The Lady who Shouted on her Phone

            “There’s also a survey on the back of your receipt, which if you complete within 7 days, you’ll get a 20% off coupon for your next purchase. So, if you like me, my name’s Ashley; if you don’t, my name’s Morgan.” The customer giggled, grabbed her bag and child’s hand, and headed out of the children’s store and into the busy mall, getting swallowed by the crowd of people that usually accompany Saturday’s midday horde.

            I look at the next lady expectantly, but she didn’t hand over her items. She didn’t even glance my way, instead focusing on shouting into her cell phone in a language I didn’t understand. Deciding she wasn’t ready, I slide out from behind the register and head back to my task of folding the big girl graphic tees, approaching the pile of glitter (which seemed more abundant than the actual fabric of the shirt) with a sense of dread. I pick up the first pile and flip it upside down, ready to battle the source of the mess and then work outwards.

            “Uhm, Excuse me!” I look around, since these words replace my name in the times that I’m at work (I’m not sure why they bother giving us name tags). I see the woman, donning an expectant look. How dare I keep her waiting! I jump to, rushing back around to the register, wearing a smile (theatre training put to good use).

            “Did you find everything ok?”

            “Yeah. I need you to tell me the price of everything when you ring it up.”

            “No problem.” I start to ring up her items, and I spout off the prices, which are all fairly low since she got the clearance items from our 50% reduced price section. By the time I got halfway through her small pile, I hear a ringing. Knowing the song blaring out of our speakers, I realize this verse is not part of the usual melody, and so the sound must be coming from elsewhere.

            The lady pulls out her phone, answering it. She starts yelling again. I’m not sure what to do with the prices she wanted to hear, so I begin telling them to her small daughter. The daughter just stares back at me with big eyes and sucks silently on her soda straw. I finish scanning and skip the phone number and email I’m supposed to ask for. I don’t want to interrupt her yelling, but I need to tell her the final price.

            She sees that I’m done, pauses to listen to the total, and slings her credit card down onto the counter. I point to the Verifone, where the customer has to swipe their own card, but she’s already gone back to her other conversation. I bite the bullet and slide for her, contorting my arm in an ungainly manner to accomplish my task. Thankfully, she chooses debit and puts in the pin herself.

            Now comes the hard part. She qualified for one of our special coupons by reaching a certain subtotal. I am given the brave mission to tell her about the terms and requirements to keep the coupon valid (spending the same in the subtotal of the next transaction, dates it will work, keeping it attached to the original receipt, etc.). “Well, ma’am, it looks like you’ve qualified for our cash coupon. There are a few rules, but it will save you…” I trail off, my high volume becoming a whisper when I see something I have never seen in my years of being a sales clerk, something I’d only heard about in horror stories, something I thought could never happen to me.

            The lady stopped shouting for a minute, cocked her head at me, and put up her pointer finger, as if to say “Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” She pulled a face, showing disbelief at me trying to save her money and let out a grunt of dissatisfaction before going back to shouting. I stapled her coupon and shoved it into her bag with her clothes. I guess she’ll figure it out on her own. I hand the bag to her daughter, not wanting to risk it with the woman. The death glares she sent me before grabbing her daughter to exit the store told me this wasn’t over.

            I haven’t seen her again since then, so I hope her glare was an empty one.

3201 part one: Loneliness and Nomenclature

"Is there a word in Klingon for 'loneliness?'  Ah yes... Garr'dock!" 

-Comic Book Guy

   When you read an article or blog entry by a self-confessed nerd self-examining so-called "nerd culture," there's often one of two patterns that gets followed: self-congratulation or condemnation (sometimes rightful condemnation) of other nerds.  It's probably the defining part of the nerd psyche: as an adolescent, they lacked social skills in some way, and while they may have overcome this as an adult, it's still lingering in the back of their mind.  So in order to stop their self-esteem from taking any damage, they either build themselves up or bring others down.  Last year a blog on Forbes (which still confuses me; Forbes?) managed to do both, the author writing at length about how being a nerd meant being intelligent and creative, while also putting down people (actually, women, as her language was quite gender specific) for "pretending" to be nerds to be part of the club.
   This is, of course, bullshit.  Intelligence has nothing to do with whether one reads comic books or not.  In any demographic, you're going to have a lot of morons, some rare brilliance, and a lot of us somewhere in between.  The smartest man I've ever known was a baseball coach and no one called him a nerd.
   And yet, too often I find myself slipping into my own elitism, I find it hard to really respect people.  It's not that I think I'm better than they are, but... well... okay, maybe that's exactly what it is.

   This weekend my brother for 19 years and roommate for 12 months left for North Georgia to live with our parents again.  I'm... still processing it.  A year ago I was quite enjoying moving in with him.  He was new to Columbus, and we would watch movies in the living room, still dark as we had yet to purchase any lamps.  I was optimistic, this was a year of starting fresh in a brand new apartment.  And from September to January, things went quite well.  But with 2013 things just... stopped being good.  My brother had made a group of friends who spent way too often in our apartment, and he took up smoking pot, which sucked the fun right out of him.  He never wanted to go out, never wanted to watch movies.  He'd simply put on a sitcom or video game, watch or play it for fifteen minutes, then leave it on as he went out to the porch for more weed.  He was still himself, just an excessively boring version of himself, one who told lame jokes and was becoming increasingly more misogynist the more time he spent with his friends.
   Meanwhile, my own social life dwindled.  Friends graduated and moved away, joined the Navy, and in one case sadly passed away.  The last member of the once large social circle of my dorm room days is preparing for a transfer to the west coast and with my brother leaving, I've more and more often taken to Skyping with friends from out of town.  This profound boredom is possibly why I decided to finally try out an MMORPG, a kind of video game I'd never been particularly interested in playing before in which you play with hundreds of other players in a large open world.  My friend told me about an upcoming one and he helped me get into the testing cycle for the game, and we've been playing together while we chat on Skype.
   The game is set in a fantasy world with an incredibly complicated backstory (think Lord of the Rings, but translated from Japanese), but it's quite beautiful and has interesting art design, so I looked forward to fulling immersing myself, indulging the fantasy of fighting dragons and casting spells that excited me throughout my youth.  You begin by creating your character.  You can choose between five races, two clans and genders each, plus eight different job types, so there are 160 possible basic characters you could play, but really it's all aesthetic.  That said, I read the backstories on the different races (I skip over elves, because who cares) and note, with some interest, the different naming conventions for each of the ten clans (human hill-people have typical English names, elf names are in French, the hulking beast people have nativistic names, etc).  The character creator is quite diverse, allowing you to make a unique enough looking character so long as they're young and beautiful (it seems no amount of graphical technology could ever force game designers to let you play as, god forbid, a fat person).  In the end, I create a tall, muscular, amazon woman with slate grey skin and pinkish hair, and try hard to think of a name that is creative while fitting in with her culture's naming conventions.
   This is all, of course, fucking ridiculous of me.  This is all flavor, it has nothing to do with gameplay, any more than it matters whether you choose the top hat or the dog in Monopoly.  But, to me, it seemed obvious: why play a video game like this if not to use your imagination, to pretend with childlike excitement to really be exploring a magical world, to really be the heroic knight.
   As I logged into the game, I found this sentiment was not shared.  Walking around me were dozens of other players, their names floating above their head in blue.  Nearly all of them were novelty names.  I saw a large creature named Ned Flanders.  A pair of hobbits named Moe Money and Moe Problems walked by.  I even spotted a cat woman with the disturbing moniker of Wet Panties.
   A worrisome thought occurred to me: was I the nerd to all these people?

Next:  Part two - Entitlement and Sub-sub-culture

The New Orleans That I Once Lived In No Longer Exists

On August 29, 2005-a date that will live in infamy-the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, was suddenly, if not deliberately attacked by natural forces in the forms of Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita. The “infamy” involved in this tragic set of circumstances proved, at least in part, to be in the responses (or lack thereof) of federal, state and local officials to the resulting tragedy. 

In short, the bureaucrats and fat cats dropped the ball; and Joe and Jane Average ended up paying for the piss-poor planning and lack of foresight on the part of their local and federal officials.

The New Orleans I once lived in no longer exists; except in my fading memories and, I suspect, in the memories of all of us who are now a part of the vast New Orleans Diaspora. I count myself among them even though, strictly speaking, I am more of an expatriate. I’ve heard it said that “you can’t go home again,” and that “you can never step in the same river twice.” If these maxims hold true, then so it is with the land of my nativity, the city that I called home for nearly 30 years of my life.

               How easily it seems that “The City That Care Forgot” and that the rest of the country remembered during Mardi Gras, the Essence Festival, Jazz Fest and any given Super Bowl Sunday that occurred in the now renovated and re-christened Mercedes-Benz Superdome, became “The City that the rest of the country Forgot to Care About” when the levees failed. Those of us from New Orleans don’t have the luxury of that particular bit of selective memory.

               It could be that the city that I once lived in was fading into to distant memory long before Katrina and Rita came along, and that was one of the reasons I left; maybe I’m just waxing nostalgic now. Being the sensual place that it was, I suppose New Orleans has always existed, in part, as more of a sensory experience for me than as an actual location. My memories of the place always involved something I deeply and vividly saw, heard, smelled, tasted or felt; and when it comes to  stimulating those senses there are few, if any cities (in the United States at least) that could hold a candle to The Big Easy.

               For some the city represents a fun getaway…where you can literally “get-away” with doing and saying things you wouldn’t dare to do or say anywhere else. For some it represents the frustrating, and apparently inherent ineptitude of the Napoleonic Laws that permeate Louisiana politics; for some it represents the apparent corruption of our local politicians and law enforcement officials, as made infamous in the movie from which the city derived one of its more colorful nicknames.

              

               I remember living Uptown at one time, between Tchoupitoulas and Magazine Street. I lived within walking distance of a Canal Villere Supermarket and a famous local music hall named Tipitina's. One night I was even treated to an impromptu sidewalk serenade at Tipitina's when the immortal Lady T, Ms. Teena-Marie performed one of her famous concerts there. I say "impromptu sidewalk serenade" because Lady T sold it out of course, and according to the Fire Marshall, wasn’t ‘nobody else getting up in there!

As far as I’m concerned New Orleans is not just a place, it’s a state of mind, body, heart and soul.

I remember one of the last times I went back home, prior to Katrina, my Dad took my brothers and I on a road trip to the Houma/Thibodeaux area of Louisiana; these were the rural cities where his side of my family, and my Mom’s side originated; and the places we respectfully referred to as “The Country.”

“I’m gonna show ya’ll the house where I was born.” He had said.

In spite of the fact that he had been largely absent during my upbringing, I idolized my Dad, and I was looking forward to seeing the place where the man, the myth and the legend originated. I was somewhat nonplussed, however, when we reached our destination.

               My Dad got out of his truck and gestured at the place with a sweep of his hand, then stood staring silently. Along with my younger siblings, I got out and beheld what basically amounted to an abandoned and decaying pile of something that used to be a house, but was now a vine covered ruin.  We could see that my Dad was experiencing something on some deep, emotional level that he couldn’t quite articulate, so we remained respectfully silent, even as we exchanged furtive, quizzical glances with one another.

For me New Orleans represents an ancestral home; the place where my grandparents are buried, along with my great-grandparents, all the way back to my maternal ancestor Joseph Champagne, my sandy-blonde haired, blue-eyed three times great grandfather, the son of a former slave and her former owner. So in a sense, I suppose what the loss of my city represents most to me is a loss of a sense of history and belonging.

Just like the biblical Abraham with his son Isaac, or Moses and his son Gershom, I too feel as if I am a stranger in a strange land; and I am raising my son in a place that is not his father’s ancestral home. That wouldn’t bother me so much, were it not for the fact that the place this his father remembers no longer exists; and I feel as if there is not now, nor will there be in the near future, a place to which I may one day travel in order to instill in my son a sense of identity, pride and familial history.

Damn.

Dad, I think I know what you were going through now….

Julie Kuralt
The Art of Perseverance

It was the most emotionally draining semester of my college career. My line of thought was that art school would be fun, that it would be just like art club in high school—drawing, painting, and having a good time with people who had similar personalities and interests. The thing with me is that I'm not really that talented in art; I’d switched to the major in hopes of improving my skill because I enjoyed it.

My 2D Design teacher was on maternity leave, so we had a substitute for the first two-thirds of the semester, another professor in the art department. This lady didn't give us a chance to learn—she expected us to be brilliant on the get-go. It wasn't like in high school when art class was fun and you were graded on how hard you tried. I was expected to make beautiful and perfect pieces of art, or fail.

For our first 2D Design assignment, we were to come up with eight sketches dealing with abstraction (stripping something down to its simplest form, but to where you can still tell what it is—like on street signs). Then we would bring the sketches to her and she would pick the best two for us to scan and edit on the computer for the final project. When I went up to get mine checked, she said I'd done them all wrong and that I'd have to start completely over. 

"You don't have a project at all. This was not the assignment."

I followed the exact definition of abstraction from the assigned reading out of the book, but somehow I'd managed to do it completely wrong. She didn't care to keep her voice down about it, either.

Embarrassed and confused, and with no further instruction, I walked back to my station and spent the entire day trying to complete two projects. I got home around 8:00 p.m., from that 9:30 a.m. class. She told me not to draw things from my head, but from actual objects. Maybe she was trying to teach us the basic elements, but I’d always thought creativity was a part of art. I ended up with a C- on the assignment.

It didn’t take long before I’d decided to switch back to the English major, but it was too late into the semester to drop the classes without resulting in some WF’s.

Then there was Drawing 1. We drew boxes. Lots of boxes. And curtains. Countless curtains. Objects. Plants. Vases. Over and over. It was monotonous and strenuous, especially when I had to hang my piece up next to the prize winning masterpiece. Then we moved on to humans. All my subjects ended up with disgusting balloon heads, terribly disproportioned to the rest of their bodies. Hours of work poured into a middle school-level drawing, at least compared to the others. I was embarrassed, ashamed to admit it was mine. But this teacher was kinder, at least. He told me how much I’d improved, to keep working, to not be so hard on myself, even if I thought I was in the bottom two percent of the class.

We had to lug huge art supply bags around for Drawing 1, filled with giant art pads, charcoal, erasers, sketch pads, special pencils, all out of our own budget. As soon as I got home, it was back to breaking out the art bag and hacking away at the new drawing assignment, staining my carpet and fingernails black with the charcoal. The hours after class and the weekend were spent fulfilling the number of sketches and drawings for the next class.

During Spring Break, my troubles temporarily lifted.  Some time away let me forget about how horrible I felt every day because of art. I started to think that art wasn't that bad. I thought it was just a work load, but that I was learning a lot. But when we returned from the break, I was reminded that my efforts were worthless. No matter how hard I tried, my best was never good enough. I made bad grades, which made me feel bad about myself.

Once my real teacher returned for 2D Design class, my grades did improve. She was still hard, but at least she was nicer about it and had sympathy for someone who didn’t know what they were doing. I started making B’s, anyway. She even let us redo some of our old works, which replaced some of my C’s.

And then we had the color scheme project. We had to produce four pieces, all the same picture but different color schemes: monochromatic, analogous, complementary, and split complementary. The hues of these colors had to exactly match up or points were taken. I had never worked harder on anything in my life. I produced something that even I was proud of. I drew my friend on a computer program I could barely use. She looked realistic enough to me, or at least recognizable. I was so happy with it that I showed it off to anyone who would look. Everyone thought it was great and gave me the praise I so desperately craved. It had intricate details down pact. All the shadows looked amazing. And with all the color schemes, frankly, it looked really cool. I fully expected a comeback from Julie Kuralt in the eyes of the art department. A+, a grade worth celebrating, a grade that could finally help me not pull up my grade.

But when I got the project back, I turned it over and found a B-. The hues were too saturated. Disappointment shot through me. This was something of the final straw for me. I was so tired and angry with the impossible expectations from the art teachers that I had to leave the room. My absolute best resulted in barely a B. So overwhelmed by the whole semester of disappointment after disappointment, I found myself crying in a bathroom stall.

Finishing that semester was one of the happiest moments of my life. I’d put myself through a lot of self-pity and even hate for never being good enough. But now I think maybe just the type of art—and their standards—was just not for me. After a few months, I was able to pick up a pencil and draw again. And after the cringing subsided, I found myself able to enjoy it and work on improving on my own time. I just learned about my own endurance and that surely I could handle any other scholastic demands.