Toughest Job in the World.

Take a look at your significant other, right now. Take a look in your mind's eye, if you have to. No really. Take a good, long look.

And now, say thank you. Say thank you to this person, because no matter what nonsense you have been through, no matter how much of a total goof he/she is, and no matter how much of a total douche you are, this person has agreed to lend your pathetic life some meaning. In the big game, they made you first-pick. You!

You're not sure what you would do without this person to take the edge off your existential dread. Without this person, there is no one to put up with your b.s. This person is your excuse, your structure, your frame of reference, your anchor. They have their own crap to deal with, but they have assented to taking on yours, too. It's a big job.

If only you could escape yourself the way you can escape your mate. It feels really fucking good to get out and be your own person for a night, or a day -- a week, even. I mean Jesus, it's really tiring being around someone who is intimately familiar with all of the ways in which you are kind of a fraud! We all need to escape, at least for a little while, from the person who actually decided to stick around. By definition, that person is sort of your life boss.

Just like we all need jobs to feel like we're not just completely screwing around, we all need a Point Person to keep us from wandering around our own navels all the time, wondering what the hell we're doing. What the hell are you doing? You're answering to your Point Person, that's what. Aren't you kind of glad they hired you?

I guess this is as close as I'll ever get to endorsing monogamy.

Too Close for Discomfort.

The thing is, when you make the choice to start a blog about uncomfortable moments, you are more or less screwed right out of the gate. Right now I only feel free to write about maybe five percent of the ish that's going down in my life right now, for a variety of reasons, such as:

- Privacy: My own.
- Confidentiality: My friends'.
- Respect: For my family.
- Fear: Of getting fired.
- Banality: A hallmark of most things that pass through my brain.
- Sensitivity: Toward others' feelings.
- Speechlessness: .
- Pride: Goddamned, foolish pride.
- Cease and desist request: One, so far.
- Eyes: Yours, which do not like to bleed.*

And so the Moments close in, and there I am, feeling like our heroes in Star Wars during the trash compactor scene.

So for right now, I am just going to make a list of general topics that are relevant to current events, either mine or my friends' or my family's, but that are too problematic to tackle just now:

- Religious differences
- Age-inappropriate relationships
- Communicable diseases
- Financial desperation
- Drinking problems
- Death
- Hair removal
- Depression
- Arrested development in adults over 40
- Penis size
- Lil' Wayne
- Pointless online behavior
- Lost loves

I will leave these alone and instead share a little vignette from my experience as a volunteer "reception manager" at CUESA's Sunday Supper fundraiser last weekend. The title is a glorification of what I really did, which was to fetch things for chefs and sample free food. At one point, I get introduced to another volunteer. We are both wearing nametags that say "Culinary Volunteer" under our names.

Me: So you are another one of the volunteers here?
Him: [nods] What are you doing [for the event]?
Me: Oh, I'm a reception manager. [self-conscious laugh] Just roaming around, making sure everything goes smoothly.
Him: [beat] So you're not actually a culinary volunteer. [He nods toward my nametag.]
Me: [momentarily puzzled] What? Oh. No, I guess not! What are you doing tonight?
Him: I'm plating desserts.
Me: [looking for some sign of irony, and seeing none] Well. I defer to your culinary expertise then.
[More awkward chit-chat about his vastly superior volunteer role, then I make an excuse to not talk to this person anymore]

Let's recap.

Here's what I said: [momentarily puzzled] What? Oh. No, I guess not! What are you doing tonight?

Here's what I should have said: No. I'm not a dick, either! Did they run out of nametags for that one?

Or: Well no, apparently I am assigned to the "conversing with douchebags" station.

I'm not a dick, either. I mean, anybody with me here? I must have repeated that lame comeback to myself at least four times over the rest of the evening. What is the best comeback you never uttered in the moment?

* I know that what follows the colons should not be capitalized or punctuated by periods. I actually struggled with this.

Bosses.

Consider the supervisor. From the day you enter the workforce, you have a boss of you, unless you end up working for yourself, which is even worse.

Your boss is a personage that looms large in your life, whether you realize it or not. He or she can review your performance, authorize or reject any number of initiatives including vacation, and influence your income. Your boss is the one you worry about when you're rolling into the office at 9:20 instead of 9:00. Your boss is the one you think of when you are e-stalking a romantic interest or old buddy, instead of finishing that project.

Your boss giveth, and your boss taketh away.

Your boss is also pathetic. Your boss is answering to another boss who is much worse. Your boss is dealing with crap that you wouldn't want to deal with, not in a million years. Your boss has made it this far without really knowing what he or she is doing. Your boss has fewer friends in the office than you do. Your boss is a cariacature, sketched out by everyone else.

In my life, I have been fortunate to work for some very good people. Along the timeline of bosses, only two stand out as utter tools:

1. Mo, short for Mohammed: American Cafe, Washington, D.C. Mo was a short restaurant manager, embodying exactly the Napoleon complex and inflated self-importance that you would expect from that description. My most salient memory: I'm standing at a station, ringing in an order, during a busy dinner service. "Don't do that," I hear from behind me. It's Mo, glaring at me. "What?" I say, not sure what I'm doing wrong. "Don't put your hand there," he said, pointing at my left hand, which was resting on the wall as I keyed in the order. "It gets the wall dirty." That was Mo.

2. G.J.: Magnet Interactive, Washington, D.C. This guy was a dick. I'm a little biased, and you will soon see why. G. was Revenge of the Nerds with a cocaine habit. He handed out stimulants to the people he liked, and screwed over everyone else. I fell into the latter camp. I got put on a project, two-thirds of the way through, that he had massively oversold to the client. The project had gone spectacularly wrong on several levels: the graphic designer was diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder, the senior producer quit, the animator was a druggie who tended to disappear at key times, and then there was me, 25 years old and a good little worker, but way too green for the gig. The dimensions of the snow job Greg had achieved with the client were too staggering for me to correct. After the project's conclusion, G. called me into his office and fired me, taking care to invite my coworkers to watch. He told me, among other things, that I "couldn't read people." It was an undeserved public shaming that took me years to get over. Later I was told that when the client heard I was fired, they responded that G. J. should have been the one to go and not me. It was small consolation. But I did emerge smarter and stronger from my encounter with this person.

Others committed milder offenses. One of my uber-bosses at a news organization sat down next to me on her second day at the office and clapped her hand on my shoulder, saying, "Hey girlfriend, what's happening?" I knew immediately to distrust this person. We are in a place of business, you are nearly 20 years older than I am, and you are my new boss, lady. This is not Living Single, and we no longer work in the jounalistic boys' clubs you're used to. Get a grip. She later screwed over one of my female colleagues, letting her die on the advancement vine while blowing smoke to her about women needing to stick together in this business. Hey girlfriend.

Most of my bosses have been good, beleaguered people who did their best with me. One of the early ones was Tim at Byron Preiss Multimedia. Tim, are you out there? At the time, Tim was only about four years older than I was, but he was heading up his own CD-ROM publishing imprint and staff, and he seemed infinitely more mature to me. He looked, and I mean no insult here, like a male Molly Ringwald, with floppy hair and pouty lips and freckles and a slight build. In other words, he looked like the kid he was at 28, but the guy had it together. Even when he was totally stressed, he was still the nicest, most well-meaning guy. It seemed like he was always handling a crisis.

Other bosses -- Nick, Kelly, Refet, Josh, Todd, Joe -- they were just darn nice people who may have driven me crazy at times, but mostly tried to do right by me. If you have at least a couple of bosses in your life who utterly suck, the ones who don't seem to be all the more valuable.

One night I went searching for Tim online so that I could add him to the ridiculous people-quilt of my life that is Facebook. I didn't find him, but I did find this. Jesus. Jesus! One of my former bosses is dead?

Byron was the first Big Cheese I ever worked for. He ran his company out of a loft in New York's "Silicon Alley," and he was the classic intimidating entrepeneur, in my twentysomething eyes: swiftly decisive, possessed of a temper, obviously smart, and a person whose time was in demand. In every interaction that we had, because he was the head of the company, I wanted to impress him, because he managed to be a person you wanted to impress.

Like any authority figure, Byron took his licks among the staff, who usually carped at how demanding he was and how lean his approach was to running the company. But implicitly, we all acknowledged that we were there to please Byron, and as a logical corollary to that, Byron's judgment was to be respected. After all, this was a guy who had turned sci-fi nerdiness into profit! He had a niche and he was ruthless.

Reading about Byron's accident, I could picture him exactly as he was in 1995, leaving his office in his Flatiron district loft, suited and bespectacled. Important. I couldn't believe that he wasn't still out there somewhere, making deals and pissing people off. The fact that he met his maker in tony East Hampton, at least, made sense. Rest in peace, Byron. To all my other former bosses, even the sucky ones: Live long and prosper. I ain't mad atcha.

My Buddy.

Reflecting on this classic commercial, a few questions come up:

What eventually became of the poor boy surely coerced by a stage parent from hell into delivering this frightening vocal performance?

Was the child actor here thinking, "This is kind of weird"?

How many boys actually asked for this doll?

The answer to this last question is surely "not enough of them," because Hasbro apparently discontinued My Buddy by the time the '90s were up. Today it is a symbol of a (hopefully) bygone period when people optimistically believed that boys could have their boyness socialized out of them.

The argument for encouraging boys to play with dolls rests on the idea that it encourages good parenting skills. But most men who had a decent set of parents seem to figure out the fatherhood thing just fine without a doll being shoved into their arms.

Kids are going to play how they want to play, no matter what is in the toybox. My niece was looking for a purse to carry by the age of two and was assembling her own fashion ensembles by age four, while my non-frou-frou sister looked on in amazement, unsure where her daughter's girliness came from. For my part, I played with Barbies *and* my brother's Star Wars figures. And if a little boy wants a doll, he's going to ask for one or find one, whether it's offered or not.

What's hilarious to me about the My Buddy ads is the way they suggest that we can create a world where a boy wants to play with dolls, but still promotes all the reassuring stereotypes about masculinity. Imagine if Hasbro had chosen to produce a doll for boys that looked like Carson Kressley and came with styleable hair, multiple outfits, and a mod furniture set. Now THAT would have been a step forward.

Uncomfortably Numb.

(I mean really, I can't believe it's taken this long for the headline above to make its appearance on this blog.)

I sat in a dentist's chair recently, there to get a filling replaced. It was a filling I hadn't even realized I had. "You have a filling on your wisdom tooth that's leaking," the dentist said. Filling? Wisdom tooth? Leaking? "I didn't think I had any fillings," I said with a frown.

She gave me a smirk, as if I were telling a lame joke, and handed me a mirror. "See that tooth back there? That's a filling, and it's discolored because things are seeping underneath it. It's not urgent, but you should have it replaced."

I hadn't been playing dumb. I really did not remember getting a filling. Ever. Surely a drill in my mouth and the affixing of a foreign object would ring a bell? Not so much. Anyway, I made the appointment.

Every time I go to a new dentist, which seems to be often, thanks to my ever-changing jobs and address, I miss Dr. Schneider. I have been going to Schneider Family Dentistry in Gaithersburg, MERland since I was five years old. With country music on the loudspeakers and twangs in the accents of the staff, it's the kind of place that makes you remember that Maryland is south of the Mason-Dixon Line -- but in a nice way.

Dr. Bill made going to the dentist seem like no big deal. "Hay Miss ChrisTEENa, how you doin'?" he'd say, swooping into the room and plopping down next to me. "How's your summer goin'?" He always gave my teeth a rave review, too. "Beeyootiful," he'd say, and send me on my way. If I managed to avoid the one hygienist we called The Crusher, it was usually a totally unobjectionable experience.

Now Dr. Bill's son runs the practice. I recently called the office to see if he could work on my teeth the next time I'm in town. Dr. Adam called me back himself. "How's San Francisco?" he said, sounding even twangier than his dad ever did. "You know, I just read my daughter May-belle the Cay-ble Car." It's a simple thing, but it's profoundly comforting: that dentistry knows me, and I know them. It changes without really changing.

Anyway, point being, I've got no problem with dentists and have been fortunate to encounter very good ones. Dr. Terry is no exception, and she plays R&B in her office, so she improves upon Dr. Schneider in at least one way. I didn't have any particular worries heading into my filling replacement.

"You'll feel a pinch," she said as she injected the Novocaine. A penetrating burn bloomed in my mouth as the anaesthetic entered my gums. "It'll be about 10 minutes for that to take effect," she said, and I nodded.

I haven't had Novocaine administered much in my life, and I remember getting a little nauseous when I had it about five years ago. Now, sitting in Dr. Terry's office, my hands began to shake. "Would you like to read a magazine?" the assistant said, and I nodded, taking a People magazine. I tried to concentrate as Elizabeth Edwards' face loomed before me, along with the headline "HER UNTOLD STORY." My heart raced, and the tremors continued. "OK, Christina," I said to myself. "You're OK." My breath was shallow, stomach queasy.

I paged through the magazine, trying to distract myself, but my body was unassuaged. Was I having a panic attack? It sure felt that way, but believe it or not, this stress case doesn't get panic attacks. Still, the feeling of unease was such that I imagined having a heart attack in the chair, winding up in the hospital as my coworkers wondered what was taking me so long at the dentist.

After awhile, I surrendered the magazine and the dentist began her work, humming along to Sade while I lay there feeling like I was living out a scene from Requiem for a Dream. When it was over, I sat there feeling fragile and wanting to cry. "I don't know why, but I feel really shaky from the Novocaine," I said as the dentist put things away.

"Oh, that's because the Novocaine we use has epinephrine in it," she said, as if this were a perfectly unremarkable fact.

Epinephrine? Well, of course, because what you want when you are undergoing treatment in the dentist's chair is a heightened sense of the fight-or-flight response that only adrenaline can deliver. Like, am I the only one who feels like 20/20 should be doing investigative reports about this?

I virtually flipped out on the drive home, feeling like a prizefighter with a fat lip and a hormone imbalance, willing the stuff out of my system and musing about what a bad scene it would have been if I had ever gotten the gumption to do any real drugs in college. This was my brain on Novocaine -- what would it be like if did acid, or mushrooms? For sure I would have been the kid who ran through a window or jumped off a building in the name of some harmless recreational fun.

Has anyone else had this experience with the Dentist's Drug? O friends. I was a long way from Highlights.

Levity Break.

Top Two Rap Album Titles

It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, DMX

Chicken and Beer, Ludacris

What else? What else can compete with this kind of artistry?

911.

Last weekend I volunteered in the kitchen at CUESA's Spring Breakfast, an event supporting the Ferry Plaza farmer's market.

Most of the time, working CUESA's Saturday market events is a pleasant and calm experience. You help procure the ingredients from the farm stands, do any prep necessary, watch the chef's demonstration, hand out free samples of whatever the chef makes, and help clean up.

The Spring Breakfast, on the other hand, is much more of a production: three seatings of paying customers, 350 people in total, large platters of food to be produced. On the buffet line, the customers can get demanding, if not downright odd. "No pancakes," said one elderly woman, waving my spatula away from her plate. "But what's that?" she asked, pointing at something else.

"It's lemon ricotta, to go with the pancakes," I answered.

"Oh, give me some of that. You can put it right on the salad." My co-volunteer winced as I ladled the sweet ricotta onto a salad of bitter greens and bacon, as ordered. Whatever you say, lady.

Even the most well-choreographed culinary event is a chaotic scene requiring a certain type of person: the person who knows how to take charge. I am not that person. I am the one who knows how to take orders. As the Spring Breakfast whirlwind swirled around me, I noticed other workers (to be fair, they turned out to be professionals) taking tasks out from under me, spotting things that needed to be done and doing them before I could get to it. At the end of it all, I felt oddly dejected.

You know that stock scene on TV shows and movies, when something really bad happens, and a witness just stands there in shock? Finally, someone else steps in and yells at the person to call an ambulance, go get help, hide the evidence, etc. The stunned character is always portrayed as a combination of innocent, cowardly and a bit weak upstairs. These scenes prompt viewers to think, "DO something, you simp!" But I empathize.

A few years ago I took a weeklong multimedia seminar at Berkeley, where we were broken into teams to produce a package about a given topic. My group's assignment involved a man who built custom guitars, and the five of us headed out to his home to interview him.

The subject of our story opened the door and welcomed us into his home, which was neat and quiet. He began to show us his creations, and as we set up for recording, someone asked him a question.

The pause before he answered was too long. With his back toward us, the man froze in a standing position and then oozed to the floor, twitching violently.

It was a torturous few seconds before we realized what was happening, then a couple seconds more as we stood processing it, horrified and slackjawed. "He's having a seizure," someone said. Finally -- finally, at least two of us sprang to action. "Call 911!" someone said, and the number was dialed while another person bent down and tried to prevent the man from biting his tongue. I stood there, watching, not sure what to do.

The man's girlfriend, who was there without us knowing it, emerged from another part of the house and ran to the man's side. "I was afraid this would happen!" she cried, and rocked his small and wiry body, which had now settled into quiet tremors. She sat there stroking his head and talking to him, though he was still far away. It soon felt as if we were intruders, wrong in our roles as witnesses and impotent as potential help. Eventually the girlfriend got us to leave, reassuring us that the man would be all right. We were quiet in the car ride back, divided in my mind between those who had reacted quickly and those who hadn't. I felt both kinship and disgust toward those with me in the latter camp.

Most of the crises in my life have been slow-moving behemoths, rather than flashes of consequence. I am practiced at painstaking decisions, torturous contemplation, difficult departures, necessary goodbyes, massive recalculations and new undertakings. Thankfully, most of these crises have been internal, soluble, relatively minor; I had the means to navigate through them.

When it comes to those crises that strike within seconds or minutes, demanding quick and decisive action, God help you -- and me. One late night in New York, I found myself facing a cracked-out mugger in the vestibule of my building. It was almost as if someone else took my place: I ended up laughing at and arguing with a man who was quite seriously trying to rob me. This wasn't bravado -- it was a sheer inability to perceive my life as if it were truly happening to me.

When the mugger left, I dialed 911, shaking and crying. "I don't know if it matters, but I just got mugged," I said. I don't know if it matters. I still think of the operator and how kindly she spoke to me: "Of course it matters," she said. "I'm so sorry that happened to you." The fact that I lost nothing more than $8, my pager and a night of sleep is due to nothing but the grace of some power up there.

In such moments of truth -- the mugging, a road incident, a child's fall -- I have managed to depend on luck and the sharpness of others. Ultimately, one or the other is bound to fail, forcing me to acquire the self-determination that can rescue something so trivial as a breakfast and so valuable as a life.

Personal Etymology.

One day I noticed that one of my coworkers was reacting to a piece of news with a low, drawn-out, "Whuuuut." You know, like shorthand for "What the hell."

"Hey!" I thought. "She picked that up from me." I would have been flattered if the intonation had been mine in the first place, but the fact was that I had already stolen it from my former coworker Bill. Now my coworker from Hawaii was talking like my former coworker from South Carolina. American state fusion!

I am painfully aware that my speech patterns, catchphrases and laughing styles are 95 percent plagiarized from other people. I have stolen one laugh from my sister, another from my friend Haylie. I have a certain way of making pronouncements that comes from Jen, and a way of imitating smug people that comes from Marcel. I say "bummer" now because of Rosie, and have an anticipatory "get excited!" tone directly cadged from Crissy. I was one of those annoying people who picked up the inflection when I went abroad to London (though to my credit, I lost it after awhile, unlike you, Madonna). I mean, is there nothing original about my speech patterns? I wait for the day when someone imitates me -- and it's really me.

Your Inner Life Is Your Best Friend.

That's what M. told me last night. Isn't that true of everyone?

I met a four-and-a-half-year old at Passover seder the other night and we became fast friends, discussing such matters as parrot tattoos and afikomen hiding places.

As she planted herself on my lap, she turned to look at me and cocked her head. "When I saw you, I could tell you were a daughter," she said sagely.

"Really?" I said. "How could you tell?"

"Because you were sitting next to your mother," she answered.

My sister-in-law corrected her. "Actually, that was my mother. Christina's mother isn't here tonight."

A lot of explanation ensued, explanation about in-laws and faraway mothers and grown-up kids. It was too much for the girl, so she changed her assessment.

"Well. I can tell you are a teenager," she said.

"Why, thank you," I said. "Really, I am a teenager on the inside."

"You are older on the outside," she said, nodding definitively. "But on the inside you are a teenager."

"Yes," I agreed.

Sigh.

Beautiful Friendships.

Have you ever fallen for a coworker?

I don't mean "fallen" in the romantic way. I mean it in the way that allows you to discover a real kinship with someone that you never would have sought out, just because you walk into the same office every day. You say your good mornings, you silently tolerate injustices together, you commiserate over shared hurdles, and you accidentally discover someone great. I still think of awesome people that I met at work: Some are now far away or long out of touch, but I remember jokes they made, ways they operated, stories they told.

Have you ever worked someplace where you have no connection to the people around you? You walk in there and it's all polite, but you wouldn't care if you never saw those people again. It's like a never-ending doctor's appointment. That's what makes the jobs with cool people all the more precious.

I met one of my best friends when he joined our "news" organization in New York in 1998. When he started work, he was always extremely nervous about doing something wrong and I thought he was way too concerned about things. He was the Fretful New Guy, and that's all he was to me. Then one day I was talking to no one in particular about a radio station in Washington. "Oh Christina," he said, turning around in his chair. "Do you know D.C. radio?" Thus, a friendship was born.

Other connections have not been so long-lived. I once joined a team of five people that made my job, and my life at the time, bearable because of the amount of fun we had. Every day, we filed into the conference room for our story meeting, and that was probably the best part of my day. But one of us eventually left the company, then another one, and two remaining people paired off and got married. I'm only friends with one of them now, but it was fun while it lasted.

My newest work coterie consists of myself and three other people. We should probably be sick of each other by now from the amount of socializing that we do on top of work, but somehow we aren't.

This quadro-friendship seems all the more sweet because it seems unlikely to last. Three of us are single and the other is married but with no real responsibilities. We are all at various stages of the honeymoon with our employer. At some point, something is bound to bring down our happy dynamic: a new job, a move, a new attachment, a falling-out. Something will happen, and things will not be the same. I guess one benefit of age is that your enjoyment of things as they are is enhanced by the awareness that they will eventually change.