Displaced

At this very last instant, I am about to pack my towel, so you know I really mean it about the leaving town. If you don’t know what I mean, please click here and get yourself to a bookstore to round out your expensive education with a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy. If you saw the movie and hated it, take heart: the book is as better than the movie as going to Costa Rica is better than packing for it.)

It is quarter past five in the morning, we leave in twenty minutes, and so, in the nick of time, National Blog Posting Month comes to a close. I will be posting as often as possible from Costa Rica and, if my plan for rainforest-based connectivity doesn’t pan out, stay tuned for large sets of posts all at once as I pass through towns seeking bug spray and turtles.

Not being able to remember how I found out about Annabelle Verhoye is an annoying lapse. I was rattling around New York for several years so it’s probably inevitable that I would cross paths with a lot of intriguing people and forget how I met most of them.

Beginnings be damned, I tracked her down once I did see her work, inviting myself, with my nonexistent art-buying budget into her studio on the west side on a bitterly cold winter day five years ago. I can’t explain why I loved her pieces. I do not usually like overtly feminine work. It must be the combination of the alien shapes of her delicate women and flowers combined with the layers of materials – paint, plastic, glass – that attracts me.

If you are in New York this week, go and see her first solo show at the Opera Gallery. Annabelle herself is warm and welcoming and her work is worth a trip.

I have now had four different conversations in which it was suggested that I develop and perfect my “elevator pitch.”

I had not heard this phrase before three weeks ago. This is nearly a miracle since I have worked for about twenty different companies in the last ten years and felt that I was fully saturated and up-to-date on all business jargon. Mind you, I don’t say that with any pleasure. Listening to the overgrown frat boy in a suit from down the cubicle hallway use words like “impactful” and “priorize” (a personal favorite) still makes my skin itch.

I thought I was nearing the end of the learning curve when they slipped “elevator pitch” in on me. After a split second of confusion in which I scanned all possible meanings, including “a highly restricted and probably physically damaging version of the American pastime” and “the advocacy of newfangled ways of avoiding the challenging exercise of climbing the stairs,” I settled on what turns out to be the real definition:

A concise, carefully planned, and well-practiced description about your company that your mother should be able to understand in the time it would take to ride up an elevator. – Business Know-How

I definitely need one of these. When people ask me what I write, I ramble on for a minute and a half before realizing that they wanted the specifics of my artistic toil about as much as they want to know about the details of that gloomy co-worker’s stint on anti-depressants that one time when the girl he thought he was dating turned out to be dropping off for UPS / paid by his mother / a bipolar homeless person living in the next doorway over or something equally sad and boring.

When people connected to you socially ask what you do, they only care about two things. First, that you are OK (read = not scary or dull). Second, that you say something amusing or, barring that, something brief. It’s not that they will not come to love you and all the mindnumbing details of your personal attachment to your work with orphan blind newts that occupy your every waking hour, it’s just that you’re at a party right now and it’s neither the time nor the place to get into all that.

When people connected to you professionally ask what you do, they only care about one thing. Do you have anything to offer? That’s it. If they are peers or underlings, you must respond by saying something brief and pithy and preferably hilarious which will offer them a moment’s relief from the tedium of their work day. (Remember: hilarious = good, too clever by half = secretly hating you.)

If they are superiors or clients or, really, anyone else, you must tell them how you are interesting to them, which pretty much boils down to how you can help them make more money, either through direct contribution to their bottom line or by relieving them of some task they can’t stand – like writing coherent sentences or feeding their dog automatically through a combination of hydroponics and robots – and thereby freeing them up for Very Important Things.

I am down with this. Let’s call a spade a spade and acknowledge that deep, meaningful conversations or professional work will follow more quickly if you demonstrate right away that you have a confident grasp of a.) your work and b.) the current context.

In short, I like this new phrase and think that the next step is to find its antonym. I’m leaning toward a verb like “slow coaching” myself. If you want to discuss it, I’ll be in the north wing elevator between two and four tomorrow afternoon whittling down my pitch.

It’s Christmas season and we all know what that means. Tomtens.

That’s right, kids. It’s tomten time. Get your hay and let’s get our holiday on.

For the unininitiated, tomtens take care of farm animals in the cold Swedish winter. They’re sticklers for tradition, OCD types who want things in the barn to be just so and they expect their porridge on Christmas Eve. Not so much to ask for living with livestock.

More info:

The best tomten books, in my opinion, are from Astrid Lindgren, of Pippi Longstocking fame. Check out The Tomten and The Tomten and the Fox.

The best online tomten source is Ingebretsen’s. Snag all sizes of the non-Disney version here.

“Why,” you may ask, “why, Emma, have your recent posts been so sparse, so undernourished, so, as my grandmother would say, spakely?” Why because we are leaving for Costa Rica on Thursday! Yes, the Christmas season this year will be preceded by a jaunt to Central America. Nothing so relaxing as complicated travel right before the holidays, let me tell you what.

There is delight in our eyes at the prospect of beaches and rainforests, I cannot deny it, but it is hardly visible beneath the glisten of panic that has accompanied this long weekend of packing and reserving and printing of itineraries and worry about potholes and rain. Oh, and Christmas. Right. That holiday for which it will already be too late to order presents that have any chance of arriving in time for the blessed day if we wait to send for them until we get back from warmer climes. That holiday of cheer which requires a tree (gotten) and lights (gotten and determined to be broken and unfixable and which must now be replaced with better ones which will also break mysteriously while lying in a box for eleven months out of twelve) and ornaments (disorganized, mostly not broken because, thank God, we have no cat to tear them from the limbs of the tree because it thinks it’s being amusing or predatory or because it has come up with other wrong-headed cat thoeries).

Yes, to sum up, we are very close to the end of our ropes at the very beginning of this season. Thank God for beaches and fruity drinks and let us all pray that there will be no showing of unflattering photographs upon our return and much laughter at the memory of how stressed we once were, back before Costa Rica, laughter about how it is all behind us and only bliss lies ahead. Yes, we will giggle and chortle…as we madly water plants, wrap and re-ship gifts, say a brief ‘hello’ to our tree and pack for our departure for Christmas in Switzerland a mere ten days after our return.

Omigod. I have to go lie down.

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY, who is black, was asked on public TV what he thought about the President: “Well, I really think that he shatters the myth of white supremacy once and for all.”

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” – Carrie Fisher

“We were going to make a movie that covered all the Merchant Ivory movies. It was going to be called The Remains of the Piano“. – Tim Curry* on a planned collaboration with Douglas Adams

*Hear an excellent interview with him on Fresh Air, here.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

“Nobody ever died from being tired.” – my grandmother

Seek excellence. Get some sleep occasionally. And have a good holiday weekend.

Interviewer: Do you wear sneakers?
Olivia Kibar, owner of French Sole: I own a couple Italian pairs in silk and cahmere. But I’m European. I don’t believe in looking comfortable.

– New York Magazine, October 30, 2006

We’re going to Switzerland for Christmas. I’m taking out all my uncomfortable clothes this weekend.

Maureen Dowd has been getting on my nerves lately. I started reading her regularly a couple of years ago when she was coherent, but in the last six months (or maybe it’s a year – I don’t have a wall calendar where I keep track), her editorials have become disjointed. The paragraphs don’t flow from one another: the pieces read like sloppily constructed much longer rants that were edited down to fit the space allowed. Cramming a dozen caustic one-liners into a 600-word piece is a futile effort. None of them stand out and she sounds like, at worst, a jerk and, at best, a rotten editor.

That said, I usually agree with her and she does hit it sometimes. This week, she’s my choice for Editorial of the Week because of this line:

“Dick Cheney and his wormy aides, of course, are still babbling about total victory and completing the mission by raising the stakes and knocking off the mullahs in Tehran. His tombstone will probably say, “Here lies Dick Cheney, still winning.””

Read the full text of “Lost in the Desert” here.

Robert Altman died today. Sad news.

I’m glad the last movie of his that I saw was A Prarie Home Companion– which had a peculiar charm and otherworldliness – and not Gosford Park which was incredibly boring and reminded me of Scorcese‘s movies with its intense focus on period details and insufficient focus on anything of interest. Whatever I think of his individual films, there is no doubt that he was a true auteur and seminal director. A pioneer of the now-ubiquitous sprawling cast and multiple storyline movie, he will be missed.