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telephone sings songs of opportunity and annoyance
Tuesday, June 18 2002I had a terrible dream this morning in which a strain of the common cold was ravaging humanity, wiping out millions of people like the Black Plague. One of its symptoms was a rash, and in the dream I had that rash. I was terrified that I would soon be just another victim of the contagion. The horrible thing about dreams is that when they terrify you, you really are terrified. You wake up traumatized, and the fact that it was just a dream helps about as much as a doctor saying "just kidding!" after diagnosing you with terminal cancer. I see no reason why one couldn't experience post traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of a particularly stressful dream.The phone rang seemingly continuously today, and, as always, the calls were for Gretchen. I hate the sound of a ringing telephone, and not just because it's never for me. My main problem with telephones is that they intrude on my life. I'm much more of an email person, not that I answer it or anything.
But at 11am this morning I got a call from the Times Square media company where Gretchen works part time as a copy editor. Now they wanted to set up an interview with me. Wow, I couldn't believe it. After a year and a half of fruitless (though admittedly low-intensity) searching, someone with a job to fill actually wanted to talk to me. This will be my first real interview (as opposed to a meeting with a recruiter) that I will have had in over two years.
Since DHTML is one of the things this gig wants applicants to know, I brushed up on my skills a bit, making this page ever so much more irritating in the process. I was amazed that I was able to, on the first try, guess the formula for tracing a circle (which I later altered into a vertical ellipse). Aside from occasional thunderstorms, the weather has been absolutely perfect lately. It's been so perfect in fact that the old folks' hospital on the corner of President and Prospect Park West has been bringing out its most frail patients and allowing them to enjoy the sunshine and temperate breezes. Mind you, I frequently see old patients in front of this hospital as I'm walking Sally to Prospect Park, but they never look as if they're on the verge of death. Today, however, I saw this one old man lying motionless on a stretcher. His mouth was wide open and his eyes were closed and he looked like he was already dead, yet the nurse smoking a cigarette beside him seemed completely unconcerned. Then I saw another old man using a cane to walk a painful couple of steps down the sidewalk. His skin was so thoroughly covered with large purple sores than my own started crawling in horrified empathy. Finally I saw a gaunt little old lady with a horribly swollen face, and she too was on a stretcher, possibly in a coma. This evening Nancy (and her dog Suzy) came over to watch American Idol with Gretchen and me. I noticed that there was an awful lot of talk about Coca Cola during tonight's show, and it was clear that Coke had done a product tie-in. I'm always icked-out by transparent product placement in entertainment, but in a way it made sense. Coca Cola is Democrat to Pepsi's Republican. Unlike Pepsi's top-down autocratic approach to celebrity endorsement (think Michæl Jackson and Britney Spears), Coca Cola is pitching their product in what passes for a democratic pop star election. If you think about it, it's almost as warm and fuzzy as I'd like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love,
grow apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtle doves.
I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.
I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.
Does anyone remember when NPR was cool? How cool is this?
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