One of my closest friends back in New York is dealing with a pretty traumatic breakup. She was with her boyfriend for several years, and they were one of those couples that you always found yourself referring to when you lay awake at night, wondering why God cursed you with a flat-chested, five foot tall frame and bisexuality, because there’s no way anybody will ever truly love you in your life, you’re not destined for that kind of happiness like them…Anyway, yeah, they busted up. And my friend, who is not only gorgeous but also one of the most hilarious writers I know, is understandably sad.

“I think I want to arrange it so that I can just work from home for a while,” she said.

This is conceivable since the small internet gaming company she works for is so close-knit that she has, in the past, vomited at her desk and seen her boss wear sweatpants around the office.

“I mean, I’ve called in sick for two days, this is my first day back and I just can’t focus,” she added. “You’re lucky. You don’t ever have to worry about getting to work.”

Oh, if she only knew.

When I started thinking about moving out of New York in order to “get my shit together,” part of the motivation was the commute. Every weekday morning in Park Slope I used to wake up at 5:50AM. I got dressed in the bleary darkness of my way-too-small apartment, swallowed two cups of coffee from my programmed Mr. Coffee percolator, and hopped in my VW to begin the harrowing commute from Brooklyn to Nassau County, Long Island, where I worked as the sole legal assistant to a real estate lawyer. My day job, while not nearly as spiritually fulfilling as my nights spent trying to get laid at poetry slams or writing, was manageable. I got paid every Friday, took an hour long lunch daily, and did what I was told. I also ritualistically broke the Xerox machine twice a week, probably as a passive aggressive display of rebellion.

My commute, however, was enough to sandwich each day between two anxiety attacks. In the morning, over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, I swore loudly, bit my nails, and weaved in and out of traffic like I was Keanu Reeves trying to bump uglies with Sandra Bullock. Every night, at five-fifteen exactly, I would take the exit ramp onto the Long Island Expressway and sit in traffic as my MPH gauge went down and my blood pressure rose. My commute to work? A minimum of forty five minutes, maximum of an hour and a half. Commute home? Minimum of an hour, maximum of don’t even fucking ask. I had three car related scares towards the end of my legal career: a blow out going sixty near the Kosciusko Bridge, a terrifying breakdown on a day when God’s wrath took the form of a flood, and, finally, a wreck that totaled my car and turned my left shoulder into a one-joint drum circle.

Everyone in Portland has a bike, which is one of many improvements to my living situation. Also, my apartment out here affords me two rooms, a room for making out and a room for working. This one, the working room, I sometimes call my “office.” Each morning I get up whenever my body decides it’s ready to kick some ass – usually between eight and nine – and then I eat breakfast. Afterwards I toddle across the hall to the work room and start my day. My commute takes thirty seconds, give or take a pit stop to drain the snapdragon.

No, the commute is no longer the problem. The focusing, however, is a different story.

In this day and age of clusterfuck social networking sites, WEBoggle, Scrabbulous (R.I.P.), Twitter, Perez Hilton, Gawker, and so on and so forth, one’s ability to simply accomplish a menial task on a computer is on par with asking an ADHD riddled kid without his prescription to tie his shoes in front of a GameStop in Times Square. Ain’t gonna happen. Already it has taken me three hours just to type this far into the post, and that’s only ‘cause I was updating my Facebook status and trolling Craigslist for a New Era Composition hat*.

If Simon and I broke up, well, let’s just say that this blog post would be made out of macaroni and Elmer’s glue from within the padded walls of your local sanatorium.

Working from home, for me, is almost as difficult as battling through rush hour traffic on the LIE. There are fewer acrylic tips and vanity plates, sure. But damned if I don’t get distracted by just about everything.

Beyond the computer there is my kitchen, with the siren song of a whistling tea-kettle and ever-present snacks. In the living room there is my roommate’s flat screen HDTV. Not to mention that there are windows all around the house that beg me to stare out at the spectacular Pacific Northwest rain. And birds. And retired, talkative neighbors.

While we clock our hours spent writing, I’d have to speculate that it takes double the amount that we charge just to get us to focus. Okay, maybe not “us.” Maybe just me. Simon and I have learned the hard way that we can’t work in the same room together.

Working from home seems glorious and, don’t get me wrong, every day that I find my teeth being ground down as I search for clients, or try to balance my checkbook, I remind myself that airbags are not soft, but my full-sized mattress is. Although I may never really be able to take a sick day, and I still find myself fighting the temptation to just bring the laptop into the bed (trust me, Simon takes his iPod under the covers and it makes me want to go on a estrogen-fueled crusade against Apple, even if that dreamboat Merlin Mann is a fan of the monolith) I appreciate the myriad comforts that are part and pajama parcel of working from home. But when things get rough, when the two of us indulge in one of our infinite curse-laden arguments, when I’m on the rag and just want to sob about how much I resemble a hippo, when Shia LaBeouf gets arrested or Ellen Page does a magazine cover and I find myself one hand short of a full QWERTY, well, it’s just as impossible to get anything done in my humble abode as it would be in an office.

This is not to say that I don’t accomplish tasks on time, or that I knowingly procrastinate, or that I do not go postal daily in fear of not being productive enough. It’s just that somewhere along the way I need to make a little pitstop at Failblog, or hop on my bike and get a non-vegan burrito with another home office lackey like myself.

A side note, just like the break room or the famed water cooler of yore, hanging out with other people who work where they live/eat/cuddle/cry helps to put things in perspective. No, you may not want to shit talk the boss in fear of seeming crazier than usual (“God, I suck today. Totally breathing down my neck. And I’m wearing that same ugly dress that I wore yesterday, gah.”), but shooting the shit with someone who can sympathize does seem to lend itself to the sense of an actual workday.

So I suggested to my friend that she talk to her boss and let him know that this week she’s feeling sub-par, or she could ask if she may take a few other sick days, but that she should not stop working at her usual time and place. I also told her that I don’t think that working from home will fix the problem, unless the problem is agoraphobia. Especially if a breakup is the catalyst for a severe alteration of your occupation situation, working where you two held each other and watched Joe Versus The Volcano ain’t gonna make things better. At least I don’t think so. But what do I know. I have two other tabs open this very minute, and one is Craigslist, and the other…well…

* New Era Composition cap, size 7 3/8.

One of several gifts I am stalking but cannot find for August 16th, otherwise known as 30 Years Of Simon Goetz. I am not so good at shopping for birthday presents. Drop him a line or, better yet, follow him on Twitter. Though he can’t unwrap attention I’m sure he’ll appreciate the gesture.

Pass me a note. AinsleyDrew the gmail one. It’ll give me good reason to be distracted.

Thanks if you Donate! All proceeds in the hat this week go to hats.

Hire Us To Do Our Housework

Pop Quizzes

A wise man once said that in every stereotype or cliche there’s a grain of truth. This can be evidenced when walking down the street in New York City and smiling at a stranger, when observing the attendees at an Ani DiFranco concert near a college town, or when trying to speak to a high-school cheerleader about Nietzsche. Often there’s a reason why generalizations exist, and most of the time it’s a valid one. So suffice it to say that when I heard I was visiting Oklahoma, I immediately thought of under-educated, toothless hillbillies who relied on farm animals for food, work, companionship, and intimacy.

I have not seen a single cow tipping thus far, but I’m still holding my breath.

A list of what I did see when driving from the airport to Simon’s childhood home:
trucks
cows
horses
baby cows and horses
trucks
oil contraptions that appear to be a euphemism for oral sex, called “pump jacks”
silos
wind turbines
trucks
a Hooters
bales of hay
the American flag on trucks
and a tractor

So far it’s surpassed my expectations in beauty, intellect, and digestibility. I’ve consumed blackened catfish, a Sno-Cone, fried okra, pinto beans, and a variety of fruits bought from farm-stands. But Norman, Oklahoma isn’t just a bastion of traditional Americana, it’s also where I dined at my first Thai-Italian restaurant. No, not fusion. Half of the menu was Thai food, and the other half was Italian. I ate veggie padthai, Simon had a pepperoni slice. I was kind of astounded by the diversity.

Simon’s parents are hilarious, adorable, generous, and deeply in love. Even if my personal compendium of meet-the-parents scenarios didn’t include a girl’s father calling Mike Piazza of the Mets a “fag” as he shook my hand, a mother telling me point blank that I would never compare to her daughter’s ex-girlfriend because she “just hasn’t realized what she let go of,” and a father walking in on his daughter performing cunnilingus on yours truly, I believe that this introduction, so far, has gone more smoothly than I could have imagined.

One of my favorite things about Simon, that he obviously has received from both his mother and his father, is his approachability, you can speak to the boy about anything. (Case in point, on our flight into Oklahoma City we sat next to a pastor. The topics of conversation included skateboarding, Malcom Gladwell , and the somewhat-predictable Jesus.) His parents are expert conversationalists and have made it very easy for me to let down my guard and be myself, which is saying a lot considering my generally suspicious nature and moronic, tight-assed upbringing where manners were emphasized over personality. Both of them work, and have a lot to share when it comes to the nature of the economy, how to shift business priorities as the parents of an adult, and the way they view the progress of Ministry of Imagery.

Simon’s father made an observation that was haunting, and it rattled around in my brain like a set of keys thrown in a washing machine. The current trend in many fields is for work to be subcontracted. Companies are less inclined to hire an employee to work permanently on-site, or to throw money at insurance policies and other assorted costs of having a “team.” Many companies no longer invest in a human element, because they’re looking to cut costs that aren’t simply reflected in dollars, but in energy and time as well. To hire someone to do a particular job, may it be a single assignment, a set of assignments, or an amount of work over the course of several months, is a lot less of a risk, there’s less inclination for an employer to worry about the return of investment or employee inertia. When you devalue the human element in business, that’s when the freelancer comes in. Which is why Simon and I have been able to start a business. Which is also why I’m perpetually worried about the where the next paycheck is coming from.

I mean, when was the last time you heard about a freelance writer asking for a raise?

The thing that concerns me about the sudden decline of office jobs, and the influx of freelancers on the market (both as writers, as well as in other sectors), is that there may be a glut in the market. Just as rabbits multiply, so do people wanting to work, unshowered, in pajamas. If there is a supposed “need” for freelance employees, suddenly the competition to get hired is less about skills or personality, more about lower rates and what you’re willing to cut out of your lives.

For an all-too-common example: we have no health insurance. If something were to happen — a skateboarding accident that breaks every knuckle in my right hand, if what I swear is Simon’s narcolepsy is actually diagnosed — we would be shit out of luck. The other day I had a kidney infection. I couldn’t look for work because I found it impossible to get my feverish, achy, bloody piss-filled self out of bed. What if it had been something worse? No shit that America’s health care crisis is tainting nearly every individual with prehensile thumbs who lives here. But isn’t the problem only going to get worse before it gets better as the amount of contract employees increases? Is freelancing the new factory work? How does any freelance writer ever make enough to own a home, start a family, and have a savings account, let alone afford antibiotics? Moreover, do freelance writers all wear the same clothes from high school and refuse to have their musical taste progress beyond mid-nineties industrial bands, or is that just me?

Sometimes it seems as though the original approach I took might have been the more stable with regard to longevity. If you can get an office job you have steady income and you still have time to dedicate to your heart’s passionate side project. You have both the paycheck coming in and the pursuit of your art on the side. If what you love is a hobby there’s far less stress and pressure, and you know that you’ll always be able to make ends meet so long as you clock into your “real job” on time. I just wonder for myself, and for Simon, if that would feel like selling ourselves short. After all, it’s too late now, we’re doing it, we’re learning by flailing, it’s terrifying, mortifying, and humbling, and we’re loving every second of it, other than the bickering when we’re hungry. I wouldn’t trade it for the world, although it’s hard sometimes not to wonder if it will never get any easier. I just wish we knew freelance writers in their forties who make a good living, sending their kids off to school, and returning to their computers to write for eight hours the way that, traditionally, parents would go to the office. I wish we had a model to follow, just like we have one to deviate from.

On the flip side of this coin, though it doesn’t answer any of my questions, most of the kids I’ve met out here have full-time jobs. They work at cosmetics counters, at casinos, or in laboratories. All of them seem pretty content. And, in case you were wondering, all of them also have teeth.

Write to me at AinsleyDrew at gmail. And thanks for everybody who contributed “meet the ‘rents” horror stories. Keep ‘em coming, if I get enough of them I’ll compile a post when this trip is over that presents them all anonymously.

The OK 140

Sooner State

The line “It’s not you, it’s me,” might be the closest a human being can get to punching someone in the diaphragm without lifting a finger.

At nineteen I fell in love with a girl who liked her paramours to be super-feminine, so I grew my hair, went shopping for lipsticks in colors like Merlot Sunset and Peachy Queen, and made sure to invest in a pair of heels that inevitably led to two sprained ankles and a particularly ungraceful swan-dive down the steps of the Second Avenue F train station. She left me for a high-school senior named Kristen who wore glitter eye-shadow and whose graduation gift from her parents was a Honda Civic with a pink paint job. With my brand of forced girlishness that was far more gaudy than gamine, it was no wonder that my ex dumped me like a pile of awkward rocks.

Like most people, I’ve been in situations or relationships where I struggled, and inevitably failed, to fit into a role that just simply wasn’t me. These include high-school cheerleader, mentally stable girlfriend, and Phish fan. I cringe most at the last one.

I’ve lived that life of wanting to fit in. It was called high-school. It led to a pitifully small social circle, a fairly high SAT score, and a frightening tolerance for alcohol by my sophomore year of college. I thought the days of rejection and nights of The Cure and Kleenex had gone the way of the rotary phone. Needless to say, when I received what could only be described as a break-up email from a client today, my heart kind of broke a little.

Now, before any of you start to chortle, allow me to illuminate you to the fact that my period is over and I didn’t cry. Okay? This was a rational response. Really.

Just like I knew when Kristen’s number started showing up in my ex’s beeper, and how her car would smell mysteriously of Love’s Baby Soft, I could see how this was going to play out. The client had hired me on for two projects, website text and press releases for their new location. I had researched their business extensively, sat down for a brief meeting with the owner, trolled the Internet for competitors, and churned out what I had thought was inventive and engaging prose. After the first two sets of revisions, complete with a terse note addressed to me and little explanation as to how to improve upon it further, I knew the client wasn’t happy. Despite the fact that I had been given little guidance on the project, I had thought I was fully capable of gleaning at least a remote idea of what they wanted for their homepage text. After the third set of revisions — and after following their notes with the exactitude of a surgeon, even repeating a word several times in one paragraph because that was how they wanted it — I composed an email asking for more detailed guidelines as well as additional deadlines for the project as a whole. A few days passed. I knew what was coming in the same way that terriers can smell storms.

The email I opened this morning was surprisingly honest and gentle, expressing their lack of clarity on where to go on the project as a whole, as though my text forced them into the role of Goldilocks and made them realize that they really didn’t know what sort of a feel they wanted for the website after all. There were plenty of backhanded compliments that I tried not to wince at (I was called “creative” more than once in the same way one refers to the kindergartener who eats paste and says they’re a helicopter.) I was promised more information as to whether or not I would be kept on for the remainder of the project, but it had the same feel as being told “let’s just be friends.”

I was rejected.

I felt like the client had broken up with me even though I got a decent piece of text for my portfolio out of it and the knowledge that sometimes, as the email said, you’re just not the right fit. That’s not a criticism of you as a writer or an employee. After all, I turned in the work on time and listened carefully to what I was told with regard to how to make improvements. It wasn’t anything personal. At least they had the consideration to write to me and tell me that they were trying to solve the conundrum of where to go with regard to the site in its entirety. It wasn’t me. It was them.

But I couldn’t help sulking around and wondering what I could have done differently.

Being able to adapt is a commendable trait. My business partner is of the mentality that, as professional writers, we should be capable of writing anything, our skills should make us little character chameleons, slipping from one medium to the next. I, however, respectfully disagree. Ouch. He just threw a shoe at me.

I believe that knowing your strengths is what makes you capable of greatness. No one ever told Superman to dance, Basquiat to write a sushi-making manual, or Pavarotti to knit a sweater. I suppose a more appropriate analogy is that no one told Pavarotti to beat-box or perform slam poetry, although both require a microphone and could be considered audio-arts. He knew he was an opera singer, a tenor, and didn’t attempt to stray too far outside of what he did best. Even if he had, he would always be known as a tenor specifically. Perhaps it would have been different if he had just said, “Oh, you know, I sing all types of stuff,” but it’s likely that then he wouldn’t have become the best at what he could do. Flexibility and compliance are certainly great characteristics to have, but I believe that honing your skills down until you are the ultimate foccacia maker, the unbeatable left-handed ping-pong player, the most knowledgeable stingray expert, whatever, is the most effective way of standing out, or, in my case, of avoiding the path of just another mediocre freelance writer.

My business partner seethes when I tell him that his style is identifiable, that the way he puts words together is unique and a sort of trademark that represents his body of work as a whole. He thinks this shows a rigidity and limitation. I think it instead allows him to be a commodity of sorts. If a potential client reads his samples they get a clear picture of how he writes, his style and flair, and they can easily determine whether or not it jives with their assignment. My hodgepodge collection that ranges from dry technical writing to over-the-top artist bios and sardonic articles only really illuminates the fact that I move my fingers fast and I’m willing to try anything once. Both can be said of my romantic life as well.

Although I’m not sure it was the correct way to handle the situation, I wrote the client back. I said that I hoped they would continue to have me write for them and that we would likely benefit from another, more intensive meeting to discuss specifics that would avoid another lengthy, drawn-out revision process. I wished them well and said I hoped to hear back soon. I haven’t heard back. Until I do I suppose I’ll just read the new issue of Cosmo, write in my journal, and wait by the phone.

AinsleyDrew at gmail

Hi-ho, hi-ho

Drop down and give me one hundred and forty