Everyone's A Critic.

Today started off like any other day.

“Chuck, you're 45 minutes late!” Lynette, our dashing secretary told me with a shocked expression as if it had never happened before. As if I had never been this late before.

“Everything's okay, just this commute. Bad traffic.”, I say in a jumbled fragmented mess before settling at my desk. And it's nice that someone here seems to care when I get in. I know my boss doesn't. And I know Roseanne doesn't.

Roseanne sits about 500 feet away from me at the back corner of the office. She is a winter solstice and I am groundhog day. We are not allowed to interact with each other or the world would be thrown into chaos.

I check the mail, hoping to find something interesting. Instead it's the usual swag that is prevalent in this job. Band after band after t-shirt after DVD have arrived for me today. I don't know why, but as a music critic, it seems I have to maintain a 3.5 pounds of music-related stuff per day. I'm not sure if the labels who send this stuff know that I have already chosen the albums I am going to review next month and the month after that. It's like they've sent me a newly produced 2008 laptop which can be used as a coupon for the 2010 model that I really want them to send me.

I set everything in my cashmere book bag. Yes, I know it's a little silly but I love cashmere. I feel confident enough in my dude-factor to say that statement and still feel straight. I grab a pen if for no other reason than to get something out of my bag. I'm going to be typing at this desk for most of the day (and not all of the typing will be work-related, I'm afraid. The day AIM Express was invented was the day my daily workload was halved.

I decide to get to work on one of my reviews for the next issue. I mean, I don't know why I bother to write such long reviews. They always end up getting shortened by our editing staff. This is amazing but true: They are trying to make the magazine (a medium which functions on written language) less “wordy”. They want the pages to pop with literal images, not textual ones. What this means is that they will chop up my review of Katy Perry's next album so the world can see a few more inches of her flesh (which I'm quite confident, thanks to the internet, they are already familiar with).

I sigh and get to work. The album is decent. I'm not sure if it's a chore to listen to because Ive been doing this as a job for the last 5 years or because the performances aren't as energetic as they should be. The singer coos and whines in a typically innocent and indecent indie fashion. The guitars are rough and murky, the perfect counterpoint to the singer's complete lack of harshness and the drummer is average. I can't remember a lick of it once it's finished. It's the best new album I've listened to in about a week or so.

I check my e-mail. It's full of something I never expected to get when I sent my resume into this periodical: hate mail. Between agents representing artists (“your review is completely unfair and you have lost any chance of interviewing Kanye.”) to the artists themselves (“The only reason you prefer Burt Bacharach to my music is because you and your kind look like Burt Bacharach. You empathize with him because you are the eternal virgin, nird and loser. Regards, Gene Simmons.) I used to let these things pile up and get me down but now my heart doesn't even sink when I read them. This really is a thankless job. When an artist gets good reviews do they thank us? No. They say “Oh, I don't care about reviews. It's nice but whatever.” Then the second they get trashed, they badmouth us. Assholes.

As I get ready to leave, I glance at Roseanne who too is busy reading e-mails. For a moment, I fantasize that she is writing an e-mail to me that she is too nervous to send. It doesn't make me feel better. I stand up, glide in a weightless sadness to the coat-rack and stomp out grumpily without a goodbye to Lynette