Monday, July 25, 2005

LISTENING TO MUSIC: PART I of Many

Country music is an oddity.

I never really liked country music for the longest time. So, having no control over what we were listening to at work, I spent the first few days of being in close proximity to a radio thinking one thought: "This sucks."

After about two weeks of exposure to it, I'd have to say the sting is gone, and some of the songs are actually kind of funny. Like Tim McGraw's "Do You Want Fries With That?" about a guy who, after losing everything after divorcing his wive, meets his ex's new husband at the drive-thru at McDonalds. While the country twang never appealed to me, the whole concept was a somewhat refreshing twist.

And "Alcohol" by Brad Paisley. The singer sings like he's reading off clues from the Twenty Questions boardgame:

"I can make anybody pretty
I can make you believe in a lie
I can make you pick a fight with somebody twice your size

I've been known to cause a few breakups
I've been known to cause a few births"
I can make you new friends...or get you fired from work

and from the day I left Milwaukee
Lynchburg or Bordeaux, France
been making the bars lots of big money
and helping white people dance

got you in trouble in high school
college now that was a ball
had some of the best times you never remember
with me, Alcohol"

While, again, the country twang just ain't my thang, the singer personifying Alcohol did something you don't usually hear in mainstream pop radio.

I can't help but think that people in the southern states would hear Boston's country station, WKOB Country 99.5, and think that we New Englanders had watered down what the station calls the "greatest music in the country."

Greatest? A little pretentious, to be sure. So what is the greatest? I'm not going to ask the question, no one will ever agree. I wouldn't care about the answer anyway. All I will say this: there are some kinds of music that are better than country, and some that are worse.

Another thing: my perception of country music was that it was filled with Jesus-this and Jesus-that and everybody living life in Christ and all kinds of syrupy evangelical Christian ideals. I can only guess that either:

1.) Being the Massachusetts liberals that we are, we watered down the content of the music, OR:
2.) My perception was wrong.

Because whatever the case, very little is mentioned about Jeee-sus or Christianity, specifically. There's talk of going to church and reference to "the Lord" here and there, but not to the extent I expected.

(In case you were wondering, I'm agnostic. My mother was raised catholic, but my father never attended church and neither have I. That's all I'm willing to say at this point.)

So my view on Country has changed. It's changed from being hated to being one of those styles of music that I could go either way on, like Jazz or the highly experimental forms of Rock that my brother listens to. Don't absolutely love em, but won't ask you to change the station either.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

First thing I want to say: I got a raise today.

Finding a summer job wasn't easy this year. Last year, the company where my dad worked, Ounce Labs Inc. had already hired someone to fill their paid internship position. So I needed to start filling out applications.

Origially, I just applied at places where I thought I might want to work. I've never been much for working with people face-to-face. I could stand a job as a stock clerk or something, at, say, Staples, or CVS, or Best Buy. As time passed and no callbacks came, I turned to temporary agencies. First Olsten Staffing, then Volt Services Group, tried to find some kind of an office setting I could work in. Eventually, I started filling out applications for food-service jobs. McDonalds and restaurants of that nature. Twenty apps later without even so much as a "we got your application and will call you when we can pencil you in for an interview" call later, I turned to a third employment agency, Marathon Temps. They specialized in light industrial work, and a mere 10 seconds after I returned to them with my second form of ID (oops), they found me the job where I am working now.

Liquid Metronics, Inc. is a manufacturing plant in Acton, Massacusetts, and a subsidiary of Milton Roy USA, along with Williams, Linc, Hartell, YZ Systems, and Haskel. It manufactures metering pumps and controllers to other industrial businesses. Water treatment, chemical engineering, anyone who works with large amounts of chemicals, probably could have LMI as a supplier for all their pumping needs.

This was irrelevant to me, since I wasn't actually making any of these devices. I was an inventory clerk. My job, as I was shown by my coworker Nat, was to fill parts orders from the workers on the shop floor. An order would come in, I would look up the part number, search the racks of parts, and bring them out on a cart to whichever assembly line needed them. Easy work; I could do it in my sleep. (And given that I had to wake up at quarter to 6 to be to work on time at 7 am, I might have to.)

At eight bucks an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, for about eight weeks, I would have filled my initial purpose of getting a job: have plenty of spending cash at college. You do the math, and don't forget taxes. But, as I said before, I just got a raise today. I'll be making $9 an hour starting Monday.

Oh, and I've been moved, possibly permanently, to recieving. Now instead of getting parts from a rack to bring to the shelf, I take the parts off the truck, and enter them into the computer system before Ron, the senior recieving staff member, gets one of the other stock guys to move the parts ON TO the shelves. Which means they're training me to drive a forklift. I was thinking, "now THAT would be an interesting thing to put on my resume." Amongst all the computer credentials would be the line "Certified in operation of a Crown SC forklift truck." And the interviewer would think, "WTF?" (or something more professional-sounding.)

Probably the most interesting thing about the job is the diversity. I'm the only white guy there. Scratch that. I'm the only YOUNG white guy there. Other than me, there's my official boss, Fred Smith, who runs the machine shop, Chris, who has taken over as head of the stock room since Fred is going to be away from the machine shop/stock room area more and more, and Brenda, whose last name I don't remember and whose jaded attitude towards work keeps the rest of us grounded in reality. Chris is in his early 30s, and everyone else is at least 40, probably pusing 50s. Then we have two latino guys in their 20s, Nat and Saúl, who showed me the ropes in my early days (god, I work here three weeks and I'm already talking about "early days"). Horn, an asian man in his 40s who spends most of his time working in the machine shop (presumably as Fred's right hand man). Sophoan, an asian guy in his 20s who left about a week after I got here, and whose job was taken over by Chris. And two guys we hired about two weeks after I got here, an african-american guy bout my age named Timmy, and an asian guy, also about my age, whose name I can't remember.

On the shop floor, Spanish is a more common language spoken than English; I'd estimate about half the people out there could only speak enough English to get by on the job. Not much when you consider that all the assembly line forepersons also speak Spanish. I took five years of Spanish classes from 7th grade to 11th grade, then mostly forgot it, but I can still occasionally make out a fragment of a conversation, if I listen closely enough.

So I'll be here for another five and a half weeks. It may not be exciting work, but I'll be bringing in cash and getting something else to add to my resume. And it'll be enough of an experience to remind me that I have the potential to move beyond blue-collar work. As Fred told me, "We want you to go to school, to get an education. You don't want to be stuck in this hellhole."

I don't think it's a hellhole now, but perhaps it's one of those places that's a "nice place to visit," but you "don't want to live there."
Catharsis, n. 1. purgation 2. purification or purgation of the emotions (as pity or fear) primarily through art; a purification or purgation that brings spiritual renewal or release from tension 3. elimination of a complex by bringing it to consciousness and affording it expression. (from Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition)

Here I stand, trying to start again. Previously I had been hosting a blog on JoeUser.com, where I voiced whatever was on my mind at the time. (Near the end of the blog, the subject was almost exclusively World of Warcraft.)

Maybe it was only a temporary bit of downtime, maybe it was my brother's relative success running his blog on this site, maybe a combination of both, but whatever the case, I moved.

The title is a holdover from the previous blog. I first heard it when I was studying greek tragedy as part of 10th grade English class, and I've always liked its sound. If my dictionary definition of Catharsis above puts you off, let's just say, you use some form of art to purge your emotions, to ground you in reality again, to bring you back from feelings of rage, of grief, of fear.

While I never liked Writing classes, it was only because even the slightest constraint on what I had to write made me feel impossibly chained. So I thought I hated writing. Here, I have the freedom to write whatever I want, if it's on my mind. Maybe it will interest you, maybe not. My last blog didn't interest many people, or at least that's what the number of responses to my posts showed.

I have a horrible habit of trying things, becoming interested for a while, and then ignoring it for a long time. Computer games I played for two weeks before going to the rack, albums I listened to a few times before being shelved, collections nowhere near complete. I come back to them, and think, "Wow...that didn't last long, did it?"

That was the fate of my last blog. If this blog should succumb to the same pitfall, don't be surprised. On the bright side, this one, unlike a lot of others, won't cost either of us anything.

Since I'm starting at the beginning, I should probably tell you a few things. There will be a certain geeky bent to this blog. I am a computerphile at heart; my father started me off at age 3 with First Letters and Words for the Commodore Amiga 2000. 16 years later, I'm studying Computer Science at UMass Amherst. I play computer games voraciously. I write music with a software workstation. And occasionally I see a new gadget and think, "My desktop needs one of those."

But this is my catharsis; when I'm tired from a day of work, I turn to the internet to solve all my problems; when I can't help but smile, I need to say why. When my temper begins to flare, I take it out on whatever virtual enemies stand in my way, so that no physical beings are harmed.

If I speak on matters political, my views will have a decidedly liberal slant. I was born and raised in Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the great USA (I want to say THE most liberal, but that honor probably goes to Vermont). I read regularly (or used to, anyway) the blog of music artist Moby, which talks as much about politics as it does music, though a lot of it is Bush-bashing. I read the newsmagazine The Nation every time a new issue comes to our door. And I'm a fan of the works of political- and former SNL Sketch-writer Al Franken, and documentarist Michael Moore. (believe it or not.)

If you generally disagree with that I have to say, please please PLEASE back your argument up. If math teachers have taught me anything, it's that for anything to count, you must show how you reached your answer. If your response is well-written and carefully thought out (if you bother to respond at all), then I will read it. Maybe I will respond in kind, but sometimes I might try to write something witty and disarming. Don't take it the wrong way.

And, for those who read my previous blog, I will TRY to cut back on the news regarding my progress in World of Warcraft. Unless you liked those kind of articles.