silly.

Was I supposed to high ball them? Tack on twice as much as the difference between what they offer and how much I want and ask for that amount?

Dammit, I am making 17% more than I was last year, so I ain't complaining. And it's in a field I totally dig (movie poster design). There's always next year's raise.

Besides, I haven't even turned on my charm yet.
Pat.

I almost never remember to make plans ahead of time for New Years. This explains why I tend to find that the really good L.A. parties are sold out by the time I start looking into them. Even so, this year was oddly satisfying. I made several promises to several friends that I was going to be at this party or that party -- and I trult meant to go at the time! -- but then proceeded to flake on all of them and stay at home with my family. My daughter promised me that she really wanted to stay up til midnight and I simply could not resist the offer. We toasted in the new year with French lemonade & grenadine. We blew horns for ten minutes while it seemed the rest of Santa Clarita was awake, drunk, and clearly in posession of illegal fireworks (thank you, nearby Ventura County!).

We spent the hour leading up to midnight watching a very scary countdown; No, not Dick Clark or Regis -- the 100 scarriest horror movie moments of all time (according to Bravo). Turns out my daughter LOVES scary movies (she didn't want to turn the channel, even when I was grossed out by a scene of bloody teeth falling out from "Demons"... I'll have to rent that one some day).

This reminds me of some other memorable New Years moments:

My best New Years (non-forgotten) memory:
Going to a multi-thousand person Hollywood street party, realizing that the dressed-up, glitzed-up, coked-up wannabes there were not my crowd and then high-tailing it back to my neighborhood bar BARELY in time to get inside, order two Heinekens and cheer in the new year with my no-name working class peeps. I think it was 2002.

My creepiest New Years:
Setting up christmas lights around the upstairs roof-access window, playing techno music, lighting off illegal fireworks and toasting-in (with Martinellis) the new MILLENIUM with my daughter (age 3 at the time) on the ROOF of our house... SPECIFICALLY so that I could create a memory from the age of three that she could always recall regarding the millenium. I figured it would be sad to tell people "yeah, i was three years old in 2000, but I was too young to remember it". So every few months I ask her if she remembers her millenium party and she still does. Creepy, huh.

Most surreal:
Toasting in the new year almost as an afterthought while playing King Henry the 8th in a live game/party/masquerade. I had gone planning to drink in the new year as only a 30-year-old would want to. Somehow I ended up pontificating and whooping it up Henry the 8th style -- completely immersed in my character (whose several wives were in attendance, to my surprise) and trying to solve the climactic puzzle -- paying very little attention to the new year itself. I am pretty sure that beer was an integral part of the evening.

Does anyone else have a particularly poignant New Year's memory they do or don't remember?

Pat.