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Show 'Lorraine Nelson A Biography . " 14 pick up information concerning destinations: trade customs, available goods, currency exchange. My daily commute took me fifteen minutes southwest on 1-15, toward the Ochre mountains and the squat steel-framed depository that houses DDS. My "office" was a cubicle the size of a bathroom stall, its walls peppered with Post-it Notes left by the previous tenant, an obviously dyspeptic former employee. On one yellow scrap fastened to the cabinet above the computer screen he'd scrawled the cryptic note-perhaps a memo to himself: Kill Loraine Nelson. "Travel" is a specialized mutation of travail, which originally meant suffering or painful effort. "Commute," on the other hand, comes from the Latin commuta-from com, meaning altogether, and mutare, meaning mutate. I travel. Language commutes. With the exception of soft and inconsistent employment I'd held as an undergrad, my experience with full-time labor was restricted to one year in my early twenties I spent as an assistant manager at a Footlocker. I'd needed the job to pay rent and keep atop phone bills for calls home, but I kept the job because-other than the eighty-hour weeks during the holidays-it suited my disengaged lifestyle. Footlocker rarely interfered with my gab-handed bachelorhood. I was clumsy and noodle-headed about my affairs and navigated the field with all the dopey grace befitting a testosterone-addled retail employee. On days off I frequented bars and spent too many nights with girls too silly and various to comprehend the foolishness of sleeping with young men who don mock-referee j erseys to work. As a temp employee for the Robert Half firm I was regularly offered the most banal and fraudulent positions. Two weeks working for a penny-stock outfit. Three employed as a clerk for an underground rigging group. A month at work with the debt collections unit of a paycheck- |
