SloB

Deer signs

What are we supposed to do with these? Stop at the sign in case there’s a deer? Slow down on the highway, when we were going at 130? Is it really absolutely garanteed that this is where the deer jump onto the road, and nowhere else? Do the deer use them? Have these signs ever prevented an accident?

Electronic signs on Toronto highways

In addition to traffic slowdown warnings, you may have noticed those signs on Toronto highways say things like “always check your blind spot” and “fasten your seat belts”. I am waiting for the moment they’re going to say “wash your hands after you pee” and “always wear clean underwear”. (Update : recently, I entered a Driver’s licensing office and the electronic sign there warned everyone not to sneeze on their hands. I am serious. Guess it’s no longer funny…)

Extreme….

I’m at a Second Cup, and on a chalkboard the copy exhorts everyone to “expand their taste buds”, with flavours like “extreme lemon”. I suppose we can expand our taste buds the way we ought to expand our consciousness. Instead of tripping out on drugs, unfolding from yoga or labouring in Buddhism, we can just get our taste buds to expand themselves safely on lemon, mango and peach ginger. This is nice. Probably cheaper as well as less time-consuming.

I am trying to picture an extreme lemon. Lemons as a whole do not strike as capable of extremism. Of course, I haven’t read or learned everything there is to know in life. I suppose it would be very, very yellow, probably quite big for a lemon, and very sour. Or tart. Don’t call me sour, it would yell out, in an extreme type of way; I’m tart! Über-tart! It would be the super-Vindaloo of lemonhood.

Everything is now extreme. There are extreme haircuts, along with extreme bird baths, hand towels, window-washing and dog-walking services. I saw a poster for the Extreme Roofing company once. I wouldn’t want to work there. Ladders? No way! We’re extreme roofers! We’ll just use our toes and fingertips and never mind ropes, ‘cause those are for newbies! And we like it when it rains! The upside, I guess, is that they’re unlikely to sue for injuries. Though you never know.

Working Wounded: group portrait

Despite its posters of matchsticks catching fire, admonishing everyone to mind their contagious attitudes, the publishing house was a hive with a revolving door. Newly arrived, Ginny felt like a test-tube experiment about to go bad. Most people who arrived there with any notion of being special deflated quickly, like so many children’s birthday balloons left forgotten in a park. At first, they would spread out adroitly before what they believe to be an appreciative audience the unique path they had taken to join the company. Invariably, they had been to many countries, some quite exotic, and had lived remarkable adventures. They spoke five, or seven, or twelve, or even fifteen languages, though not all of them fluently. Just as invariably, their life experiences, even their very personalities, were met with a wall of indifference. As a result, they acquired the appearance of blinking automatons fairly early in their employment. It was not that others were hostile to their new colleagues, or felt threatened by them. Quite simply, too many new and eager faces had passed through the doors of the company to go back out again and be replaced by another, almost identical crop.

Amongst the new, and newly deflated, there was Synthia-with-an-S. Synthia was newly graduated with honours from the best university in the country. Abrasive, accomplished at virtually anything she set her mind to, she was quite intelligent and proud of the fact. She was bossy and naturally quick to show everyone their mistakes, how to correct them, and how to accomplish any given task presented to them. In short, Synthia-with-an-S was a pain-in-the-B. Aged 25, she declared herself a Buddhist – not, Ginny felt, out of any nascent, burning, natural spiritual hunger, but because, having mastered kayaking in Indonesia, singing in a band in France and the Danish language in Seattle, she could hardly resist conquering the challenge of spiritual perfection. Faced with the indifference both around her and toward her, Synthia retreated into a blustering joviality, knitting alliances with broad helpings of giggles and forced humour. Thus, she retained her significance, her sense of mattering to the world. She remained happy and motivated, something which Ginny and most other workers could not claim for themselves.

Amidst all those who tried and failed to be special, Kalle stood out by not even trying. At first sight, and perhaps at second and third sights, he was a perfectly ordinary man, with nothing to make him stand out from his surroundings. He wore the same type of fashionable clothes as countless others, with one long-sleeved shirt under a short-sleeved one festooned with corporate logos. His hair was parted just like several other young mens’, with a duck-like pompadour that made him look like a cockatiel, especially when he whistled, which was often. He liked to follow soccer, the most popular sport in 90 percent of the world. His glasses had no frames, adding only a hint of gravitas to his angular features. It was precisely this chameleon-like quality that Ginny first noticed about him. He seemed to have developed the ability to hide in plain sight and deflect attention from himself even as he stood in the middle of the room. Another peculiar thing she noticed was the pronounced dichotomy in his character. One side of him radiated an almost transcendental maturity: responsible to a fault, or scathingly critical. Another side broke out often: impish, impudent, sniggering, youthful to the point of a complete regression into adolescence.

She knew he was too susceptible, too vulnerable to the opinion of others, to take any serious notice of her. She was more plain than beautiful, more quirky than confident. He would be too easily dissuaded from following his heart and natural inclinations, should they lean toward her, by the fashion of the day, the diktats of being accepted by others. At heart he may have been a good sort. He may have been sweet. He may have been moved by those things which elicit the deepest human emotions. But in the end, these sentiments within him took no root. They were frail and easily dispersed. He was an indecisive man. That was the most enduring feature of his personality.

Perhaps, however, Kalle suffered instead from what Ginny dubbed the Groucho Marx complex: he would never join a club that would have him as a member or, more precisely, felt too great a suspicion at any attention being showered upon him to return it fully and whole-heartedly without a single afterthought. Any affection of which he was the object seemed tainted in his eyes. When Ginny turned away, detached herself, felt confidently independent of his opinion and gaze, he appeared sheepish, awkward, meek and soulful; and she almost felt as if she had the power to make him inexpressibly happy merely by looking at him kindly and magnanimously. Conversely, when she, herself, looked at him with any sort of meek admiration, he appeared to stomp haughtily away from her line of vision at the first opportunity. Of course, this could also indicate that he wished to be dominated by a powerful woman. Ginny didn’t mind the idea, but only so long as it wasn’t in perpetuity. Domination was fine in special clubs on Saturdays but there were times when it grew tiresome to order a man to behave like a footstool.

Kalle judged her in a negative light most days, Ginny reflected. He could not stand what he appeared to see as her self-indulgence and complete lack of physical discipline. The fact of drinking two colas in one night or having more than one helping of dessert elicited repulsion and contempt in his eyes, tone of voice and comments. Ginny, on her part, couldn’t stand Kalle’s moral ambivalence in the face of malice and backstabbing. Ginny thought to herself: why should Kalle’s judgement be superior to her own? To her, befriending the unbefriendable, the malicious, those who gossiped in such a manner as to hurt and destroy others, was to her far worse than simply having a second helping of chocolate, or for example, not minding one’s posture and relaxing in a chair.

Why did she care so much about his judgement? Humans are social animals. Office politics could be just as harrowing as a skirmish in a wolves’ pack, she thought. The outcome of losing the fight or the job would be the same: a loss of food, a loss of shelter, a loss of companionship – and, therefore, misery, or perhaps even death. It was the perfect picture of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Ginny knew that in that respect she was treading a fine line with the office gossip. His name was Ansell. He strutted – no, glided across the floor, like a model on a runway, despite his slight paunch of which he was quite self-conscious, and his tonsure that made him look more like a monk than either the professional he was, or the dandy he had once been and perhaps still aspired to be. He carried with him daily his bag of fruit and vegetables, which he ostentatiously consumed to demonstrate to one and all that he had a dainty appetite that could not possible damage his figure.

She saw the pinched face and nose, the malevolent blankness of the stare across the top of her head. His wormlike words had destroyed more than one colleague’s reputation and driven away several neophytes. Ansell excelled at the art of being the third-hand source of every rumour circulating on the floor: he never made wild accusations to anyone’s face, never denounced anyone directly by name to management, but simply undermined his subordinate colleagues’ credibility with sarcasm and disdain, calling them uptight and much worse if they dared protest the tone of voice he used with them directly while critiquing the quality of their work. Behind anyone’s back, including his superiors, he was lethal and held little or nothing back.