last night i was talking to a friend who is thinking about changing jobs. he works in a large office building downtown. he told me that he enjoys his work, likes his coworkers, and is fine when he’s at his desk, but starts to get down when he rides his bike into the corporate parking lot, sees the unhappy people get on an elevator to go up to their desks and then ride back down at the end of the day even unhappier than when they started. i have exactly the same feelings, and i suspect they’re pretty common.

the elevators/parking lot/dealing with strangers bad interaction stuff is by far the worst part of my day. it’s why i haven’t taken the bus in about four months. i’d rather ride my bike in the rain than deal with the bus. today i took the next step toward not dealing with unknown humans by taking the stairs on each of my three trips up to my desk on the 10th floor. no more elevators. ever.

as an aside, i wonder if that social anxiety disorder medicine is right for me. i should ask my doctor.

before i started work at america’s biggest online bookstore, i assumed that it would be all magic and super-perks everywhere (free returns? huge supply rooms full of every book ever?). turns out that other than having it be a really good icebreaker at parties when people find out where i work (this only works outside of seattle — in seattle, everyone works here or at the other big company), there really aren’t many. i mean, i love what i do and the impact i have on the internet as a whole, but the other big company has a super-sick gym that contains the old sonics floor on which their nerds can play basketball at lunch. i’m just saying.

the biggest perk at working at america’s biggest online bookstore is getting to attend lunchtime talks by visiting authors. i’ve seen a pretty great assortment of talks and won books written by: david lynch, jonathan lethem, and floyd landis. yesterday, david sedaris came to speak. i won his new book, too. i’d never won raffles until recently and now i can’t lose. (here’s where my losing streak starts.)

there isn’t a lot i can say about david sedaris that hasn’t already been said (other than a surprising number of my coworkers didn’t know who he was, which i didn’t think was possible), so i’ll talk about waiting in line for 40 minutes so that he could sign my book. there were only about 30 people in front of me, which means that he took a fair amount of time with each person, and i got to spend a fair amount of time away from my desk yesterday.

turns out that he does a little drawing for people and the opening line is a lot like those caricaturists in central park — they start drawing you on rollerskates and then ask if you like rollerskating (at least this was the case in 1983), for me senor sedaris started drawing a turtle and then asked me if liked turtles. my only possible reply was, ‘um, you already started it, so yes.’

he then began a stream of consciousness drawing/talking thing, which i think if i had to sign a billion books per week i’d be doing, too. his went something like, ‘your turtle, he’s a smart turtle, you can tell by the glasses… and he’s reading a book… about jesus being crucified… i guess that book would be the bible…’

here’s the drawing. it’s pretty rad:

in retrospect, i probably should have told him my last name so he coulda said something about the greeks instead of something generic about turtles and jesus.

it’s tough to write a composition about the environment, but i’m going to take today to reflect on my impact on it.

i’m in the environment all the time, though not as much as i should be. i ride my bike to work (in the rain today), i compost, i’m vegan. there’s only so much that one man can do. i haven’t switched over to cf bulbs because my normal bulbs haven’t burned out yet. and when they burn out, i probably won’t replace them at all, or at least until mia gripes about being unable to see. i don’t really like light anyway. and i’m very sensitive to ugly light (a lot of cf bulbs give off ugly ugly light). i even unscrewed my fluorescents at work. when it gets dark, i go home to sit in the dark at my house. bye-bye work.

you know what’s greener than buying cf bulbs or organic hemp pants? buying nothing. you only think you need new bulbs and new pants. you actually don’t. you may ask me, ‘jay, how do you reconcile this attitude with your job at amazon? why don’t you get your head and your ass together?’ this is a good question and one i ask myself a lot. yes, i work retail at the earth’s largest selection store. i design things that get people to buy more things though i really don’t want them to buy anything, ever. i think that the earth may have enough things already and maybe we should just make do with what we have.

so to answer your question, i am not sure how i reconcile my retail job and my don’t-buy-anything-that-isn’t-absolutely-necessaryness in my head other than to tell myself that i spend my day solving very hard problems and not contributing to the larger disaster that is consumer culture. and i think that’s at least somewhat true. i also tell myself that i’m working to make amazon a little greener and that my personal contribution is helping people find books on composting human waste, and hemp pants, and cf bulbs, and dr bronners in bulk (we sell all of those things). it’s the same way that i convinced myself that my federal taxes are going toward schools and head-start programs and food stamps and not subsidies for corn farmers and nuclear weapons. but i digress…

to conclude, i’m going to keep doing what i’m doing: not buying much stuff and if i have to buy stuff, i’ll buy as green as possible and put my purchases in a backpack that i brought from home, so that i can sling it over my back and ride my bike ride home from the store. it’s a good start. every little bit helps!

happy blog action day.

there’s an engineer in our group at work who is deaf, so a few of us take turns transcribing what gets said at meetings for her. since i’m not that chatty in big meetings, because typing and giving conversation commentary are fun, and because she’s super-nice, i do this whenever i can. in a meeting today, there was much typing, so afterwards she smiled at me, put her hand on her chin, and brought her hand down. i don’t know if she noticed the puzzled look on my face, though there was definitely one there.

apparently the asl for ‘thank you‘ and the italian hand-gesture for ‘fuck you‘ are maybe too close for a non-discerning eye to interpret.

also, is this my first work post in a really long time? it might be.