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Saturday, Apr. 12, 2003 - 3:41 p.m. wearing: fabulous orange T-shirt with paranoid graphics by S.F. designers ElevenEleven, jeans the corner office So here I am in my new office, which is indeed kind of in a corner. (The building is a weird shape, okay? I have windows on two sides, but one of them only looks out onto another wall, so it's not quite as brilliantly panoramic as Dave's or Janice's real true-to-life "corner offices.") Wacky, wacky, wacky. I guess this means I'm going to have to pay extra-special attention to being on time to work to avoid Dave lecturing me about how I need to set a better example for the junior associates. Actually Dave wouldn't do anything like that--he'd say something even more brutal like he did the other day, when we were talking about setting a meeting for the day before I leave on my W.T. and he was like, "Let's do it early on the 1st--like, 10:15?" and laughed maniacally as I stood there stoically. I don't have as much street noise in this office but the wind noise is a lot louder. Also I'm not facing the really beautiful view any more, which is too bad, especially since I realized there is added excitement to that vista in that you can count the number of Med-Flight helicopters that come by to land on the roof of the hospital across the street. But as soon as I get back from vacation and have paid off some bills, I've already picked out the table and chairs I'm going to buy for the windowed corner so that I can have a place other than my desk to sit and read medical records, eat, etc. (Don't even imagine for a second that Dave will pay for this. But that's fine, because this way they're mine to take home or do whatever with if need be.) To translate this into Hollins-ese--my old office was roughly the size of a Tinker single, and this office is the size of a Tinker double or a largish Front Quad single. And, in that vein, I'll note that I now have a bulletin board on which to hang my fabulous Hollins calendar (even if this month's photo is of a bunch of dancers and their armpits) and enough wall space for me to justify having framed this weird black-and-white photograph of a rooster that I bought off eBay that some couple in Kentucky found out in their barn. On the way in to the office, I decided I'd stop at this non-Starbucks coffee place I spotted last weekend. There are approximately two independent coffee shops here in Las Vegas, this one and a place down by the UNLV campus about 12 miles from my house, and so for anyone who might be inclined to criticize my patronage of corporate caffeination, it's not like I have much choice here. The place I went to today is called "Holy Grounds Coffee Lounge," and I didn't think anything about the name since I know that, for example, the coffee shop that sponsors the Arcata Eye Police Log is called "Sacred Grounds" and it's clearly a fine hippie coffee shop, right? I should have been warned by the fact that when I pulled up in front of Holy Grounds, the schedule on the door stated that it was closed on Sundays. Yep, you guessed it--it's a Christian coffee shop. There are crosses (not crucifixes, take note--this is as Protestant a place as the post-Catherine of Aragon court of Henry VIII) EVERYWHERE, and praise-and-worship music playing over the PA, and Bible study guides on every table. But what was I going to do--turn around and walk out? That wouldn't have been a very Christian thing to do (and keep in mind that although I might be an atheist, I don't have much problem with the baseline un-Paul-erated philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount--I don't think J. of N. was the Son of God or that there's an afterlife or whatnot, but I think the Beatitudes provide a pretty reasonable framework for one's personal/ethical decisionmaking, which many purportedly devout "Christians" seem to have forgotten; see, e.g. Bush II. Or, as K.'s favorite bumper sticker says, "I love Jesus--it's his fan club I can't stand.") So I had a cup of coffee and a piece of cheesecake and wrote for half an hour, and eavesdropped on an earnest Christian couple having a passionate conversation about--I kid you not--what safe drivers they are. (Which brings to mind my own favorite bumper sticker: "Jesus would have used His turn signals!") Apparently this place is kind of co-op like and staffed by volunteers, which is a cool thing. I say this because there were three people on duty, one of whom was female, and she was having to do EVERYTHING because the two guys were just too freaking clueless to, e.g., wipe the sticky honey off the outside of the honey dispenser, and I don't mean in a "that's wimmin's work" kind of way--I mean in a "oh, I'd never have thought of that" kind of way. They were extremely nice and asked me how I heard about them, and I told them I saw their sign and I'm always interested in patronizing non-corporate coffee shops, and the one especially clueless guy agreed with me that there is an unfortunate dearth of these in Vegas, especially on this side of town. The chairs were more comfortable than those at Starbucks, even though they bore the indiciae of having been purchased at an ex-hotel-furniture clearance facility (think total beige color scheme). On my way out, I saw that if I had been paying closer attention to the sign on the way in, I would have seen that the "O"s in "HOLY GROUNDS" had little crosses in their centers. I probably won't go back, if for no other reason than that I can't think straight with that Godawful music droning away, but I certainly applaud what they're doing to the extent they're running this well-patronized small business--I'm sure if there had been such a place in Huntsville when I was going through my churchgoing phase at age 13, I would have been there CONSTANTLY and enjoyed it very much. Also I'm not 100 percent confident, in retrospect, that my coffee was actually caffeinated. I'm now going to make a list of the next ten things I pull out of my box of crap that I emptied out of the junk drawer in my old desk, and then I'm going to get back to work: 1. Empty wrapper from a bag of Maharishi Ayur-Ved Stimulating KAPHA TEA," which was "Made in India - Land of the Ved," and which provides five tips for balancing one's kapha ("Be active," "Exercise regularly," "Don't overeat,"" "Avoid sugar (one exception: a little raw honey)," and "Keep warm"), all five of which I violate on a daily basis. 2. Box of (metal) paper clips. 3. My cell phone charger, which I actually have an outlet to plug into in this office, unlike the old one. 4. Card from Janice's old secretary congratulating me on passing the Nevada bar exam. 5. Wooden ruler. I actually use this a lot because operative reports always talk about how many centimeters of colon or whatnot the surgeon removed, and this way I can look at that distance on the ruler and have an appreciation of just how much tissue had to be ripped out. 6. Scraps of paper on which I wrote down my billable hours for some month of August that could be 2001 or 2002. 7. A pencil. When do I ever use pencils? 8. Packet of ketchup from Burger King. 9. Empty box formerly containing small binder clips, which I can't imagine why I was keeping around except those tiny little paper/binder clip boxes are so adorably small. 10. A Post-It Note on which Grant wrote his excellent score on the MPRE. A pack rat? Moi? � 5.2.03--all packed up and nowhere to go yet - Friday, May. 02, 2003 *** Diaryland *** Moi *** Maintenant *** Temps Perdu |