Steve Jobs, Editors, Ashton Kutcher

I had a very powerful reaction to the death of steve jobs. i hate when people said they don’t get all the fuss. creative genius is so rare. if that’s not worth idolizing, what is? even though he was a maker of products and a corporate giant, it’s obvious he never pandered to the market. The values of the market would not have led to minimalism or beauty, unfortunately. Thea says I have to read his obit in the Wall Street Journal. Thea, you read the Wall Street Journal? She is quite more spiritual than it's typical reader. As the Wall Street Journal put it, Jobs always had “a miracle in his pocket.” Thea loved that phrase. Go figure.

Speaking of jobs, I’m not sure if my job has been worth it so far. Am I learning a lot and meeting a lot of people, which paddy johnson says defines a worthwhile internship? well define “a lot.” I meet a few new people a week. I learn a few things a week. Not very good numbers for full time. One of the most pressing tasks i’m assigned at work seems to be bringing little packages to the fancy apartments of beautiful french women. French women who then tell the editor I once so admired that “i took my job very seriously.” ugh. I can only imagine. “you’re eentern took her job verry seriuhzly” in some winking french way. What is that supposed to mean? I have no idea.

It seems the jobs that are the most interesting are also the least important. A prize winning story comes in and it is amazing. Yes, it is about an unplanned pregnancy and told from the perspective of a young girl, but these things do happen. Young girls have deep thoughts and pregnancies. The eds take their sweet time reading it and then decide it is probably not something the main man will like. True, because there was no strange, unexplained sexual encounter and it was not told by a detached narrator who may be a robot, but you’re not really sure. Neither was it about an insecure but attractive failed artist and his sexual conquests. There is not one woman being published in the upcoming issue. Typical.

Other days, you are asked to do one serious thing all day, so you do it right away and do a good job. They say “wow! didn’t mean to instill such a sense of urgency!” Or else, they say nothing. They’re embarrassed they asked in the first place because they probably won’t use it. But when you successfully deliver a soft package to a hot french girl’s west village apartment? Bravo. You took your “job” “seriously”. Good God. No one responds to emails that do not require a response. As a rule one does not hello or goodbye. They also do not as a rule respond to @mentions on twitter. I am not a twitter user and even I know that this flies in the face of online etiquette, not to mention the whole point of twitter. The weirdest part is that they are all genuinely friendly and nice people except that they’ve instituationalized standoffishness as a policy. And by the way rudeness doesn’t come unnaturally to them. Whatevahs.

Thursday i email exchanged with an associate editor all day because he wanted to come to the monthly libertarian lecture series my dad runs. I guess Assoc. is a libertarian. (weird much? Very.) We left the office without saying goodbye or acknowledging the exchange. I decide to show up anyway to diffuse things in case he did decide to come. I had not fully warned him about the wacko extent of these meetings and was worried I might have to save him from dad making him perform CPR on command in an initiation ritual. I see him there, the only normal one in a crowd of homeless people and mad scientists, sitting way up in the front. My mom and I sit in the back and take in the macabre scharade.

A word about Assoc. Normal is not quite it. He is hot. So hot I am not even attracted to him. Actually he’s like a 1970s movie star. He wears boot cut jeans that are a little too tight (just because he’s prob had them since 1999) and birkenstocks. Seventies haircut like Ashton Kutcher in “That 70s Show.” (but just cause he hasn’t gotten a haircut in a while). Actually he looks remarkably like Ashton Kutcher way back before he was “hip”. So after the “show” I invite Ashton to the after party, which unbeknownst until then to me was happening at my house. He hedges; he wants to drop off his Steve Jobs tribute at the Apple store. Wonderful! No pressure. The Apple store is on my way home (and I’d like to see it too) so we walk there together, talking about his background as an Ohio boy turned college athlete turned British boarding school teacher (turned Oxford grad student-turned intern-turned editor). And I, in turn, sound and feel like a complete underachiever. At the Apple store vigil hotAssoc basically starts crying (for Jobs). And I realize his hot face is actually a geek’s face. Kind of puffy and twisty in the mouth, Iike his hand would be at home on his chin, stroking an imaginary beard. His tribute is an apple he wrapped in black electrical tape so it looked like a solid metal apple. It’s the most clever icon of the bunch. He leaves it at the shrine while I am busy texting chax pics of the shrine (why even in the company of pre-trucker hat Ashton Kutcher am I texting chax, even though it is chax’s “turn”? Don't ask.) After we’ve both had our moments with Steve, Ashton reports that his brother’s concert at Carnegie hall (did i mention his whole family are accomplished classical musicians?) has not ended yet and offers to “walk me home.” Awks much, that he called it that? I think he actually wanted to come to the party to fraternize with his own kind (libertarians--as I keep almost forgetting). I learn a lot about him. We were talking a lot, not because we were hitting it off, but because I was deathly afraid of running out of things to talk about. But in the end that made for a fun convo. He’s very forthcoming and solicitous, quick to laugh. Extremely nice.

After he leaves the party I am overcome with fear that he had been looking for a way out for hours but is so nice he didn’t know how to leave. Plus he got such an intimate look at me, my strange house filled with strangers, my baby brother asleep on my aging dad’s lap. And the next day we are back to strangers in a strange standoffish office. And we will probably drift to real strangers again before next week is over. I’m too paranoid to pursue the friendship. I’m sure from experience he assumes I have a crush on him, as every intern before me surely has. I don’t. In fact, at the end of the night, I was happy, not because I made a hot friend but because making this hot friend provided enough distraction to quell the urge to call chax for the night. Make sense? Not really, I know.

Every second I am excercising strength when it comes to chax. I’m still holding out hope that something big will happen and we’ll realize we can’t live without each other. (I’ll just be as honest as possible, i’m fantasizing about a near death experience for me--not too near. Maybe I fall into a manhole, get trapped for an hour, just long enough to question whether i’ll ever be found, before I am found, with a broken leg perhaps, and I'm hospitalized for shock. This is when charles rushes to my bedside, skipping his final review to be there for me because “this is what’s important”). There is no point in thinking any of that. I have dreams about his ex still. Had one last night, and a few nights before that. I wake up thinking “it must end.” He has not been good enough to me. Even if i don’t really believe that (which I don’t, really), the best way for us to be together in the future is to let him remember how cool and independent I am. I can’t show neediness or make him associate stress with me. There will be other boys. I want him to know what I’m feeling but i don’t need him to. It won’t change anything.