Columbia Dance Majors

This weekend I drove six hours for French toast. It really is that good. After driving another six hours back, my friend asked if I wanted to make an appearance with him at this gathering. I said sure, as I am always up for meeting new people to fail to talk to, and we showed up. It was of course pouring rain in New York, and I hadn't shaved in a good week or so. So upon our arrival, I have a pretty strong appearance of being a hobo.

It turned out that the "gathering" in question was less a party than a get-together for a group of Columbia dance majors who were premiering a dance video many of them had done together. And, of course, I knew no one. Being me, I used this opportunity to talk to no one and just sort of hang around creepily. That is, until I left, and I blew up a lamp, covering the room in shards of glass.

Here's what happened. I went to put on my jacket, and I was standing next to this lamp. It was the sort where there is a bare bulb on top, and a cheap plastic bowl shaped thing underneath, usually attached with a locking nut of some sort. However, this particular lamp had nothing attaching it at all, and as my newly coated arm came down, I hit the rim, and it tried to come flying off. Trouble was, the bulb was considerably smaller than the hole in the bottom, and the whole thing shattered and flew all over the room and all the gathered dance majors.

Point being, I am pretty sure I am now known amongst the Columbia dance set as "the creepy hobo who breaks your house." A typical Saturday night all around.
-TC

A Series of Unfortunate Events

So, you know that feeling you get when you're at work editing porn and a stranger comes in, mistakes you for a secretary, and hands you eviction papers for your office? 'cause I do.

In other words, it was a typical day at the office.

As many may already be aware, porn has deep pockets, and I was bought a brand new iMac at work that exists solely for the purpose of ripping old, bad porn DVDs. However, when this process began our instructions were simply "rip these DVDs," and we failed to interpret that as "rip the individual scenes from these DVDs as separate movie files." So, silly us, we Started ripping entire feature length porn DVDs. When this error was cleared up, I was instructed to go back into the QuickTime files we created and cut these movies down to their individual elements. So, over the course of two days, I have been editing nearly five terabytes worth of porn. It's good that I never meet women I can try to impress, because it's becoming increasingly difficult to honestly say "I am a video editor, and I do not work in porn." But that's neither here nor there.

As I was nearing completion of this project, a man walked into my office and caught me at it. Now, it is worth remembering that there is a children's charity run out of the back, so whenever people walk in, I do my best to hide any porn that may be in plain view. But, just in case I'm not fast enough, I try to screw my face up in look of deep concentration so that if anyone does catch me, they will immediately realize that I am hard at work and not enjoying myself. Though to be fair, since I then immediately hide what I'm doing anyway, they might just think I am a very dour man who enjoys pornography.

In any case, the man looked at me and said "I have these papers for someone." I then promptly said to myself for the first time in my life, "Hey, I'm someone!" And since the man seemed disinclined to offer any more clues as to what he was holding or who it was for, I agreed to take them. He handed me a loose stack of about a half a dozen copies of the same form: A letter from our landlord's lawyer informing us that if we don't pay the rent within the next ten days (which we appear not to have done for a very long time), we must vacate the premises. I know my company isn't in great financial shape, but I was still a bit surprised to learn that a company that seems inclined towards paying me so well, if never on time, is about to end up on the street. But there was nothing really to do but bring the papers back and give them to someone. So I did, and like a good American, I didn't ask any questions.

A few minutes later, our accountant stormed out asking if the man had asked for him by name, or if the papers had at least come in an envelope, and I said no. And he started off on a nice little tangent about how irresponsible of the lawyer that was. "It's not a big deal because we have no secrets here and we've known this was coming, but if this had been a real company and people saw this, there'd be a lot of panic." Clearly not panicking, I paused for a moment to assess the implication that I wasn't working for a real company, but I let it slide. The accountant explained that this was all part of an on-going discussion with the land-lord, told me that we are not moving out in ten days, so I shouldn't worry. And for a lack of anything better to do, I decided to take his word for it. At least for the next ten days. At that time I might start asking myself what kind of discussion actually involves not paying someone and having them send a lawyer after you.
-TC

Pornographizing

Among the characteristics that make us human, denial and rationalization are among the most treasured. For example, when I found out my company made "adult" comedy, I decided that it was okay, because it was theoretically comedy, and I support comedy in all forms. Then when I found out we were being bought by a porn company, I decided it was okay, because I wasn't making porn. Then when I found out I had to rip DVDs and log some footage, I decided it was okay, because that is relatively uninvolved work, and it's not like it actually requires me to think about what I'm doing. But today I discovered that I will actually have to cut some porn tomorrow. And I finally had to admit that I am in fact a pornographer. I have officially relinquished any claim I might ever have had to dignity or self-respect, and I may finally run wild and free with my pornographer brothers.
-TC

An Odd Feeling

It's a very odd feeling to be editing a children's show on one computer and to see transexual porn playing on another. Yet another in a series of observations I was not expecting to be making at this point in my life.
-TC

Six Toes

Today I was mentally undressing a girl on the subway, and as I looked down I noticed she had six toes. So I mentally put some socks on her.
-TC

W.

I was supposed to attend the premiere of Oliver Stone's "W." tonight. It was not entirely for pleasure, as I had too do sound for some red carpet interviews, but all things considered, life could be worse. But apparently that's not happening, and apparently it's because of the Chinese government. I'm not entirely clear on the details, but I don't suspect they're going to get a whole lot clearer than that.

It's the story of my life, really. Every time something good happens in my life, a communist country comes along and ruins it. I am still reasonably sure that the fact that I am single can be traced back to Cuba.
-TC

New York City

For those of you who have not been following the saga of my life as closely as you should be, I suppose you're wondering exactly what it is that I'm doing with my life. I have been living in New York City since April, where I have found a previously unimaginable degree of prosperity. It didn't take me long before I got a job with a major credit card as a "data analyst." What that means is that I got paid to look up online to see if people take their credit card, which you'd think they'd know, but apparently they needed me to tell them.

But only three weeks into it, I managed to wrangle a job as head video editor for a small comedy studio. While the pay is insulting by New York video editor standards, it is easily the most I have ever made at a regular, full-time job, so it's not hard to keep my spirits up, which is a nice change of pace. And what is more, it affords me the opportunity to get paid to work with comedy, my one true passion in life. Having been in the city for just a few short months, I had managed to find a great apartment and land my dream job, and I was able to do it all on my own. Needless to say, I was walking around the city with my head held high and a bounce in my step. The operating word here would be "was." That all changed one day when I bounced my way into work and discovered that I now work for one of the largest porn companies in the US.

I am sure you have a question or two, but let me back up for one second. When I originally interviewed for this job, I had been told that they do a small amount of adult oriented comedy. I took this to mean that they did comedy with adult subject matter. Blue comedy, if you will. But shortly after I started working there, I discovered that they meant "adult" in the biblical sense of "porn." (I read a very good bible.) They produce things like comedians doing "funny" commentary over Girls Gone Wild type videos. I hadn't thought there was anything in life that could be more demeaning than taking your top off for beads on camera until I saw someone taking their top off for beads on camera with untalented comedians making fun of them. It's hard to say whose life is going more poorly there. But at least the girls don't have to admit that this is their career. The comedians do, and unfortunately, so do I.

After another short while, I got to see some of the other adult comedy they produce. Perhaps the most bizarre segment is one where they take old footage of unwitting stand-up comedians, put it on one side of the screen, and slap a girl stripping on the other side. The girl was probably equally unwitting, but to be fair, it's probably less damaging for a stripper's career to have her show juxtaposed with a comedian on TV than the other way around. I wasn't especially happy about the voice-over segments, but I was okay with it, because even if it's not funny in the most traditional sense, I can at least understand the theory that having a comedian make jokes about something is in fact comedy. So on a very, very theoretical level, I could see how the Girls Gone Wild stuff constituted humor. But no matter how hard I try to rationalize, I just can't see how any humor is added to stand-up by simply slapping a nude lady over it. And whenever I tell people about it, they always laugh, but not in the way I think they're meant to.

Oddly enough for a company that produces edgy porn-comedy, they've been having financial difficulties. To this day, I have yet to be paid on time, and after a month or so, I found out that I was the only person being paid at all. No one was being paid because there was no money, and I was only being paid because I make so little of it that even when they were going broke, they could still afford me. Point being, work had been a stressful environment, but I remained hopeful that they could turn things around, as my boss always talks up the connections they have. And of course, I have endless faith in the power of comedy.

But after I'd been with this company for a month or two, my boss walked up to my desk and said "We've been bought." Seeing my no doubt surprised expression, he quickly added "And that's a good thing." He then proceeded to tell me that we had in fact been bought by an adult entertainment company. Fighting back the urge to ask "And how exactly does that qualify as a good thing," I tried my best to keep the frozen smile on my face from turning into a look of horror when I wasn't paying attention.

He explained that the president of my company was in fact a huge porn mogul ("a junior league Hef" is the phrase he used). When asked to become vice president of this adult company and help them launch some new companies, he said he would accept on the condition that they buy and fund the comedy studio. I asked what felt like an obvious question: "How will this effect the content we produce each month?" After a good half-hour of him explaining the history of this deal and the history of everyone involved (coincidentally, everyone at this company but he has a background in porn), I finally stopped him and guessed "So you're saying, our content won't be changing, and our company will continue to exist with its current business plan, but we can expect some bleed-over work while these other companies the president is starting get off the ground a bit?" And he said yes. And I died a little inside.

This was all several weeks ago. In the time since then, not only has my company made me shoot a series of events for a children's charity, but porn has slowly become a more and more pronounced part of my day-to-day life. So far it has only relatively low-end and uninvolved work, but the phrase "thin end of the wedge" keeps coming to mind. The other editor who works for me really hopes we're going to actually start producing porn so we can get to do some camera work with naked girls. Or at least I think that's what he said, all I could hear was "I have no artistic ambition or future."

It probably goes without saying at this point, but I have started applying for other jobs.
-TC

Welcome

For years now, people have been trying to convince me to start a blog. Perhaps they are under the sadly misguided impression that I am funny. Or perhaps the schadenfreude they derive from observing the constant degradation that accompanies me in my day-to-day walking around time gives enough solace to their otherwise dreary lives that they are able to hold their heads up for one more day. Who can say?

I have never regarded myself as the sort of person whose life and opinions were worth putting on public display, and I often wonder why it is that everyone seems to think I am a natural born blogger. As much as our culture tends to embrace the potential for technology to network and bring people from disparate worlds together, I have always regarded those who actually do so as sad, desperate people who need to create a web of virtual camaraderie to mask the emptiness and isolation of modern living by fueling the fire of an otherwise unsatisfied sense of self-importance. And whenever someone suggesta that I should join in the festivities, I always ask myself, do I really want to be one of those people?

But I finally paused for a moment to take stock in my life, and I came to some startling realizations. I have very few real friends and the sort of abundant free time that comes from having nothing of interest or value going on in my life; I have an innate sense that the world should be revolving around me and considerable bitterness about the fact that it doesn't; I hold very strong opinions in spite of the fact that I am ill informed about virtually everything. In short, I already am one of those people.

So, I finally decided to give it a shot. I will use this space to update the world with all the awkward stories that come my way, which if the past can be taken as any sort of measure, will happen rather frequently. And in between moments of excruciating awkward, I will fill the silence with the inanities of my life and the random musings that occupy my thoughts.

To the extent that you care, I hope you enjoy.
-TC