Meeting of the Minds

Friday evening I went to a staff dinner for work. I’m usually pretty skeptical about these kinds of “team building,” or bonding exercises. At every other place I’ve worked, it’s usually been implicit that once the day is over, spending extra time with your coworkers would be akin to asking for more root canals at the dentist. Therefore, I typically try my damnedest to skip out on these things. I’d rather sit at home watching a PBS special on the art of Venice, or whatever, than listen to Sally from accounts payable talk about her herniated disk.

Yet that evening I found myself not only sacrificing a perfectly good Friday night to be in the company of my fellow office drones, I also volunteered to drive to the location of the dinner. In my car I had our office’s Sally, Karen, who lent me a book on home remedies for cats. (I think that pretty much says all there is to say about Karen.) Also riding with me was my work-buddy, John, and his wife.

It’s always funny to see how people’s official work personas erode when they’re taken out of the office context. Sometimes, folks will surprise you. One guy, who I thought was pretty closeted, remarked to a female staff member who was mock flirting with him, “Honey, you’re just too much woman for me!” Another girl regaled us with frickin’ hilarious stories about working for a plastic surgeon in LA. Personally, I present myself to my coworkers with a veneer of genial blandness. This helps maximize stunned responses when I selectively mention that a weekend’s events landed me at a leather bar where I was fed cherries by a shirtless bartender. (So many hot gay men just wasted on my poor little lezzie eyes…)

On our way home from the dinner, we got on the topic of teaching English in Japan. John was sitting in the front with me, and his wife and Karen were in the back seat. At some point in the night, John and I had broken down a barrier that allowed us to approach out-of-office normality. I was telling a story about how certain Japanese exchange students I had met in college got the wrong impression of me and decided that I was huggable. I grew up in a cold, unsentimental, Yankee family. We don’t do touchy-feely. If you’re a stranger to me, the last thing you should consider doing to get in my good favor is give me a bear hug. However, somehow my “please keep your distance” vibes translated into Japanese as, “SQEEZABLE!” God only knows why.

John commiserated with me by sharing that when people first meet him, they think he can’t speak English (he’s Korean-American), and then they assume that he’s a ‘mo, mainly because he’s a snappy dresser. It’s true. I thought it when I first met him.

“I’m like Harold from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” he lamented.

“Oh my god! I’ve thought that before, but didn’t think it would be polite to say!” I felt relief that he saw the similarity.

“Yeah, people always assume I’m the catcher,” he joked. “So you’ve seen Harold and Kumar? I tried to get my wife to watch it with me, but she thought it was crap and turned it off thirty minutes in.” I could tell that I had earned some coolness points in his eyes.

Here his wife chimed in to say, “It was so bad! That’s a terrible movie!”

“Harold and Kumar is a quality film,” I said, not even facetiously. “Dude Where’s My Car? – with the aliens? Now that’s crap. Harold and Kumar is a brilliant piece of comedy in comparison.”

Karen, completely confused, then asked, “What’s Harold and Kumar?” I’d discovered earlier in the evening that Karen apparently lives in a bubble with her cats. She hadn’t even heard of Lost.

“It’s a movie. I’m not really sure you’d find it funny. It’s kind of frat boy humor. It’s about two guys who get high and then drive around looking for White Castle burgers” I replied.

“Well, I find lots of movies funny. You never know,” Karen replied, defensively.

“What movies do you think are funny? Maybe that’ll give us a better idea of what you like in comedy,” John said with far more diplomacy than I could’ve mustered.

“Well, I thought Sideways was a very good comedy,” Karen said earnestly. Immediately, John and just looked at each other and busted out laughing.

“Sideways won an Oscar!” John exclaimed.

“Harold and Kumar features a giant, walking bag of pot!” I added.

Karen, who didn’t understand how what she had said was so unintentionally hilarious, huffed out an, “I don’t get it. I don’t see how this is funny!”

John and I looked at each other and shook our heads as if to say, “Well, you don’t. But we do.” And in that respect, I guess the evening was a success. John and I, thanks to Karen’s cluelessness, had now officially bonded. Granted it was at the expense of laughing at a fellow coworker, but I’m sure that HR would've shrugged their shoulders in approval.

P.S. - I am completely in love with Be Your Own Pet's song, "October, First Account." It makes me want to ride around in a 1980 AMC Pacer not wearing a seat belt. I would upload it, but the file seems to be protected. Damn. But I just thought I'd share.

An American Tale

When my former coworker was moving his family from Israel to New York City a few years back, he traveled ahead to find suitable lodging. Erez booked his hotel online. He couldn't afford much, so the room wasn't very fancy and it didn't have its own bathroom. The website made it look like a decent enough place, and the booking was totally legit. Plus Erez had spent his tour of duty in the Israeli military on a submarine, and what could be worse than that?

When he arrived, the hotel looked like the kind of place characters on Law and Order: SUV go to get raped. It had one of those double-paneled glass guards around the front desk for "security." The bathrooms at the rooming house were so bad that Erez would go to the Trump Towers down the street to use the facilities. And to call it "quaint," as it was advertised on the web site, you would've had to have been recently released from doing several years' hard time in prison.

Consequently, many of the other inhabitants looked as if they had felony convictions, or soon would. One of his neighbors, who stood out as being pretty normal, was an African American man who smiled at him in the corridor and dressed nicely. Everyone else looked like they were from a central casting call for crack addicts.

One evening, Erez couldn't make to the Trump Towers to use their toilet, so he decided to brave the hotel's restroom instead. When he entered the shared bathroom, he could hear a rustling behind the shower curtain. Not wanting the imminent stabbing by a junkie to be a total surprise, he called out, "Hello!"

"Hi," came a voice. From behind the shower curtain appeared the nice black man Erez had befriended in the hallways. Only he was wearing a dress. And heals. And carefully applied make-up.

Erez said to me, "It was like, 'Welcome to America, where all showers come equipped with their own African American drag queens!'"

ETA: Mine's named Anita Cocktail.

A question for the ages...

The new AV support girl at work isn't too bad to look at.

Would it be inappropriate to manufacture reasons for elaborate audio-visual presentations so that I may bask in her cuteness? Or do you think she'd eventually get suspicious as to why a Power Point presentation with audio and video components is needed to illustrate the correct method of ordering office supplies?

Hmmmm....

Moment of Zen

If you are someone I've spoken to at any length within the past four years, you probably know that riding the subway on a daily basis has turned me mildly homicidal.

First of all, exposure to the unpredictable incompetence of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) will induce even the most mentally stable person to find solace in rocking in a corner and eating paste. Case in point, a couple of weeks ago, the token collecting turnstiles at the subway station near my work burst into flames.

Instead of fixing the situation promptly, the chronically in debt MBTA has decided to depend on the honesty of our fair city's citizens to drop tokens into a box next to an open gate - in one of the busiest stations on the line - and did I mention this was in Boston? Well, I guess with the way the MBTA dupes tourists at the airport stop into putting $20 a pop onto metro cards that barely work anywhere else on the system, everything comes out even. So scratch that. I think they may be secretly brilliant and I just haven't figured out their evil master plan, yet.

Add to the injury done by the general incompetence of the MBTA the insult of having to come into close bodily contact with dozens of complete strangers, daily, over a span of years, and you come perilously close to your breaking point. Seriously, if I wanted to get that intimate with people I had never met before, I would have taken up a career in porn.

Apparently I'm not the only one who has been slowly driven mad by regular subway ridership. Recently, the MBTA decided that its customers were getting just a wee bit too hostile. Instead of taking measures that would fix longstanding complaints, the operators of the T thought that the best way to encourage civility would be to reward random acts of kindness by handing out $2.00 vouchers for coffee. And the judges for what constitutes acts of civility? The same MBTA employees that slam shut car doors in your face just as you're millimeters away from boarding the train. Plus, might I point out, coffee isn't exactly known for its calming effects on the nerves. Good call, MBTA.

So I've got a better idea. I wasn't exactly in a great mood this morning when my train was fifteen minutes late. Due to the build-up of commuters, the trains were especially crowded. I was accidentally groped by a man who couldn't keep his balance. But my mood lightened considerably with what I saw when I disembarked at my station.

As I was slogging up the stairs with the rest of my fellow worker drones, a blip registered on my gaydar. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied two women in their mid-thirties, holding hands and talking to each other. I tried not to stare, but it was hard - they were really adorable. Next thing I knew, they leaned in and shared a big, fat, lesbian kiss, right there on the subway platform. It made my blackened little heart sing. I walked the rest of the way to work with a smile on my face that stretched from here til next Tuesday.

Now, if only the MBTA would plant cute gay couples in all of the subway stations. They can hold hands, kiss, wave rainbow flags, whatever. I know that would make me way more likely to not spit on tourists than any $2.00 coupon for coffee ever could. But this might just be my opinion.

Happy National Coming Out Day!