I Hate Toddlers/Review of More Real at MIA

If there is one thing you should do before going to an art show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, it is this: Check their schedule for kid events.

If there is an event for kids, such as Sunday’s Rock the Cradle with 89.3 The Current, DO NOT GO. You can be sure that every 2 year old in the metro area will be there.

You will find this out when you get to the museum after backroading through south Minneapolis because the GPS decides you need to visit every pothole in Minnesota on your way there. You will begin a spiral shaped pattern of driving around the museum in ever widening circles and narrow streets as you search hopelessly for a parking space. “Surely this street will have openings,” you think. “Parents wouldn’t want to walk their 2 year old in this cold for half a mile.” But you would be wrong.

Finally, you find a spot seven blocks away in a neighborhood that has several run-down apartment buildings daring the laws of gravity and good taste.

You walk the seven blocks in dampness, each step screaming “this better be worth it.”

Kids are everywhere as you get closer. Without wife along, as she was feeling sick, you start to stick out as the only tall guy, wearing a black coat and hat, without a kid hanging off a limb. You begin to feel as pedophiley and suspicious as a guy with a van and candy at a playground. But dammit, you’d punt a kid if you weren’t surrounded and actually rather terrified they might turn on you. And you have the lingering knowledge that if you have a sudden poop attack, there will be kids in each fucking stall in the place to make your life more miserable.

You begin to have conversations with these parents in your head. One-sided conversations where you pretty much yell at them.

“What the hell do you think your kid is getting out of this? Every kid here is about 2. Two! They don’t even understand the concept of fucking TIME yet, but you think you can force culture on them and they’ll get something useful out of it. Like the four cardboard tubes they tied together with string that they are carrying around like a fucking badge of genius rather than the worst craft project known to man? I can understand if your kids were 8 or so. At least then they can discern the concept that other people in the world think different thoughts than them, and they might actually remember what they saw today a month from now. You fucking liberal douchebag parents want to cram your 2 year olds into the genius class and want to grab on to the fact that your kid spent two seconds looking at a piece of art that they might just be the next Picasso or some shit. I hate you. This much.”

That’s the conversation I had while walking behind a mother who was letting her 2 year old walk up the stairs in front of me all by herself. I had a lot of time to think. 2 year olds are shit at climbing stairs.

I got up the stairs and dodged and weaved my way to the More Real show. I knew that there would be solace there, because tickets to get into this exhibit are 14 bucks, unlike the free rest of the museum. 14 bucks is a small price to pay to get away from munchkin land.

The full name of the exhibit is MO/RE/AL: Art in the Age of Truthiness. They already have a 300 or so page souvenir book about it you can buy for 40 bucks at the gift shop. Ugh. Also the site just linked to has more annoying gifs than a geocities refugee center.

If you don’t know what truthiness is by now, here you go.

The Colbert Report
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The idea of art as a lie that gets to the truth is an old one. I’m a fan of unreliable narrators and metafiction, but the pieces here did not impress like the collection at the Real Life show, which used a lot of the same thematic organizing devices, yet managed to group the pieces in more useful and digestible clusters.

Unlike the other shows I’ve been to at the MIA and the Walker, I had a lot of trouble getting into this one. The first three rooms, in fact, were a bit of a bummer and I was wondering if I could get my money back if I left early enough. Compared to the Sports Show and the Until Now shows at MIA and the Real Life show at the Walker, this exhibit was sparse. Most rooms had one or two artists, sometimes just one or two works to examine. It makes you jealous of MoMA visitors who have a chance to see Tilda Swinton in a box. 

I turned around a bit on the experience when I got to the “Phantom Truck” by Inigo Manglano-Oralle. This piece takes up the largest room in the wing, so much so you wonder how they got it in there. The whole room is dark, like photo-room dark, with little more than the exit sign illuminating anything. Out of the darkness you can make out the vague massive shape of an open top semi trailer with big, boxy and air-compressor shaped equipment loaded and strapped down. It’s rather menacing, and for good reason, since it is based on the idea of the chemical weapons trucks that were supposedly our reason to invade Iraq.

You wanna feel bad about your fellow social internet surfers? Like, shit we are doomed bad? You can check out this piece called “NoFun” Two artists decided to use Chat Roulette (You can go there anyway if you need to feel like we’re doomed) and put up a hanged body. People laugh about it, even though nothing about the scene looks fake. Out of the many people who saw the scene, one called the cops.

Another point of interest was Vik Muniz’ “Verso” pieces. A Rembrandt hangs on the wall, but around the room are other paintings, leaning up against the wall so you can only see the backs. On the backs, there are mailing labels to say what they are “Starry Night” or “American Gothic” and where they have been. The idea here is to give the museum goer a look at the story of the life of the painting, where it has been, which is typically only seen by the museum staff. I think this is where I get a bit perturbed by this.

The act of recreation here is impressive, don't get me wrong. Obsession like that usually is. However, pointing out to me that there are other stories behind great works, that they go to different museums, is about the least insightful thing you could say about artwork. I know that they keep making commentary tracks for movies, but I quit listening to them years ago after the point where they all pretty much say the same damn things and you aren’t really going to learn anything new about the movie business that you really cared to know. Exception: Anchorman commentary – it’s like another hilarious movie. Back to the Verso pieces, this insight isn’t even as good as a commentary track about how people got along in the making of the movie or which scene was shot first. It’s the intellectual equivalent of telling me that the book I’m reading was shipped to a Barnes and Noble once.

Much more interesting, and in the same meta-fictional realm of the backward paintings, was the nearby room showing a 10 minute film by Eve Sussman called “89 Seconds at Alcazar.” The film is a recreation and behind the scenes look at the minutes before and after the scene depicted in “Las Meninas” by Diego Velazquez. Here’s that painting, which I’m sure you’ve seen:

What’s so interesting in this one shot scene is the constant fluid motion of the people involved, the intricate costumes recreated from the painting, the way everyone eventually lines up, and the fact that Peter fuckin Dinklage is in a dress! And it’s way more interesting and says more about the piece it’s commenting upon then the back of a painting. There’s also a bit with a dog.

At the risk of apples to oranges comparisoning: here’s a list of novels concerning nature of mixing fiction/art/life that you will get more out of than spending time on the same subjects at this gallery:

Atonement

Lolita

The Neverending Story

The White Hotel

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Stop being a stupid interviewer, please!

The web is full of articles about the job interview process. These articles range from "10 things not to do in an interview" to "the five dumbest answers given in interviews."

Notice how all the emphasis is on the interviewee. The person desperate to get the job they've been "lucky" enough to get called in to talk about. As someone who goes through job interviews at least once a week for the past six months, I've become something of an expert on the interview process. I have to say, your performance is lacking, interviewers.

So, in the ever-tried-and-true list form, here's a top five mistakes to avoid that I've seen over the months.

1.       If you interview someone, whether over the phone or in person, do them the favor of telling them they didn't get the job.

                About half of the interviews I go on, send thank you letters for, and contact a week later to check on their progress - all perfectly reasonable things recommended by experts - I never hear from again. I took the time to thank you for taking the time to meet with me and discuss how I could best help your organization, but the fact is, I drove to your office, changed my schedule, and put on my best suit for you, sometimes taking 3 hours worth of writing tests. You show up in the same old thing you wear every day, talk to me for 30 minutes, and move on. I feel like we slept together and you didn't have the decency to call the next day.

2.       Please put the questions away!

                I now have a good idea what press junkets are like. I go to interviews, handle the same questions with a rehearsed ease of "spontaneity," and feel like we learned nothing about each other by the end of our time. Look, I interview people for a living as a reporter, let me tell you something - the best stuff you'll get is when you LISTEN to the other person, and ask questions about what they are saying. It's called a conversation. It's awesome! All too often, I get sat in a room with 2-5 other people, who read pre-written questions that come from the Dummies Guide to Conducting Job Interviews. "What interested you about this job?" "How do you handle change?" "What do you do when you have competing priorities?" I can only spin so much gold for such questions. I promise you, you will never get to know someone in this way. Don't get me wrong, pre-written questions can be a useful tool, but only if you ask follow up questions.

3.       More than the act of sticking to your scripted questions, some of the questions themselves need to go!

                You know what interested me in this job? You pay money. For services I can provide and have been doing well for years. I'm sorry that I don't have a born and bred loyalty to your company that I just applied to along with 30 others last week. I'm unemployed and am not choosy. That being said, if you hire me, I will kick so much ass and be so loyal, you'll be begging me to take it down a notch. But right now, the only thing that interested me was that you need a writer, and you pay. Period. But you ask this question and expect an "honest" response. I guarantee you all you will get is bull crap. 

4.       Telling me about your company is all good, but edit your shit.

                Maybe one in three interviews, but enough to be annoying, is the interviewer who spends 20-30 minutes of our brief time together talking about the company, their position, and the job details. This can be done in 5 minutes, tops. Any more time, and you are wasting a lot of time in our interview telling me about your company that I will not be working for because you haven’t taken a second to stop proselytizing to have a real conversation.

5.       Be honest.

                You ask honesty of people in interviews. Honesty and integrity screwed me out of a job last week, actually, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the things you say after the interview. If you are already set on someone else, let me know. Don't lead me on for a week or two, saying "we are still having internal discussions about the position" only to tell me later that I didn't get it. If I'm not in the running, let me know, and let me know what I can do better. I ask for feedback, but rarely get it. If I never hear what I did wrong, how can I do better? Constructive criticism would be good.

So, there's your top five. Not that I expect you to do them. After all, there's "so much going on around here" that you don't have time to put effort into finding the right person to fill a position at your business. You make that clear in the first two minutes. Every time. 

That damn reuben sandwich!

The great emotional breakdown of 2012 started with a latke reuben from Rye Deli.

It had been months since wife and I had gone out to enjoy this city that we moved to six months ago with a job for her and dreams of continuing a career for me. Months of having to scrimp and save. Months of saying "Well, we can't go to this musician or comedian that we are hard core fans of, but once I get a job, things'll change."

Then on a tip from Andria, I started checking out the local library for free tickets to local places. The hope was to score tickets to the Minnesota Zoo and go there Thursday. Wife was taking her first paid vacation ever. I was working a temp job for three weeks and now had extra cash for gas money, and we had a plastic bin and bankers box full of books to sell to fund this excursion.

Unfortunately, the zoo tickets are a hot item at the library, only put out randomly, and they go fast. I've checked 4 times since last week, and never got lucky. We tried on Thursday and got nothing. I was determined to give wife a good day out though. We didn't know what we would do, but after selling the books, we had some money to do it.

Wife had read about Rye in pretty much every Twin Cities magazine, and ever since the New York honeymoon, she's wanted to visit. So we pulled in on Thursday afternoon, an empty time at Rye, and our eyes boggled at the menu, the fish on display, and promises of hand carved meats.

I ordered a brisket sandwich and poutine to share. Poutine at Rye is fries and cheese curds smothered in an onion-heavy gravy, and it makes you want to sell your unborn for the promise that you will have it again, soon.

Wife ordered a latke reuben, which is a reuben, but with latke instead of rye.

Her sandwich came out first. A pile of corned beef between two burned looking pieces of latke. She took a bite, and was instantly transported back to our honeymoon, wolfing down a pie tin full of corned beef from Carnegie Deli with a plastic fork in our hotel room across the street. She piled a fork full, carefully balancing the ingredients to give me the perfect bite. A bit scared, I put the fork in my mouth, and my eyes misted. The meat must have been soaking in angel blood and puppy dreams for a week. The latke was blackened, but tasted unburned, just perfectly crisp.

My sandwich was not as good. I'm not a fan of mustard, but it happens so seldom that a sandwich has mustard that I don't make sure to hold it every time.

But that reuben.

Damn.

Shit.

We sat there, I scraped mustard off my sandwich. Wife occasionally gave me more bites, which I took without hesitation.  I usually pick better than her, but this time it was her turn to share.

We then took in the Life Like exhibit at the Walker, which was fantastic. We could have gotten free tickets for this, but it was just one of those things where we didn't know we would be going until we were driving by it. The Life Like exhibit was one of those rare times where my background in modern lit and themes helped me to decode and understand the pieces on display, while still having a gut emotional reaction to them.

(not my picture)

We coasted through Friday, but I got a rejection from a job I sorely wanted and hadn't heard from for weeks. She was nice about it, but it still stung. With the temp job coming to a close, it started to feel like we were once again approaching that dark precipice of not knowing how to make it through another month.

On Saturday, I woke to check my email, and before I was gone 10 minutes, wife was calling for me. I was annoyed.

The off feeling didn't stop. I went to Cub to grab some groceries. Came home and cooked bacon and egg sandwiches. I rented two movies from a redbox. I know wife's tastes are different than mine, but I figured I had scored a good medium by getting two kids movies. Hugo and Tintin. I had to talk her into Hugo, which annoyed me, since I got it specifically for her. She had wanted to go out for St. Patties day, but we couldn't afford it. Instead, I made corned beef. But nothing seemed to be good enough. I was looking down the hole of joblessness once again, and I didn't know what was going to happen. The reuben had cracked the emotional wall on Thursday, and the art gallery had stuck a crowbar in that wall, but Saturday's fights with the wife took a bazooka to it.

We were lying in bed together at about 3, because we had had enough snipping, and nothing was going right between us, and the weight of everything just. Snapped.

And I started crying. Deep sobs. Like the kind a 13 year old girl would have if she came to the deep realization that Robert Pattinson was way too old for her and would never, ever, ever be interested and the best she could hope for was the scabby acne guy named Stan from fourth period. Holy shit did I break. And wife just jumped on, wrapping her arms around me, calling me back from the abyss. Telling me it would be all right. I cried like I couldn't breathe. I wore my way through eight Kleenix. I felt like I was doing sit ups, the deep stomach shit that was going on.

One hour later.

Me: What the hell was that?

Wife: It was you letting go for once. You haven't done that since we moved.

Me: Holy shit.

Wife: It's nice to know you are still human. I was worried. No one should be able to do what you've done for six months without that happening.

Me: Thank you for being here.

Wife: Hey, it's my turn. Howabout we watch Tintin?

Me: OK.

Epilogue: Tintin is frackin awesome.  

Netzophrenia

Hello valued customer, 

I want to thank you for choosing Netflix, also known as Quickster, then for a few hours, Moovier, before changing back to Netflix again.

In these tough and unknown economic times, we at Netquick strive to fully show our support by mirroring the United States' uncertainty and keeping you, the customer, on your toes. Are you enjoying the ride?

Quickflix wants to inform you that to keep our prices low, we will be making a slight change in our services. Our movies will now be delivered right to your hand by elephant. That’s right, Netphant is working for you. Our elephants, you should know, cannot reach every residence due to local laws, so between our service described two sentences ago and now, we have changed our business model to deliver you movies on the double by providing one central location in Kansas City where you can bring in your movies and take home new ones at the same low cost of 10.99 a month. That just changed to 12.99 a month. Order Quickphlixsas soon.

You may notice the name change throughout this letter. At this point, it is difficult to write our name in any correspondence since we change it every 10 seconds. By the time I went back and changed them all, they would be out of date. So I will continue to refer to our services as they are named when I write them. That’s the up to date care you will get from us at Netster.

So for the low introductory price of 15.99, you can get 10 minutes of your favorite movies at a time. Our central location has now changed to Nome, Alaska. If you are enroute, for 5.99 a month, you can get our new ap that will tell you where the central location is to go and get your next movie. It’s never been so easy!

Thank you for continuing to support Netfilmresidue. We appreciate your business.

Sincerely,

The Netflop team

Dead Horse for UND logo!

I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said about the UND logo debate, and let’s face it, most people are pretty vocal to the point of not being able to hear the other side anyway. If there are any commonplaces in this mess, they include:

1.     That this whole situation is ridiculous

2.     That the other side is ridiculous

3.     That one’s own side is the only logical thing in the world to believe in and Oh My God how stupid are you to keep bringing up this issue during the time of existence where things were going well for my side and we should have let it rest.

It looks like the powers that be are retiring the Fighting Sioux logo, leaving a Native American sized hole in the hearts of many North Dakotans and UND graduates.

For this reason, I am starting a campaign to submit Dead Horse as the new logo.

There are many great reasons for this:

1.     The name is vaguely Native American enough to vaguely offend some people without being specific enough to cause problems.

2.     Dead Horse loves a good beating, and any UND logo needs to be able to take a good beating.

3.     Zombies are "in" right now.

4.     Dead Horse will love you no matter how hard you pound him and no matter what sorts of implements you use to clobber his bones.

5.     If you have been on a college campus lately, you know that they are great places to go to kill time while you wait to grow up. They are also great for debates that have been talked to death over the course of existence. College campuses are full of students that like to discuss our bullshit bourgeois society and the death of capitalism. What better symbol of this Ouroboros of intellectualism than Dead Horse? Except maybe an Ouroboros, I guess. 

6.     Because how cool would it be to have a dead horse as your mascot?

It has also been suggested that "Dead Horse" by Guns N' Roses would make a great school song. How rocking would that be? Extremely. The answer is extremely rocking.

So vote today, vote often. Long live the UND Dead Horses!

Open letter to Life

Dear life,

I get the joke. Ha ha. That was a good one. I’m amazed at the elaborateness of your prank, how you involved so many people in this thing. You are like “The Game” times a million. Bravo.

It was like you had me on puppet strings, the way you got me to focus on my studies in school with promises that there would be some sort of reward at the end of it. I did my best for you – state competitor in extracurriculars, top of HS class, great scholarship for college. You even got the college to shortlist me as senior of the year. Things were going well, a good high peak, you might say.

Then you had me sell shoes for years as I looked for jobs related to my major. You whispered promises of the baby boomer generation leaving their jobs soon, and there would be a glut of openings in every field. Still waiting on that one. Nicely played, life. I like the way you came in at the last second to ruin their retirement savings so they would never be able to leave their positions. Better yet, you managed to just absorb the jobs of those that did retire so that people are working 2 or 3 jobs instead of one, saving the company money on salary.

You threw me a bone with the newspaper gig, which took about 1 year to sap the strength from my soul, and another to pound the snot out of what was left. All the while, I kept developing my skills as advised – I learned to write quickly on deadline, to express ideas and feelings through story, to meet and interview people on the spot, to collect information and impart that information clearly to others. I like to think I got good at it. I’m still learning, but aren’t we all?

Every good story has some bits of relief, and graduate school was certainly that. I was once again in my element, where hard work is rewarded, and I actually thought perhaps teaching would be a good option. Hey, I’ve always been a good student, and my students seemed to be pretty cool with me even when they were getting bad grades.

That was one of the best twists, since you managed to set up a good system where way more master’s degrees and PhDs are produced than are needed in academia, which leads to a great Ouroboros system where colleges are getting people to pay for degrees and then turn around and work for those same colleges for less than they would make at an entry level job, and with no benefits. They make their own subservient labor force and get paid by people who want to get into that job pool. Genius!

The best trick by far is the way you continually dangle little rays of hope out there – life-changing possibilities that make me believe that maybe, just maybe, you don’t suck so much, that things can be better. The way you set it up so employers can take months to get back to you for an interview, then weeks to get back to you after the interview and still expect you to start the next day – well done. The way you set it up so we have to interview multiple times at the same place – masterstroke.

OK, life, you got me. You got me good. I tip my hat to you. You got me to work my ass off for the American dream that says hard work gets me ahead in you, Life. You even got us to believe in you so much that we dug a financial hole to cover basic medical, food, housing costs, figuring surely you wouldn’t stretch out the joke much longer. But you did, you took that joke all the way to the breaking point. That’s fucking commitment, my friend, and I double salute you.

I’m anxious to see what your next trick is. Perhaps you can have a fourth person leave my office so I can do four people’s jobs for the price of one. Perhaps you can continue to keep me in Fargo, where there are no opportunities for my Fiance. I didn’t think you would be so crass as to go for this type of kick in the balls, Jackass humor, but you did, and it’s been awesome. 

I enjoy a good poop joke, as you well know, but there’s only so much shit you can watch one eat, isn’t there? I think it’s time to stop joking, Life. My sides are splitting. I’m tired of laughing so much. You got me, you got me good. Can we move on, please?

Sincerely,

Fargo Jones

Shopping trips make me hate America

Before embarking on this anecdote about a night in my life, I want to reference a graduation speech by David Foster Wallace. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html  The daily grind/shopping section is particularly relevant and hits on the nose the absolute soul-sucking activity of having to go and get shit and not caring that you have turned everyone around you into an obstacle to your perfect life.

My night began by finding out our maid of honor will not be able to make it to the wedding due to what some call “ongoing operations” in Afghanistan. Fiance was devastated by the thought of losing her best and perhaps only friend besides me. After properly being there for her through the tears, we decided that I wouldn’t finish the basement last night, but would just go get some supplies. Two stops would suffice – Home Depot and the grocery store.

I pulled a piece of loose paint off the stoop and headed to Home Depot to get some outdoor paint and enough sealer to finish the basement. And since the sealer wasn’t quite matching the rest of the basement walls in whiteness even though it’s the same shit the previous owner used, I thought I would look into getting some paint to cover the sealer. The shopping trip from hell begins:

First I had to convince the paint mixer that a quart would be more than enough paint for three stoops and two other tiny spots on the house. Probably about 10 square feet all together. He wanted to sell me a gallon.

Then as the paint mixed I went off to find basement wall paint. A guy who looked sort of stonerish asked if I could use some help. He was clearly bored with his job of putting paint cans in stacks. I said I’m looking for basement wall paint. He directed me to the water sealant.

“I’ve got some of this, but is there paint to put over it?”

He looked at me confused. I continued.

“I have put two coats of this on the walls, and you can still sort of see through it. The can says you can put some paint on over the top to finish it.”

He pointed to the basement floor paint, which isn’t what I wanted. I now wanted him to stop helping me, but remained polite.

“OK. I think I’ll just look around a bit. Thank you for your help!”

He sort of ambled away. I looked at paint scrapers, trying to find a cheap plastic one that wasn’t too big.

“What you looking for?”

He was back! I explained I wanted a plastic paint scraper, but all I could see were packs of three, which was more than I needed. He pointed to the metal ones, which were 3 times the cost. I balked. He pointed to a plastic paint scraper that was the size of a Bob Ross paint pallet, but there were no happy trees swaying in the breeze in my head.

“I think I need something a bit more versatile.” I said. Fiance found this statement highly amusing when I later recounted the story.

So I got a metal scraper, picked up my mixed paint and said fuck it to looking for a latex wall paint because I simply did not want to have the dude try to help me again. I went searching at the far end of the store to figure out how much gutters would be to put up, and looked at drain spouts for 10 minutes wishing now that someone would ask to help me.

No one did.

So on to the check out.

Home Depot has a bank of four self check out counters, but I have yet to have them work right. This time I thought might be the first, since everything in the cart had a barcode. How wrong I was.

The girl that is the actual check out person said she would be over to help me as soon as the second thing I scanned didn’t work. “The mixed cans don’t work as well in these,” she said. She used her hand scanner, but it wouldn’t enter the price. She started to say things like “are you sure it isn’t up there?” until she finally figured out that she was using the wrong hand scanner.

So then I pay and am walking out to the car. I see an older woman and her cane-using mother walking the same direction and guess that they are parked next to me. I scoot to the car and practically throw the stuff in the trunk, but it’s too late and the cane woman is slowly getting into the car, which is fine. What isn’t fine is the part where the car was running, and she spent the next five minutes sitting there with her car door open so I couldn’t get into my car. Five fucking minutes of me leaning against my trunk and trying not to think horrible things about how easy it would be to grab her cane and beat her car door shut with it. I wanted to go and shut her door, but I’m an intimidating guy and didn’t want to get rape whistled or something, which is a real fear of mine from watching too many hilarious misunderstandings in sitcoms.

So I get out of there and finally get to Cashwise, where the adventure continues. I had five items to get, including some Ben and Jerry’s ice cream as requested by the Fiance to help with the Afghanistan emotions. I get to the frozen aisle and there is no one there except a woman with a shopping cart full of her groceries and young son and her husband. They are debating what ice cream to get, and her cart is sitting right in front of the Ben and Jerry’s door. Dammit! I go and get some garlic bread thinking they would be done. But I ended up standing there another five minutes as this woman looked through every fucking coupon in her fist full of coupons to find the right one. Politely waiting on the outside, but wanting to take her cart and shove it away inside.

Got the Ben and Jerrys and headed to the checkout, which was crazy busy. The self checkout counters were less so, and I got in the line with a couple who was nearly done scanning their items.

Pause here to insert how much I hate people who use the self check out when they have a cart overflowing with groceries. For some reason, I believe that self check out should be reserved for those without 100 items to scan.

I watched the next line over as three people pulled up, scanned their items, paid and left as the couple in front of me struggled to get Pert shampoo to scan, then gather up change between them to pay for the groceries – CHANGE!!!

I spent entirely too much time in lines, and even though it was nice to see a TSA agent waiting in a line at the grocery store, it wasn’t worth it. And it’s hard not to think about Fiance’s best friend going off to fight for our right to hate the miserable existence of daily life and waiting in shopping lines and dealing with overly helpful or non-existent employees while watching other people struggle to pay for food with change and have to spend 5 minutes finding a coupon to make ice cream affordable and perhaps help bring a bit of sunshine to this ridiculous world where jobs are still scarce despite recovered profits and growth in the corporate sector and you just want to take a dump on the grocery scanner as a statement but don’t want to spend a night in jail, although that’s becoming more tempting every day you don’t hear from the 30 resumes you sent out last week. And that sort of run on sentence is what goes through my head every minute I spend shopping which is why I wear headphones to keep the podcasts going and keep out the demons. 

Open query letter to travel editor of Midwest Living after listening to her presentation

Hey girlfriend!

I’m going to dial down my snarkomatic quip-generator for this letter. I learned during your presentation that while you enjoy making snide comments to degrade writers and the writing profession you claim to love so much that you only do it for 5-10 percent of your job, you are not a fan of hearing snide comments from writers. For the bile that remains, I’m sorry.

I’m also sorry to see that perhaps another trait you carried over from newspaper writing to magazine writing is an unhealthy dose of cynicism. I feel lucky that I was able to escape newspapers after several years with my enjoyment for writing and hearing from other writers intact, and that I am able to translate those skills into writing award-winning magazine features. I see that you’ve applied for an American Society of Magazine Editors award and won a gold recently from the American Society of Travel Writers. Congratulations! It was interesting to find out during your presentation that my awards are meaningless since editors like you do all the work that earned those awards while we writers apparently stumble through life helplessly spouting out words and sentence fragments with no chance of being understood without an editor taking over and writing it herself. Thank God there are editors out there who, rather than work with writers and see them as colleagues, have the writers simply do the scouting so the editors can write the features themselves. It’s good to know that while a writer’s style can ruin a pitch by being unprofessional (like this very letter!), you simultaneously believe that style doesn’t matter because it’s your job to fix said writing.

It’s wonderful that in no way does this competing set of views on query letters scream out to you a big problem. The style or formality of a pitch letter has less to do with a writer’s chances at your magazine than your personal idiosyncrasies and gut response based on ethereal moods. I typically start an email more formally and with respect and a hint of dignity, as I believe many in the business would want to be treated. Your advice to a room full of writers, some of whom may not know better, was to start out a query with a simple “hey” and the editor's first name. Seeing that as a sign of maturity versus opening an email with an address as a sign of amateur writing – I’m still trying to process that bucket of gold nuggets.

I actually enjoyed, in all sincerity, what you said about branding – that readers come to a brand for specific needs. With travel writing, you want the reader to imagine herself at that location. You like small-town content like articles on destination bakeries. I suggest you listen to yourself on this one because minutes later you casually dismissed any possibility of appealing to younger readers by expanding this limited travel focus while at the same time lamenting the median reader age of 52.

As you suggested in your presentation, you like people who want to help write for you, but I’d much prefer to help you in your presentations. You have a room full of people, yes, actual people, in various stages of their communications careers. They come to listen to someone provide insight on travel writing or publishing. The insight they get instead is how jaded the process is toward writers. And while the jokes may receive a few chuckles, they are at the expense of some of the very people who are there to learn, earnestly, and with humility in such tough times. These are people who seem to be looking for something to hold on to in an ever-diluted field. I consider myself fortunate to have a position where I can share others’ stories and experiences. I wanted to see what was out there for the stories I find that don’t fit in my position’s goals – for instance, traversing a red-scoria gravel road through more than 30 miles of cow pastures and burning coal veins in October, when every hill crested reveals a new panorama reminiscent of colorized photographs from the 1950s, like a Technicolor fairy tale come to life. The fields of wild sage and tall grass sway like neon-green ocean waves sunder a brilliant North Dakota sunset. The red ribbon of the road winds through the small valley to the next round hilltop. Cattle, at first unnervingly close or even on the road, become comfortable witnesses of a journey where few other cars travel in favor of the tourist mecca known as Medora, N.D.

But why put in the work as a lowly writer not worth the two words of a byline? I don’t get bylines often, and am comfortable with the fact that some stories don’t get them because of the official nature of the piece. But to make a blanket statement that the writers wishing for a byline in your magazine need not apply goes against both your own website's writer’s guidelines and against any writer’s wish to diversify his or her portfolio.

The sad fact is you can treat us like dirt because there are so many of us. We are lost amid legions, and more often than not, we give away our work for free for the chance to stick out of the throng. My venom-filled sarcastathon chock full of grammar tics and run-ons may keep you feeling busy and superior, but will not change things when the next writer is willing to do the grunt work of pre-reporting for just two measly words, perhaps a hyphenate. Oh, you don’t do bylines? The next one will do it simply for the cost of travel! Side note: sorry to hear your personal travel budget has been cut to a scandalous $7,000 a year. I’m sure many in the room who are piecing together freelance jobs to eke by felt your pain.

I don’t write this as a “diva,” although it may be easy to dismiss me as such. I have no wish to write for people who denigrate the profession. Instead, I write it with all the feeling I can gather for other writers who will put up with such belittling from the one person on earth who should understand the various, sometimes wonderfully invigorating challenges inherent in writing, the editor. I understand that your job, like many, has a certain grind to it. I’m sure you have to deal with certain types of people (like me!) that make life a little less worthwhile, day in, day out, without end. I’m sure you find yourself dispensing the same advice again and again to no use because the next person has not heard that advice and will make the same mistake. It’s the nature of working with people. But, please, remember that they are people.

Sincerely,

A writer (I will withhold my byline here as well)