There is a good friend of mine… I have to pause here. I don’t know how good a friend he is when I call him and he doesn’t return my calls. I asked him about it and he gave me this explanation that compels me to feel sorry for him: he is so busy, work is cutting his pay and increasing his workload,  it takes all of his emotional reserves to deal with people at work, and when he is home, he wants to tune everything out. As if this type of thing is unique to him. Another good friend of mine works with special ed students, especially autistic and other special needs students. As an educator who works with kids who constantly need his attention, he is drained. All my dealings with students at any level has also placed emotional demands on me. This so-called good friend of mine… he is not special. He is lucky enough to have a full-time job, even if things are fucked-up right now.

Now that I’ve talked smack about why he doesn’t call me back, here’s some more smack: he calls me up asking me “for a favor” because he’s going on vacation. When I listen to the voicemail, I wonder what it is. I call back this time and he actually answers the phone. We chat and the favor turns out to if I could record some shows. Unfortunately, I tell him, I do not have a DVR and that’s the truth. I catch up with most of my TV viewing through the on-demand channels or Hulu.

I suspect the TV show in question is Project Runway. As much as I enjoy the show, I just don’t consider it a life-or-death situation. Some time ago, when I was blogging recaps, I did. But my summer viewing has been about Dr. Who, True Blood, Being Human, and Mad Men, in that order.

Ignore me, call me when you’re drunk, and call me when you want to watch TV. And if I piss you off, what are you going to do? Not talk to me? Geez!

Somehow, we will wind up having a lunch where my friend will get mushy and say we should hang out more often. As long as there isn’t excess alcohol involved, it’s ok.

Then there are the words we all use to close letters. For close family, lovers, and spouses, “love” is appropriate. Fortunately, I don’t have to pretend to write to HR people, department chairs, managers, or anyone who holds my CV in their hands. Also, I’m not obligated to show such affection to when I complain to politicians or editors of magazines with objectionable or erroneous articles. Instead, I’m supposed to tell them I’m “Very Truly Yours” or that I’m “Sincerely Yours” or that I’m parting with “Warm Regards” or that my letter overall has been written very “Sincerely.” First, I’m not comfortable offering myself to a stranger as “Very Truly Yours.” I have trouble enough even seeing myself as “Very Truly Yours” with guys I have an intimate relationship with, so closing the letter with this phrase can make me feel very slutty. And, I’m definitely not “Sincerely Yours” and I often don’t feel sincere about a lot of business letters, especially the job queries.

As much as I can take issue with words like “Dear” and being “Very Truly Yours,” coming up with more modern, appropriate means of address is a challenge. For salutations, “hi” works in e-mails and scribbled notes, but doesn’t always sound professional to managers and others. I would prefer to open letters with Mr., Ms., or Mrs. ———, dispensing with “Dear” altogether. As formal as this term is, these people are not my dears. I may not be sincere or giving of myself to these parties, but I’m definitely awaiting response. Which is the whole point of writing the letter.

This clichéd sentence belongs to a whole class of catch phrases where the speaker really is trying to avoid being the bad guy, such as “It’s not you, it’s me” and “Let’s be friends.” It’s the language of break-up. If there’s no romance involved, it’s implies that whoever says it is moving on without you. Is there really a need to wish someone well if this person intends to remain friends? I don’t think so. Insincerely wishing luck is a big part of our culture; it’s the way we avoid the responsibility of rejecting other people as evident in editor’s form letters for work absolutely not considered for publication and in how job terminations are handled. And the rhetoric comes in handy for gracefully ejecting people from our lives, lest we get burnt by the fallout.

About 12 years ago, after someone broke off dating me, leaving me to get back with his previous boyfriend, he insisted on being friends. Shame on me for believing him because I took him up on his offer. I tried calling him to no avail. We were on a messenger application called ICQ – he became invisible after he dumped me. Once, he agreed to go to see one of those showings of old Kurasawa films at the Ken, only to stand me up at the last minute. I decided to forget about him. Six months later when I decided to clean up my contacts, found him, and requested that he delete me because I was deleting him.

He could care less that I was alive, yet he couldn’t stand the thought of me deleting him. I then received several messages explaining his side of the story. Whatever.

Recently, a good friend’s longtime girlfriend dumped him after being together for close to 10 years. I knew her before I became really good friends with her now ex-boyfriend, so we had a long friendship history. Shortly after her breakup, this friend also went through a mass defriending, interestingly expressed through Facebook. I’ve tried “re-friending” a few times, only to be ignored. Three months later, once I removed her from my Netflix “friends,” then I got her attention. She texted me and said she missed me and that we should hang out for dinner. We wound up having a passable dinner at Jimmy Carter’s with stunted conversation. Since then, I have put in one more “friend” request on FB, only to be rebuffed.

Here’s the e-mail exchange that followed:

shindo: Fine. Don’t ever pretend to be my friend again.

——: I don’t believe friendship depends on FB situations.  You and I knew each other before it, and you are welcome to email or call me anytime.  I’m sorry…your message to me below made me sad.  Take care of yourself.

shindo: What am I supposed to get from the FB situation? One day, I found I was “de-friended” and I’ve tried several times to “friend” again. Frankly, it troubled me even if was only FB. I really don’t know what kind of statement that is.

As for knowing you before the whole FB thing was in our lives, yes, and I also knew you before I became friends with the guy who is now your ex-boyfriend.

——: I would say, again, not to place too much importance on FB.  And you did know me way before then, which is why you’re always welcome to email or phone.  It makes me sad when friends say unkind things or use a certain tone with each other unnecessarily.  As with before, I wish you well.

I perfectly understand her whole rhetoric about Facebook. It’s not everything in a friendship. I have friends who are not on FB and will never ever be, and we’re ok, because we are friends. What bothers me is that I feel shut out and excluded on something. Perhaps the real reason is that she is concerned I will tell everything I see on her FB profile to her ex-boyfriend. It’s only an inference I can get from her saying she “needed to protect her privacy” when we met for dinner and conversation that went nowhere except for the warm fuzzies of “I miss you.” I’ve also really come to hate that conversation not only because of that context, but a few others with different people. It is frustrating when I’ve been friends for someone for nearly a decade and there’s no depth at all.

Not every interaction has to incredibly profound and deep and heavy. But I really don’t have time for nonsense like “I wish you well.” It’s challenging to find time for my real friends as it is.

I suppose I should be over the awful nightmares with my bitch of an ex-boss Linda, right? Time may heal all wounds, but some come out as serious scars. Some worse things than getting screamed at by an unprofessional boss have happened, but some things haunt more. I wasn’t physically injured or permanently crippled by the incident, but I felt helpless. Some people would fight back or find a way to handle their loose-with-their-tongues Lindas appropriately, but I didn’t. All I could do was throw someone else on the tracks, hoping to save myself from the train that had already run me over. Towards the end, all I could do was say “I’m sorry,” but that didn’t help. I may have been in the wrong about everything Linda called me to her office about, but she is a prime example of how supervisors can abuse their subordinates with impunity. They hold the employees’ livelihoods in their hands and their superiors are often not willing to get rid of them.

In the months following my firing, when I was looking for work, I would have moments where I would start crying because I remembered my meeting with Linda all too vividly. Most of the time when I lost emotional control, I was safely home in my apartment. There were times when I would be in tears while I was in my car or when I was walking around the downtown neighborhoods. Once, I felt a little too naked around someone I was dating at the time when I started crying sometime after we had been talking for a while after sex. Thankfully, Linda’s mouth isn’t something that would reduce me to tears now.

However, that event still brings up a lot of anger for me. That an incident could bring me to tears months after it happened doesn’t help me forgive the perpetrator. Instead, I feel violently angry. I’ve thought about throwing a cobble-sized rock through her office window. I’ve had fantasies where I’d call Linda at work and tell her that she’s a cunt, among other things. I’ve imagined papering the office building and the blocks nearby with posters with her picture and a caption declaring that she’s an incompetent bitch. I’ve wished many times that Linda would painfully die after getting mangled in a horrible car accident. I’ve often hoped Linda would get a big karmic payback commensurate with the amount of the amount of abuse she showed me and others.

I’ve never acted out any of those scenarios in the previous paragraph. For the ones where I would take action, I would get arrested. There are two things that definitely keep me in check:

1. The bitch is not worth my jailtime.
2. I do not want Linda to have the satisfaction of saying she’s a victim.

Retaliation is never good, especially when it can cause loss of freedom. As for wishing, visualizing, and fantasizing – they aren’t crimes. At least not yet.

I have retaliated in a way that is within my First Amendment rights – I went on a few work-vent websites and wrote posts on the company, focusing on Linda as a boss. I stuck with what I knew, what happened in my professional relationship with her. I didn’t fabricate anything in those posts or writing about when I wanted to drive into the tree. If Linda ever said that I libeled her, my defense would be that what I said was true.

I don’t like that I feel violently angry whenever I think of Linda. I don’t like I have imagined those fantasy revenge scenarios. I don’t even like that I would wish her dead many times over. I don’t like that I have even imagined coming to her funeral, whenever it happens, and telling everyone present what a miserable, abusive bitch she was. Perhaps the most constructive thing I can do with all this anger towards Linda is to write a character who reaps all the evil she has sown. That’s what I’ll do. All I need is to find the right story.

It was few years ago, in the middle of December, 2006, the worst time to be afraid of losing a job. It was close to Christmas. I found out that Linda, my boss at the office wasn’t too happy with me and she would have gotten rid of me earlier if it hadn’t been for my friend the accountant. While I was out on a work-related errand, Linda was looking in my mailroom for something faulty and found it – a newsletter with the previous address. We had moved less than a month before to the new office and I only had a fragment of the updated letter with a few translations to be done, which meant not all of our constituencies could be served. So, instead of pushing my boss on the issue of mailing the letter out complete, I mailed out the other one. When I came back from the errand, the receptionist coolly told me my boss needed to see me.

I don’t even remember what I needed to fetch from my errand. All I know is that it essentially was a shopping trip to get something for the mailroom or something the accountant said was needed. What I do remember is quickly going to Linda’s office, sitting down, only to have her start screaming at me: “DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE LEGAL RAMIFICATION OF WHAT YOU’VE DONE?! WHY DID YOU MAIL THAT OTHER LETTER?

In a fantasy scenario, I would have told Linda to frak herself and walk out. In real life, Linda’s verbal barrage was more like a beating where I threw up my hands to protect myself, only to find myself still getting hurt. Looking back, I’m not proud of it, but I tried to blame my assistant, as if would help. It didn’t. Instead, Linda bared her teeth and huffed through her nostrils like a bull. Somehow, her red jacket only intensified her aggression. After she was done screaming at me, I left her office. During the whole meeting, the door was never closed and I never even remembered her telling me to close it. Everyone in the office had heard my humiliation. I’m surprised I even worked a few more hours. I don’t even remember what I did until the office closed.

After work, I drove to Mission Valley to shop around at Best Buy. I thought that gadget shopping could erase what happened in Linda’s office that afternoon, but it didn’t. All I could think about was driving my car into a giant tree or trolley track pillar at high speed. 60 MPH in a suburban street would have done the job nicely, but 80 to 100 MPH would have been extremely effective. Only I didn’t destroy my car. That would come much later. In the Best Buy parking lot, I called one friend, who didn’t pick up. I left a message and called my friend Brian and told him about my impulse to drive my car into something. I can’t remember the conversation at all, but I was able to drive myself home.

I called in sick the next day. The day after, when I returned to work, Linda was sweet to me, too sweet. She still wanted to get rid of me, though.

A year ago, I read about Cloutier in Robert Frank’s Richistan and forgot about it. Much of the people profiled in that book were new money, especially those that became rich in the late Clinton or Bush years. Apparently, the guilded age Frank mentions is no longer a reality, but Cloutier is still in business because he has a “strong sales organization.” Of course, his customer base, ailing small businesses, is even more desperate than ever and should keep sales going for some time.

According to him, businesses should not blame the recession, saying it “has been an excuse for poor performance.” Businesses need “strong sales organization,” which he’ll happily teach for a fee and the privilege of getting his hands dirty on the job. They, in return, make it possible for him and his wife to attend charity balls and gain social status.

Getting back to why I find this man fascinating is that the interview and his business are about a teaching style. The tough talk and the hard truths, as glib as they can be, center around teachable moments. To teach something, one has to be as direct and succeint like Cloutier. Ramsay has taken this approach with some pop psychology mumbo jumbo and has ruined his clients though airing their dirty laundry on TV. I looked through American Management Service’s list of clients served, and everything listed by industry, not companies. On one hand, Cloutier’s clients are protected by confidentiality, but on the other hand, there isn’t concrete evidence to go on with AMS’s success stories. But money is to be made on some kind of education, especially if the client needs it to survive these uncertain times.

We’re at a party early on for the University’s MFA program and I mention working with Professor Joseph K. You ask me what he’s like and I’ll try to give you a sound byte answer. After all, this is a party, and the conversation’s not supposed to be too deep. So, here’s what I say: Joe’s a good guy and I work very well with him. I also enjoy his workshops a lot.

My answer would change much later, as I was only one year into my academic and professional relationship with Professor K. Being his secretary didn’t pay much, but I liked it better than working in the supermarket. There, I was paid better and I had benefits, but with Joe, I had keys to the mail room and his office, and I had a code for the English Department copier. I had a place to hang my coat, to read, to study, and even to write. I even had my own desk so I wouldn’t use his. What I had lost in practical terms, I gained in privilege. Which is essentially the case with anyone who goes into something arts or humanities related. I also harbored great hopes that my association with Joe would benefit me in the future. Perhaps I would become an editor or a professor, or even an editor-professor like Joe.

In other jobs where I was at an entry level and the boss were professional mentors, they were often happy to help someone like me move on to another job. They recognized that these jobs weren’t meant to last forever. They knew these jobs were starting points for a long term career track. For example, when I tutored for the English Center at the East County college, the professor who coordinated the program was happy to serve as a reference when I got an interview for a tutoring position for the University. She was definitely a good example of a healthy mentor.

Joe, on the other hand, was not. During the second summer I worked for Joe, the TA’ship that formally was my professor’s secretary job only paid $200 a month and I didn’t get paid after the spring semester was finished, so I tried to find a job. I went high and low. Not surprisingly, I could not get arrested for applying to Target, Trader Joe’s or even Borders. Perhaps I was overqualified with my bachelor’s degree. I sent my resume to a local subsidiary of a an international publishing company and I got an interview. My $200 a month assistant editor job qualified me for a job that paid at least ten times as much, even if it mean losing a title, privilege, and perks. My ability to abuse copier codes might vanish. However, being able to pay my rent and the bills would have been more secure if I got the job. Only, I didn’t tell Joe and he found out from someone else.

Rosalyn was someone I became good friends with in the course of program and she was also one of Joe’s acolytes. I helped train her to do some things for the avant-garde literary journal, including dealing with PageMaker, and I told her the news out of excitement. She then told Joe, who sent me a restrained, but nasty e-mail telling me I couldn’t work at this company and his university press enterprise at the same time. E-mail is often strictly text and it can be difficult to gage the tone. However, he seemed genuinely offended that I wanted to move on to something better.

I did go to the interview. The local publishing house’s subsidiary was located in a downtown high-rise and I even got to see my apartment building from my interviewer’s office. Looking back, I was unnaturally stiff in my shirt, tie, and suit. In this Southern California city, dressing up isn’t natural at all, even though the protocol applies to job interviews. I did not get the job.

I still had my $200 a month job, but the end was coming soon. My personal, academic, and professional relationship with Professor Joseph K had been strained since the middle of the spring semester, my second in the program. I had known him for two and a half years, and he had treated me like a son for most of that time. I looked to him as a paternal figure in my life, mainly because my own relationship with my father was strained. There was a dark side to all this. At one point after Easter, Joe summoned me to his home for an intervention. I became less diligent in my duties as his secretary/assistant editor, and he called me on my flaking out on some tasks. Fair enough. Then he said I had no loyalty to him.* Intuitively, I knew there was something wrong with that statement, even though I wanted to salvage the relationship. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue being his gopher, but I just didn’t want to quit. I have learned since then when it’s time to quit, I should definitely do so. To continue is to make things worse, which was the shape of things to come.

Also, he was supposed to chair my thesis. I hadn’t asked him yet, but working with Joe seemed to be the direction by default. There was that other guy, his rival in the MFA program, but I wasn’t sure about him. Joe has said enough to taint my views of someone I didn’t even know. If he was possessive of me on a professional level to the point where it was better for me to work for $200 a month rather than get a job with professional pay, then workshopping with other creative writing teachers was definitely anathema. There was a popular visiting professor and I wanted to take a workshop with her. Oh, I should have known that was the beginning of the end. Of course, I did know.

*As someone who got involved in a Christian fundamentalist cult in my mid-twenties, this raised a red flag. Intuitively, I knew there was something wrong with it, even if I couldn’t rationally defend it as valid. It was only later when I met with a counselor did I find my instinct about Joe’s loyalty remarks validated.

Facebook has managed to change the meaning of “friend” more within three or four years than the one and a half thousand years the word has existed in English. For some other languages, we can add a few more millenia for the word’s respective counterparts. A friend on Facebook is simply someone you add, provided the other party agrees. However, the breakup is much simpler.

De-friending a Facebook friend is a relatively painless process. It’s easy to do with a click of a link and no explanation is needed. Simply remove them from your friends and it’s done. There is no online equivalent of the awkward breakup dinner; no explanation is needed. If the friendship is low interaction, it may take a while for the other person to find out. For ones where there’s a higher amount of engagement, then the news arrives quicker, especially if one has just commented on your item and Facebook provides followup information. The last part is especially ironic.

I’ve been de-friended by a few people over the past few years. A couple of the “friendships” were low engagement or none at all, so not much was really lost. During a time where I had every tweet automatically sent to my Facebook profile as status updates, I can understand some people getting tired of the Twitter noise. There have been some where I wondered if it was something I said. Having a great deal of curiosity, I want to know why, but I know it’s counterproductive. They made their decision to part digital ways with me, and I have other things to worry about.

I have also dropped a few people from my digital blackbook, AKA Facebook. One person was a mutual “friend” who tried to get me involved in a drama he had with a long-time friend of mine. At first, I tried to be neutral as it was something between him and her, but this so-called mutual friend “wrote” on my “wall” his issues with my real friend (in addition to some rambling e-mails), which was embarrassing. I didn’t want this stuff broadcast to all my friends. I quickly deleted it, but I then decided to delete him too. I can’t say I regret the decision. The one annoying thing that happened was he decided to “steal” one of my friends; that is, go through my list and pick someone. Whatever.

There has only been other person, the accountant at the job that went badly. While he wasn’t responsible for my boss making the workplace a hostile one for me, he was caught in the middle. We were friends before I worked for his company, but the friendship quickly deteriorated. I’ve seen him from time to time, but we never really talked. He then “friended” me on Facebook. It was a low engagement “friendship,” but given our history and that it felt awkward to even say hello to him, I made the decision to “de-friend” him. I don’t hate him or harbor any malice, but he’s not someone I want to be trapped in an elevator with.

Perhaps I should ask myself if I want to be trapped in an elevator with the various people I’m friends with on Facebook, especially the low to no engagement ones. It might just whittle down my list to one of higher engagement and I can interact with with people I truly feel a sense of friendship with. Or, I could interact more with some people, the one of the lower or no engagement. Either option would deal with the quality of friendships, which Facebook never really seems to address. To quote Chumbawamba in a recent song, “Would you like to add me as a friend.”

It has recently occurred to me that most people obsessed with grammar care less about saying something well than they do catching someone in a violation of the English language. They are superior little snots. Also, they are the type of people who would fastidiously avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. Their sentence are clunky because they have correct grammar, concision be damned. Then again, these are the people who obviously suck at math and take out their insecurities on others. Subscribing to a language dogma somehow makes them feel better about themselves as they are incapable of adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and solving equations. That would take real mind work and knowledge.

One important thing to note is the grammar-obsessed rarely teach English or writing. They’re often not even linguists, who actually take classes on this type of stuff. They are often rank amateurs who often don’t know what they’re talking about. They may even have a dangling modifier in their sentence and might not even know it.

Self-appointed grammarians, leave this stuff to the professionals. Thanks.

General advice: DO NOT ENGAGE. They are the type of people to put up a fight, especially if they’re wrong, because, the burden of proof’s on you. It always is. Christian Lander has some further advice in his post about grammar.

I’ve been guilty of speaking off the cuff a lot to classrooms over the past few years. Obviously, preparation is the solution, but it was a matter of time, or that I was too busy, etc. It’s easy to do when there are several classes. However, lack of preparation makes for a trainwreck. And bad communication.

Last week, I made a script for my second day of class for the summer. I made notes on the reading assignment, wrote down what the students essentially needed to know about the text, and even threw in my talking points. Even if it took several hours of my time to prepare, I had a much smoother class session. It was much better than if I took it for granted that I read the story a few times and tried to get class participation out of them. Even if last week’s lesson wasn’t perfect, I was communicating and the students were. Also, I didn’t feel as drained as I would on unprepared classroom sessions.

I wish I could just talk without the pre-written stuff. I envy the people who can really hold their own without the notes and who don’t have to mentally write their sentences. Then again, I can spell and I know my punctuation. I can apply this type of approach of writing before I speak to other things, especially if I am speaking before any kind of audience. For video or podcast, I can write. All I need to do if fine tune it so it doesn’t take so much time to do. For notes I make now, I can always re-use and revise, but creating new stuff is where the challenge is.