Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Happy, happy, happy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness


Happiness is weird if you have a paranoid-schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, bipolar-personality identity disorder (with marked petulant/suicidal/narcissistic/psychotic features), like the company receptionist at the small Jewish family business I worked at for awhile, with her typical "Office Cow" dreams of fine art glory and Rockefeller-like wealth; her make-believe, handsome, and very supportive shiska husband standing by her side, just like her first generation Israeli parents who worked blue collar jobs on Long Island prepped her for. Right? No?! Oh, well, then let me try that again. 

Ahem...she was delusional, but people who do bottom-feeder, highly repetitive service jobs are usually like that: arrogant, petty, snippy....you know the attitude. She was bored, and also a totally ignorant loud-mouth, with a completely over-inflated sense of self about her life and her skills, only tempered by her "down" cycles filled with dramatically petulant sighs that widely signaled her "Woe is Me!" boredom, interspersed with frequent hits off the big blue bottle of Listerine in the ladies room, because it has some alcohol in it.

She avoided me for many months, because I was extremely busy and she was busy getting her "best friend" from high school fired from her high-paying executive administrator job, because that's what you do to former Architecture majors who come from the same small Long Island town as you, former shul classmates who are also bipolar and very brittle: you stab them in the back whenever it's necessary. Right? Oh....okay, let me try that one again, too: our former "Office Manager" was one of the biggest fucking bitches any one of us had ever met in the sometimes semi-professional world of big city book publishing, and this was a somewhat gay-friendly media business in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, which is like saying that West Hollywood is "kind of gay". Yeah, like that.

She was an obvious bitch from a company that broke its back hiring other Jews and relatives, so much so that it was sometimes good clean fun to watch the crazy old people who hired these disastrous amateurs justify their secretary's insane bullshit, which got wackier and wackier as time went on. The wife of the owner talked through her anxiety over scary machines by talking back to the copier machine whenever it did any kind of banal action whatsoever; they told me she used to be an elementary school teacher. Huh...wonder what happened with that. Yeah, I knew. Like so many other business, the phony lines that employees used on each other could possibly pass muster under less legitimate circumstances than the real professionalism I brought to the table, which is kind of a bummer if you're an incompetent drug addict. I worked with plenty of those, too, educated or not.


Like any other uptight, self-righteous, hippie dippy, Jewish art fag, she scrutinized me through narrowed eyes every single time I walked passed the reception desk (in case I ever bothered to wonder how she felt about me), and if I was working for "too long" on my own, in her bizarre estimation, she would find an excuse to violate my workspace with her rancid beer breath, usually with a question so fucking stupid, I wondered how she breathed air at all. Sometimes I gave her the answer (the same dull ones, over and over and over again), and sometimes not. I am the Master in any studio, and so whatever I feel like teaching my staff is up to me, at any time I want to, and if anyone disturbs me, they're gone. It's simple: no me, no money.

And so I didn't worry about her neurotic bullshit too much, so successful was I at putting distance between us, while she nursed the same pit in her stomach everyday that she would choose to blame on other people, places, and things, weather permitting or not, like the special UV light bulb she needed because she also has S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder), in addition to the many other serious brain disorders we were forced to ignore under threat of firing, which grew into a more serious threat with each passing fire. As the company grew smaller, she stood out more and more, and not in any good ways. One afternoon, she stopped me walking past her with her disordered teenage bullshit to ask me a vaguely stupid "self help" type of question, because, like, why do other people feel things that are, like, different than her? You know? Like, why?

I had time to kill that day because I just made my deadline way under budget for the umpteenth day in a row, and by that time in my employ, I had the whole company in my pocket. They stopped working to listen to me speak, as they passed around my emails and cover designs like I was Mick Jagger at a mall signing autographs (because they couldn't stop themselves from gossiping about me within earshot), and they followed me wherever I went online using the company's network. In short, I owned them. If I used a famous media site as a starred commenter to slice-and-dice some would-be intellectual, they knew about it. If (and when) I hit it "out of the ballpark" again with my designs, it became company news within seconds. I had their complete and utter attention, short as those spans could be at times. Why their stupid ugly bitch thought to fuck with me on that particular afternoon, after all the schooling I'd already given her, is still beyond me to this day, besides good old fashioned mental defect.

She hated any outward signs of happiness we showed as we went productively about our days, as baffling to her bad brain as if I was the resurrected Pharaoh Queen Nefertiti herself walking around in full Royal Egyptian dress. It was envy mixed with hero-worship, mixed with misplaced desire, and what serious scholar would want that tossed their way? I sure as fuck didn't. You hired her, you deal with it. End of story. By the end of my time there, they tried to railroad me into taking their special bitch "into therapy", that brilliantly inept Jewish band-aid on a disease so bad, people die from it every single day all around the world, by deliberately setting me up as their "fall guy" for their bad hire. Nope. Nice try though! I deflected every single scheme they threw my way, monied up and lawyered-up as they were over me as their paltry advantages, but in the end, all they were left with was this: I'm better than you. That's it, and no banal amount of talking would cure it.

So, to finally answer fully your question, Ye Ole Stupid Bitch of Work Days Past, ("Why are you always happy, happy, happy all the time?"), I'm "happy" because I'm everything that you are not, and will never be. How's that for the truth? Oh, and failing that, click on the fucking link under the pretty picture above, you ignorant piece of shit. Yeah, that big yellow one with the smiley face. I won.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Th%C3%A9odore_G%C3%A9ricault_hiena_de_Salp%C3%AAtri%C3%A8re.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envy