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29 :: sufferer of clowns ::
[posted 2/23/01]
Janine has Billie Holiday in her head: I fell in love with you the first time I looked into: them there eyes. And you've got a certain little, cute way of flirtin' with: them there eyes. What she is actually looking into at the moment is not anyone's eyes at all— not yet —but rather her computer screen, which shows a mass of bezier lines and anchor points, blown up 300% in Adobe Illustrator. The company she works for does design for a bunch of e-commerce sites. One of those sites has some kind of St. Patrick's Day-themed sale coming up, and so they want images of leprechauns. Playing, frolicking, holding bags of cash. The task of designing these has fallen to her. She's having trouble getting the eyes right, getting them to have a certain mischevious sparkle. She's done a few preliminary leprechaun-heads and dragged them, half-finished, out into the junkspace that surrounds the Illustrator artboard. The eyes of one of her nascent 'chauns look like raisins pressed into a misshapen lump of dough, the eyes of the other are trapezoidal, and lend a frightening cyborg look.
When she'd first gotten the assignment she'd nodded and grinned (her sure, I can do that grin-and-nod, a maneuver in her repetoire which this corporate job has made all too familiar). She'd then returned to the Designer House and said to Lee: —They want me to do leprechauns. I don't know how to draw a leprechaun. Lee responded, without even turning away from his own screen: —Let me run home and get my Monster Manual.
He's off at lunch now (and she doesn't think he's coming back with the Monster Manual, although now she kind of wishes he was). She zooms out for a second, to get some perspective. She's been working from nine to noon—closer to twelve-thirty, now—and she's come up with two messed-up heads, the one she's working on now (which looks a bit like a red-headed cartoon beaver and may also end up in the messed-up pile), and a heavily-aliased “reference leprechaun” that she found through Alta Vista's Image Search, copied to her hard drive, and pasted into her Illustrator document. She'd really like to just sharpen the reference leprechaun and turn him in, but there's the copyright infringement problem there. Outside of the Illustrator window she has a Netscape window open which contains a tutorial on how to draw anime eyes — she dug that up and used it to draw the eyes for this third head, although she's starting to think that putting Western eyes drawn in a Japanese style on her American version of an Irish folklore figure will cause her leprechaun to implode under the weight of competing cultural traditions.
She's thirty and is spending her day trying to draw a leprechaun. She's reminded of a line from Spinal Tap: Too much, too much fucking perspective! She zooms back in to tweak the eyes some more. One part of her brain keeps belting out Holiday and another part reviews various elements of a joke about some hapless guy getting sodomized by a midget. I can't believe you thought I was a leprechaun! God. The things you pick up.
Colin from down the hall sticks his head in. —Hey, he says. She jumps a bit, pulling a direction point a bit further than she'd intended, looping her line accidentally, putting what looks like a wicked rip into the corner of her leprechaun's eye. She clenches her back teeth and a throb ebbs slowly into her head. —What, she says. She doesn't turn around.
—I'm running down to McDonald's, Colin says. —Want anything?
—Clown food?, she says. —That's for first graders. Take it elsewhere.
—Ohh-kay, says Colin, and he disappears from the Designer's House doorway. She envisions him with a thought balloon that says bitch in it. You are a bitch, she thinks, it's no wonder that nobody around here likes you. Why do you have to keep saying stuff like that to people?
It doesn't matter. She doesn't care. She doesn't want the people around here to like her. She's rebuffed Colin ten thousand times in the past year and she still feels certain that if she asked him to dinner he would eagerly go. Her constant sarcasm isolates her from the other people who work on this floor of this building, she knows this, but that isolation leaves her a space inside that is hers and hers alone, a private space, a sector of herself that she has not yet offered up to the company. She does not yet fully belong. And she will work to keep it that way.
Further Reading ::
Information Prose : A Manifesto In 47 Points ::
A manifesto, outlining some of the aesthetic goals behind Imaginary Year, can now be read here.
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