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Brule painting
Tuesday, March 15 2016
This morning Gretchen said that she could feel the start of something in her head or throat that sounded like the ominous first stirrings of that illness that left me bedridden for the better part of four days (and which is still causing me hack up large chunks of phlegm). Her solution was to squeeze herself some fresh grapefruit juice, though if she really has the disease, that is unlikely to be enough.
Gretchen contributes generously to a number of organizations promoting either veganism or animal rights, and when she isn't writing them checks, she is perusing their various media manifestations (both online and in print). The other day, she found a job listing on the website of these sites advertising for a remote web developer. So I sent them my resume, a decision I immediately regretted, because I really don't think I could handle the emotional wear and tear of looking at photographs of tortured animals all day. There was also the matter of pay, which would be less than the kind I could get from a for-profit company. But it would be a full-time job with health benefits, which I haven't had since the end of 2001.
Today I had a phone interview with that organization. The guy on the other end of the line sounded young and socially awkward, the 50 mg dose of Vyvanse I'd taken to speed my thinking and improve my sociability didn't seem to be resonating. The guy asked a lot of questions about my abilities that were easy to answer in ways that bolstered my case, but I had difficulty not coming across as either arrogant or blasé. Part of my problem was thinking about those horrible animal pictures I'd have to see if I got the job. Oddly, though, the interviewer never even brought up that aspect of the job, and when I talked about my animal rights bona fides, it was clear he wasn't interested. Still, he said the interview had gone well, and then he sent me a skills test to be filled out at my leisure.
The test consisted of 12 context-free lines of code, some of which with such obvious problems that I soon came to view it as one of correcting damaged syntax. This also made me think some of the lines were problem-free and placed there just to mess with my mind. The clearest example of one of these was perfectly good use of the Javascript command console.log. This led me to identify lines without syntax errors as seemingly okay. But later the interviewer replied saying all the lines had some problem in them. So then I realized that all the unfiltered $_GET["variable"] were things I needed to deal with as well. The console.log statement needed a "window.console &&" in front of it for idiots using older versions of Internet Explorer, but there was also a something I'd never heard of, and which I didn't learn until after submitting my answers for a second time: according to my interviewer, suddenly now all HTML form tags have to include an accept-charset="UTF-8" specification in them. When I saw this, I sort of lost my remaining interest in the job. It's fussy, unnecessary, and completely arcane notions like that (and the dogmatism surrounding them) that provide most of the unpleasantness that I experience in my career.
Tomorrow would be our friend Nancy's birthday, and though Gretchen had already arranged plenty of gifts from our households, I decided to make an additional one. I painted a tiny painting of Dr. Steve Brule, one of Nancy's favorite comedic characters (as played by John C. Reilly on Adult Swim's Tim & Eric Show). Dr. Steve Brule coined one of Nancy's signature phrases, "sweet berry wine." Here is that painting:
Tonight I sipped booze and beer while noting the returns from yet another Tuesday in presidential primary season. Donald Trump had won Florida but John Kasich had won the state for which he is the governor: Ohio. Having lost his home state of Florida, Marco Rubio finally dropped out of the race. He'll probably be back in four years with a bigger gut, less hair, and whatever politics are fashionable for Republicans in a post-Trump world. But I don't think he'll ever be president.
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