2002-06-06 - 11:37 a.m.

Dream entries entertain only one person. Hint: it's not you. Nonetheless.

I just saw my HR manager in the hallway, and it reminded me that I dreamt of her last night. Oh, sweet Florence. You salty native Brooklynite!

Anyway, in the dream my parents were visiting me in Brooklyn, and for some reason that clearly wasn't thought out too carefully, I decided to take them to a broke-ass Brooklyn bar. Maybe it was the one in Greenpoint where the bartender told us about the other bar nearby where the sister of Peter Krist from KISS works. (She's reportedly a gnarly bitch.)

So at this broke-ass bar, I see Flo. (She's cut her hair, making me doubt just for a second that it's her. But it's none other than.) And I'm fucking scared. I mean, do you wanna run into your HR manager in some sad bar built for shameless hipster slummin', and have to introduce her to your parents? No, of course not. So what do you do? Physically altering their course if necessary, you distract your parents by reading to them aloud from the Village Voice outside the bar. Hey, whatever works.

But just to satisfy those of you who don't think my dreams smell like roses (Remember those days had you readin' my dream log?), here are some thoughts on my recent promotion.

In many ways, this was a bad move on the company's part, strategy-wise. You give an employee a promotion, no bump up in salary, and you expect that lucky slacker not to update his resume with that tasty morsel of a new title within fifteen seconds of getting off the conference call? (Actually, first I changed my email signature.)

That apparent lack of "strategery" makes me realize that my superiors have nothing but the most genuine of goodwill toward me with the whole promotion thing. And then I feel guilty about the whole resume thing. And then I transcend that guilt.

Now, for those of you who don't place Office Politics next to the top hash mark on the Thrill-ometer, a brief remembrance of the weekend past. On Saturday, Lauren, Neil, Nami, Kate and I hitched a ride to Rockaway Beach.

I had been there once, back in the '00, a beautiful (if a bit brisk) late September day on which my jobless ass was expecting to hear back from a couple potential employers (including the current one). I didn't want to sit around biting my nails, watching Maury and hovering near the phone, so I took the A train out to that nearly inaccessible peninsula about which the Ramones crooned so eloquently back in '77.

This time, however, I wasn't alone, and those rickety rails that cross Jamaica Bay (very slowly) are under construction. So we had to take a packed shuttle bus out to the beach. (Once again, the Ramones are right: bus ride is too slow. No disco to be heard on the radio, however.) It's pretty clear that I'm still a Midwesterner at heart when, every single time I see the ocean, I think, "Wow, the ocean! That thing goes all the way to Europe!

So anyway, the beach was fun. That story didn't have a point.