Internment

... a "life piece"

Today my office smelled like Hot Pockets. That's right, Hot Pockets. Like a Subway restaurant or clove cigarette, the stench of a Hot Pocket is unmistakably distinctive. My office smells like this because one of my coworkers loves them. Once, he bit into a Hot Pocket that was so hot it burnt his lip and left a dime-sized blister that lasted a week.

I've learned that a few continuities occur on the spectrum of internships. For me, one of these has been that the intern is given the office chair with the weird stain. It works okay, but it's got this big, awkward stain that I hope is coffee. If I ever try to switch the chair with someone else's, it always comes back to me before the next morning. For this internship specifically, I have the delight of painting the office walls for between 20 and 50 hours a week!

The holidays are a special time for any office of this kind: cheesy casseroles, awkward gift exchanges, etc. My secret Santa is a really friendly, kind of burly, older construction manager with a thick Mississippi accent. I figured I'd get him some beer until he came to my end of the studio and said loudly, "Eif eenybody has me as theyur secret Santa, ah just wantchou to know that ah really lahk Burt's Bees. Ayund candles." After a burst of laughter from the entire studio, he said seriously, "Weyell, ah lahk girls ayund girls lahk candles." I asked him later what he liked from Burt's Bees. He told me how his hands get dry and cracked from working outside so much, and then said, "Yeeou know those little honey bee gloves they hayuve? Theyure wat cotton gloves with the little huney bees all over um. Sometahms ah just lahk to sit at home with those on after I put on the hayund cream." Ah, people and their eccentricities. This bit of information made this rugged yet dainty Southerner my favorite person to run into at the office.

For one assignment, I was to make a flier to send out to clients that offered our services of hanging Christmas lights in landscapes. This is how my coworker explained it: "Well, we want this to have more than just Christmas pictures. So... you probably know better than I do... just... maybe something to do with Hanukkah? Or... I don't know... you know what I mean." Do I? What kind of Jew-specific holiday decorations exist in the world of crazy landscape architects? This kind of awkward interaction between religions is common in a town like Alpharetta, GA, where I commute to work. This poor lady got the assignment from the ultimate boss, who runs the company and gives out whimsical, intangible orders to whomever because he's too important to be bothered with concrete details or human decency.

He says, "I drive a hybrid," with the same up-inflection he uses to say, "I don't shop at Walmart." These responsible decisions have given him the moral foundation to act as he pleases, which has included screaming at one employee, verbatim: "Your opinion doesn't count here. I run this company and I have the ultimate say! My opinion is the only one that really matters here!" While this saddens me deeply for my coworkers who have long term commitments to work there, sometimes I view him as a fictional character that is part Steve Martin's character in Baby Mama and part Michael Scott from The Office, and it makes me laugh.

For example, each fall, when the geese come through on their arduous, mystical, migratory journey, he develops new methods of taking care of the problem of their presence. Most recently, he employed the floor manager, a proud hunter and his right hand man (who suffers the worst of his abuses and is my immediate superior) to help him in this effort. They walked outside, armed with roman candles, and stalked the geese from behind cars and steep banks, screaming and pouncing occasionally to fire off another round at the enormous birds that are such a nuisance.

My manager also seems to take pride in the ability to put down the people that work for him. Maybe he wouldn't be this way if he weren't treated the same by his superior. The owner doesn't realize that while profits don't trickle down when he says they will (he had to get that new hybrid Tahoe with company money for the sake of the company) negativity certainly does. In the moments when this gets me down I have music to carry me through, my refuge in a cruel and hierarchical world.

When I throw on an early 80s Grateful Dead show, I have Bob Weir's vocals, like a softball coach, cheering me on through the workday. I listen to him over the sound of my manager, asking me if I've done anything with the latest office supply that he lost. I have the Bad Plus' dry musical humor and Battles' crazy math-rock funk to keep me awake. Animal Collective and David Byrne restore my faith in the human capacity to create when people around me seem so apathetic. Steely Dan puts me in a fun, sleazy mood. Freddie Hubbard's "Red Clay" makes me feel like Superman. MMW helps me keep my cool and Feist feels like home. These artists get me through the hard days, when all I really want to do is go home, take a fat bong rip, and forget the whole thing ever happened.