paradigm shifts
The restaurant was one of those swank, postmodern affairs, twinkling in bronze and blue from the corner of Fanueil Hall in the city's downtown. The company had rented out the top floor for its annual Holiday Party. The Holiday Party was separate from the regular company parties -- our semi-annual assortment of DJ's, sushi, Playstation2's and crowds of friends was absent this year (the economy, you know) and instead we had sequined dresses, wild forest mushroom canapes, and "oh, hi Cris, have you met my wife?" It was all toned down, restrained, polished -- the sort of thing you'd expect in a recession.
I'm still not used to this. The grooming part, the theory, I'm more or less familiar with. But the execution and the mingling and the "oh no, I don't believe we've met. How are you? Let me tell you a joke about your husband ..." that part still needs practice. So it's no surprise that most of the evening was spent with one of the few men in the company that I knew outside of work. This guy I knew before I worked here, helped me get the job, and after work we'd sometimes run into each other at the clubs or at friends' homes. We talked about who's been here the longest, how the early crew were MIT geeks and Senior Haus alums, and how they're all outnumbered by the consultants nowadays.
We stayed until about 10:30, when I begged out and drove to Allston to attend a friend's 30th birthday -- discarding the tie and unbuttoning the collar on the drive over. The party was in Allston, the ghetto of Boston University students and Berklee Music grads struggling to make it in the Boston-Cambridge indie music scene, in a dilapidated house close to the railroad tracks -- not on the bad side of the tracks, but close enough for visual cues as to why the bad side was bad. I met up with Jason and A. as I parked my car and together we walked to the house and cursed the bitter cold.
Freezepop had just started playing in the living room when we got there. My friend wasn't a musician, but she knew people and knew them for a long time. The house wasn't hers, just a good friend's, himself in another band that's been making the rounds, and the crowd was a mixture of scenesters and midnight rockers watching the synthpop trio in the living room, smoking cigarettes and looking cool.
Our host led the three of us upstairs to drop off coats and bags. Paint was peeling, and the wood on the stairs looked half-rotten. I wondered how long it's been since I've partied in this neighborhood, thinking back to 1996 and '97, when the college kids I knew hadn't graduated yet and weren't pulling in $50k salaries. He took us into his office and said that we could leave our stuff here.
"Thanks. Hey, is that an Aeron chair?"
A $700 designer chair sat idly next to a G4 with a dual 19" monitor setup. MIDI keyboards and drum machines lay nearby and the base station for a wireless network glittered in the corner, all lit by a naked light bulb dangling over a wooden floor warped with age and weather. It was an incongruous collision of high-tech and low-rent that I never wanted to get used to.
We went back downstairs as Freezepop played on, and I watched the crowd, feeling as seperated from them as I was from my co-workers earlier in the evening.
I'm still not used to this. The grooming part, the theory, I'm more or less familiar with. But the execution and the mingling and the "oh no, I don't believe we've met. How are you? Let me tell you a joke about your husband ..." that part still needs practice. So it's no surprise that most of the evening was spent with one of the few men in the company that I knew outside of work. This guy I knew before I worked here, helped me get the job, and after work we'd sometimes run into each other at the clubs or at friends' homes. We talked about who's been here the longest, how the early crew were MIT geeks and Senior Haus alums, and how they're all outnumbered by the consultants nowadays.
We stayed until about 10:30, when I begged out and drove to Allston to attend a friend's 30th birthday -- discarding the tie and unbuttoning the collar on the drive over. The party was in Allston, the ghetto of Boston University students and Berklee Music grads struggling to make it in the Boston-Cambridge indie music scene, in a dilapidated house close to the railroad tracks -- not on the bad side of the tracks, but close enough for visual cues as to why the bad side was bad. I met up with Jason and A. as I parked my car and together we walked to the house and cursed the bitter cold.
Freezepop had just started playing in the living room when we got there. My friend wasn't a musician, but she knew people and knew them for a long time. The house wasn't hers, just a good friend's, himself in another band that's been making the rounds, and the crowd was a mixture of scenesters and midnight rockers watching the synthpop trio in the living room, smoking cigarettes and looking cool.
Our host led the three of us upstairs to drop off coats and bags. Paint was peeling, and the wood on the stairs looked half-rotten. I wondered how long it's been since I've partied in this neighborhood, thinking back to 1996 and '97, when the college kids I knew hadn't graduated yet and weren't pulling in $50k salaries. He took us into his office and said that we could leave our stuff here.
"Thanks. Hey, is that an Aeron chair?"
A $700 designer chair sat idly next to a G4 with a dual 19" monitor setup. MIDI keyboards and drum machines lay nearby and the base station for a wireless network glittered in the corner, all lit by a naked light bulb dangling over a wooden floor warped with age and weather. It was an incongruous collision of high-tech and low-rent that I never wanted to get used to.
We went back downstairs as Freezepop played on, and I watched the crowd, feeling as seperated from them as I was from my co-workers earlier in the evening.