I have a theory as to why Southern Californians think 78 is "hot" and 69 is "cold." They're here for the weather, right? That's why they put up with the smog, traffic, parking tickets, lousy public transit, high gas prices, high prices on everything else (unless they're from San Francisco, Boston, or New York), the recall election, the possibility of a 9.0 earthquake that will send the state into the sea, and being the butt of almost as many regional jokes as New Jersey. If they're going to put up with that, they figure (consciously or subconsciously), the weather had damn well better be absolutely perfect.

Or maybe they're just wussies.

:)

Oh, how I miss the days when downtime at work meant you could answer your email, surf the web, and return phone calls. Maybe there's something to this white-collar thing after all.

I got spam in three languages today.

So much for cheaper CDs and the Do Not Call list. All this and Bush is still president? Arrrrgggghhhhhhh!

***

Two very different examples of how you can be smart and stupid at once.

Exhibit A: Well-educated, possibly brilliant, but with the common sense of weasel spit*:
A group of graduate students. All at least 21 years old and college-educated; most will have PhDs by the end of the decade. They're waiting in a line that stretches to the curb. Instead of curving the queue to the left or the right, they extend it right into the street. A real, two-lane street with cars coming. They're almost into the second lane by the time someone (a professor?) comes by and tells them to pull their heads out of their asses and stand on the sidewalk. (But without the ass-head part, unfortunately).

Exhibit B: Street-smart, well-endowed with common sense, but frighteningly ignorant:
There's someone I've worked with who knows all there is to know about the food/bar business. She's run her own catering company. She's very efficient; the best worker you've got at any given job. But until last week, she thought there were 52 states in America (yes, she is native-born). Today, she referred to the language spoken in Mexico as "Mexican."

Help.

* Dave Barry Rule of Humor #97: When you haven't been funny in a while, say "weasel spit." (I am making this up).

Oh, and for anyone keeping score at home, the full-time job I got offered in July is officially no more. I'll live.

This was my 8th day in row of menial work. Most of those were not 8-hour days, but I am beat nonetheless. My next day off is Saturday, and it's not really "off" because I'll be working at a beer event. For free. Well, for beer.

I have phone calls to return, email to answer, things to buy, dishes to wash, I could drive to Hollywood and pick up a paycheck, the tub could use a cleaning, and then there's that DVD I should watch and books I'm in the middle of. Oh. And I should shower at some point.

What I really want to do is lie down.

I think I will.

Why I hate the hell out of CNN, reason #983,034,927:

CNN Headline News gave me the following tidbit this morning (beginning of sentence is approximate):

"Soccer has become very popular in Japan recently, in fact, the sport has literally exploded!"

Really? Literally exploded? Must have been messy.


***

Weirdest thing a temp agency has ever said to me, as of yesterday:

"And you'll have to wear an angel costume. Is that okay?"


***

One final verbal tidbit, but I've seen this in three places already so you probably have, too:

But I promise, it's really cool.

I worked at a breakfast for a Catholic organization on Saturday morning. Each attendee had a nametag that also listed his/her organization. One woman's nametag indicated that she represented "Natural Family Planning." She was pregnant.

Harmless mindf*ck of the day:

While sitting, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction.

September 13, 2001. Hamburg, Germany: When I finally ventured into town, I saw this, a full-page ad from Hamburg's major daily newspaper, in the window of every store and restaurant. The English version of the text below the picture reads:

Yesterday, the people of Hamburg - along with the whole world - witnessed the murder of thousands of men and women in the United States of America by an enemy full of hate.

The pictures we saw, pictures of innocent victims, of aggression and destruction, will remain in our minds forever.

We grieve for all people who lost their lives. Our thoughts are with their families who lost their daughters, sons, mothers and fathers. All of them have our deepest sympathy.

Many years ago a magnanimous United States of America helped the German nation to free itself of its darkest past.

The President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, brought us hope when he said during a time of need, "Ich bin ein Berliner."

Today we say to the American people: We stand by you!

For a while, the whole world was with us. We blew it with our unilateralism. Go team.



March 25, 2002. New York City, USA: This sculpture, "The Sphere," used to stand in front of the World Trade Center.


It was conceived as a symbol of world peace. So much for that.

Warning: What follows is one of those "Kids today"/I'm getting old/"Tell us again about the early 90s, Auntie Jen" sort of rants. Sorry.

Today, I overheard a teenager complaining that she had a chemistry assignment to name the six most common elements, and she couldn't find the answer anywhere on the Internet. In her defense, she said she also looked in the dictionary.

Do schoolkids still go to the public library and use the Encyclopedia Brittanica? Seriously. The first thing I would have done was go to the library, go upstairs to the reference room, and reach for "E." I actually used to hang out at the public library. Back before there was an Internet, it's how semi-rebellious teenagers found out about things like witchcraft and anarchy. Plus my local library always had some weird modern art exhibit or another -- the pretentious comments in the guestbook were the best part. You ran into other kids you knew at the library. It was almost social. Great, now I sound old and nerdy. Anyway, it took me less than a minute with Google to find out that the six "bulk" elements are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and phosphorus. So not only are today's teenagers using the Net for anything and everything, they're not necessarily even doing it right.

This ties in with something I was thinking about last night. Right before we pulled into the supermarket parking lot, the blues and jazz station played an Aretha Franklin song I liked and commented on. Rick identified it as an Elton John cover but couldn't name it. I made a mental note to websearch a lyric or two and "elton john" later so I could identify the tune ("Border Song.") Later, I wondered how on earth I would have found that information back in The Olden Days. I pondered for a minute and then it occurred to me: I would have called the radio station.

I still go to the library, but I no longer call radio stations. I no longer call much of anyone. I don't send or receive letters on paper, but I can go to Classmates.com and learn the political leanings and pet preferences of more than 100 people from my graduating class I never want to see again.

The Internet has given me more than it's taken away, but sometimes I wonder how much more.

Remember cars? The little things people drove before SUVs? They might be coming back.

Other good news: CD prices are going down. That's less royalties per CD but a lot more CDs sold, most likely. Can someone drop the prices at movie theaters while they're at it so I can go more than a few times a year?

I have a new blog, but it's all about beer so very few of you (Josh P., do you still read this? ;) will be interested.

More of you might want to check out my better half's new blog for his California, science, and beverage-related observations. He notes our first earthquake, and his first Spanish-language telemarketing call.

Other LA moments of late:
* Restaurants and stores around here must post the results of their latest health inspections in the window. "A" is 90-100% clean, and so on. You see mostly A's, a few B's. Generally the B's are okay but you might want to watch what you order, that sort of thing. I recently saw my first C, on a small grocery store on Pico. A's and B's are blue, but the C is big and red. Damn! Plenty of people were still in the store, by the way.
* Further east on Pico, there's a place that could have been the model for the movie "Barbershop."
* One of the local hip-hop radio stations aired not one, but two commercials for bail bondsmen during one block of commercials this weekend. Elsewhere in the commercial block was an ad for Cadillacs.
* I worked at a Jewish wedding on Sunday that had chips and salsa as part of the appetizers. Also, the groomsmen were four different races.
* I've now been asked, twice, if I'm an actor. If you look familiar for any reason, it's assumed the familiarity is due to your having been on TV.
* Obviously I'm not an actor, because actors go out of their way to let you know they're actors and what, if anything, they've been in lately.
* Yes, females are "actors" just as there are no more waitresses, only "servers." I'm a feminist, but this strikes me as nitpicky.
* I've now been stuck in traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway (or "PCH" to the locals; it stands for "Parked Cars Here") behind three blondes in a convertible.
* I actually want to go to Roscoe's Chicken & Waffles.
* I now go out of my way for $2.03/gallon gas. (Note: this is expensive for America but cheap for California, and hella cheap for, say, Europe.)
* I just said "hella," didn't I?
* I ate a beef-tongue taco a few weeks ago.
* I'm tired of the governors' race.

Oh crap. I think I'm becoming a Californian.

I'm no longer feeling sorry for myself. This had to happen on its own -- no number of people telling me "at least you have your health" and "at least you have a roof over your head" was going to do it, particularly because the people offering the relative-suffering speeches were, without fail, very comfortable and surely felt they deserved more than shelter, Ramen, and freedom from disease.

I've finally realized that there really are worse things that can happen than to lose your career and all your savings. I'll have a new career someday. Maybe it'll even be writing. Maybe it won't. Maybe the job I got offered in mid-July will materialize someday. If not...eh.

Sure I'm annoyed, I'm embarrassed, things could be better. But now when I see a homeless guy in the alley I think "at least I'm not him," and mean it, without an undercurrent of self-pity about what I do have to deal with compared to most people I went to school with or used to work with. "The media's focus during this gloomy economic time amazes me: So many stories zero in on some version of Joe/Jane Blow, a former success who once pulled down six figures but now is consigned to a $10-an-hour job selling clothes," writes Julianne Malveaux in USA Today. "Well, what about the folks who always hold down jobs that pay less than $10 an hour?" Yes, what about them? I don't want to be woe-is-me, where'd-my-money-go Jane Blow. I'm more than that, and I'm better than that.

I'm also done getting angry at people who complain to me about their white-collar desk jobs. I still think they should know better than to complain to me rather than to someone who might be able to relate, but having a professional job isn't what it used to be. Especially right now: you're 25% more likely to get shitcanned in the four months after Labor Day than you are in the first three quarters, since that's when the corporate barons take a long, mean look at next year's budget (another reason my full-time job offer doesn't look good). "Feel like you're doing the work of two people?" asks SmartMoney. "Come September, you should work even harder, since management will be looking to identify workers who aren't pulling their weight." Just in time for the corporate baron in the White House to gut overtime pay -- assuming you were eligible for any in the first place. Americans, long pitied by the rest of the world for our pitiful vacation allotments, now have it even worse. Workers are afraid they'll get laid off while they're gone, or they're so tied up doing the work of three people that they have no time to get away. Jesus, maybe it really is better to be broke.

I'm also glad I'm not:

• ...someone who's been unemployed so long they don't get benefits anymore. I imagine if I ever got benefits, I'd miss them terribly after they were gone.
  
• ...a dot-commer who got rich by dot-com standards rather than just by global standards. I never made six figures. Again, less to lose.
  
• ...a "discouraged worker." These are the people who've given up looking for work, and they're media darlings at the moment, these sad baby boomers who live off their home equity and take a lot of Prozac. I suppose it would be nice to have a safety net more than what my savings (RIP) provided, but this would have given me even more time to feel sorry for myself like an overprivileged chump.
  
• ...the people who took out a ton of loans to go back to school, praying another degree will get them a job when they get out. Talk about anxiety.
  
• ...the immigrants in LA who work full days at car washes and walk away with 25 bucks. What can you do? It's $25 more than you had before, and if you don't take it, someone else will. See also The Grapes of Wrath.
  
• ...eligible for food stamps.
  
• ...unable to afford food because my credit cards are maxed out. I'm not even eating all that much ramen.
  
• ...living with my parents (nothing personal, just that it would be an even bigger blow to my sense of self-sufficiency).
  
• ...living on the street or in a shelter.
  
• ...unable to afford a car in LA , as my mobility is the only thing getting me any gigs at all (there is another subset of unemployed that can't work due to transportation or childcare issues. You need money for a car to get money. Eat your heart out, Joseph Heller.)
  

What I'm not going to do is get all happy that I don't live somewhere like Tanzania or Cuba where poor Americans look rich. If we're going to rattle our sabers and proclaim our intrinsic American rightness all over the globe, waving our flags and saying we're the best darn country in the world, we can't then say American poor people aren't really poor because they don't earn 13 cents a day in a sweatshop or use chickens as currency. The way we treat our working class gets me angry, even if the fact that I'm part of the working class doesn't keep me up nights anymore.

The federal minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, sucks. It gives a wage slave $10,712 a year if he works 40 hours a week (which he probably won't be able to). The federal poverty line for a family of three is $15,260 a year. One in four Americans, 30 million of them, earn less than $8.70 an hour. Ten million earn less than minimum wage, and 71% of them are NOT teenagers. These are adults with real bills trying to pay them on $40 (gross, not net) a day. Could you do it?

Add up essentials like basic groceries, enough gas not to freeze to death in the winter, rent in a working-class neighborhood, and thrift stores clothes so you don't show up for job interviews or your job naked, and you're still pushing it. You know what food stamps, WIC, and food banks are for, right? It's for when people can't afford to eat. That's poverty, whether you've got a place to live and non-livestock currency or not.

This is only getting more common. "The two lowest-paid work categories, retail and service, increased their share of the job market from 30 percent to 48 percent between 1965 and 1998...By the end of the decade, the low end of the job market will account for more than 30 percent of the American workforce," says lawyer and author Beth Shulman in the Providence Journal. "There will be about 1.8 million software engineers and computer-support specialists, but more than 3.8 million cashiers." And, the way things are going, not much in between. Everyone in America likes to say they're middle class, whether they make $10 an hour or $2 million a year, but most of us are either struggling or spoiled. That sort of societal stratification is a mark of, er, "developing" nations, and while it would take major social collapse for the US to get there, the richest country in the world should bear no resemblance whatsoever to somewhere like India. There's just no reason.

If all you care about is the stock market and the Greenspanny bits of the economy that don't account for whether people can pay the rent, you should still care about low wages because the minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. Badly-paid people can't buy as much crap as they could in previous decades. Teenagers, the most marketed-to group of the 90s, can't prop up the economy like they used to: for example, sales at Abercrombie & Fitch are down because starving grown-ups are taking the menial jobs that used to go to teenagers with no expenses, and parents have less extra cash to hand out to their little freeloaders -- thus, fewer people buying status brands.

Upscale brands tightening their belts wouldn't be a bad thing if all it meant was that fewer people wasted money on gratuitous consumer goods. We could certainly, as a society, use a little less emphasis on marketing-created status. But while former rich kids stop buying overpriced clothes, will the CEO of Abercrombie freeze his own salary, or hire fewer designers to create unfunny and dubiously racist T-shirts? No, he'll send more manufacturing work to those 13-cents-a-day sweatshops, reduce middle-tier staff and pile more unpaid overtime on those who remain, and/or use sales figures and the economy as an excuse to keep paying salespeople lousy wages. One of the big arguments against increasing the minimum wage is that it raises costs for businesses. And exorbitant executive salaries and perks don't?

"What about mom-and-pop businesses?" you ask magnanimously. "Wouldn't a higher minimum wage really screw them?" They're not hiring anyway, they're employing themselves and their families, and I wish them all the luck in the world in this hideous chain-store universe we've created.

When I'm queen of the world

In my perfect world, every corporation would have to do what Ben & Jerry's used to do before it got eaten by Unilever: pay the CEO no more than five times the lowest-paid grunt. Business is good? Everyone gets a raise. Business sucks? The CEO's pay sucks, too.

Don't tell me a VP of Whatever deserves to make 20 times more than the janitor because he's smarter and harder working and went to school for longer. He's not 20 times smarter, harder-working, and better-educated -- if he is, in fact, any of those things at all. I've known some smart minimum wage earners and some executives who are dumber than Barney.

This wouldn't just benefit the guys at the bottom. CEO salaries that aren't absurd would leave more room for jobs in the middle. Instead of paying Bernie Ebbers a zillion dollars a year to screw things up, WorldCom could have hired better accountants and outside auditors. A software CEO that pays himself less can better afford the jobs that aren't "mission-critical" (yawn), but greatly enhance the quality of the product: quality assurance testers, editors, interface designers, support staff. A better product means more money for everyone eventually -- assuming there's anyone out there with enough money to buy the product, which under the Queen Jen Economic System, there would be.

With plenty of jobs in the middle for hard-working adults, teenagers can watch our kids, ring up our groceries, and wash our dishes, just like in the old days, instead of sitting idle because college-educated people like me are taking the menial jobs. Arguably that would decrease the ills brought by teenage idleness: gangs, drug abuse, dealing, binge drinking, cheerleading. These things might decrease anyway if adults didn't have to work overtime or several jobs, and could spend more time with the little hooligans. Everyone wins.

In the meantime, a shout-out to the adults working this weekend for $10 an hour or less.

Happy Labor Day.