TryBecca

I relish the ten minutes of each working day when I get to smoke a Justin hand-rolled cigarette and watch the sun set over Dumbo. Even though I don’t really smoke.

The top floor of our building is a construction site. It’s dirtied with man-spittle and condom wrappers but it’s quiet and it’s mine. Sometimes Justin and I have HR meetings. Mostly, I stare out the window and pretend I’m Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (meaning I imagine I have two thick braids that wrap around my head) and think about life. I hear a precocious 13 year old girl asking:

*Why is it unexceptable to talk to ourselves when we all think to ourselves?
*Should I blog that Dick Chaney looks like The Penguin from Batman Returns?

Today’s roof time was well-earned. Earlier, I botched a UPS shipment. That is the technical term for what I did. Then I knocked over Lemon Lift Hot Tea and drenched my keyboard. I had hoped I wouldn’t have to tell anyone even after the spacebar stopped working and my emails started to look like this:

Hello!Thankyouforyourinterestinoursummerresidentialacademicprogram.

(My replacement keyboard is dark and not Apple. You have to attach it to the monitor, too, which makes me feel chained.)

Anyway, up on the roof, slightly buzzed from my cigarette, patting-down a fictional braid, I had a wordless thought. Its rough translation would be: I am an adult. This wasn’t the first time my adulthood ever occured to me, just the first time in awhile that I had felt it so profoundly. I don’t like to attribute any insight to Jewel but after writing about her I had music on the brain and what it takes to feel successful as an artist and an individual in a city where everybody sees through Liberal Arts colored glasses with black frames.

I’m almost thirty, pretty happy, and finally figuring stuff out. Stuff that isn’t shipment labels.

(taking a meditative drag by the window)

Allow me to better illustrate my point with The Sound of Music. When I moved here from North Carolina five years ago I was all Maria–

–fresh faced, musical, twirly. I could pull off wearing a Snuggle Fabric Softener tank top. I smiled too often at strangers on the train. I told a man just how much I liked him after our first date. I kept a journal of light and hope. I was a Poet, capital P.

By the time I had turned into The Baroness, the tank top was too tight and the journal, well, that was filled with blank verse entries like: My Stuff Is Still At Adam’s When Do I Have The Time To Pack It Up?!! and: Matthew Had A Fiance That Month? What The Fuck? Like most good little girls, I grew up hating the Baroness. Then I became a New York Woman. I probably had what I call My Baroness Awakening, or MBA, on the midtown roof of a banker bar.

Look at her! Sophisticated and beautiful! Guarded for a reason! Along came a singing nun–a young nun– who stole the Captain away from her, the emotionally unavailable Captain the Baroness loved. What woman wouldn’t have wanted to ship those children off to boarding school (or summer camp) so she could parade around the grounds in flattering cocktail dresses and have sex with an angry Captain?

(taking another meditative drag by the window)

Where was I going with this?

Oh OK, the point being that my “Ah-ha! I’m an adult!” moment happened as I was thinking about Jewel, and then music, and then my friend John’s show, and then how hard it is to stay positive and maintain that Julie Andrews attitude but how you need to be Baroness, too, because cynicism keeps you sharp and stylish and fun. And I feel lucky, because I’ve learned that. I think I’m a more interesting person and artist, and certainly more of an adult, than I was five years ago. Most of my friends are the same way.

Like my friend John McGrew.

John is an amazing singer, songwriter, keyboardist, and trumpeteer. He also has the grown-up ability to be innocently cynical. This picture of us toasting shows that quite nicely. It’s saccharine but we’re drunk, which is oh-so-Baroness.

John’s performing 8PM Wednesday, January 31, at the Crash Mansion (199 Bowery @ Spring Street) and you should see him. Have a listen to his music

here.

My blog isn’t just about my job. Actually, I’m not sure what my blog is about. I’ve decided it can sometimes be about Jewel.

Jewel rubs me the wrong way. It isn’t her jacked up grill. Strangely enough, I respect that she has the money to fix her teeth and doesn’t. I can feel like she’s part of some great dental protest, that her teeth are crooked for a cause. I’d take Jewel’s smile over Jessica Simpson selling me Pro Active any day.

No, my beef with Jewel is long-standing and deep-seeded and beyond cosmetic. It also involves some degree of self-hatred, because when I get drunk at karaoke I am the FIRST to fill out a slip for “Foolish Games” or “Save your Soul.” And a decade ago, in a moment of weakness, I bought a bootleg cassette of Jewel Live and spent the better part of a Fall cruising around Chapel Hill in my silver ’84 Volvo with the sun-roof down, yodeling.

I hate Jewel for her homelessness. This doesn’t mean I hate all homeless people–just Jewel. She lived in her van for a year when she was 18. I still don’t understand if the van was parked in one place or if she could afford gas to drive it around, but either way, she never fails to mention the van in interviews. Being poor sucks, yup. But if I had my choice, I’d take my destitution all at once, undiluted, rather than have it spread out evenly throughout my twenties. I even think I would have been a little excited to live in a van when I was 18 because it would have felt no different than going off to college–leaving home for the first time, cramped room, not much sleep, potato chips in my bed. Jewel was homeless for twelve months and became an international sensation. I’ve spent a third of my life sharing shoebox apartments and qualifying for food stamps and borrowing heavily from the government and I still can’t publish a damn book of poems.

I hate Jewel because she published a book of poems.

I can’t explain it. That feeling I get when I wander into the Poetry Section of my local bookstore and see Jewel snug on a shelf between Randall Jarell and John Keats. I vomit a little in my mouth. For those of you who spent the late 90’s living under a rock or in your van, the book is called “A Night Without Armor.” That’s a stupid name. My friends had cool titles for their thesises, titles like “Fire May Be a Form Of Drowning” or “Monument Avenue” or “Greener.” OK, that last one was mine and I’m partial, but still.

When “A Night Without Armor” debuted in 1998, it was the only book of poems on the Publishers Weekly list, coming in at #22 for the year.

It isn’t that she writes crappy. Well, OK, it kind of is, but I’m all for Jewel jotting down Haikus in her private dream journal. It just isn’t fair that she gets to mass distribute them or star in public poetry service announcements like this:

I get it. She’s making poetry popular. But maybe it’s only her poetry! Maybe the poem we’re supposed to share with the one we love is called “Upon Moving Into My Van!” There’s a lot of bad verse out there in the world. Take, for example, these uplifting lines I found from a blogger in India:

I am nothing
I am nothing
I am nothing for I turn
I turn into nothing
no bleakness
no darkness
nothing

I don’t like “I Am Nothing,” I will never turn to it for comfort after a long day at work answering multiple phone lines, but I’m not losing any amount of sleep over it, either. Because this poem will never reach The People. This guy in New Delhi might recite it to a couple of friends while depressed and high but I won’t ever have to contend with it in Barnes and Noble.

Now, here is the Jewel poem, probably read and emulated by millions:

“Upon Moving Into My Van”

Joy, Pure Joy, I am
What I always wanted
to grow up and be
Things are becoming
more of a dream with
each waking day-
The heavy brows of Daily Life
are becoming encrusted
with glitter and the shaking finger
of consequence is
beginning to giggle
Grumpy old men
have wings
Burns sport Halos
and everyday dullness
has begun to breathe
as I remember the
incredible lightness
of living

Yeah, that year living in your van sounded tough, Jewel. And since when is an encrusted glitter brow NOT scary? Or for that matter, a finger that can giggle?

When you google “giggle finger” this is what you come up with:

I want a fat office tabby. The kind of tabby so fat it can’t open its eyes. The kind of tabby that never moves except to stick out its obese paw to trip you.

My boss told us he’s highly allergic but does he mean stuffy nose or crippling hives? I discussed this with my four non-boss co-workers at Festivus, our weekly lunch meeting. We recently added a loft to our loft (think of those Russian dolls you look inside to find surprise! another doll) and have a budget of $5000 to pimp it out. I proposed red shag carpet, a retractable movie screen, a zen garden, and a fat tabby. The fat tabby won’t do much except stare down teacher candidates during interviews and *maybe* pull the lever to the concealed trap door that opens to cut these interviews short. Josh said it should be a button ’cause that’s less work for fat tabby. Probably.

We decided to name fat tabby Human Resources.

Soon it came about that Human Resources is so fat because he never gets to relieve himself. This all happened really fast. I had initially envisioned some sort of litter box but yeah, no box makes more sense, because fat tabby is fat DISGRUNTLED tabby. He meows and we hear cat noise but really he’s saying “Hey fuckers, give me the bathroom key” or “one day I’m gonna get up and pry open this 9th story window and bum a ride off that moving scaffolding.”

Here are the various office sketches of Human Resources. They are presented in no particular order except best-worst.

mine

Ashley’s

Michael’s (note the cross-eyed constipation)

Justin’s

Meow.

I really like my job. I’ve been there two weeks. I was hired as the Head of Human Resources (I’m the only Human Resources person in the office so I head it) and Sales Rep. Depending on who calls, I am also Secretary, Program Coordinator, Camp Director, and according to one grandmother in Malvern Pennsylvania, That Very Nice Young Lady.

The company I work for is a full service turnkey solution. I have no idea what this means. All I know is we operate cool academic summer camps for kids, that colleges enlist our services and we build each camp from the ground up. We exist behind-the-scenes. We hire the teachers, develop the curricula, and enroll the students. If I do my job right, a parent of a perspective student has no idea that he or she is speaking with a third party provider.

I have six phone lines.

We run six distinct camps at six distinct colleges. When a parent calls–assuming that I am not making a paper daisy chain or googling my name–I answer the phone. That part isn’t so hard. It’s what I say into the phone next that makes my job an exhausting exercise in location.

“Hello, (insert name of summer camp here), this is Rebecca.”

The first hurdle is putting the right camp with the right phone line. If I mess that up, I have to cough or pretend the school has a cute nickname that just happens to sound like the name of another school. The worst is when I say the name of our company. (Remember, we’re supposed to be an invisible turnkey.)

Um, there are also two phone lines just for our company.

OK, so let’s say I’m spot on. I’m representing the right college. I’m in a sales frenzy! I’m in the zone!

Mother of potential camper: “Performing Arts sounds ideal for my gifted-beyond-her-years-Sophie. Now tell me all about Troy, NY. How would you describe the Troy Farmer’s Market? At what angle does the evening light strike the campus quad?”

Me (scrambling to paraphrase website):

“There-are-many-Tudor-style-buildings-here-on-campus-in-Troy-

where-I-am-right-now.”

I am not in Troy. I have never been to Troy. I am in Brooklyn, in a Dumbo loft, with an unobstructed view of the Empire State Building, counting barges go by, wondering if the car plant across the street is giving me cancer. God forbid the caller is actually FROM Troy and asking about the weather, and I say it’s sunny here in Troy, where I most certainly am, then find out the people of Troy are snowed in and there’s been a rush on canned food and some hungry family just ate their frostbitten neighbor.

And when that happens–not the cannabalism, but my confusion–the guys I work with laugh and play me the following soundbite from Star Wars:

If only I had the smooth caller recovery of Han Solo. We’re all, uh, we’re all fine here in Troy.

Hey there. This is me:

”

and this, Trybecca, is my blog. Trybecca isn’t my first attempt at blogging. You might remember the short-lived yet unsuccessful “Cork!” which came about the day I found a packaged corkboard in Central Park. Finding a corkboard in Central Park was remarkable only in that I had planned to purchase one THAT VERY SAME AFTERNOON. Fate’s Intercession seemed worthy of a blog in a way that other, smaller things in my life hadn’t before, like: Is it possible I got felt-up during my first full body massage? or: How come I sometimes swipe my metrocard at the exit turnstyle?

Now I care less about Fate and more about rent, anti-wrinkle cream, and that disturbing gas smell that occasionally permeates lower Manhattan.

Since my friends will be reading this, I’d like to begin with an announcement, an announcement I can not make by calling each of you individually. It’s rather a chicken/egg situation. I have decided not to reactivate my phone. This is because Becca is poor. I am poor despite having two jobs. Day Becca convinces parents to send their kids to summer camp for forensic science and trust falls. Night Becca sells candy at a musical about the inventor of the printing press (“I Can’t Read Him”) and is getting fat from intermission Snickers.

I have $50,000 debt and a degree in poetry. I keep my thesis in the bathroom underneath a Pottery Barn candle. I have a change jar with no more change in it. I know this Asian place on West 3rd that puts out Ziplock baggies of pork dumplings to entice drunken college students to enter and the baggies sweat and smell like wet fart and I swore I would NEVER EVER eat one again, but I have. Recently.

Just how poor am I? Free-pork-dumpling poor.