12 November 2005

Screaming egos

I was out walking in the neighborhood the other day when I saw the personalized license plate "RLLN22S." Huh? It was one of those that takes you a minute as you try and jam the letters together and sound out the numbers. "Real lawn tutus?" "Our ellen twenty twos?"

Then I saw the big rims and figured it out instantly. "Rolling 22s". The license plate was on a huge SUV with giant chrome tire rims.

Not only was this person convinced that big tire rims were a way to happiness that they were willing to spend upwards of $2000 on them (I just learned that myself, wow) but they wanted to make sure people noticed by putting it on their license plate.

Did someone not get enough hugs from Mom?

To me, stuff like this - conspicuous consumerism, wearing clothing and accessories with logos all over them - is just embarrassing. What it says to me is not "I'm classy" but "I don't have anything inside me, so I have to buy my identity."

I think I am probably hopelessly old school about this, because it is rare to see anyone under 30 who doesn't have enough logos on their bodies to rival a NASCAR car. Let's face it, it's hard to BUY clothes without logos on them. You have to make a real conscious effort and even then there are some logos, like on athletic shoes, that are unavoidable. You have to dig pretty deep into the bargain bin to find running shoes that the makers are so ashamed of that they won't slap a logo on them.

But people take it too far. Purses that are just one continuous logo pattern. Tiffany jewelry where showing off the maker's mark is the whole point. I even saw a girl with a Roxy logo tattooed above her butt. I can't wait til she has to explain that one to her grandkids.

09 November 2005

New blog, new place

I ditched the old blog. The $9 a month it was costing me at Typepad just wasn't worth it. At the beginning, I had these grand ideas of turning it into something beautiful and complex and then...life happened and I never got around to it.

So here we are, at Red Stapler in homage to Milton and the movie "Office Space."

I am not, of course, really Milton. I am a girl. But I have been trapped in a cubicle for three months and the movie has been much on my mind. I have many of the same scenarios as the movie - a tiny cubicle, endless, pointless paperwork, and a job that doesn't seem to much matter to anyone. Basically all we do all day is cover our asses, and some days there isn't even a whole lot of that to do.

At first it drove me crazy. Then I somehow learned to waste time. I can stretch 15 minutes worth of work into four hours. Before I know it, I am thinking "Hey, it's lunchtime! I was so busy making binder tabs and walking back and forth to the bathroom that I didn't even notice!"

I do go to the bathroom a lot, thanks to my prodigious coffee consumption. You probably didn't need to know that. But if you see someone scurry past your cubicle every half hour or so, that's me, on the way to the can.
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