Eaters can be Fakers, too

A lovely little bit from the Eater blog about how to talk about restaurants you’ve never been to. Love it!

Office Faking Essentials

• Keep shoes lined up neatly under desk so they can be slipped into the moment someone approaches. If summer time, comment loudly how it smells like feet in here and look around, disgusted. Acknowledging the problem is the grownup version of calling “noses.”
• Locate secret refill stash for candy bowl and eat from there rather than fast-emptying glass receptacle.
• When vendors call for with inquiries, tell them this is a private home number and threaten to report them to the consumerist. Old lady voice a plus.
• Engage in your online dating and offshore gambling forums on iPhone to avoid Ethernet surveillance.
• Smile.

Why I’m glad there is no such thing as time travel

Aside from the obvious assassination plots it would incur, I’m mostly glad we can’t travel back or forward in time so that 20-year-old me has no chance of seeing 30-year-old me–hanging out in her windowless, middle-sandwich bedroom in a railroad share with exactly 3 pieces of furniture to her name, drinking 2 buck Chuck from a mug cribbed from a former workplace, doing some ironing on a Tuesday night–and asking her: What the hell have you been doing all these years???

Pulling off a successful life do-over requires the utmost in Faking skills.  The art of Faking is all about quelling panic and pushing through the suspicion that everyone, everywhere knows you have no idea what you’re doing. So say we all.*

 

*Part of this life-restart involves me sometimes sitting at home streaming Battlestar Gallactica for hours at a time.  So say we ALL.

In Good Company

This Freakonomics Radio podcast illustrates what I’ve been saying for months (years!)(ok months!). We all do it, we all feel a little paranoid about it.  All of us, that is, except for John Edwards, I guess.

Freakonomics Radio: Faking It

A very notable sentiment in this production–which investigates the motives and MO’s of Kosher cooks who love bacon, Presidential candidates and Southern tech reps who lie about their church-going habits, and a law professor afraid one of his students will ask him a question that will reveal he’s just a medievalist masquerading as a legal expert–is that Faking it is an essential part of our social life.  It is how we say “I want you to like me.”  I think that’s sweet.

Taking Book Suggestions, Or: Why I Am So Dumb

It’s taken me a couple of decades to admit, but I’m a terrible reader.  Sure, I review books for fun and for publication, sometimes, but this is beside the point.  I’m excruciatingly slow at it.  I have to do all the voices in my head.  I am a few neurons short of moving my lips when I read. And I never developed the skill of deciphering a dense block of text. Unless something is incredibly readable or compelling, I just can’t effing finish it without skimming.

It came to me on a bus, when attempting a paragraph of Gender Trouble, which I was convinced would make me smarter and au-so-po-mo. I couldn’t do it.  Even though I was pretty sure I agreed with everything she was saying, Judith Butler’s notoriously sticky academic writing was like middle English to my brain.  I was filled with shame. I finally admitted to myself: It’s not that the books I couldn’t finish were dumb and outdated.  It’s that they were too hard for me.

Here I was, a reasonably clever girl who always did well on her SAT tests and reading comprehension stuffs, but I couldn’t get through Butler.  Or, more surprisingly: Chaucer.  Spenser. Milton. Marlowe. Pope.  Blake. Multiple women named George.  Any of the Brontes. Mary Shelley. Dickens.* Defoe. Joyce. Or even (as I’ve shamefully demonstrated) Jane Effing Austen. What was the deal?

Ah, yes.  Them SAT and NY Regents tests were multiple choice. Which means that you pass them by figuring out the psychology of the questioner and guessing what they probably want you to pick.  It’s a measure of your intuition and aptitude at statistics–a lot like Trivial Pursuit. I’ll not be modest on this account: I was a phenomenal test taker.**  Being clever and intuitive, however, doesn’t make you able to read books.

The ability to sustain focus for long periods of time and to cull meaning out of dense, complicated sentences is a skill.  It’s not something you’re born with (though some, admittedly, seem more naturally apt). As a kid who stopped voluntarily doing homework of any kind at age 12, it seems I missed the window on this skill.  It never occurred to me, before age 29, that this was the purpose of homework assignments: to practice focus and sustained study. Who knew?

In light of this, I’m even more ashamed. Here I was, always strangely proud of having swindled the SUNY system out of an English degree having read all of 4 books all the way through, and I was the one who lost out. At least I got the degree concentration in Rhetoric, because Frank knows how much Rhetorical spin I used to write papers about all those classics I knew nothing about. How much more would I have gotten out of this expensive education had I actually put the work in? WTF, brain?

Well, it’s time to find out.  My life as a Faker is a wonderful and complicated one, but I’d like to un-Fake this part. I’d like to build a curriculum of essential books to validate my BA. And read them.  All the way through.

Anyone have any suggestions to start with?***

*Except A Tale of Two Cities, which I read last year and liked very much, thanks. ALSO, you might notice I don’t mention Shakespeare.  Because I’ve watched many dozens of plays and read a few of them and I’m classing it differently because generally these were read out loud as plays should be.
**Likewise, you don’t want to mess with me on the Trivial Pursuit board.
***OH!  I did read Beowulf.  I liked it a lot, especially Grendel’s mom.  She was badass. But this means we can skip the Saxons.

Where have all the Fakers gone?

Friends!  It’s good to see you again, metaphorically speaking!  I’m excited!*

It has something to do with the sparseness of Faker posts as of late.  The reason for this neglect is that I am not doing a whole lot of Faking these days. I know, it’s a shock, turning one’s back on a way of life and all, but I’m slowly coming to terms with the amount of sincerity in which my world has been steeped since November.

Why the sudden rush of earnestness? A little thing called “Lack of Work.” That’s what you put on your unemployment claims when your position is eliminated from your former place of employ.

Now don’t get me all wrongheaded here, I’m not saying that unemployment is awesome (having money is much, much more awesome) or that all I want to do is sit around on my tuchus all day and get paid for it (that lasts about a week and a half). I have been looking for new sources of income just as steadily as I’m sure most of the other unemployed 10% of the country is. I’m not, f’gawdssake, gloating, but merely expressing the wonder at how NOT going into an office every day has drastically cut the Faking from my daily routine.

Item 1: Daily conversations about meteorological events cut down 98%. It’s a cliche, but we continue to act surprised by precipitation in the name of filling silence.  Bring on the silence.

Item 2: Ugly, ill-fitting work trousers collecting dust in closet.  No longer Faking that boxy polyester atrocities are “comfortable” simply because they are nondescript.

Item 3: Times this week I have feigned interest in someone’s weekend plans: 0.** Weekly average pre-layoffs: 46.8.

Item 4: Phone calls answered with a dour eye roll and a chipper “Hello!”***: 1 (sorry Mom). Daily average pre-layoffs: About a thousand.

Item 5: Number of times this week I have blamed the subway for lateness because I got stuck staring at something in my apartment or had to do a last-minute Ajaxing of the tub/sink/dog: 6 (ok, that’s about the same).

… And those are just the top 5. Most importantly–and this is REALLY important–everything I have worked on in the past month, be it odd job or school application, has commanded my full attention and interest. Which, omg, that’s crazy right? Is my Faking life slipping from my grasp?

Pff, nah. No worries.  There will still be plenty of inexcusable tardiness and awkward social interaction to fill volumes. It will only mean higher-quality, better-planned, more heartfelt Faking.  And that’s better for all of us.

 

*Keeping with the rules of prose, I’ve just used up my entire year’s worth of exclamation points. Worth it.
**In fact, now that I talk to 88% fewer people per day, I’d LOVE to hear what y’all are up to.
***That exclamation point doesn’t count as it’s in context.

Moan-Mates: Your relationship with the person on the other side of the wall.

Like most everyone I know under the age of 50 living in the five boroughs, I live with roommates. This has always suited me just fine.  I don’t want to live alone; it makes me paranoid and I hate taking the garbage out. Whether you like it or not, though, we flock together for the sake of rent and access to public transport. We share furniture, sometimes eggs, and other–less tangible– things, as well. Because as people cannot get by on awkward forced-proximity-companionship alone,  it is inevitable that when you get roommates, these roommates get laid.

I don’t have a space for this in my Hierarchy of Personal Comfort. Here is a person who should be a stranger to you, therefore regarded even below the Facebook friend level on the pyramid.  Indeed: Upon encountering a man you’ve never met before in your kitchen, wearing nothing but a hand towel and peering at the expire date on your milk carton, one’s normal reaction would be to yell obscenities and eject him forcefully into the cold, cold night.*

But no — he is no stranger.  You know things about this man his own mother does not, because you listen to him DO it. In keeping with roomie etiquette, you say nothing, make no complaints and DO NOT ever pound on the wall back except in life-threatening circumstances.

So what do you do?  You fake one for the team You say hi, continue to the bathroom as planned. If you see him at social functions, you pretend you are being introduced for the very first time.  If you’re particularly open with your roommate you can comment on how it’s nice to put a face to all the impressive grunting. Or you leave it be.

Cause sometimes, Faking it is the only thing keeping your non-family household a happy, peaceful home.

*And of course, by “you” in this dramatization, I mean “my ex’s roommate,” and by “him,” I actually mean “me.” Ahem.

Resume Time

I can’t think of any better example of socially-sanctioned faking than the job application process. This is especially appropriate to Fakering it, because by the rules of Fakerist Theory, you’re not really lying, you’re just presenting a slightly more polished picture.  Obviously everyone has an occasional slack-attack, blogs during office downtime, takes too many sugar packets from the canteen.  This is standard and accepted behavior. But during the job interview process you’d think that every single person you meet is a compulsive multi-tasker, chomping to do some data entry, creaming him/herself over the idea of making your company some profits, whose biggest problem in life is that at some point, he/she will have to go home and stop with the productivity already.

Whereas I have been thinking, recently, while contemplating a move to an entry level position in a new industry, how it might benefit to be completely, brutally honest on my resume.  Like so:

Mrs. Miyagi
1776 Baskerville Old Face Road, Shiftyside, Queens
hot.snox(at)gmail

Objective: To get a new job that’s somewhat less soul-flattening than my current one.

Special skills: Expert-level lunch-ordering, cracking wise at appropriate times to cheer you up, dancing to copy machine noises,  Internet research (incl. anything you want to know about your ex on Facebook), wearing of whimsical but tasteful outfits, improving everyone’s grammar in meeting minutes. Proficient in Spanglish.

Education: BA in vagueness from someplace it’s long enough ago that it doesn’t matter anymore.  Minor in gender studies (no LGBTQ sensitivity training needed)

Relevant Experience:

The Fancypants School for Dogs – September 2007- Present
-Diligently did exactly what was asked of me
-Added to client base, made money, went home and got drunk

Hot Lox Smoked Salmon Distributors — November 2006- August 2007
-Took the g-damn fish orders every g-damn day until I couldn’t stand it any more
-Still washing that smell out of my best blazer

Company I haven’t got reference contact info for anymore — October 2004-November 2006
-Made hundreds of thousands of photocopies

Company that may not even exist anymore for all I know — August 2003-October 2004
-Successfully tackled quarter-life crisis and made peace with my existence as a peon

Irrelevant Experience:
Three-quarters of the way through a short story collection that will knock your damn socks off.  Extensive knowledge of low-end whiskies.

…Now, wouldn’t you hire that girl?

The Austen Project: Tardiness and Neglect

Chapters 4-19 (Book the First)
More girl talk, your parents hate each other, someone catches a cold and someone else gets muddy, my God but those rich girls are mean…

Oh for feck’s sake. I know. This was supposed to be a 30 day project and I’m topping off two months at this point. But, pardon my French, but this merde is hard.

I get it. It’s hilarious. It’s just so hard for me to care. Mr. Crumbley is so affable but won’t marry Corelsibeth for some mysterious reason, while Schmamy has made a suitable match with the wealthy but horrible Mr. Blangitty Blang, and if Jane was a modern girl she would have developed an eating disorder like the rest of us.

I’m not going to let the book win, though. Likely I will skim some of it and lie about it, because, I mean, look at the title of the blog.

Gonna get right to it right after I finish the jam-packed and very relate-able Super Sad True Love Story. Gary Shteyngart is doing to me here what Chris Farley did to me as a child. Namely: convince me that all attractive women should marry physically repulsive but hilarious men, who will appreciate them much more than those boring hotties ever could. Let’s go, ladies!

Austen Project: Chapter 2

Enter the Girls! 

Prepped and ready by the wit & exposition-packed first chapter, Book-the-First continues with our first taste of the Bennet girls.

It’s man hunting season at the Longbourn and the competitition is fierce.  Personally, I like my lady-to-lady competition in very specific venues.

Badassery

All this boy craziness affronts my modern sensibilities.  Suspending my feelings about time and place, though, we plough on. I can’t help but wonder, though, how much more interesting Elizabeth or Mary would be if this was a college drama set in the 70s, or something.  You know, if they had something to do with their quickness and nerdiness, respectively, if they had something else in their future besides the grapple for matrimony and inevitable death in childbirth.

Still good characters is good characters, and I’m goin with em.