I called a temp agency once and they were like "Well, do you have any phone skills?" I was like "um...I called you didn't I?"
-Zach Galifianakis
LOST ANGELES
For sometime I'd been planning on writing something about how crazy life in Los Angeles is compared to life in the Midwest. And while it certainly is, I don't think that news is going to come as a galloping shock to anyone. Yeah, there's a metric-shit ton of people here, and yes many of them speak a language that, I swear to God, sounds identical to gibberish. And sure, the traffic is atrocious, but unless you've seen it with your own eyes there's really no way to describe the feeling you get whenever the car in front of you pulls a u-turn in the middle of a busy street.
The one quasi-fun fact I have about driving in LA is that motorcycles, for whatever reason, are permitted to drive in between traffic. So, whenever you're stopped at a red light, a couple of motorcycles will usually come speeding down the center line and push their way to the front of the pack. I can't even begin to tell you how strong the urge is to simply open your door whenever you see them coming.
But for the most part there's nothing overwhelmingly interesting about living in a big city, at least nothing that people wouldn't naturally expect. And while I will say that in my short time here I've seen a few things that I'd never seen before, I think it's best to keep those things to myself. Because let's face it, something is lost in the translation. Nothing is ever quite as strange or disgusting or befuddling secondhand. It's just not. So I'm not even going to try to relay to you any crazy LA stories. Sure, if I happen upon a particularly juicy one, I'll give it a shot. But there's no substitute for seeing this place first hand.
Trust me...
I DON'T WANT TO SELL ANYTHING, BUY ANYTHING, OR PROCESS ANYTHING AS A CAREER
If you haven't been to a temp agency I highly recommend you go. Even if you have a job, take a day off from that job and make a trip on down to the nearest temp agency. I've been to two now and believe me, you won't regret it.
Whether you'll openly admit it or not, I think we can all agree that there is something rewarding about seeing people who are worse off then we are. And I'm talking about a little worse off than us. Nobody sees a homeless person and feels good about themselves, because that's just sick.
And if you think I'm wrong about this, imagine for a second that you're playing baseball. You're up at the plate, and you strike out. The next guy up hits a homerun and now you feel kind of shitty because he's much better than you. But the guy after him strikes out, and not only does he strike out, but it's bad. I mean, he's swinging at pitches after they've already hit the catcher's mitt. Now you feel pretty good, cause compared to this guy you don't suck quite as much. But then the guy after him comes up and this guy has Down Syndrome and he's trying to eat the bat. Seeing this doesn't make you feel good. Even though you're clearly a better player than him, it's just too fucking sad.
It's the same thing with temp agencies and jobs and homeless people. I'll leave you to connect the dots.
And if a refreshed sense pride isn't reason enough to pay a visit to the local temp agency, then how about priceless entertainment? Sure you have to take boring typing tests and talk to someone who, despite what their job description says, really couldn't care less about whether or not you find a job, but in the end it's all worth it...because you get to watch The Safety Video.
Admittedly, the safety video at the first temp agency wasn't anything to write home about. It just showed the right way and the wrong way to go about doing various duties around the office. For example, a guy would come on and say "Do not open more than one drawer of the file cabinet at a time. If you do, it might fall over." And then some hapless employee would do the wrong thing and the damn cabinet would fall over. Yawn.
But the video at the second temp agency was priceless. It had all the same safety tips, but they were laid out for you in the guise of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. I forget the title of the actual movie, but it was something along the lines of "Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Perilous Office." In this one, a man dressed impeccably like Sherlock Holmes, complete with pipe, would wander around an office, stumble upon some kind of accident, and try to deduce how the accident occurred. After putting the clues together, he'd tell Watson what should be done to avoid such an accident in the future.
For example, in the first video they simply said "Do not attempt to repair office equipment yourself. Call someone from maintenance to do it for you." But in the Holmes video, the clever detective came upon a woman who had been electrocuted and was passed out on the floor. After finding a pair of scissors inside a nearby copy machine, he deduced that she had tried to repair the broken machine herself and gotten electrocuted.
Which video would you rather watch?
And just in case you're wondering why I went to two temp agencies...shouldn't one have been enough? Believe me when I say that that part of the story is much less interesting.
ISN'T EVERYTHING WE DO IN LIFE A WAY TO BE LOVED A LITTLE MORE?
For the first time in roughly ten years I'm not thinking about the opposite sex. I'm not really sure when it happened, but I know that I used to think about women quite a bit and now I don't. And no, my thoughts of women haven't been replaced with thoughts of men. I'm just not concerned with relationships right now.
I'm applying to jobs, taking a class, writing two screenplays, trying to get used to a new city, and I guess in the middle of all of this my head just pushed out the ladies. As if somehow my brain intuitively knows that even if I did find a girl I wouldn't have any time to spend with her. Now, I've heard about this happening to other people and I always dismissed it as an excuse made by those who didn't get whomever they were after. But I have to say that it does actually happen.
But even though I have no desire to pursue any kind of relationship right now, either serious or casual, I am still hopelessly in love with Julie Delpy.
I'm sure most of you have no idea who Julie Delpy is and that's perfectly fine. She's the French girl in An American Werewolf in Paris. But for our purposes here you only need to know that she's the woman in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. And before we go any further I should tell you that, even though I am completely in love with her, I'm not at all attracted to her.
First of all, she doesn't really do it for me physically. Sure, she's kind of cute in a mousy sort of way, and even though I have no problem with mousy, there's just something about her appearance that rubs me the wrong way. Secondly, I can't stand French accents. I know a lot of guys go crazy over them, but for me they rank somewhere between German accents and Brooklyn accents. Third, she's an actress, and even though I have nothing against thespians in general they do have a tendency to be overwhelming. And all of this is to say nothing of the fact that she's fifteen years older than me.
So how can I be in love with her? The answer is surprisingly simple.
A couple of months ago I was watching Before Sunrise, and it just hit me...I love this woman. Not so much Julie Delpy (for all of the aforementioned reasons), but I love her character, which in a roundabout way means that I'm in love with Richard Linklater, but we'll ignore that. I was listening to her have these endless discussions with Ethan Hawke about all manner subjects, and it occured to me that that's what I want...someone who I can talk to about how everyone's parents set them up for disappointment and how people nowadays are so scattered because they only have a fraction of a soul and how the politics involved in breaking up with someone are strangely complicated. I'm not saying that I would want to do all that in Paris over the course of one night. But yeah, that's what I want.
Or at least it's what I would want if I had time to want anything.
How do these things get so complicated?
-Zach Galifianakis
LOST ANGELES
For sometime I'd been planning on writing something about how crazy life in Los Angeles is compared to life in the Midwest. And while it certainly is, I don't think that news is going to come as a galloping shock to anyone. Yeah, there's a metric-shit ton of people here, and yes many of them speak a language that, I swear to God, sounds identical to gibberish. And sure, the traffic is atrocious, but unless you've seen it with your own eyes there's really no way to describe the feeling you get whenever the car in front of you pulls a u-turn in the middle of a busy street.
The one quasi-fun fact I have about driving in LA is that motorcycles, for whatever reason, are permitted to drive in between traffic. So, whenever you're stopped at a red light, a couple of motorcycles will usually come speeding down the center line and push their way to the front of the pack. I can't even begin to tell you how strong the urge is to simply open your door whenever you see them coming.
But for the most part there's nothing overwhelmingly interesting about living in a big city, at least nothing that people wouldn't naturally expect. And while I will say that in my short time here I've seen a few things that I'd never seen before, I think it's best to keep those things to myself. Because let's face it, something is lost in the translation. Nothing is ever quite as strange or disgusting or befuddling secondhand. It's just not. So I'm not even going to try to relay to you any crazy LA stories. Sure, if I happen upon a particularly juicy one, I'll give it a shot. But there's no substitute for seeing this place first hand.
Trust me...
I DON'T WANT TO SELL ANYTHING, BUY ANYTHING, OR PROCESS ANYTHING AS A CAREER
If you haven't been to a temp agency I highly recommend you go. Even if you have a job, take a day off from that job and make a trip on down to the nearest temp agency. I've been to two now and believe me, you won't regret it.
Whether you'll openly admit it or not, I think we can all agree that there is something rewarding about seeing people who are worse off then we are. And I'm talking about a little worse off than us. Nobody sees a homeless person and feels good about themselves, because that's just sick.
And if you think I'm wrong about this, imagine for a second that you're playing baseball. You're up at the plate, and you strike out. The next guy up hits a homerun and now you feel kind of shitty because he's much better than you. But the guy after him strikes out, and not only does he strike out, but it's bad. I mean, he's swinging at pitches after they've already hit the catcher's mitt. Now you feel pretty good, cause compared to this guy you don't suck quite as much. But then the guy after him comes up and this guy has Down Syndrome and he's trying to eat the bat. Seeing this doesn't make you feel good. Even though you're clearly a better player than him, it's just too fucking sad.
It's the same thing with temp agencies and jobs and homeless people. I'll leave you to connect the dots.
And if a refreshed sense pride isn't reason enough to pay a visit to the local temp agency, then how about priceless entertainment? Sure you have to take boring typing tests and talk to someone who, despite what their job description says, really couldn't care less about whether or not you find a job, but in the end it's all worth it...because you get to watch The Safety Video.
Admittedly, the safety video at the first temp agency wasn't anything to write home about. It just showed the right way and the wrong way to go about doing various duties around the office. For example, a guy would come on and say "Do not open more than one drawer of the file cabinet at a time. If you do, it might fall over." And then some hapless employee would do the wrong thing and the damn cabinet would fall over. Yawn.
But the video at the second temp agency was priceless. It had all the same safety tips, but they were laid out for you in the guise of a Sherlock Holmes mystery. I forget the title of the actual movie, but it was something along the lines of "Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Perilous Office." In this one, a man dressed impeccably like Sherlock Holmes, complete with pipe, would wander around an office, stumble upon some kind of accident, and try to deduce how the accident occurred. After putting the clues together, he'd tell Watson what should be done to avoid such an accident in the future.
For example, in the first video they simply said "Do not attempt to repair office equipment yourself. Call someone from maintenance to do it for you." But in the Holmes video, the clever detective came upon a woman who had been electrocuted and was passed out on the floor. After finding a pair of scissors inside a nearby copy machine, he deduced that she had tried to repair the broken machine herself and gotten electrocuted.
Which video would you rather watch?
And just in case you're wondering why I went to two temp agencies...shouldn't one have been enough? Believe me when I say that that part of the story is much less interesting.
ISN'T EVERYTHING WE DO IN LIFE A WAY TO BE LOVED A LITTLE MORE?
For the first time in roughly ten years I'm not thinking about the opposite sex. I'm not really sure when it happened, but I know that I used to think about women quite a bit and now I don't. And no, my thoughts of women haven't been replaced with thoughts of men. I'm just not concerned with relationships right now.
I'm applying to jobs, taking a class, writing two screenplays, trying to get used to a new city, and I guess in the middle of all of this my head just pushed out the ladies. As if somehow my brain intuitively knows that even if I did find a girl I wouldn't have any time to spend with her. Now, I've heard about this happening to other people and I always dismissed it as an excuse made by those who didn't get whomever they were after. But I have to say that it does actually happen.
But even though I have no desire to pursue any kind of relationship right now, either serious or casual, I am still hopelessly in love with Julie Delpy.
I'm sure most of you have no idea who Julie Delpy is and that's perfectly fine. She's the French girl in An American Werewolf in Paris. But for our purposes here you only need to know that she's the woman in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. And before we go any further I should tell you that, even though I am completely in love with her, I'm not at all attracted to her.
First of all, she doesn't really do it for me physically. Sure, she's kind of cute in a mousy sort of way, and even though I have no problem with mousy, there's just something about her appearance that rubs me the wrong way. Secondly, I can't stand French accents. I know a lot of guys go crazy over them, but for me they rank somewhere between German accents and Brooklyn accents. Third, she's an actress, and even though I have nothing against thespians in general they do have a tendency to be overwhelming. And all of this is to say nothing of the fact that she's fifteen years older than me.
So how can I be in love with her? The answer is surprisingly simple.
A couple of months ago I was watching Before Sunrise, and it just hit me...I love this woman. Not so much Julie Delpy (for all of the aforementioned reasons), but I love her character, which in a roundabout way means that I'm in love with Richard Linklater, but we'll ignore that. I was listening to her have these endless discussions with Ethan Hawke about all manner subjects, and it occured to me that that's what I want...someone who I can talk to about how everyone's parents set them up for disappointment and how people nowadays are so scattered because they only have a fraction of a soul and how the politics involved in breaking up with someone are strangely complicated. I'm not saying that I would want to do all that in Paris over the course of one night. But yeah, that's what I want.
Or at least it's what I would want if I had time to want anything.
How do these things get so complicated?
