All posts in category work

hiding under my deck from the insect overlords

Channel 6 anchorman Kent Brockman mistakenly reports on a master race of giant space ants.

Welcome to the Kingdom of Ants. I don’t know what goes on here, but I like it. Actually I don’t care for ants. I particularly don’t like when they start that business of traveling in lines. Nor do I like them crawling incessantly around on my kitchen counter or invading the hummingbird feeders (even though there are no hummingbirds this year? where are they? hello?? I created an urban paradise for you and you never showed up?). But enough about that. I enjoy the idea of an Ant Kingdom. Do you remember the Simpsons episode where Homer gets sent into space? He bumps into an experimental ant farm, letting the ants loose into the space shuttle. Footage of the accident, depicting ants looming large in the camera lens, is picked up by Springfield’s Channel 6 News. Anchorman Kent Brockman subsequently reports that the shuttle has been taken over by a “master race of giant space ants.” Brockman goes on to state: “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.  I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.” On the wall behind him, Brockman has hung a homemade “Hail Ants” sign. Now that’s funny. My roommates and I hung an identical sign in our apartment many years ago. But in reality I’m pretty sure I would not enjoy living under insect overlords. They would likely make me march in lines, which I would hate.

Brockman shows off his obsequious nature.

Mondays are so absurd. Lately I’ve been away from work more than I’ve been at work, which makes being at work now seem all the more ridiculous. I’ve got this sticker at home in a box that says “Why do you work?” I hate that sticker. That’s why it stays in the box. It’s so cold at work and it’s so hot at home and this is a source of perpetual confusion for my body and my mind. This morning it was raining so I suited up in rain gear and then the sun came out as I rode to work sweating in my non-breathable rain gear, as was expected according to this fundamental rule of bike commuting. This evening I rode into the alley and the kid whose grandmother always screams at him was walking toward me, banging a long metal pole of some sort against the pavement. And it was like that scene in The Warriors where David Patrick Kelly clinks the beer bottles together, yelling “Waaaarrrrrriiiorsss, come out to pla-ay!” except substitute a little kid for David Patrick Kelly, a long metal pole for the beer bottles, and a cold blank look for “Waaaarrrrrriiiorsss, come out to pla-ay!” I got off my bike and I was sad.

But I digress. Here are two mostly unedited short pieces I scrawled in my notebook a few months back while riding south on the light rail. I’m not exactly sure where I was going with these at the time. I think I was pondering the 1950s and the beginning of the suburbanization of America. Maybe imagine these as entries in the American Handbook™ that we give to our insect overlords so they’ll understand us better. If we’re lucky maybe they won’t force us all into subterranean caverns and we can keep our decks and our pools and our acres of green green grass.

Deck: A deck is a popular structure attached to a house. When people tire of feeling closed in, they retire to the outdoors, without leaving behind the comfort and security of their home, the deck being an extension of the house and not a separate entity vulnerable to attack. Homeowners enjoy inviting over acquaintances to sit on their decks with them. Often this is accompanied by a meal cooked “en plein air” on a grill that sits proudly on the deck. The man, clad in a masculine-themed apron, always controls the grill. It is his domain. His wife brings him platters heaped with sanitized animal flesh, which he slathers with sauce before neatly placing on the foil-covered surface of the grill. After the meal, the deck people continue drinking themselves into oblivion before finally driving home and/or passing out in their bedrooms.

Pool: A pool is a status symbol popular among the wealthy. In-ground pools are the only ones that anyone cares about. If heated and covered by a screened room to keep out bugs, so much the better. Teenage girls enjoy laying out by the pool as their bratty brothers plot to splash them with water or inflict some other heinous act upon them. Rich mothers bring trays laden with glasses of cold lemonade to poolside. Their daughters sip daintily before applying more tanning oil. Their snotty sons then sneak up and snap the bikini tops of their pretty daughters. When the man of the house arrives home from a tough day at the office, he may, if of a certain disposition, change into his trunks and swim a few laps. But first he tousles his son’s hair in greeting and gazes briefly and uneasily at his daughter before finally kissing his wife on the cheek. He may then pop open an Amstel Light if feeling particularly spent.

Stay tuned for more entries!

Maybe. Depends on if the ants come, I guess.

8 Comments
by sean on July 9, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in absurdity, american handbook, ants, confusion, decks, horror of humanity, insane humans, insect overlords, mondays, pools, simpsons, temporary insanity, work

Posted by sean on July 9, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/09/hiding-under-my-deck-from-the-insect-overlords/

my thoughts dried up so i wrote this instead

When you isolate yourself, you have no one else to blame when things go awry. There is some small comfort in this. It is possible to go days without talking to anyone. This can be a magical combination of your own self-imposed silence and a general indifference on the part of others. Together we can make it work. The woman in the alley enjoys screaming hateful words at her grandson but she is sweet as pie when I say hello. This dichotomy hurts my brain. The alley is loud in the summer. The ladies across the way gun their motorcycles at all hours. The level of their inconsideration for people living together in a confined space staggers me. Small children yell and sing and talk like adults. I brood at the kitchen table. If it weren’t for the swatch of overgrown vegetation threatening to engulf my porch, I would have to see, as well as hear, the denizens of the alley and that I could not bear. Meanwhile, in the plus column, the city installed four solar-powered compacting trash cans on a main street in the neighborhood. I was overjoyed to throw my dog’s poop in them. Then they took one away. It was the most conveniently located one. Why. On another street near my house the city erected an expensive-looking fence in the median. A few weeks later they removed it. Why. Every day I see the thousands of dollars I pay in property taxes hemorrhage out onto the streets in the form of Kafkaesque activities such as this. It pains me. I could make much better use of those thousands of dollars than by funding the erecting and dismantling of fences. Segueing into the employment realm, it’s summertime at work which results in a curious laissez faire attitude toward attendance. I like it but it confuses me. I am always suspicious of it. Yet there is a natural relaxed cadence I cannot ignore, and so I allow it to carry me in its wake. When I feel agitated, I look at the little pictures in the dictionary and this soothes me. Last night I had a pleasant time in dreamland, but I forgot most of it upon waking. I don’t like that. I need to remember my dreams or waking life seems vacant. Do you ever wonder about the nature of friendships? They are curious things. Coming and going, rarely staying. Sometimes they wane; sometimes they wither. Sometimes they fail over the stupidest things. And you wonder if it could have been avoided, but in reality if it was a strong friendship it should have been able to withstand most of the nonsense we manage to self-generate. Which then begs the question of why the friendship existed in the first place. Convenience, perhaps. Boredom. Desperation for human contact [see: possibility of going for days without speaking to anyone, as outlined above]. I have had many friendships through the years, for all of these listed reasons and more. Not many have lasted, but the tiny few that have are worth more than gold. The question is then, do I now need more friends? What purpose would they serve? It gets harder to make friends as you get older. It’s horrible but I find myself more judgmental than I used to be of people when considering them as potential friends. I am also perhaps even more guarded now. Friendship requires time and effort, both valuable resources that I don’t expend lightly. How can you know if it’s worth it. Most of the time I am content to be by myself. I also have a dog now. The ultimate friend. Always dependable, always happy to see you. Can’t go to the bathroom without your help, which is a little weird. Doesn’t talk, which is both good and bad. Sometimes I wish he’d talk, just a little. See, even though I am content by myself, I have this annoying urge to reach out sometimes. It’s irrepressible. Sometimes everything can’t be found in books. Or nature. Most things, yes. But not all. This is the curse of human nature. We are not 100% autonomous. And I am so restless. This incessant unease shadows my every move. The panic. The urge to drop out. The crushing confinement of your own mind. We’re all so spread out. Held together by weakening links. I trip over my own shallow roots and fall face-down in a mucky bog. Roll around and let the clay harden on your skin. Let it cover all that you see as wrong. It feels so good.

9 Comments
by sean on June 26, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in age, anonymity, city life, companions, confusion, dissatisfaction, doom and gloom, dreams, employment, existence, farley, friends, horror of humanity, human behavior, human nature, identity, inner life, insane humans, introversion, isolation, life, melodramatic tripe, nature, neighbors, parts of the whole, philosophy, rants, restlessness, solitude, work

Posted by sean on June 26, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/26/my-thoughts-dried-up-so-i-wrote-this-instead/

flying the flag over fort futility

I’m at a low point in my job. I have no motivation for it. But it’s not that I’ve lost my passion for librarianship. It’s not that. I still fervently subscribe to Sandy Berman’s adage that “I can’t have information I know would be of use to someone and not share it.” This philosophy, I believe, is the golden kernel rotating inside every librarian. However, my present job affords me little opportunity to exercise this reflex of mine. I spend more time outside of work fulfilling this mission: finding bits and pieces of information, cataloging and sorting them in my mind, and sending them off with a flourish to friends, relatives, and colleagues. But at work I am too far removed from this process. I primarily sit at my desk and wait for the day to end. I answer emails. I review and fulfill (or deny) photo requests. I catalog photos and documents. I select journal articles to include in a database. I attend meetings. I wander around outside at lunch and wonder what the hell I am doing with my life.

I have long known that I am a dreamer. At this point in my life I’m comfortable with this role, but it often interferes with practical matters. I could certainly leave my job and go find some other job. I could do that. However, I know that I would soon also tire of it, because this is a now tattered pattern that I’ve traced my finger along for my entire working life. What this present job has going for it is a four-day week, valuable benefits, decent pay, proximity to home, low stress, and not much in the way of responsibility. Collectively, these aspects would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in another job. So I bide my time, suffering my disconnection from how I spend it, eight hours each day, four days per week.

Leaving my own personal melodrama behind, though, and returning to librarianship, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about access to knowledge lately. This is chiefly because I volunteered to write up a blog post for APLIC about Brewster Kahle’s presentation at the conference I attended in San Francisco. While Brewster is a librarian, among other roles, some of his views are unusual within librarianship. For example, I’d venture to guess that the traditional model of librarian-as-intercessor still carries significant weight among many librarians. And yet Brewster is sending a wrecking ball through this ideal with his efforts to put all knowledge within grasp of anyone with access to an Internet connection. These days such access is becoming easier and more convenient to obtain than access to an actual physical library. The question is, then, does access constitute nine-tenths of the battle when it comes to knowledge attainment?

If so, does this mean librarians will become obsolete? My guess is no, but we are certainly becoming more specialized. And I think our role as intercessor has largely fallen by the wayside, despite our possible reluctance to admit it. At this point, the knowledge is out there (if anything, now in such high quantities as to warrant special skills in navigating it) and much of it is freely available. Now, rather than brokering information, I see librarians as more important in authenticating information, and taking it one step further, in showing others how to authenticate it. And by that, I mean showing them how to determine the trustworthiness of information. Because there is plenty of just plain shoddy information out there.

4 Comments
by sean on May 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in brewster kahle, information, librarianship, melodramatic tripe, work

Posted by sean on May 23, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/23/flying-the-flag-over-fort-futility/

recycling with the mayans

Straighten your papers, the ones you never look at. Never touch a paper twice, that’s what they say. Avoid information overload! Never touch a paper twice. Look at it and file it or throw it out. Don’t straighten your papers then, see if I care. Log in. Er, try to log in. Oops, forgot your password. How many are in your head. How many are the same. You fool! Don’t use the same one twice! You must use a combination of four numbers, three symbols, and no less than six letters. We will not accept anything less. Also we’ll need you to change it again as soon as you begin to remember it. Forget it the first time you try to log in. Request new password. Make up new one, but not the same as your email password. And don’t use your pet’s name. Your neighbor might hear you calling him outside and hack into your account. Throw a few papers out to make yourself feel better. It’s okay, I know you touched them already. Just throw them out so you won’t touch them again. There, isn’t that better? Now go outside and breathe in some car fumes. It might be better than recycled office air but honestly science hasn’t bothered to find out. No corporate funding would touch that kind of study. So it’s still up in the air. [Don’t laugh at that!] Walk around and pretend you’re not an insignificant speck, not just another cog in the machine (you are, even though you purport not to be by affecting a continuous broadcast of apathy and cynicism to the world, and to yourself– the worst and most damaging lies are always to yourself. We learn this over time.). Return to the office. Pick up another stack of paper from your mailbox. Leave it on your desk for weeks to gather the appropriate office patina. Then recycle it. Or think you’re recycling it. Everyone knows the cleaning staff just throws it all in the trash anyway. It’s common knowledge. It doesn’t matter. Recycling can’t save us, Derrick Jensen says. Only complete destruction of civilization will save us. Would you prefer that? Read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and check back with me. I’ll make tea and we can pontificate. Then we’ll pack our emergency preparedness kits. Leave work behind now. Go home and attend to the needs there, the ones behind the scenes of everyone’s public life. Nourish your body. Attempt to nourish your mind but mostly just numb it and then maybe squeeze in a little bit of nourishment before sleep. If you’re lucky when you’re out late walking you’ll look up and see Venus glowing above the rooftops. Or maybe a full moon. If you’re lucky a breeze will rustle the cottonwood leaves and leave you breathless. But you won’t be lucky tonight because it’s winter and the branches are bare. So go to sleep and dream of spring. Dream about the end of civilization. Dream of anything at all. Like Amy Hempel says, that’s where most of us get what we want.

1 Comment
by sean on January 26, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in amy hempel, apocalypse, breathing rights, derrick jensen, dreams, existence, human behavior, parts of the whole, technology, walking, winter, work

Posted by sean on January 26, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/01/26/recycling-with-the-mayans/

reverse weekend

This week I’m experimenting with the old “reverse weekend” concept. This is when you only work two days and take the rest of the days off, instead of vice versa. In my case, I’m currently finishing up a four-day weekend, gritting my teeth in anticipation of the next two days of work, before I sail off into a five-day weekend. It’s pretty exciting stuff. Mostly it just makes me realize that I’d be perfectly happy never going to work.

In other news, I came home from birding today to find a dead bird in my living room. WTF?? It was a Chimney Swift and it was lying right on the mat in front of the door. I have no idea how this bird got in the house, given that our fireplace is sealed shut with brick. Of course, it’s not unheard of for chimney swifts to pop down a chimney and end up in someone’s house. I mean, they LIVE in chimneys, or rather they build their nests there. Most everything else they do on the wing. But unless this one can pass through brick, I am mystified as to its presence in the house. Given that it’s highly unlikely that the bird came in the house on its own, I am forced to pin the blame on our neighbors’ cat, a known bird killer, and frequenter of our front porch. He has also been known to shove his paw through our mail slot, and so it would not be that great a leap to consider the theory that he shoved this bird through the mail slot. I mean, he does like us quite a bit, and spends at least as much time in our yard as in our neighbors’ yard. So perhaps he just wanted to give us a thank you gift. If it wasn’t so horrific it would be sweet. It’s times like this when you really wish your pets could talk. I am sure that Fiznit would have a lot to say about this dead bird. But she refused to comment.

Anyway, I have a local connection who traffics in dead birds, so I’m donating it to the Smithsonian.

1 Comment
by sean on May 24, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in birds, cats, work

Posted by sean on May 24, 2011

https://sd-stewart.com/2011/05/24/reverse-weekend/

dragon monday breathing down your neck

Yes, once again it is Sunday night and I am reluctant to bring the weekend to a close. It started out great on Friday with an excellent day of birding at Lake Roland. Many new arrivals were on-site, both summer residents and migrants passing through.  I found most of the birds I was hoping to see, with the exception of a Brown Thrasher.  The day started out a bit slow but I eventually came upon a mixed flock of Palm Warblers and Yellow-rumped Warblers.  It was wonderful to see swallows hawking insects out over the lake again.  The crew I spotted included Barn, Tree, and Northern Rough-Winged.  Other highlights included a pair of Wood Ducks, three Red-tailed Hawks soaring on a thermal (as well as one being acrobatically harassed by a crow), a high-flying Black Vulture, and the buzzing of many newly returned Blue-gray Gnatcatchers.

Much of the rest of the weekend was spent working in the yard, ripping out the evil multiflora rose and pulling weeds.  I have battle scars from the rose bush.  Many of the vegetable seeds in our new raised bed have germinated over the past week (photo forthcoming).  Today we went to a native plant sale and bought an inkberry bush and two butterfly weed plants.  Unfortunately, I found out later that inkberry bushes are dioecious, which means they require a male and female plant in order to produce their berries.  Now we must determine what sex the plant is; if it’s a female, it will need a male to pollinate it.  If there’s not one in the neighborhood (probably not likely), then we need to plant a male so the birds can have their berries.

Tomorrow begins a new week of stifling office hell.  Hooray.  One day I will extinguish the putrid fire of the Monday dragon forever!

Leave a comment
by sean on April 12, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in birding, gardening, mondays, native plants, sundays, work

Posted by sean on April 12, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/04/12/dragon-monday-breathing-down-your-neck/

random

Nicest day we’ve had in weeks and I’m stuck inside waiting for a tardy contractor. As I wait, someone intermittently uses a loud drill next door. Sometimes homeownership sucks. Muggings and robberies are up, in both the neighborhood and the city at large. This depresses me on an epic scale. Drilling next door probably indicates installation of new deadbolts. Bars on windows, steel doors, quadruple locks, where does it end? How safe can you be? Muggers lie in wait looking for opportunities. We really have no control over it. The problem is systemic: the haves and the have nots forever divided. No reconciliation possible. Only solution is to take to the woods. The cities are doomed.

In 1960, John Steinbeck traveled the United States with his dog and wrote a book about his trip. At one point he notes, “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”  Since then, we have happily continued to destroy all the natural places, with the exception of a select few that are so overrun they project a carnivalesque atmosphere.  We have built a society so spread apart that most people see the automobile as the only way to traverse the uncomfortable distances between point A and point B. To not own a car is anathema. You are branded a freak and possibly un-American; at the very least, you are suspect. Similarly, to eschew the consumerist lifestyle that is so red-bloodedly American is also viewed with suspicion. Why wouldn’t you want to buy all the latest greatest stuff? You saw it on TV, after all, and it looked totally awesome. And everyone who had that stuff looked really happy. So why wouldn’t you want to be happy? Get out there and shop, sucker.

Often I think I was born in the wrong century, perhaps in the wrong country, possibly of the wrong race, and maybe even on the wrong planet altogether.

I just got back from a work retreat that I had been dreading for quite some time. During said retreat, I spent some late night hours carousing with a few coworkers who I hadn’t really gotten to know beforehand. I found them to be decent and fun to hang out with, at least in my inebriated state. I’m sure they were surprised by my sudden bout of gregariousness. I’m not a mean drunk, but I can be a saucy one. During the work sessions, I was surprised to sense a tiny flame of enthusiasm ignite somewhere deep below the layers of cynicism within me. But I know better. We can talk grand and eloquent away from the office, but reality is grim. Knowing how long it’s taken to get this far (still a sad state of affairs) makes it impossible to expect that even a quarter of our lofty ideas will ever come to fruition within the next three and a half years. And that is not cynicism talking; that’s just pragmatism.

The place where we stayed was a Bavarian-styled inn that was the type of place where the Griswold family would’ve roomed during one of their epically disastrous vacations. My bathroom had a disused-looking bidet in it and a space heater mounted in the wall that smelled like burning dust when turned on. Still, the king-sized four-poster bed was comfortable and the vaguely shabby past-its-heyday look to the entire place was preferable to the sterility of modern hotels. Not a good place to be a vegan, but I got by (barely). I wish I had photos to share, but the camera was left behind.

2 Comments
by sean on January 15, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in books, car culture, cynicism, home ownership, horror of humanity, human behavior, insane humans, john steinbeck, life, nature, reading, unease, work

Posted by sean on January 15, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/15/random/

routine part ii

Certainly routine has its place in life.  For example, recently an infant stayed at my house for an extended visit, affording me the chance to observe how routines helped both the parents and the infant (unknowingly, perhaps) to manage their life together.  Point to ponder:  even from an early age, we humans experience life as an ordered structure of events.  But when too much of your life feels governed by routine, this can’t be a good thing.  Take office work, for example.  I work in an office setting; however, many of the people in the field in which I work are drawn to it because of the opportunity for travel.  They itch to travel, and when they don’t get to, they are restless.  They seek escape from the office drone lifestyle, so infused is it with the boredom of routine.  I personally don’t want to travel for work, and I suffer the consequences of asserting that preference.  I face the blandness of routine each and every work day, but I don’t think that I wish for the complete disappearance of routine from my life.  It has helped me in the past and I still see some value in it.  In some cases, I even think it keeps me from completely falling apart.  But what does everyone else think?  I feel like I’m talking in circles.  Will anyone de-lurk and weigh in on this issue?  I know there are at least a few of you reading this thing.

2 Comments
by sean on December 8, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in routine, work

Posted by sean on December 8, 2009

https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/08/routine-part-ii/

if dante had worked here, there would be another circle of hell in the inferno

Today is meeting day at work.  Tuesday is always meeting day.  In my lexicon, meeting day is known as the Inferno.  We have an all-staff meeting, and then after only a 30-minute reprieve (Purgatorio), my section has its weekly meeting.  These section meetings are excruciating and often stretch their weedy tendrils into the lunch hour, so that near the end everyone has been stricken blind by the gnawing hunger in their bellies, and they begin to hallucinate that there are even more items to discuss on the agenda.  Nine times out of ten there is absolutely nothing on the agenda that relates directly to my work and so the torture is particularly poignant for me.  The boss man spews his oily drivel and we all flop around in it.  We drink down his bitter poison and smile through our gag reflexes, even as our insides melt away.  Then I go back to my desk and stare hollow-eyed at the computer until the end of the day.

On many of these days, the only moments I truly feel alive are those I spend biking to work.  Attention to my surroundings is crucial, as traffic is unpredictable and hazards abound.  At work, at my desk, my senses dull to a blunted finish.  I sit for hours, an empty husk, with glazed eyes and blank mind.  At the end of the day, I struggle to shake it off for the ride home.

Every day they dump new blazing coals upon us, and the greedy flames consume another chunk of our dignity.  As the fat sizzles, so do our ideals.

P.S.  Someone just told me that the staff meeting has been moved to Thursday.  Perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel after all!

1 Comment
by sean on December 8, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in bike commuting, cycling, insane humans, meetings, work

Posted by sean on December 8, 2009

https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/08/if-dante-had-worked-here-there-would-be-another-circle-of-hell-in-the-inferno/

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