I spent almost two hours this morning in a conference call with a client for whom I did some urgent work over the last couple weeks. Their website is being redesigned and unleashed on the yawning world in only a few days, and they hired me to edit and revise some of their documents and presentations. My job was basically to impose a measure of sameness over everything so all the little electronic pieces would pull together well. I was enforcing conformity. Oddly, this turned out to be a surprisingly engaging task some of the time. Trying to lower the level of chaos in a whole bunch of wildly different, irreconcilable items can be almost as fun as fostering chaos in more static systems. This is probably the kind of mentality that makes people become high school principals. I'm monitoring it in myself with some alarm.

I had little to contribute to the phone discussion, since all my work on this task was basically done, but trailed along and occasionally offered up little nuggets of wisdom. I liked the idea that I was just a disembodied voice emanating from the phone in the room with them. It made me feel like an angel.

To pass the time, I hooked up the new sincam and did a real-time test with a two-minute refresh cycle. I doubted anyone was watching, so I set the cam to upload to the website and experimented with camera position using a small Jean-Luc Picard action figure that was given to me by a former office rival. Watching the camera update the website automatically was cool for about 5 minutes. Five years ago, updating the website with pictures taken by a little camera sitting on top of the computer might have been vaguely novel, but now it quickly became a snoozer. I'm still waiting for one piece of equipment to complete my satire sexcam site, so I can't do much with the webcam yet but amuse myself while remaining unamusing to others.

My arms and hands are discolored with greasy bruises; I look like I recently defended myself from an attack. In fact, I played volleyball behind the rescue squad building at midnight on my last shift. Volleyball is one of the few things that I'm able to enjoy in spite of an embarrassing lack of skill. My volleyball prowess inspires people to say things like "keep your eye on the ball," which isn't something people generally say when the ball is the size of your head. On this particular evening, I was playing alongside two much larger and more physically adept colleagues, firefighter types. As the match wore on and the ambient level of competitiveness increased, they occasionally moved in on shots I was making, and unintentional body slams sometimes resulted. After about the fourth bone-jarring collision, I asked them whether this was some form of fucked-up hazing ritual for new volunteers.

I managed to perform well enough in the volleyball game to avoid complete embarrassment, and I stood around chatting with my teammates afterwards. The larger and more aggressive player turned to me and said "Now the real hazing begins," and jokingly motioned as if he was unbuckling his belt. "Thank you sir, may I have another!" I replied in the hazing parlance immortalized in Animal House. They laughed, and I considered how many times in my life I've redeemed my physical ungainliness with a judicious application of wit.

Susan was appalled to hear that someone would make a joke like that to someone he barely knew. But she doesn't live in Guy-land. I often feel like a visitor there myself, but little that I see surprises me. That kind of homoerotic jo(c)k(ey)ing turns up rather often in the company of men. Predictably, it's often an assertion of dominance, a joking accusation that the other person is gay, and thus weaker or more feminine. However, sometimes it's less about power than connectedness -- the golden gauntlet of underlying eroticism laid down carefully between two men so that they can collectively scoff at it. The hazing crack belongs to the former genre. Maybe after a few more volleyball games, a scattering of witticisms, and a little more proving of my manhood, I'll merit the latter.