Friday, July 04, 2008

Google’s Tips for Getting Ahead

Just the other day, I had a fleeting desire for self-improvement.  Before the mood passed, I turned to Google for some advice.  Now Google doesn’t burden a fellow by demanding complete sentences, the way some people do, so I typed in “how to get ahead.” I wanted to complete the phrase: how to get ahead by doing what? Reviewing the massive search results, I found that this is a land of dreamers; we are a people of contradictory impulses and destructive longings. Even Google is having trouble sorting this country out.

Many Americans have web sites about getting ahead. Google found techies who want me to use the latest computer tracking systems or to zap my feet with levitation rays. There were capitalists in favor of putting today’s decisions into the context of long-term aspirations or innovating rather than suing the competition. Some capitalists have more specific tips about trading Philippine real estate or sending bulk commercial e-mail, which, last I heard, is called spam.

Certain little criminals say to get ahead by cutting corners and telling the occasional white lie, or if necessary, lying, cheating, and backstabbing. Bigger criminals go for busting heads, breaking fingers, and dressing neatly. If that doesn’t work, try killing, or brokering a sensitive drug deal with a mysterious crime lord known as Mr. Gold.

Google found shameless operators who want me to marry above my station, mistreat customers, undercut the boss, or slurp off the taxpayer-provided infrastructure.  Some bozos focus on getting ahead by looking like you deserve it or on using body language to enhance your power of benevolent manipulation. Some of our fellow countrymen like sticking it to The Man: stepping on people, psyching out your boss and co-workers, or, if nothing else will do, getting into someone else’s head, making highly placed people feel good about having you around, and controlling people’s thoughts in day to day conversations. Also, be sure to take advantage of passing management fads and do as little work as possible, if you’d like to get ahead, that is.

The poor folks who’ve been wounded by life also have advice. Get ahead by proving you can handle the grunt work without complaining, they say, or by being the good little slave, or by really trying. Some people feel that watching reality tv, being naturally good and cute, reading the newspaper, cross-dressing, going out of business, or manipulating someone into loving you emotionally and fiscally might make all the difference.

Milder, gentler citizens teach that self-improvement comes from making small adjustments to one’s life.  Their web sites propose honest work, making the right decisions, applying lessons, trusting one’s heart, and staying the course, bless their souls. One web site recommended doing some reading about how to get ahead.

As you can see, America, you are ever hopeful and always longing for self-improvement; you are a people with a dream. Americans have the most contradictory values, when they deserve to be called values, and a good number of us don’t have the slightest idea what really matters in life. Google pretty much proves it. I hate to say this on your birthday, America, but you’re a mess.  You need to find some way to improve yourself.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on July 04, 2008
Community • Customs & Rituals • Work • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, June 27, 2008

Making Up on the South Shore

The woman caught my eye right away as she stepped onto the South Shore train.  We’re riding the 8:55 to Randolph Street and I’d just settled in to one of those face-to-face seats with my morning Starbucks and the paper, all relaxed, a whole day awaiting in Chicago.  Then this petite but strong statured woman gets on at Carroll Street.  She’s got a casual, natural look, dark hair thrown across her forehead and a simple leather bag slung over her jean jacket.  She sits down right across from me.  Great face: honest, confident, no makeup, a few character lines, and just below her dark eyes a small, mysterious scar on the bridge of her nose curving down toward her cheekbone. 

As we’re approaching the Beverly Shores station I glance over and see the woman looking into a pocket mirror.  Yes, you’re pretty, sister. Don’t worry about that. Then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a big pink tackle box, sets it on her lap and opens it up, revealing a whole assortment of little tubes and jars.  She selects one tube, squirts some stuff onto her fingertips and starts rubbing it onto…her face. Whoa! What are you doing? I think they call the stuff foundation...which I never understood because a foundation is supposed to be made of wet cement and hold your house up, not your face.  All the way to Dune Park she’s wiping it…no, pressing it into her face, hard, like you press putty into a window frame.  Wiping, wiping like Lady MacBeth trying to rid herself of a horrid spot on her cheeks and on and on she goes as we zoom toward Ogden Dunes. Oh come on, I’m thinking. You don’t need that!  She glances over at me. Oops.

All the way to Gary station she’s rummaging around the tackle box.  She pulls out a round container like a shoe polish tin and a pad and now she’s wiping that stuff on over the first coat.  Another layer?  Furiously wiping it on…over and over, like when you spread on a second coat of drywall mud after you sand the first coat and she must be wiping her skin red and I’m no dermatologist but sister there is no way that can be good for your pores.  She drops the drywall tin into the purse and I start breathing again but then she pulls out a clear plastic zippered pouch filled with utensils and selects a bristle brush and a flat lid box and poofs that on over the damp mud and a little cloud of flesh colored dust rises all around her and poof poof poof she’s whapping it on and where’s her face? Augh! Her mystery scar is gone, the character lines gone, the depth of her skin now an opaque unicolor like someone spray painted her face!  By East Chicago she’s completed the rehab project, she latches the tackle box and drops it all into her shoulder bag. Whew. She had enough stuff in there to embalm and caulk Ramses II into a pyramid.

Pulling into Hammond station the woman looks in the pocket mirror again. She frowns. Oh no. She’s into the zippered pouch again, pulls out a silver twist pencil, changes her mind, puts it back…pulls out a gold twist pencil and Phase II begins.  Wax eyebrow crayons, lip varnish, emo eyeliner, eyelash thickener…

I must have blacked out.  Because next thing I know, the train is slowing, the conductor announces “Van Buren…Van Buren Street next” and this perky, unrecognizable woman across from me presses her lips together, smiles, pops up out of the seat and stands at the door.  Ready for the world, I guess.

Me?  I’m still back in my seat, slumped over, exhausted and confused.  I could probably use some makeup, before we get to Randolph Street.

Broadcast by Jeff Nixa on June 27, 2008
Customs & Rituals • Travel • Women & Men • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, June 20, 2008

Time Travel in Paris

It feels good to have an adoptive city, a great foreign capital to which I can return at different stages of life, marking those stages. This spring I visited Paris for the eighth time. My first visit was the most momentous. I was twenty-one and at the beginning of my first trip to Europe. My best friend and I arrived in the Latin Quarter just an hour before François Mitterrand was declared the winner of the presidential election. Those were the days before the student population had been driven from the quartier by tourism and gentrification, and young people flooded the streets, climbing the statues and chanting. France had elected its first socialist leader, a mere thirteen years after the student revolt of May ’68.

I had studied maps of Paris and read French literature and the Parisian works of American expatriates like Stein, Hemingway, Baldwin, and Miller. I had fallen in love, of course, with my French teachers in high school and college. My prior romance with the language, art, stories, and landmarks animated the city. I remember a morning when the sun emerged and lit up the domes and towers across from where my friend and I stood on a right bank quay, and the world itself seemed like a pure gift, a fresh beginning.

You’re only young once, and you can only go to Paris as a young man or young woman once. By the time I had returned six years later, I was a jaded grad student. The six years might as well have been twenty, I was changing so rapidly then. But even had I returned only a year later, the city would already have lost some of its sparkle, because much of the dazzle had emanated from my own eyes. But that summer I fell in love with a French woman named Chantal, and that was another miracle Paris could produce. She lived in an artist’s loft in Montmartre, and I would take the Metro to her place almost every day, or would wake there and go out to buy baguettes and pastries while she brewed tea. You unlocked the heavy wooden front door of the building with a bit key and turned a few cobbled streets down to the local patisserie. As an American, you fall in love in Paris only once.

Meanwhile, I pursued research at the national library. Later that summer I drank beers with the philosopher Jacques Derrida at a café on the Boulevard Raspail, an event comparable to meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950s. If my first trip to Paris was the initiation, the second trip was a higher order rite of passage that set the course of my professional life.

My third visit to Paris came eleven years later, at another transitional moment, as I was preparing my tenure dossier and contemplating marriage. Chantal now seemed far in the past, but I was in Paris again, potentially within her sphere of influence. I was pleased to find that the city had renewed itself, or in other words that I had been renewed, and that my new love called to me from America purely and sweetly over the Atlantic, so that Paris was somehow ours now, even if only I walked its streets.

Just three years later I returned to Paris with my wife and her father at the start of a trip that would also take us to Italy and Greece. It had been years since my father-in-law had traveled to Paris for pleasure. His introduction to the city was as a graduate student in the 1950s, and part of the pleasure of our visit was in vicariously revisiting his past, getting to know his Paris. Now his spirit hovers over the city whenever my wife and I return there, even as we discover our own Paris. And there, also, are my former selves, each inhabiting his own Paris, alive in a parallel universe I occasionally cross fleetingly. The doorway of the past may be opened by the smell of croissants, the roar of a truck on the street, or the glance of a child. I may not know what my most recent visits mean to me until years have passed and my present self has become a ghost capable of haunting my future self. But I know I’ve changed, because Paris is a different place.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on June 20, 2008
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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Joe Chaney -- Showing Your Goat / The High School Football Scene / The Middle Manager’s Beatific Vision / A Confession / Who Gets to Drive? / The Curse of the Teenage Clone / Super Bowl Fever 2007 / Hawaiian Shirts, Local Time / Hearing Our Spirit Voice / Sneezes and Oopses / Working for the Minimum Wage / More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Enthusiast / I Love A Parade / Ice-Carving in St. Joseph / Where Are You From? / A Walk in the Park / A Turkey Tale / Pledging My Support / War / Revisiting the Past / First Call for Help / Admiring Irish Dance / More essays by Louise

April Lidinsky -- A World of Our Making / Shampooing the Mouse / Surviving Kids’ Birthday Parties / True Confessions of a Girl Scout / Pajama Parties, Not Political Parties / The Allure of Youth Culture / Microclimates of the Self / Second Thoughts on Sex Ed / Grace on the Journey / Pomp and Happenstance / Having a Field Day / More essays by April

Jonathan Nashel -- Hitting the Road / Bikers, BMWs, and the Nature of Community in Michiana / My Lawn, My Nightmare / How Paris Turned Into South Bend / New York, 9/11, and Those Images / Life is Beautiful / Baseball and Me / Pushing a Lawnmower to the Max in Granger / Eating Out With Job Candidates / Riding a Big Rig / Why We Need Kung Fu Films / More essays by Jonathan

Jeff Nixa -- The Last Customer / A Hospital Epiphany / Kayaking a Great Lake / Black Ice / Dancing with Trains / Humor in the Hospital / Making Up on the South Shore / Daddy Daughter Dance / Inner City Bike Repair / Gettysburg / Bike to Work Week / More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- For the Love of Cooking Shows / Google’s Tips for Getting Ahead / Watching the Firefighters / Pride and Hype Along the Interstate / The Morning after Valentine’s Day / What Is Poetry Good For? / Taking the Family Camping / In Praise of Perennials / Santa’s Helicopter / The Power of Medical Experts / Turtle Lamps and Other Gifts / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- True to Type / Chronicling Michiana / Celebrating Magna Charta Day / Patrick Henry in the Marching Band / More essays by Jeanette