neonanima | Entries tagged with fucking marketing

i came down with some other chest infection or cold a few weeks, maybe a month, after recovering from the last one. it felt very similar, but much less severe. the fever and body aches were fleeting this time. the worst symptom was the sore throat that took so much gargled saltwater to conquer. i replaced the air filter but margot suggested that i might have mold due to all the water damage. i called a mold inspection company. $450 for one air sample. fuck it. if the company i work for doesn't implode before july, i'll have enough money for all the reasonable, basic environmental health precautions i need.

i'm sure all the stress and anxiety at work isn't helping. i realized my last 3-4 sessions with my therapist were all about my CMO. these weekly four-hour meetings with her are killing me. it's a new direction, a new market, a new audience, some drastic new pivot every week. they can't even settle on what we're actually selling. i can't imagine it's much better anywhere else right now. a.i. has everyone acting like they're robot experts and they can't wait to lay off half their workforce. i desperately never want to work for a tech/software company again.

tues i finally went to the ent like i've been meaning to for a year or so. an audiologist conducted a hearing test because of the ringing in my ears i've been complaining about since i had covid in '20 or '21. i have no hearing loss and he said it didn't seem like i had any blockage behind my eardrums, but i still wish someone could tell me why water never seems to find its way out of my ears anymore or why they randomly hurt or feel clogged. re: the ringing, he told me that i might have first heard it during covid inflammation and, since noticing it, i always hear it now. i just have a new definition of what silence sounds like.

the ent doctor said everything looked fine, as well. she doesn't think it's sinus infections i've been experiencing. she snaked a tube with a camera on the end up my nostrils, which was a trial even with the lydacaine she spritzed, but not as horrible as i thought it'd be. i'm going back for an allergy test in may. after all the things i was told i was allergic to as a kid that have proven to be non-issues, it will be interesting to see what actually does set my allergies off.

the perfume hyperfixation is over. couldn't care less now. i moved on to vampires again, for a bit. finished memnoch the devil, which sees anne rice taking her vampire chronicles into much less vampiric territory. in it, lestat is essentially just a virgil-esque observer of her rewrite of the god/devil conflict. after learning that rice lost her six-year-old daughter to leukemia, i have a much deeper appreciation of her obsession with life, death, and god.

i'm still in a phase where i'm ravenous for anything that shamelessly injects spirituality into its plot. finally watched end of evangelion with margot, snek, and baron. it was playing at a local theater. absolutely sublime, cosmic occult divinity. i told margot there is something so special about eva. something that speaks deeply to my motherlessness, loneliness, and fear of others. to my desire for some cataclysmic, shattering and freeing restart of humanity. i think anno managed to put a piece of his soul into it.

i'm trying to finally get through the second season of twin peaks so i can watch fire walk with me and the return. there is a stretch of truly rancid episodes. worse than i remember. last time, i gave up when josie was turned into a drawer knob. i've struggled past that and ben horne's civil war delusion, literally skipped every scene with james/evelyn. so wild to see the cut to the theme music and waterfall after something as stupid as ben marching his little confederate figurines. then i guess someone in the writers' room said, "hey, did you guys notice there are many beautiful actresses on this show? what about a beauty pageant subplot?"

there is so much more of this sitcommy crap (some of it pretty fun—i actually like nadine's superpowered schoolgirl subplot) than the glorious enigma of laura palmer, it's hard to imagine what s3 will be like or how the characters will suddenly care about her again after having already put it all so far behind them in these episodes.

i started taking 5mg of lexapro on the hypothesis that cutting it out had made me irritable and removed that glass floor stopping my mood from seeing how deep and dark it can drop. i noticed a pretty immediate difference, particularly in how upset i am about work. i think i'll want to write again soon.

I've been getting so much done at work that it's really unlike me. Lumberpunk sent me a screenshot of a tweet that said something like "You ever catch yourself working too hard and think 'I gotta chill, they don't pay me enough for this.'" That's been me for the past two weeks.

I even entertained a little paranoid thought the other night that maybe they put something in the water and air after they finally cracked some kind of chemical way to make people more motivated and productive without paying them more.

I was telling Margot it's so bleakly hilarious how all businesses seem to be suddenly speaking with one voice about the wonderful company culture and productivity benefits of going back to the office, making no effort to hide that they only let people work from home to begin with because it was that or lose their employees, and they never actually cared who died or developed lifelong health problems during the pandemic.

Admittedly, the new office is exponentially nicer and there's more of a sense of community with the no-cubes floor plan. There's a little nook with four bean bags that they've been using for "Thirsty Thursdays" where people can have a glass of wine around 4pm, and three restaurant-style booths next to the kitchen so you can have lunch without leaving the office but not feel obligated to keep working through it. They got a Bevi machine, which dispenses your choice of flavored water with caffeine or vitamins, hot or cold or ambient.

The latest CMO absurdity is that she (a white woman) refused to take her huge, dark sunglasses off when filming a video about what Black History Month means to her. All of us on the marketing team agree it was an off-putting choice. The Art Director verbalized something I was thinking, that it makes you think about being shady or throwing shade on Black History Month. I imagine it also gives the sense that she's filming it under duress, somehow, or she doesn't want to be recognized saying positive things about Black History Month on social media. The social media manager even directly asked her to take them off when he was filming and she said no, she had a migraine.

I'd rather we just not post it but I'm also hoping the internet scoops it up and roasts her for it.

I started watching True Detective Night Country. As hardened as I am on horror, there are still moments in the show that shock me and creep me out. There was a part at the end of the third episode, though, which was so glaringly a missed opportunity that I have to script doctor it here. There's a guy on the verge of death, and he tells one of the detectives, "Your mother is here. She's waiting."

It's such a silly and generic piece of dialogue, totally undermining the moment. It would be so much more interesting if he said something very specific that her mom used to say. Maybe not speaking in her voice, as that would be a too demon-possession tropey, but something that was deeply, disturbingly meaningful.

I fell in love with a sample of the Parfum de Marly perfume Valaya a while back. It grew on me so much, I ended up liking it more than Delina or Oriana, which I bought full bottles of. It's softly sweet with a breezy peachy floral musk. Clean but not soapy, uplifting without being loudly fruity. I couldn't find it anywhere for less than $300, though, and I'm imposing a rule that I won't spend more than $200 on a bottle of perfume. I got an email this morning that Aura Fragrance had it in stock for $169. I bought it immediately. All day I was half-anticipating an email from them cancelling the order, saying the pricing was a mistake, but they just sent me the shipping notice. It's really made my week.

I have a teal velvet couch arriving tomorrow. I'm not sure how many pieces it will be shipped in but I can't imagine sofas come detached other than the legs on the bottom. I'm so excited. I haven't had a couch since the water damage was fixed and I moved back in last Christmas. I'm really tired of hanging out upstairs.

Saw Poor Things last night by myself. There was a woman a few rows in front of me, also alone, with gray hair up in a braid. I thought, "Me and me in 30 years, seeing a movie by ourselves." Eventually, a couple around the same age as her came in and sat a few rows behind me. I was the only one who laughed. The charm of Emma Stone acting like a toddler and Mark Ruffalo's whole-body frustration were lost on them, I guess.

It was all right. I expected more. Enjoyable, but I don't see myself wanting to rewatch it anytime soon. I was a bit irritated at the depiction of sex work as this easy, obvious choice for women, with only the stigma of it being in our way. It touched on the dangers of the profession with the madame saying "Some of them prefer that you don't like it," yet Bella is never in danger and is only shown having the time of her life, despite the fact that she's not allowed to choose her johns like she suggests.

I finally caught the KG freeleech, right as I was sure it was the one year it wouldn't happen purely because I was actually on the ball. The wifi behaved, too. The internet tells me that choosing a VPN located closer to you usually results in better performance. I've been using a Florida location that's served me well. I got so many files. Two or three short film collections including Peter Hutton, the long home-movies film As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. A lot of things I'd already downloaded before but lost in various computer and hard-drive deaths.

I think my CMO is going to quit soon, for real this time. Being sexually harassed by the CFO wasn't enough to do it, or even for her to report him to anyone. The CFO is also the head of HR, but she could report up to our VC firm, who she has a good relationship with. When I asked her why she didn't do this, she said "You're going to judge me," then told me it's because she has stock in the company. Slimy, slimy.

But finally they pushed the right button to insult her pride. She snapped and yelled in an ELT meeting a few days ago-- it was quiet on the floor and everyone heard her through her office even with the door closed. The CEO said he was going to train her to get her to an "executive level." He said she needed work on her presenting skills and that's really stuck in her craw, too. She keeps mentioning that she and the CRO gave the best presentations at our conference last month. He said she was his "project" for this quarter. She sees herself as the smartest and most high performing executive and she may not even be wrong, so I don't know if her pride will let her take this much longer. The CEO is bringing in someone to help us with product marketing copy and she thinks he'll be her replacement.

I'm curious how my life would be under a different CMO. Someone less of an emotional and mental terrorist, who makes a decision after careful thought and then sticks to it. Someone who doesn't overestimate all of their talents because they live in the pretty bubble, and doesn't think that every nasty thing they say is "radical candor" or "just being honest."

My biggest concern is the $15k stay-bonus they're supposed to give me in July. I was planning to start looking for a new job as soon as I got my hands on it, but I've actually been really motivated and engaged since we moved to the new office. The bonus is signed by her and my manager at the time (who's still there but on a performance plan, which I shouldn't know about but CMO tells me everything). I'm wondering if it would be invalid with neither of them employed at the company anymore. I had big plans for that $15k, namely to finally replace my upstairs carpet with hard floors.

started anne lamott's bird by bird last night, even though i'm in the middle of one other book and an audiobook. i like that she begins by describing the eagerness of her creative writing students to get advice on publishing, emphasizing that they have to write for the love of writing first, then publication may follow (unlikely), then maybe making enough money writing to live on (even less likely). fuck all those online courses that promise to teach you how to get published, how to write a best-selling fantasy series, how to sell your novel, how to get an agent.

lamott describes writing as an act still worthwhile—like a person you love, an exercise of emotional and mental fitness, a type of exploration. like stephen king, she recommends writing at the same time every day. king called it scheduling time with the muse instead of waiting for it. eventually, the muse learns to show up on time.

after the first chapter, i sat at my new writing desk for ~500 words of freewriting. a simple vignette about a woman who spontaneously buys a set of paints. i enjoyed it, though the baby-blue, plastic bic xtra smooth mechanical pencil was hard on my fingers. my sister used to get big pink bulbs of skin on the sides of her fingers from holding pencils too long.

i took friday and monday off to enjoy a long birthday weekend. my concentration's a wash. all i can think about is napping. at work they served hot dogs and cheddar flavored chips and grocery-store pumpkin cupcakes, on top of the pizza lunch my department ordered to see off our interns. the little ginger one who gets under my skin just asked if he could help me do anything in his last few minutes-- i said it would be great to have any progress he's made on the last writing assignment we gave him and he went back to playing on his phone. i would prefer a flagrantly shiftless do-nothing to this fake corporate-sunny shit from someone who doesn't want to actually do anything. i won't miss the sighing and staring at his computer with one hand in his hair as if these low-expectation assignments are the greatest burden. more likely it's boredom. here i am, after all, looking for any distraction from rewriting the content on a 5 year old website to reflect a product we're hastily putting out because leadership seemingly just realized that we've rebranded to promote things we don't actually offer, so here's a new thing we're offering to distract audiences from the thing we're promoting that we don't have, except the decoy product doesn't work as promoted either. god.

four visits into my planet fitness membership and i already feel a positive change in my mood. there's something about going to the gym that feels better and more effective than all my other attempts to get fit. maybe it's the simple neurosis of capitalism telling me the only reason to keep doing something is if i spent money on it, maybe the multi-step commerce ritual of it, maybe the diversity of activities that prevents boredom. maybe the sense of community. there's a 60-something woman with bleached blond hair who i've seen twice now on the same treadmill. this time i noticed she had one book open on the control panel in front, another book off to the side waiting, headphones, and water. it was like a tiny little office and i was surprised at how lived-in a machine like that could look. it seemed downright cozy.