So why has no one done "Queer Eye for the Straight Girl", in which five stereotypical lesbians demonstrate the joys of flannel, Melissa Etheridge, and really short hair to a stereotypical straight woman?
Well, HI again. The last time you heard from me, it was nothing but bad news. (Cat died, no job, bleh.) Seeing as how Karma owed me big, I think this installment of the Ron Big Life Update will be considerably more upbeat.
First up - I got a job. And not just a jobby-job - this is a really good job! I'm now working as a patent engineer at Altera Law, an intellectual property law firm here in Minneapolis. I write up other people's inventions. (I went through the process about 30 times for my own inventions, so I got pretty good at it. At present, I think I'm up to 13 patents to my name as an inventor.) Because I don't have a law degree, the firm can charge less for my hourly rate, and that savings gets literally passed on to the clients. I'm actually quite valuable at this firm, and they'll probably be looking for a few more PhD's with good writing skills over the next few years, as they plan to become one of the foremost IP firms for the dozens of medical companies here in town.
It's an astoundingly dignified job! I have an office, not a cube. Not only do I have a door, I have a super-heavy wooden floor-to-ceiling door! As an engineer in the capacity of my former jobs, there is literally no hope of ever having a door, let alone an office, unless you go into management - not for me. I don't just have one of those little computer print-out name tags on my office door, I have a real order-from-the-place-that-makes-signs nameplate! I don't just have a window, I have gigantic windows on a full wall of my office, looking out over trees and stuff. After 14 months of unemployed tedium, I have earned it.
Although I was one of the nicest-dressed engineers (am I not tres chic?), I didn't quite have the wardrobe required for a law firm - tie is just about mandatory, and the only serious ties I had were red ones for interviews. (We don't count the Jerry Garcia tie or the '70s throwbacks.) Dang - I needed more clothes, and I really hate clothes shopping! So this past weekend I trudged out to a men's store at the Outlet Mall (God I hate the Outlet Mall...), and bought a whole bunch of shirts and ties. I hadn't bought a shirt with pins in it since I left Tucson! And in order to keep my sanity (my wrinkle-free without ironing sanity, that is), I bought the shirts with some polyester in them. Not that I stay up late worrying about these things, but about 10 years ago I'd worked so hard to make sure that everything I owned was nothin'-but-cotton. Oy! I did notice that the shirts are a little on the shiny side - maybe a little TOO shiny under the wrong lights - and if wear them without ties, they do look a wee bit pimp-tacular. Next time, maybe I'll spend the big bucks at Brooks Brothers...
So this past week has been the biggest Fashion Thing since May 2001, when I celebrated New Pants Week. Ah, the unbridled joy of New Pants Week! In hindsight, that was even better than the current New Shirts Week, which doesn't seem to have the same punch. And in my new threads, my friend Carla called me the "man in charcoal".
I've been at the new job since the beginning of October, and it's been the best first few weeks I've ever had at any job. It appears that at 35, I am the youngest person at the entire firm. A strange tradition - it seems like I'm always the youngest person in the department at whatever job I have. I dunno why.
The place is literally the exact opposite of my summer job, which I mentioned in the last letter. (From June through September I was working at a music promotion company, and it was T-shirts every day, music cranked up all day, hours start late end late. A great job, and I'm very grateful they let me work there for the four months.) It appears that law firms are quieter than libraries. Or at least small law firms - Altera has 5 attorneys, about 6 paralegals, maybe 3 patent engineers, and about 4 admin people. Very much unlike the Seagate environment with 5000 people under one roof and not a single moment to yourself.
I need to thank all of you for your support over the last 14 months - my time between jobs has been unquestionably the worst 14 months of my existence, and I'm grateful for such considerate friends and family. So I'm back to work, and it's a career change that most likely won't crash and burn every 18 months like my optics jobs! Stupid telecom...
Margaret's been working also. About a month ago, she started work at Rose Galleries, a furniture auction place way across town. She found an ad in the paper, went in for an interview (where she bluntly spoke her mind - in stark contrast to the last few interviews she had), and got the job! So far so good - it takes her about 90 minutes to get there by bus, and she's been getting a lot of reading done.
That's the BIG news from our end. And now the smaller news, in sorta chronological order.
At the beginning of the summer, I got to DJ a wedding way up in the northern part of the state. When we hear people talk about goin' up north to the cabin with the boat on the lake, they're talking about places like this. Beautiful terrain, four hour drive from Minneapolis. And a really great party, but it was outside, literally right next to a lake, and at the beginning of summer in Minnesota - the Great Mosquito Factory In The Sky was working overtime for us. After a four hour drive back home, we still had mosquitoes in the car, and all over my equipment and tux. My neighbor saw the car the next day, and remarked that I'll be OK in a day or two when they die off. Unless they start to breed...
The high point of the drive was a little place in Rice, Minnesota. The sign read, "Live bait, mini-storage, deli".
My summer job, which I described in the last letter, was working for The Conclave, a convention for radio people that's held every July here in Minneapolis. We had 800 attendees this year, and the highlight was a live appearance by Willie Nelson. There are lots of famous people in this world (like Hank Aaron, Nelson Mandela, Charles Nelson Reilly, ...), but few of the stature of Willie Nelson. One of my responsibilities was to print up badges for everyone, so I printed "Willie Nelson, Country Music Hopeful". Sadly, that got nixed.
The other highlight of the summer was a wedding in Boston in early September. Many of you might remember Seth, my college roommate from the University of Rochester. Well, he got married to a lovely woman named Gami, who has a PhD in physics from the U of R, and they both live in Boston as "Dr. and Mr. Maislin". Since I had an excuse to go out east, I decided to stretch it out to a week and fly in and out of New York, just to see family there.
I wanted to fly Sun Country Airlines, a little niche airline that's based here in Minneapolis (just because they're NOT Northwest), and they only fly into the New York area at Kennedy Airport, not Newark or LaGuardia. I figured that was good enough, and an airport wouldn't last very long if it weren't convenient, right? AAAAaaack - what was I thinking? JFK was literally 100,000 miles from mom's house, with $3.2 million in bridge tolls! An unfortunate start to the week, although the flight was very pleasant.
As timing would have it, the week I was in New York was the very week that mom began a vacation of her own. (She was visiting her friend, Mickey, in Arizona, and then her mother, Min, in Florida. The Mickey and Minnie tour!) Margaret and I got to stay in mom's house, but we never actually saw mom. The closest we came was leaving obnoxious post-it notes all over the house. For example, one of my favorite things to do is rummage through mom's fridge and throw out all the expired salad dressing. (Mayonnaise from 1993? That's gotta go!) I do this every time I visit, and it's a tradition at this point. This visit, I went through the vast medicine closet and assembled a giant pile of outdated drugs. I left them on the kitchen table with a note, "Careful! These are expirated!" What's not to love? And besides, I think mom misses us a little bit less now than before we trashed the house.
Driving around New York, I got to hear a little bit of the last days of "Blink 102.7", which in hindsight, may be the least successful big-market radio experiment in history. It was an extremely uncomfortable mix of Entertainment Tonight-style reports (Wow! J Lo did something!) and light rock (Wow! Celine Dion songs!). Every single thing they did sounded like a train wreck, and I, the rubbernecker listener, was glued to the radio. About two weeks later, 102.7 changed format and the "Blink" experiment came to an end, just five or six months in. What a mess! I believe that somebody is currently writing a book about the history of 102.7 FM in New York, and that will certainly be in there.
We picked up our college friend Charles from NYC and drove up to Boston. (We've done this before; it's part of the driving-to-Boston tradition.) One of the big thrills for me about the drive to Boston is that if you plan your route correctly, you can drive the entire length of the Saw Mill Parkway - a seemingly ancient highway that extends north from New York City through Westchester County into the odd void of New York State east of the Hudson River. It was probably built in the 1200's when the indigenous New Yorkers stacked some rocks along a cow path. Since then, it's been paved and the speed limit has been upped to 55, but not much else has changed. It's got to be one of the most dangerous highways in the whole country (outside of Boston proper). For most of the highway, the entrance ramps have no merging lanes and a "stop" sign at the end. (Really.) You have to somehow accelerate from 0 to 55 in about ten feet before you get rear-ended by the cars coming around the blind curve right before your exit. It's a life-threatening experience, and to me, it's more thrilling than any of the rickety wooden roller coasters at some of the NY amusement parks. And truth be told, I only braved it because I got to drive the whole length of it all at once without getting on or off; that's a lot of left-lane driving - the equivalent to clutching the roller coaster safety bar with both hands. But what a ride!
The rest of the drive to Boston was pretty uneventful, and I only got lost once trying to find our hotel. Boston is so incomprehensible that even MapQuest just throws up its hands and gives up. Once we got there, though, a good time had by all indeed. The weather couldn't have been any more perfect, and we found our way around very nicely on the T. Walking around downtown, we counted 12 Dunkin Donuts shops. Twelve, all seen in one day by us tourists. We also had some pretty terrific seafood, not at the Dunkin Donuts.
The wedding was a good time, as expected. Seth and Gami had the DJ do a rather untraditional thing - an open mike after dinner, during which guests tell stories, wish well, and the like. I, not one to retreat from a microphone, thought I'd convey a little story. I could have told the embarrassing story of The Laundry from when we were college roommates, when Seth would wait until his dirty laundry reached the light switch, then go the bank, take out a whole roll of quarters, and take over the whole laundry room for the day. Nope, didn't tell that one. Instead, I talked about the first radio show I ever did, in November 1986. Seth was there with me in the studio as I tried to push all the buttons correctly and sound like I knew what I was doing, even though I didn't. We had a lot in common - Seth and I were both musically inclined, and he and I both had a knack for writing. (He is currently one of the world's foremost indexers, and even gives seminars on the topic.) I can't remember my exact wording, but I said that Seth and I both share an appreciation for the beauty and precision of words and music. Seth was right there as I began my radio career 17 years ago, and I'd like to think that every time I turn on the mike, there's a little bit of Seth in there. And every time I leave it on just a little too long, well... that'd be Seth...
We also went bowling in Boston, with the proper 10 pins. None of that crazy 9-pin stuff for us. Besides, you can't throw the ball as high with 9-pins, as I recall.
One of our Boston friends had us over to her house, north of the city, right on the ocean. Whatta place! We wandered around on the beach and Margaret collected a bag's worth of seashells and beach glass. I was surprised that you can take home the shells, because the California beaches that I saw strictly prohibit removing anything at all. Cool! Shells make Margaret very happy. And they had a brand new kitten, named O.C. (orange cat) - kittens make Ron very happy!
So we drove back to NY, dropped off Charles, and retreated back to mom's house for a day or two. I thought I'd visit some of the old record stores in Rockland County while I was there, and boy was I in for a shock. Tapeville - the primary source for used records and old 12" singles - closed in May. (The Italian restaurant next to Tapeville, where mom used to get take-out all the time, also out of business.) Pic-A-Disc, the indie store that would always order the strange, pricey foreign singles with rare B-sides, had a big "Liquidation Sale" sign in the window. The word "liquidation" was tucked under, but it looked like he'd be unfolding it soon enough. The store opened during my senior year in high school, and I'd visit every time I was home from college. I talked to the store owner for quite a while, and he attributes a lot of the downturn in business to teens; teens just don't go to record stores anymore, like I used to do 15 or 20 years ago. Historically, teens have always driven the entire music industry, and the current generation just doesn't buy music - they download the individual songs that they want, and if they want a full album for some reason, it's right there at Target or Wal-Mart. There is no more niche market of teen music collectors, and the little stores are suffering for it. I was really affected by talking to him - I mean, we've all heard that music sales are down, Napster, blah blah etc., but this struck a really unpleasant chord for me. All the stores I used to love as a kid, the stores that pointed me down the musical path that I walk all these years later, are going away. Certainly, I don't buy as much music as I used to (at least in stores), but the reality that nobody was following in my proverbial footsteps was quite a jolt to me. I ended buying quite a bit of stuff at Pic-A-Disc, knowing that the next time I'm back out east, the store probably won't be there. Very upsetting.
Moving on... I've always wanted a stage name - a cool fake name that I can use on the air, like one of my former colleagues from 98PXY named "Rocky Martini". Well, this trip out east has provided me with one. From now on, I shall be known as "Pip Helix". Yes, Pip Helix. My friends and family may call me Pip, but I'm Mr. Helix to all else.
And just where did I come up with "Pip Helix"? As the Palisades Interstate Parkway feeds into the George Washington Bridge, the road goes through a cloverleaf and passes under itself, and the little green sign posted atop the underpass, identifying the road that's overhead, reads "PIP HELIX". I love it.
So I threw Margaret a surprise birthday party when she turned 35 on October 16th. She wasn't surprised at all, but it seems like she had a good time anyway. We all signed a card that said "All your friends think you're old!", which got a laugh, but laughter probably masked the Evil Eye...
[rebuttal from Margaret]
There was no evil eye, mostly because I certainly don't feel old, unlike my cranky gray-haired spouse who is always railing on about "Damn kids!" "Damn Rock and Roll music" "Things just aren't like they used to be - why, back in my day.." "Oy! My lumbago is killing me!" Maybe it's the difference in lifestyles. He wears a tie, I'm still catching the bus with a backpack. I also spent the entire summer resurrecting the ghost of my first bike which I found "as is" on E-bay after two years of looking. Next summer, maybe I'll learn how to skateboard. My new job is great! All my mad skills I have accumulated over the years about old books, furniture refinishing, jewelry repairs, etc., well, at this job, they really ARE mad skills! And there are two dogs at work, so it's like I have dogs, only I don't have to put up with Ron whining and scratching! I don't know why Ron is the way he is, but I'm ALWAYS ironing my clothes, I keep the ironing board next to the t.v. and do them when I have nothing good to watch, but Ron refuses to let me iron his shirts for him unless it's for an interview. Even then, there's usually a shouting match because I refuse to let him leave in a wrinkled shirt. He won't let me iron his suit, either. The woman who had the house right on the beach was on no ordinary beach, she was right on Marblehead! And the mussel shells on her beach are cobalt blue! The locals call them "Periwinkles". My 90 minute bus ride is the alternative to 60-90 minutes in a traffic jam. I'd rather teach myself to knit than grind my teeth, so bus it is! Stinky is getting fat from not chasing Pookums, and she won't chase us instead.
[/rebuttal from Margaret]
Lumbago?
"Crap From The Past" bounces along nicely. Apparently, it's bouncing in the right music collector circles, and somehow, I've managed to enter the innermost sanctum among pop music geeks. I now own MP3's of every single song that's ever hit the Billboard Hot 100. All of them, going all the way back to 1955. And now that I have every song that's ever hit the pop chart, EVER, I don't really know what else to collect. It kinda takes all the fun out of it...
And that's about it from the land of ice and snow. Stay warm, and Happy Halloween!
Ron & Margaret Gerber
Monday, October 20, 2003
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