Monday, February 11, 2002

Keeping up with my old homies over at Amazon, this entertaining piece was at Wick'd Boy News, a drunken blog by a legend of Amazonian foolishness. He writes:

I later went to Night One - the big A's post-holiday party they had at the historic(ed. it is now closed) Seattle DC. They turned it into a big Ol' Rave-BurningMan kind of event (complete with museum and multimedia installation art representing our past 7 years of toil). Overall, it was the good, party-hard kind of spectacle that usually gets thrown... Big and flashy and fun, but at the same time, it was one of those awful work functions where I lapse into the following exchange with almost everyone:

Them: Hey, you came!

Me: Yeah, I had to see... Morbid curiosity.

Them: (Straining to hear) Yeah... What?

Me: Nothing. Wasn't important.

Them: (looking at over the crowd) - Kinda weird huh? You know?

Me: Yeah, very weird.

Them: Yeah. Well, see ya. Gotta get another beer.

Me: Yes! Have fun!

I couldn't only take less than an hour with strained conversations.


It's nice to read these accounts, because sometimes when I look up from my book and show for ten minutes I think that maybe I'm crazy...but then I realize that it isn't me, it's Amazon, and more than Amazon, it's the culture of Required Faux-Hip Office Parties everywhere--more often than not icky and in a lot of cases it's because the people you work with are the last ones you want to have fun with. It took me years to believe this, but I now think you should actually enjoy the humans you spend the majority of your life with. If you think about it, this is actually a radical act if you try to exercise it in actual life. I can't say it's been all skateboards and five-cent cigars for me, but it's working for me.