1/13/08

fight or flight

A week before Christmas I stopped in at the paper supply store – the place where they sell you solid colored envelopes and notecards, ink pads, sealing wax, kits to build your own gift boxes, and paint-pens to color in your own holiday greeting cards (with the design already outlined on the front). They have everything to make you feel like the creative artsy person everyone wishes they were, which are the kinds of things that sell very well on Armitage Avenue in Lincoln Park. We all know it’s easier to buy a project and do it than to think of one yourself – and it certainly helps the neighborhood ladies that the store’s got a little extra space to park your triple-wide stroller while you browse.

I was working out whether I was going to pay $3 per card for something that required me to invest still more time coloring everything in – this, on top of finding my cousins’ addresses out in Denver and DC and wherever they all are these days and I was thinking I might as well just get discounted cards at Hallmark the day after Christmas and call it a day; I was already late on the whole thing anyway.

And then I saw her. Melissa had been a colleague of mine at my first job out of college. We worked together as business analysts for a corporate management consulting firm, and throughout the twenty months I lasted there, Melissa’s presence was the reason I could not be satisfied. I had ups and downs at that job, and I would be on the verge of quitting for various reasons from time to time. Ultimately, it was nothing other my conviction that I could not be associated with anyone like Melissa James that brought about my final resignation.

Melissa was a sweet girl, really. She had been the president of her sorority at Northwestern or somewhere, and she coordinated firm-wide volunteer activities every quarter or so. She was interested in non-profit management, and I’m pretty sure that is what she is pursuing at present; more power to her. There were two most essentially and frustratingly unfair things about her, though. One, she came off – on your average first meeting, first-impression – as the dumbest rich girl you’ve ever met. Two, she moved in – quickly – on the one firm partner who remained an attractive and eligible bachelor. Despite the first and largely due to the second, Melissa was hugely successful as a business analyst. Oh, and one other thing – she refused to take public transportation. Grr!

I had learned, via Facebook a few days prior to the whole paper-store episode, that Melissa and her Consulting Partner boyfriend were engaged. When I saw it on the newsfeed, my brain had a mini anger spasm and I think a small invisible puff of smoke may have escaped over my head. I flashed back to that constant feeling whenever I saw her around the office, my need to scream, “doesn’t anyone see that she took this job to get her M.R.S.?!” and feeling sorry for all the competent and immeasurably more intelligent-sounding, well-spoken candidates who lost the job to her.

So when I saw her in the paper store, I did what any normal individual on my high-horse would have done. I hid behind the rack of rubber stamps. I could hear her squeaky, child-like voice and I cringed. Then I bolted for the door, nearly knocking over a few holiday-happy moms giddily discussing the Hanukkah-themed project boxes in the front corner of the store.

As my long and powerful strides took me down the street, passing everyone in a huff, attempting to “walk it off”, I thought about these brushes with our past. Specifically, I thought about the moments when the past disgusts us and we want to run away – like I did in the first place, only faster this time. When all is said and done, and there is a new president in place next year at this time, how will we feel about it all?

It wasn’t just Melissa’s personality – which I resent – but the fact that someone like her could succeed in the same environment as me, the fact that she was actually more successful than I was all that time. George W. Bush – who has led a relatively successful presidency on his own terms –maintained a personality throughout that was a complete affront to so many of us. Personally, I want to see a politician who can inspire and speak eloquently; I want someone who genuinely sounds like he is smart enough for the job. And every time I heard his braggadocioed jumbled answers to intelligently-posed, necessary questions, a part of me wanted to punch the wall. But, even though his incoherent statements defied reason time and time again, he got away with it. He used connections to obtain his post, and his money paid for the rest.

Melissa was hired by an alum of her college and a former sorority sister. Once there, her association with our superiors allowed her opportunities on some of the best projects in the company portfolio. She was admitted to a top tier business school, and she will be a happy, successful, wealthy, suburban mom who can afford to buy creativity at the paper store.

I wonder how we will see President Bush in retrospect. Will we cringe and run away from that chapter in our history, or will we – as we did with Reagan a few summers ago – fondly speak of him as The Great Something-or-Other, chuckle at his incompetence in the spotlight, shake our heads a bit over the war he invented? I hope, above everything, that we neither run away from nor forget our anger. We have seen how badly we can be represented on the world stage, and we must always demand better.

As for Melissa, this should show her.

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