Humanizing the distance.

I was called away from watching the National League Championship Series at a friend's house because of Serious Problems at work. The guy I was watching the game with, a vulpine old guy who knows every Yankees opening day lineup since before I was born, remarked "That's exactly why, when they asked me for my cell number last year, I said 'Oh, don't worry, if I need anything I'll just call you'." Driving over, it occurred to me that TBS's announcing team is to the post-season as Edward Lane was to The Thousand Nights and One Night. I mean, I'm just saying what's on everybody's mind.

When I arrived, there was a very angry kid standing in the middle of his program's television room, shouting obscenities in rapid succession. He was particularly fond of "fuck" and "fucking", which he used in bizarre sequences, sometimes using "fucking" to modify "fuck" (eg "what the fucking fuck") and if you'd just substituted "nothing" for "fucking" he could have been shrieking out Heidegger from memory at high decibels.

This sort of new staff with whom I get along pretty well was standing there trying to reason with the kid. The staff kept saying "Remember your ABC's", which is more/less exactly what he should have been saying. The "ABC's" is our slang for that ancient communication technique where one remembers to phrase everything in the form of "When you _____, it makes me feel _______, because ______." When a kid is in the middle of a meltdown it isn't going to help, and it may make him angrier, but the idea isn't to deescalate every situation at every cost so much as it is to emphasize coping skills so the kid can think about them later. Pretty much nothing shows you're pretty damn serious about a coping mechanism than standing there in front of a kid who wants to punch you in the face and urging him to use the technique anyway.

Finally, the kid yelled "When you fucking stand there, it makes me fucking want to fucking hit you in the fucking face because you're fucking ugly." The staff laughed, which was actually the right thing to do, since it broke the tension without any further escalation of violence. It took a long time and lots of both of us talking to the kid after that, but we finally convinced him to go to bed. By the time I was finished with the paperwork and requisite email notifications, the evening was already utterly and completely shot and another guy had a bootlegged copy of Inglorious Basterds, which I want to see both because I'm a BJ Novak fan and because someone who may or may not really be Bret Easton Ellis tweeted that the movie was "the first great movie of the year"*. More about that movie later, maybe, but I was pretty tickled to see Tarantino go out of his way to namecheck Le Corbeau**.

They're also gutting the mail room, which also contains a fax machine, a copy machine, and the main time clock. Apparently, they're putting in tile to make it extra slippery for winter. I found the fax machine in a conference room, and several of the mail shelving units down a hallway leading to some offices, but the copy machine has gone completely missing, which meant walking across the quad to the admin building to make copies of several of the forms. But at this point I'm just kvetching when I really need some sleep. But if I still can't find the copy machine tonight, I'm probably going to have to let somebody know.
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* This same twitter account also announced that a Miley Ray Cyrus song is its favorite song at the moment and that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has given the best performance by an actor so far this year. This both does and does not sound like Ellis, and, if it is Ellis, he may or may not be sincere. Artists of the subtle schools, etc. Though I don't think I share the affection for Miley Ray Cyrus, I was a huge fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his 3rd Rock From The Sun days.

** Le Corbeau, among its other virtues, has my all time favorite parody of Pascal's Wager, which takes the form of a dialogue between an old doctor and a young doctor.

Old Doctor: Will you be joining us for Mass, then?

Young Doctor: No. I'm not religious.

OD: Oh. I should have guessed. You have the self-assurance of an atheist.

YD: You're religious, then?

OD (Dismissive): Eh. I'm cautious. I always take out insurance. It's cheap enough.