Got Beef?

This is my Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy Task Force diary. Due to my desire to keep my job, there is nothing about how the task force was actually run, who my coworkers were, how we traded arms to the Iranians for hostages, etc. The diary amuses me, so maybe it'll amuse you. It seemed like a waste to leave all this text lying around doing nothing. Post-task force additions are indicated using [brackets].

1/25

Three of the five urinals in the Terminal A men's bathroom at Not Reagan National Airport are closed off from public access with tape reading "RESTRICTED AREA/AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY." The dude in the far urinal seemed surprised when I pulled up next to him. I felt like telling him, "I would have taken another urinal, but I don't have clearance." Because truly, if I had whizzed in one of the RESTRICTED urinals, the terrorists would have won.

In Seattle's airport, by contrast, the yellow tape blocking access to the men's bathroom urinals just says OUT OF ORDER. Accurate, and thus boring. Is this a portent?

1/27

Here I am in sunny Yakima, and I arrived for a few of the only days over the last month when anyone’s been able to use that adjective. Nevertheless, just for me, the huge mountain overlooking everything is quite visible: through the window of the closed restaurant in which we have set up shop, out the back window of my room in the adjacent hotel, and looming particularly impressively over the Yakima Greenway hiking/biking trail. This last follows the river as it snakes alongside the mountain, and at 5 am when I ran a few miles this morning the whole scene was eerily beautiful. The mountain and river are both visible in indirect manmade halflight, although they were scary even to me as I considered the numerous shadowy places in which a murderer could be lurking. Hey, maybe there’s one there! Nope. This bridge could certainly house a — Nope. Well, what about black ice on the roadway? Haven’t fallen so far. Still, I may hie myself to a gym proper soon, since I’ve heard there’s a Gold’s down the road.

My booth neighbors are both data enterers. Just like I used to be! The one behind me was just listening to Big L’s The Big Picture, and yesterday was listening to Al Green, so I like him. It’s not quite like having cube neighbors, though, because everyone could be someone else tomorrow. The ergonomics of typing on a laptop in a booth are, as you might expect, horrendous; I can feel my shoulders straining with any bouts of extended typing. The lack of work may turn out to be, in the medium term, a blessing.

Most people here appear to be extremely competent and kind at once, a rare enough combination of qualities. Some people don’t appear too eager to socialize, but all of them deliver the info I need without complaint, and some of them even do it without being repeatedly asked to. This is my first day doing the report alone, after a grand total of one day of training. I’m confident that I can get it done and pretty sure that there will be a bump or two along the way. That’s just how these things go.

I can tell I need to eat lunch because I’m having big existential thoughts. I swear, in five minutes.

Apres lunch. It’s hard to tell why I’m here. The irony is inescapable – I jumped on this opportunity precisely because I thought it would be a completely different work experience, and it is: I work much longer and eat worse food and do less work. That last one was supposed to be “much more work,” and was supposed to be the rationale for coming out here, besides the overtime pay: feeling useful, feeling like a contributor, feeling central to the efforts of a team working for a noble cause instead of a necessary distraction to the efforts of a team that would rather pay as little attention as possible to my products, which is what I get at home. Well, here, everyone does pay attention to my products. And I’m working for a nobler cause. But I’m still peripheral. I’m not writing; I’m assembling data, using organizational rather than prose-creation skills. I dunno. I suppose I should be used to this by now, but I’m not.

Question: Isn’t it odd that I come to work wanting to exert myself as much as possible and then my ambition is thwarted at every turn? Is that for-real genuine irony? Is it indicative of huge personality flaws for yours truly? (Answers: Yes, in some removed-from-reality world; yes; probably not, and the only reason you’re suggesting it is because you think you should be more like your slacker friends [not that all my friends are slackers! he hastily emended].)

The restaurant where we work is a vision of hunter green and floral patterns, with dark cherry-finished wood fixtures and a few of those weird indoor trees scattered about. Multiple levels, ceiling fans, and exposed (but painted) duct piping above break up what otherwise could be a barnlike space; cheesy little curtains separate the booths, while other walls are taken up with more standard padded seats. In another time, there were tables and loose chairs next to the padded seats; now those tables have been shoved around into passable workstations, and the chairs have been herded into the large central clearing to serve as a meeting area. The whole place is strewn with extension cords; I’m connected to the network via AirPort and to an outlet via an extension cord to a power strip that is connected to an outlet somewhere that I frankly can’t find. It’s like that.

The north face of the restaurant boasts wall-to-ceiling windows that provide terrific views of the river immediately in back of the restaurant and the mountains set off only a little bit farther. When I got here this morning at 7, the vista was completely dark. At 5, the vista was completely dark again. I’ve been working in this booth for the vast majority of the intervening time.

Elsewhere there is a bar room, in which we hold our staff meetings; a bakery, which is empty; and a men’s bathroom that has a severe plumbing problem that no one thinks is important enough to fix but which makes using the restroom a trial for one’s nose. If I lived in Yakima when this restaurant was actually open, I’d try this place out; the space has that generous air to it of a restaurant without astonishingly good food but with reasonable prices and a fun atmosphere. [A couple days later, however, I was informed that the place actually closed due to a rodent problem, which makes me significantly less interested in theoretically eating here.]

[Further notes on restaurant from 1/31: Also, I’m sure the restroom was once lit well enough to see where you were going when the restaurant was actually in use, and that better lighting might aid the bathroom’s users in aiming properly, possibly minimizing the massive odor problems. Ahem.]

As I mentioned above, the booths were not designed for use by people typing on laptops. I have to raise my hands to about the middle of my chest in order to properly address the keyboard, and my shoulders become fatigued after tying more than two or three sentences. Having originally injured myself in similar (though less extreme) circumstances, I fear for the wrists of my data-entering comrades.

1/29

I suppose I should be exploring Yakima more, but (a) the two hours between getting off work and sleeping are pretty dead ones for me and (b) from what I’ve seen of Yakima, I’m not sure I want to explore anymore. It appears to have experienced its first great wave of development in the 60s, and many of the groovy signage and design elements of that era have persisted up to this day, the once-gleaming buildings that sported the ornamentation now themselves faded and deserted-looking. The Yakima Convention Center (which this week welcomes Bimart, which is probably not a store entirely geared towards persons of dual sexuality) is a good example of this: all swoopy glass and circular adornments and thick sans-serif typefaces, and its edges look worn and its paint looks dull and the building generally looks lost. Stores have parking lots built for huge hordes of eager shoppers that never showed up and signs that are sized and painted to compete with each other for dominion of the skyline (and that all lose inevitably to the mountains). I think the only healthy-looking asphalt I’ve seen the entire time I’ve been here is on the Yakima Greenway, where I hope to jog later this morning; the concrete aggregate most of the roads are constructed from looks ground down by the years.

There are some nicer developments, or at least newer, more prosperous-looking developments. The Wal-Mart across the street from the Oxford Inn is the prime example of this, with a huge parking lot always filled in front of an equally huge store. There’s something called the Greenway Center with a Target and an Office Depot and several smaller businesses that looks exactly like the Pentagon City equivalent. In forty years, I suppose, these too will look dated, and newer asphalt gardens with the latest hypernational shops will spring up in ground as yet unploughed. Yes, I said “unploughed.”

1/30

Random notes [not that those other ones weren't random]:

MTV’s Direct Effect has to be the most annoying show ever, especially since I’ve watched parts of it three times now. Well, maybe that sentence doesn’t make sense to you, but you haven’t been working 12-hour days for the past four days, nor have you become desperate for hip-hop in the evenings after listening to country and/or a weird omnioldies station (more on this below) quietly on the PA in your restaurant-office. Anyway, Direct Effect features the world-famous DJ Clue, who always introduces himself as “the world-famous DJ Clue,” and a veejay named La La who is indistinguishable from all the other DJs save that she’s black and she’s named after slang for marijuana. Yay. Here is how their prattle goes:

DJ Clue: Here is a video by an artist I am aware of. He was featured on a mixtape I did [or] He was featured on some mixtape somewhere. The video is hot. I am the world-famous DJ Clue.

La La: I like everything! Yeah! Be sure to check out my appearances elsewhere on MTV! They will be off the hook!

Sometimes they engage in actual dialogue-like interactions, which always go like this:

DJ Clue: Say, I hear that you may be promiscuous, La La.

La La: Excuse me! I am not promiscuous. But I am dating Ja Rule (apparently). And I am appearing on other MTV shows! Yeah!

Omnioldies: The oldies station currently leaking out of the overhead loudspeakers is perfectly content to play Chic, the Monkees, the Beatles, the Supremes and that “Hey Mickey” song in the same hour. As I am writing this they have played Stevie Wonder and “To Everything There Is a Season (Turn, Turn, Turn)” within 10 minutes of each other. As anyone who has ever sat in a restaurant with me knows, unless the music being played in a space is coming at a near-subliminal volume, it will catch my ear and distract me. So I find my thoughts often turning to this station’s omnivorous appetites — stuff from the early 80s and stuff from the early 60s, black oldies and extremely white oldies, whatever. I’d rather have one of the four Spanish-language stations that played on my cursory scan of the local radio when I was driving my rental car, but whatever.

The music isn’t on quite so loud that I can’t drown it out with the local laptop and a classical CD. I’m so glad I filled up my travel pack. Haydn, Bach and Beethoven have really been helping me out. But then, when have they not?

1/31

I may not have adequately communicated the cognitive dissonance I experience when I hear “If You Really Love Me” and “Mony, Mony” coming out of the same radio station above. I suppose the fault is not the radio station’s but mine – I have become accustomed to concentrating on particular compartments of music, and those two songs do fall into completely separate bins, ne’er the musical twain to meet. I recall the occasion a coworker referred to “you know, that Weezer video” in a conversation with me, and my immediate reaction was “Why would I know anything about anything Weezer does?” Perhaps the people who watch MTV indiscriminately are the true avatars of inclusiveness, and persons like myself who direct their musical inquiries to a select few genres are artifacts of a bygone age when the boundaries of taste had not been completely leveled. Hip-hop is better than rap-metal! Classical is better than emo! Oops, I forgot the time in which I live.

Yesterday I decided to go out and drive ‘round Yakima. I have a rental car, of course, as leaving someone in a city like Yakima without a rental car would be tantamount to just telling them to starve (or, I suppose, to eat only at the Burger King next door to the hotel). The rental car is a Mitsubishi Lancer, and like 99% of the cars produced in 1995 or later, it is more powerful than my car, a 1995 Chevrolet Cavalier with the special Lo-Horse engine. Now, I do not like my car, but I do feel a kind of odd affection for it, seeing as how it was passed to me from my grandmother and it does at least get me where I need to go when I need to use it, albeit with much grumbling. So when I am enjoying the relatively Herculean power of the Lancer, I feel the odd sensation of guilt. What would my Cavalier think if it heard of me actually enjoying the sensation of moving away from a stoplight quickly, or merging into highway traffic without feeling compelled to offer up a desperate prayer to whatever deities may be present? It would think, “I have no torque,” that’s what it would think, because that’s all it ever thinks.

Drivers in Yakima are weird. They all drive the speed limit, and they establish safe following distances, even when the driver in front of them is going less than the speed limit. This is as opposed to Washington, where if you drive the speed limit people will tailgate you in an attempt to remind you that you could theoretically be going faster than you are, while never actually passing you because it would deprive them of the opportunity to tailgate. Well, maybe it’s Washington drivers who are weird. Nevertheless, I constantly find myself evaluating whether I can make a left-hand turn using the assumption that the oncoming drivers will be hammering the accelerator when they see that there are no cars in front of them; when the Yakimans just crawl up the road, I have time to both realize the error in my assumption and make my turn.

Yakiman drivers do, however, make extremely vague turns, turns for which they start braking way before it is actually necessary to brake and come nearly to a complete stop before executing. They’re also lane-weavers, and they run a lot of lights. A lot. So many that I myself got caught up in the light-running excitement and probably ran more lights than I actually legitimately went through on a trip to Safeway. “Go for the yellow, Andrew!”

Yakiman road planners seem to have settled on the five-lane road (two lanes each direction with a center lane for turners) as the Platonic ideal of thoroughfare design, and consequently every main street in Yakima looks about the same as the others, which is a bit bewildering to the visiting driver attempting to discern local color from the confines of his Mitsubishi Lancer. I do have to say that the signs I complained about above look better at night, when the power lines giving them juice are lost against the black sky and the signs themselves look less like pathetic attempts at outdoing each other and more like beacons for much smaller businesses. I’m still quite opposed to this style of development, but one can’t deny that it does have its (isolated, puny) aesthetic pleasures to give.

(Does this oldies station have a Martha Reeves and the Vandellas Greatest Hits CD in the changer or what? Not that I am complaining.)

My rental car can boast a CD player, and I was rocking a mix CD I created to try to get a friend of mine interested in hip-hop last night. It closes with my parody of LL Cool J’s “Big Ole Butt,” which, in fact, I do still find incredibly amusing. As I cruised down the highway rhyming lines like “I went to Barnes and Noble to buy some Nietzsche/I’d been reading Kirkegaard but I was sick of his preaching” along with my own voice, I thought to myself, “You know, no matter what you do with the rest of your life, ‘Big Ole Braine’ is a pretty cool thing. Just remember that when you worry about accomplishments and advancement and whatnot: You’re the only person in the world who wrote that cool-ass parody.” A nice thing for my rental car to do for me. Another thing for the Cavalier to envy.

(This is the second Four Tops song this morning. Maybe what really annoys me about this radio station is the fact that it draws so deeply from so few points among so many genres. But I do like the Four Tops.)

(Okay, this can’t possibly be a radio station. For one thing, there are no commercials. I cannot believe this vital detail escaped my notice until now. For another thing, there are not this few artists in the world. For a third thing, I have not heard one single song I don’t know during the entire time the music service or whatever this is has been set on “oldies.” It used to be set on “country,” and then at least I didn’t know what was going on, even if, upon closer inspection, it turned out to be the banal pop-country that currently saturates country-music airwaves. But there is no way a human being could operate this radio station and not go insane. Especially without commercials. I’m nearly going insane listening to it; imagine being the person who says to him- or herself, “You know what we need right now? ‘Brown-Eyed Girl,’ again! And again! And again and again and again and again!”)

I seem to have dropped into one of those “What am I doing here?” pits again. For the past few days I have been busily wondering about what exactly I am going to do for laundry here, and the possible solutions have been perfectly obvious for just as long, and yet I have not been able to commit to a choice. I can either take my laundry to a laundromat and get it laundered for me, by the pound, or I can do it myself back at the hotel after securing some quarters. Each solution has advantages and disadvantages. I cannot decide, and keep putting off the decision. This is one of those personality features of mine that annoys me. Just freaking decide already and clean some stuff.

[Later] It is a music service! I have seen the equipment. By pushing a button, one can change the musical style. The music is delivered by satellite; this restaurant has been defunct long enough that the purchase of the equipment alone must entitle an establishment to permanent service. Rochelle changed it to the smooth-jazz station; apparently at one point it was playing classical, but everyone thought it was a little “blah,” to quote our IT person. Now the classical has come back on! Oh joy! It’s not particularly good. I may have to play What’s Going On. Ha ha.

A border collie named Maggie, the companion of one of the epidemiologists, hangs around the restaurant-office. She and I have a relationship developed: She licks my hand and sometimes even shakes it. After the pleasantries, she sits up with her back turned to me and settles in for a couple minutes of quality belly-scratching. During this time, she never looks at me, except when the belly-scratching stops, in which case she turns her neck to glance at me impatiently. When she’s had her fill of belly-scratching, she wanders off. I am struggling manfully not to make a very obvious self-deprecating joke here.

Oh, and did you know that if you have about fifteen epidemiologists hanging around, you call each individual an “epi”? Rhymes with “peppy.” The epis produce the epi report each day and undertake epi investigations. Sure, the abbreviation makes highly trained professionals sound like children’s-show characters, but let’s do a syllable count: Epidemiologist: 7. Epi: 2. As Black Sheep said, the choice is yours. Still, I never heard of a single epidemiologist consenting to being called an “epi,” or describing his epidemiological (8 syllables) inquiries as “epi traces.” As you can tell, I’m learning an incredible amount out here.

[Way later] Okay, I can't contain my outrage. That was the absolute worst meal for which I ever paid $31 [which, incidentally, is exactly how much the gummint was giving me for meals and incidental expenses each day]. Let us examine why:

• The restaurant (whose name I forget but which the Internet will remember [as Gasparelli's]) was cozy, sort of, but it also had really stupid-looking "pink marble" wallpaper that could never trompe anyone's oeil; industrial ceiling tile; really dumb-looking faux lamps with candles in them, so that the dumb-looking lampshade completely blocked out the romantic glow of the candles; and white tablecloths with huge ironing creases.
• The Syrah [I ordered a glass of, since there were no bottles, not that I think I could have agreed on a bottle with the people I went out with] sucked ass, [more ass than it really needed to suck]. If you're only going to serve wines by the glass, maybe you should invest in some decent stemware so you don't have to fill the damn glass to within a quarter-inch of the rim, and then maybe I wouldn't have to drink off the top two inches of wine to let the swill get any complexity at all.
• When I see the words "mixed greens," the mix I am thinking of is not 90% iceberg and 10% sliced cukes and radishes with trace amounts of filler. Also the blue cheese flavor in the "gorgonzola" dressing was purely theoretical.
• When I pay $13 for linguini with pesto, I want it to be better than what my mom makes, not worse. Definitely not as much worse as this was. And would it kill you to actually stir the pesto throughout the linguini before serving it [instead of leaving all the pesto at the bottom of the bowl in a glumpy mass], or let the linguini cool enough that it wasn't so hot that it actually scalded my tongue?

The water girl was cute, though.

[This was supposedly Yakima's finest restaurant. I had one better meal, at Abby's Legendary Pizza, where the pizza had a light, crisp crust that nevertheless retained a chewy texture. The toppings were kinda pedestrian, but for a crust like that I will gladly pay $7. Especially in Yakima.]

2/2

Line of the Day from yesterday’s Super Bowl party: A commercial for “The Alamo” came on, and someone noted that the Alamo movie has been made many times. One of the Texan inventory people said, “Yeah, and we’re gonna keep making it ‘till we win.”

[Watching the Super Bowl on a 26" TV in a large room, none of us could really tell that that was Janet Jackson's right hooter, or I suspect there would have been several more Lines of the Day. It was definitely the highlight of my tour of duty to watch the Super Bowl with about six Texan cattlepersons wearing enormous belt buckles and cowboy hats making manly remarks the entire time, in addition to my officemates, who were only too enthusiastic about causing a general uproar. There was a lot of pent-up energy on that task force — or, at any rate, energy for caring about something other than BSE.]

[It was weird, in fact, to come home and not be around people who were completely immersed in the details of prion transmission and epidemiological criteria and whatnot. Oh, wait, that's my job. Well, out in Yakima they weren't embarrassed by their preoccupation like my fellow regulations writers often seem to be. And, while I was in Yakima, it was nice not to have to dance around the fact that, regardless of whether I want to write about animal health issues for the rest of my life, I do find them quite interesting.]

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