#295
Are you sick of that Goo Goo Dolls song yet
Last week, my husband went on a business trip. He was only away for two nights, which is, to me, the sensible limit for such an excursion. It was not always that way but fortunately (?) many companies have less money to spend on such things, or at least less appetite to spend it, than they used to.
In 2017, I spent a very long Sunday through Thursday at Oracle OpenWorld (now enshittified to Oracle AI World) and took daily Ubers to a brewery at 5:30 am so I could set up my team’s Customer Welcome Center on the second floor. I dragged high-top tables into position and covered them in bright red table socks. I set up monitors for the demo stations. I arranged the swag, which dwindled as the week went on, and then all day I would scan badges of Big Important Men from airlines and industrial equipment manufacturers and foreign governments.
On the day of my flight home, I stopped in the hotel’s business center before calling my sunrise Uber and printed out an offer letter for a new job, signed it, and faxed it back. At the brewery, I packed everything into boxes and labeled them for storage. I would still have to give notice and work out my two weeks but I felt free and very done with OpenWorld.
When the rest of the team finally trickled in1, a senior director whose attitude toward me had taken a decidedly nasty turn2 in the run-up to the event, mentioned something about everyone meeting for breakfast the next morning. I told her I was leaving that afternoon and she barked “Next year, you need to understand you don’t leave until Friday, okay?” And because I’d signed that offer letter and by next year OpenWorld would be but a figment of my imagination, I just said “okay.” I gave my notice on Monday morning and my manager laughed because I was the second person on her team to quit that day.
As I interview for a new job, however far I get in the interview process, there is always a moment where I think – are these my new people? The people I’ll see on Zoom most every day, and in person hopefully very rarely, because I don’t love work travel (see above)? Sometimes it feels very overwhelming. Get to know more people? In this timeline? Seems unthinkable.
I made one of those “me in the 90s” instagram videos, like a real sucker. I felt justified because the 90s was when I graduated from high school, finished college, got my first job and moved into my first apartment. A lot happened! There were a few outtakes I didn’t include, for instance this senior picture proof that I did not order copies of:
The chokehold that turtlenecks had on my generation!
Here is me holding a friend’s baby, whose identity is obscured by his sunglasses and also by the fact that he is nearly thirty years old now:
I lost a lot of photos from this era when the basement of our duplex apartment flooded sometime around 2012. So I’m glad I have what I have, including this example of business-wear-as-club-wear:
Here are a bunch of my college friends at my parents’ house sometime around 1995 or 1996 and will you look at our feet. I mean.
Finally I was properly sad when the hoodie in this picture went missing:
I don’t remember where it was from, but I wore it constantly.
In going through these pictures I considered doing a theme issue of “me wearing flannel” or “me holding a beer” but there are just too many of both. Sadly I don’t think I have any pictures of me smoking? Which is odd because for a time in the 1990s I STAYED SMOKING but if any evidence exists, I don’t have it. I also do not have any pictures where you can clearly see my pierced eyebrow. Incidentally, I got it pierced on that Arizona trip by a shirtless man who worked out of an old house with a cactus planted in a toilet in the front yard. Colorful!
Despite having lost all this photographic evidence, and despite knowing the pictures I do have are destined to clutter my house until I die, I remain grateful that phone cameras and social media were Not A Thing in the 90s. I don’t know how kids today do it, to be honest. It’s one thing to know there’s a print photo of me clearly high as hell and wearing a Macbeth t-shirt that was probably from the Wireless catalog, but at least it is not going to go viral without me doing it myself (hence why it is not shared here, I mean Macbeth???!?!?).
Did you watch the Oscars? I did, though I missed large parts of it because we were eating dinner in the dining room like real aristocrats. I really don’t understand how a broadcast in which nothing happens can take so long? I’m not even sure why the orchestra bothers playing people off, as I’m not sure it would add that much time to simply let people say a few words. It’s an especially bad look because the people who get played off are usually not white, or not from the US, or women! Funny that!
There was one point where I walked out of the room in total disinterest, which was when Anna Wintour and Anne Hathaway appeared on stage to present. I feel whatever about Anna Wintour, but I am disgusted by her embrace of tacky Bezos money and this, to me, seems like an attempt to lean into appearing to have a sense of humor about herself in hopes of goosing her image somewhat.
I am also well documented as having never been able to stand Hathaway, I’m sorry, I do not get it at all! For evidence I submit each incredibly cringe thing she has ever done, including accepting her Oscar for Les Miserables (unforgivable casting, I will never see it) and telling her director in an upcoming film that “I have to apologize, because I think what's going to come out of me will hurt you.3” I have to apologize, because please give me a motherfucking break.
Anyway, all that to say, I could really care less about The Devil Wears Prada sequel, and I love that movie, despite its star. I clearly (see above!) am subject to nostalgia, but we are drowning in it at the expense of creating new stuff (also coming in 2026: another Meet the Parents movie). I also just find it sad that two out of the four stars of this thing look like they have aged appropriately in the last 20 years, and two of them look exactly the same only weirder because WHY HAVEN’T YOU AGED IN THE LAST 20 YEARS. People’s uncanny valley faces are another reason why it’s sort of depressing to watch the Oscars anymore, I’m aware this is far from an original line of thinking but it’s hard not to feel some kind of way looking at Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman.
In closing, my favorite Oscar winner was this woman, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who won for Best Cinematography for Sinners, a movie I will unfortunately never see because I am a baby:
She looked regal, she was chill but heartfelt, her colleagues seemed fucking JAZZED for her, her son has amazing hair. More of everything like this, please!
On the first morning of the conference I got a very bitchy phone call from our events coordinator, asking me to please hurry up and meet everyone else in the hotel lobby otherwise we’d all be late to set up, and it gave me an extraordinary amount of pleasure to calmly say, “I’m already at the venue. Everything is set up. So you can all take your time.”
I can only guess her behavior was due to generalized annoyance, event-related tension, or something in her real life that was causing distress, but just a few months prior, I’d helped this woman empty a tampon machine at an Oracle office as she complained about the horrors of perimenopause. I deserved better!
The plot of this film: “The film follows the psychosexual affair between pop singer Mary (Hathaway) and fashion designer Sam (Coel) after the former's need for a dress for her new tour draws them back together.” OKAY, SURE