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And we, we got upsot!
Wow. An 1,100-word post that mentions six other Christmas songs. No pressure, Harriet.
Hello, and welcome, all ye who are following this chain of posts.
Since I tend to write a lot about sacred music from this bully pulpit, I’m going to use this opportunity to think about music that is not manger-centric. As it happens, the most evocative seasonal song for me is Jingle Bells. It is probably the song with the longest lineage in my cerebral cortex.
Ever since I can remember, my mom, as part of the Christmas decorations, had a foot-tall plastic tree on a wind-up base. After just a few turns, it would play, seemingly for hours, bringing to mind the Woody Allen quip, “Eternity is a long time, especially near the end.” But as the tree started to slow, Jingle Bells would. . . get. . . slow-er a — nd, sl – o – w -er. The joyful groups of monophonic pings would turn into singular, strangled doinks, as if the tree was desperately trying to maintain a stiff upper lip, to maintain its head above water, and other similar unarborial metaphors. And that is my favorite time to listen to it, because that’s what brings me back to my childhood. The simple repetition of an old song, which, as it turns out is a Thanksgiving, and not a Christmas, lyric.
These years, we don’t get a lot of chances to head over to my parents’ house at Christmas. The place is still decorated to the tasteful nines, but the big family party just got too big for any one family to host, given the rapidly increasing number of grandchildren in the immediate vicinity. But, whenever I want to be in my parents’ living room with the off-white carpet and plaster walls, and furniture that contains more Christmas memories than Calvin Coolidge, put together, I imagine that little tree, gradually spinning around. Then I’m 32, or 16, or 8 years old again, looking out the window at the feet of snow on the front lawn, and the white lights on the tree, and waiting impatiently until all my cousins show up at 4 pm, as my mom makes lobster bisque and hot ham and cheese sandwiches.
******
On the other hand, one of the versions of the song that I’ve grown to love as an adult is the Jack Jones (of “The Love Boat” Theme fame) recording that I discovered on the Rhino Records compilation Santamental Journey.
I know, it’s everything that’s wrong with what American culture has done to Christmas: It’s Jesus in a tiki bar. I don’t care. My favorite part of this over-the-top, faux-jazz-hound version is the last note: a strangled, two-syllable “slaayy-eeeeee.” You imagine all of the close-cropped, horn-rimmed producers in the studio stage-whispering “Go, man, go!” If he wasn’t serious, he’d be Bill Murray crooning, “Star Waaars.”
I’d better wrap this up before I fall asleep. It’s buyback week at the bookstore, and that means fourteen hour days. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this a little.
This is the second post in a blog chain about holiday music. You can read more about the chain here. Next up is Jeanne at Necromancy never pays.
The rest of the chain includes:
Cranky at It’s My Blog!
Dr. Geek at Dr. Geek’s Laboratory
Lemming at Lemming’s Progress
Readersguide at Reader’s Guide to…
Freshhell at Life in Scribbletown
edj3 at kitties kitties kitties
My Kids’ Mom at Pook and Bug
joyhowie at The Crooked Line
Magpie at Magpie Musing
and back to Harriet for a wrap-up at spynotes
EDIT: Sorry, I have been remiss in responding to these nice comments. I’m a bad blogger.
It’s Tryptophan-tastic!
Transitioning from a bunch of part-time gigs to a full-time gig has left me with not a lot of time to catch my breath, and the posting on this site has suffered. My 85,000 word goal for this year, which for a long time seemed reachable, now appears to be something I’m going to have to re-evaluate for 2013. Like in many professions, mine has a holiday rush, which means long hours at the office, and being too exhausted at the end of the day to Facebook, Twitter, or blog.1
Thanksgiving went quite well, though calling it a “break” or a “vacation” may be somewhat overstating it, since we tend to get back from the trip about as exhausted as we were when we left town. We did, however, score a pretty sweet ride: a 2013 Chrysler Town & Country with Sirius/XM Radio, a DVD player, and one of those back-up cameras which I scoffed at until I used it. Though I fear what it would do to my natural driving skills once I had used it for a while. The Wife and I spent most of our listening time on the New Wave channel, though it did play a little too much of The Cure for my taste. The Mother-In-Law came with us, and was kind enough to spring for the ride, so that was very much appreciated.
It was great that it was warm enough that I could do my walk across the Mississippi. Basically, I walk from my cousin’s (where we stayed) down through the Augustana College campus, over to the Rock Island Arsenal Bridge, over the river to Davenport, IA and back. The whole thing is a skosh under two hours, and I wish that I could do it every day.
Though most of the places we go during the weekend are hallowed by tradition, we do try to shake things up. We (around 30 of us), after having had Thanksgiving Brunch and Thanksgiving Dinner (yes, two separate-but-equally-important meals), meet for breakfast on Friday at a restaurant. For years it was the late lamented Crooners, but this year we tried City Limits. It was great. One server competently served all of us, the coffee flowed, and the food was inexpensive and very well prepared. They had just added on to the back of the place, and it felt like it had been there for years. I took bets on whether or not they would have rye toast and, two thumbs up, they did.
Your own behavior comes back to haunt you, though. During the traditional trip to the bowling alley (though now it’s located in an “entertainment complex”), Daughter #2 became cryingly frustrated at the number of gutter balls she was throwing, since the median age of the younger generation means that it’s no longer cool to have the bumpers. This brought back memories of my own less-than-stellar2 behavior when I was her age. I tried to pull her out, calm her down, and get her thinking about the salient details: no bumpers, no practice, and older competitors. I told her that I felt exactly the same way lo these many years ago. Oh, and I also tried to give her “advice”, which never seems to work, since I am not Marshall Holman. Another reminder that times change: I used to love the hand-typed bowling league standing sheets attached to the walls of the old alleys. From the humorous team names to the whole statistical-analysis of scores and handicaps, it pointed to some parallel universe. All gone now.
Now that the kids are old enough to want to do their own thing, that leaves the Wife and me with a Saturday afternoon during the trip to have some alone time. After lunching at Dr. Gyros,3 we finally got a chance to go shopping at this awesome area: The Village of East Davenport, a very cute collection of independent stores just off the Mississippi River. Though you could spend a buncha money here, you don’t have do, and we picked up a lot of little things. My big score was a shaving stick from The Soap Box. What is a shaving stick, you may ask? Well, read the link. It actually works quite well, is easy to maneuver, and is locally made. I may have to go to the site and order a bunch of them.
We also picked up some treats for our dog and the neighbor’s dogs at Freddy’s Fritters, had some great coffee (me an eggnog latte) at the East Village Coffee Cafe, and a couple of other stores that I don’t remember the names of. It was perfect, a great time. Something that is a great antidote to those stupid commercials that say, “I stopped at one place and got all my Christmas shopping done!” Really? Who says, “why waste time looking for the perfect gift, when I could just buy you something at Target?” [The teenage me is rolling his eyes at the sentiment of that last sentence.] The last stop we had time for was the recently-relocated Yarn Shoppe, where the Wife had a great time feeling all of the different products, and speaking knitting-professional speak with the proprietors. The compliments that we given to my wife’s present project may have been nice for her, but they made me feel incredibly proud.
[I don't usually throw this many links into a post, but since there was a big push to shop independent stores this past weekend, I thought that I would do my part, because those links will, I hope reach a wider audience than me just telling my local friends. The internet gives these small shops a global reach. Yay, the internet.]
Saturday night brought the third consecutive year of Mo Brady’s Steakhouse. Daughter #1 has, over the last couple of years found that she really likes steak, and Mo Brady’s is a great place to have a really good, decently portioned steak. So, as you can see we do take this time of year to eat a lot, and spend a lot of quality time with our relatives. The diet goes out the window at this time of year, but I seem to have lost most of the weight I had gained over the past week.
Sunday morning, the Wife and I decided, for the second year in a row, to go to church Sunday morning before we leave town. This gives the girls the opportunity to sleep in, and we get to not miss. What’s interesting about finding an Episcopal church in this part of the world is that the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy split in 2006 over female priests, among other things. Not to go into too much detail, but you have to make sure when you look up a church in the yellow pages that you’re not going to a schismatic church. This year we avoided that problem by going across the river to Trinity Cathedral, Davenport. According to Wikipedia:
The cornerstone for Trinity Cathedral, then called Grace Cathedral, was laid in 1867. The building was completed in 1873. It is the second church built as a cathedral in the Episcopal Church in the United States.
It’s a beautiful old building, at the top of the ridge overlooking the Mississippi. I wish that we had had more time to investigate the walls. This was one of those weird “Thanksgiving-weekend-Sundays-which-is-not-Advent-1″, and so there was a subdued air to the proceedings, though the sermon was quite fine. The choir, composed of about twelve, sang well. I did think it odd that they chose the seven-verse Love Unknown for the gospel hymn—a bit long for the purpose. But, hey, that’s just the liturgy nerd in me coming out.
Speaking of Advent, I do believe that my Advent writing discipline begins tomorrow. So, if that’s not your thing, you have been warned.
1 Before this became a Turkey-weekend-recap post, this paragraph came next: Which is not to say that nothing fun is happening. The class that I teach is coming to an end, and so we did teacher evaluations yesterday. I have a good feel for where they’re going to say that I was strong, and where I could use (a lot of) improvement. Then again, it was my first experience teaching college students, and I would probably do a lot better next time. I didn’t crash and burn, which is what was fearing 4 months ago.
2 I’m amazed that Cricket is still around. I should have taken better advantage of it when I had my subscription . Maybe it would have made be a better writer. Oh, what the connection? One of the favored adjectives the illustrated insects use in the margins of the magazine is stellar, as in “something stellar for everybuggy.”
3 A place she loves so much that the Wife has a frequent diner card, even though we live six hours away.
It Can Happen
In lieu of a new and shiny post, which you all certainly deserve, I post a recent offering of mine to a FB group that wanted submissions under the heading of “What I did last summer.” The group is made up of 1980s graduates from my college, and so the headings of each paragraph are snippets from It Can Happen, a song by Yes.
Look Up
It’s the first thing takes your breath away. The hundred-plus foot spider-web vaulted ceiling, much more impressive than the limitless grey East Anglian sky you’ve just escaped. The one-and-a-half-football-field-long nave is beautiful, but easy to take in, easy to compare to something like a football field. The structure, impossibly far away yet very much attached to the human architecture that supports it, is much like the God of the people who built it five hundred years ago, placing the johnny-come-lately roof on top of a 900-year old Benedictine monastery.
Look Down
The multi-story stained glass windows are full of figures that everyone knows: Jesus, Moses, the saints. But the stone floors are littered with memorials to the locals, the people that were tied to this church. Carved into the grey or black Caen limestone floors (memorials themselves to the Norman French who conquered this land), are tributes to Canon This and The Wife of the Rt. Rev. That. Those who served this place for decades. Most are just name and dates, but some have extended Latin perorations on the goodness or faithfulness of Thy Servant. Higher up at eye-level on the walls are the family memorials, people with titles, men wounded or killed in foreign engagements: the Boer War, The Boxer Rebellion. But all with roots in this place.
Look Out!
The service of Choral Evensong, though it is usually sung at the close of day, is very intense; hymn, prayer, chant, prayer, anthem, prayer piling one on the other. Singing from the Coverdale Psalter, which predates the King James Version by some 75 years, is just enough like parsing a foreign language that we are never quite comfortable. To balance this, we are given the opportunity to sing some of the great cathedral music; famous-among-dozens composers, Herbert Howells, Kenneth Leighton, Thomas Tallis, Edward Bairstow. The organ supports, converses with, and challenges us as we attempt to fill this vast space with thirty voices. The congregations are small but reverent.
Look Around
By the end of our week in residence, we feel at home. After the 4:15 warm-up, we exit the contemporary glass-and-blonde-wood choir room and make our way through the exhibit on the Book of Common Prayer, past the gift shop. I am dressed in my red cassock and white cotta, supplemented by my maroon and pink academic hood that the choir wears only for Evensong. The tourists, both local and international, stare at us, as our gait suggests that we own the place (about which I do nothing to disabuse them). Little do they know that we’re just a bunch of goofy Americans.
A Song A Sigh
We line up to process in the south aisle, which is as wide as a small parish church. I take in the ceiling, the floor. I listen to the organ prelude. I glance around to see the Dean come up to greet us, pray with us, and give us leave to process to the choir stalls. And we start walking.
Novus ordo blogorum
All new chapters in life should start with a new blog theme. The ascetic look of my previous theme (called, helpfully, Chunk) mirrored my outlook over the last three years, not to mention the frequency of my posting. This new theme (Bold Life, sorry it’s a little bit too Oprah for me) will, I trust, not only reflect the present season, but my outlook going forward.
This change is enough for me. If I were a good blogger, I’d start a completely new blog as well. One with a less imposing name. But that would require brain space that I don’t seem to have at this present moment. And I don’t necessarily want to cut all ties with that part of me, since they still exist, obviously. Somehow Jacques Barzun‘s recent passing makes it important that I not drop Permanent Qui Vive.
I still want to incorporate more graphics into the flow of things here, but choosing a photo-dependent theme would mean that I would have to start taking awesome pictures, or the space would look terrible. Too much pressure. Here’s to hoping, however, that some of that happens.
I still want to hit 87,500 words by the end of the year. That will involve a lot of typing. But no impossible goal was ever reached without effort. I hope to have more things to write about, or at least more interesting things to write about.
I don’t know yet, what my new employer’s policy is on social media, so I will not be writing with any great detail about my new employment situation. Which is too bad, because I know that it would make some good blog fodder. No great loss, as there are many other things to tell you.
So, a virtual toast of apple cider to the upcoming months.
Working my way back to you
Yeah, wow, it has been a while since I’ve written here. In my defense, it has been that time of year. I realized early this afternoon that I could take a little break from stressing about everything, and post a little bit of an update to this here blog. So, to make sure this gets out, here’s 100 words on a variety of topics just to get caught up.
Furniture
Thanks to a bat-out-of-hell trip to deepest suburban Chicago, I secured nine bookcases from a friend, in addition to some excellent furniture and miscellany. It’s amazing what that has done to clean up our floors. They have almost all been placed in strategic locations in the house and filled, not to capacity, but comfortably. I rode my bike about nine miles to pick up the U-Haul Van (in retrospect, I should have gotten one size up), and they were nice to forgo the extra day’s rent even though I was an hour-and-a half late returning it. Now, what will I do with my new garden edger and axe?
Volleyball
Both girls are now on their respective school volleyball teams: Daughter #1 on the 7/8, and #2 on the 5/6. The older team is benefiting from the experience of having some great players to lead it last year. Though the parents were under the impression that there would be a significant drop-off in talent (and therefore, wins) this year, that has proven not to be the case. They have dropped only one game in their first three matches against some rather stiff competition. The JV team is 2-1, but has many girls whose older sisters are players, so they’ve been around the game. I’ve been lassoed into service as the line judge, which the other parents appreciate, since they don’t have to do it. More as this develops.
Teaching
I’ve started teaching my first class at LMU (short for Large Midwest University, as Chesterley puts it). I’ve very much surprised myself, as my extroverted side has allowed me to lecture/improvise for 75 minutes in a row. The students are nodding their heads and laughing at some of my jokes. Most of my headspace has been taken up with preparing for this class, taught in a large, echoey classroom without benefit of technology (so no PowerPoint.) I had lunch with a couple of my b-school professors on Thursday, who welcomed me and suggested that I might parlay this into some sort of clinical professorship. Hmm.
Church
It was very much of a wrench after spending so much time with my church choir in England to come back and immediately stop spending Sunday mornings with them because of my singing gig. However, due to a loophole that I will explain next, I’ve been able to spend the last couple of Sunday mornings attending church with my family, sitting in the congregation, and acting like real people. It has been so comforting to sing the hymns, pray the prayers, and stand with everybody else, rather than being responsible for something. It makes me feel like an adult again.
HHD
Rehearsals for High Holy Days have begun at the synagogue, which doesn’t feel too foreign as there are three other paid singers who I sing with at my church. The whole group is a lot of fun and, now that I have sung most of the music before and gotten into the swing of pronouncing the transliterated Hebrew, it feels like greeting an old friend. Rehearsals are on Monday and Thursday, which means the contract I have to sing with the Jews overrides (in my mind), the week-to-week pay that I receive from my paid singing gig. If I can’t be at Big Church on Thursday, they don’t want me on Sunday, which, as we saw above, has freed up Sunday mornings for the duration of the High Holy Days.
School
The Daughters have also had a pretty good start to the school year, though we haven’t gotten any grades back. Both of the received high honors at the Honors Day Breakfast, the first led by the new head of school. He’s a solid, if unremarkable, speech-giver, but that’s I think what the school needs at this point. There was the usual grumbling from some corners as to the Wobegon-like percentage of the students who received academic honors, but y’know, I’m really past that. If nothing else, it was a great opportunity to have some bagels and coffee with the other parents.
I am already sick of the Presidential campaign as it is playing out on Facebook. If any of you who know me in that realm see me ever posting anything political, please remind me, and I will get rid of it immediately. Since the great majority of my friends seem to be of one persuasion, I’m actually more annoyed with them than those of the other persuasion. I’m feeling the itch to delete a lot of posts in the coming months. I’d rather hear about what you had for breakfast. Twitter, take me away. . . .
Rain
We actually had some significant rainfall this afternoon, after being the place where rain came to die for most of the weekend. On the radar, we’d see a huge patch of Isaac-inspired precipitation coming our way, and then just as it hit Terre Haute, it would dissipate into nothingness. Finally, the droplets began spitting down as we made out way home from church, and have continued for most of the afternoon. With the new bookcases, and some rejiggered lamps, the space that I call my office looked quite homey. Let us all pray for continued wetness.
Chair
I know that I already talked about the newly-gained furniture. But I must single out the chair. I believe it’s an IKEA rocking chair, though, it being on some rather thick carpeting, it doesn’t rock that much. It has that stunning quality of being soft enough to be comfortable, large enough to curl into, and stiff enough so that it is very difficult to unintentionally fall asleep in. Which makes it the perfect work chair, especially late at night. Not that I can’t go into the arms of Morpheus: it’s simply that I have to say, “I’m going to close my eyes now and put my head back.” Oh, it’s so much better than a La-Z-Boy.
Reading
Not that I completely detest The Tome of Visages. My college’s 1980′s alumni have a page which sponsors an occasional reading group that reads books by alumni of the school. Authors have included Laura Hillenbrand, Jake Kerr, and, this month, Cammie McGovern and her murder mystery Eye Contact. The story centers around a murder which may or may not have been witnessed by an autistic boy. It’s an interesting read—I certainly don’t know enough about autism to judge how “realistic” it is, though I suppose that’s not the point.
Writing
The same group is sponsoring a writing competition judged by the actual writers in the group. Five hundred words on the topic “What I Did For My Summer Vacation”. I dashed something off for that (it’s amazing how easily blogging makes 500 words seem short), my goal being feedback more than fame. If it is posted somewhere public, I’ll link to it here; if not, I’ll just post the whole thing.
Twelve hundred words may or may not make up for two lost weeks, but it will, I hope, put me back on track for my 85,000-word yearly goal.
Growing up, in the rear yard of the house, was a black rock. It was rather large, maybe three or four feet across and maybe a foot an a half tall. I may be misremembering the dimensions because, at the time, I was smaller. I am not enough of a geologist to divine what kind of rock it was, and not enough of a landscape architect to know why it was plopped down there. It didn’t seem to be native to where we lived, so I can only assume that it was originally meant as a design element, because I can’t believe the local Potawatomie tribes left it there as a sacred object, or that Archange Ouilmette (the wife of the French-Indian trader who gave his name to the town) had dreams of being featured in Better Cabins and Gardens.
It was uncomfortable to sit on and touch; being very rough, it looked like the remains of some igneous development on an island, like the inside of an Aero bar (the candy, not the triathlete’s equipment.) Tucked away in the corner, it was in the midst of some trees, a big pine, an old elm, a peeling birch. It was my hiding place in my youth, though it was never very hidden, especially in the autumn, after the leaves had been whisked away. Thinking back on it now, I wonder why I chose such an unforgiving environment as my “special place”: A sitting rock that was almost untouchably uncomfortable, a hiding place that left me completely exposed.
I can only assume it was my modern equivalent of a hair shirt. ∞
‘Cause you see I’m on a losing streak
I have read that it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Rolling Stones, or some such. I must admit that I have never, ever, liked the Stones or their music (and, yes, those are two different things.) You can babble to me all you want about Charlie’s drumming savvy, or how Keef is the ultimate fusion of Robert Johnson and a Twinkie, but I’ll take The Beatles and The Who over them any day of the week.
Having read a blog post about favorite RS songs, I feel compelled to share mine. Actually, there are two, and they both date to the same experience.
Let me rephrase that. They’re not my “favorite” Stones songs, they’re the only ones that I don’t have a viscerally negative reaction to. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that they are both ballads and not rockers. Before finding the above videos, I hadn’t heard them in forever, beyond the choruses, that is. But they both took me back immediately.
As I have said and hinted many times before, I was a misfit in a lot of ways in high school. The church in which I grew up had a youth group for high schoolers, as most churches do. Mine seemed to mirror the cliques that was encountering at school, so there was no love lost between me and this Sunday evening activity. I certainly wasn’t blameless, being both an introvert, and into a lot of things that the other kids weren’t, like singing in the church choir, and liturgy in general. I was much more Tridentine Mass than On Eagles Wings.
Anyway, the big event every year was a ski trip to Michigan. My senior year, the decision was made that I was going to attend. I don’t remember how involved I was in the decision, but I went willingly. It was a little bit more okay because I was part of the oldest group of kids. I assume that we went on some sort of bus, though I have no memory of how we got to the place, or how or where I got my skis. Luckily, I did have experience skiing, and so I wasn’t a total doofus on the slopes; I was somewhere between the bunny slopes and the double black diamond.
As it was, I was paired with another senior who was very nice to me in the same way Special Olympics volunteers are nice to their charges. I had no conception of how to deal with the opposite sex at this point, and could not countenance any middle ground between the girls who looked at me as though I wasn’t there, and girls who I was deeply in crush with. So, I was sort of taken aback by this girl who was completely out my league being sociable with me, but it made me feel included with a group of kids that I had never felt close to before.
The music that I remember from the weekend were the above two songs which, as I remember, I heard over and over. It was music that I really hadn’t listened to before, but I was experiencing a lot of things for the first time. “Ruby Tuesday” started to grow on me (who at the time was a devoté of new wave and corporate rock): “Oh, so this is what the cool kids listen to.” It was really like entering another world.
We left the snow-covered bumps of Michigan, and the spell was broken. I didn’t rush out and buy Sticky Fingers, returning to my New Order and Styx, avoiding the cool kids. In time you learn that everyone has their hangups, their insecurities, their emotional challenges, even the cool kids. But in that dark, wood-panelled cabin, The Stones made me feel like I could see over the social transom.
The snake who swallowed an elephant
Why, yes, I had a very nice Father’s Day, thank you. The best part was that I was off my Sunday morning gig (Men get FD off, Women get Mother’s Day off) and so I got to attend church with my family. Since these are the down weeks between the end of the normal singing year and when we begin preparation in earnest for our choral residency in England, we were in the actual congregation. Actually, the Daughters were both acolyting, so we got them for only part of the service. BUT STILL! It was nice to feel like a real person, and not the hired help. The sermon compounded the wonderfulness: we had a guest preacher, a college chaplain, who based his sermon around Raising Arizona. Score!
This was just after we had Daughter #2′s “birthday” party: an overnight, where everyone (save me) was up until all hours watching Shrek. We all did our traditional pizza at the pool, and sparklers after dark. And, as is usual (if not traditional), we had one kid go home early because sleepovers are a bit too much of an “away” experience just yet.
Friday was Shabbat in the evening. I hadn’t sung in a while, and I felt much better after this one, mostly because my voice has felt awful the last couple of times that I have sung there, and the tessitura of all the music always feels very low for me. My voice felt better and freer this time. The sermon here focused on James Bond. So, it seemed to be movie weekend at my sacred buildings.
Here followeth a little rant, preceded by some explanation for those of you who haven’t (willingly or not) been sucked into this. I’ll keep it as general as possible (a) to protect myself (b) to avoid getting sucked into it.
My undergraduate alma mater, and my former employer, made a possibly-inadvisable business decision, and a hugely-inadvisable PR decision, with regard to moving some employees from under the purview of the institution to the purview of a multinational services company. This caused a huge uproar in the institution’s community of the realm which likes to pride itself on it being a “family.” Much of the complaining has taken the form of “I can’t believe they would do this”: They is usually defined as the President of the school and the Chief Business Officer.
This vomit, which has consumed all of my social media outlets, has pushed me to the brink of deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and/or summarily unfollowing anyone who mentions it. IMO, there are no “good guys” in this situation, there are only sides:
- The school’s administration, whom I’ve known was evil for a while, and who were either so clueless about the possible ramifications of this decision, or so calculated as to be completely untrustworthy.
- The unionized employees affected by this decision. I’ve worked with employees of the school, and they’re not so uniformly saintly, or uniformly dedicated to the school, as the alumni think they are. Believe me, they’ll get theirs.
- The alumni, who, in the main, could have cared less about how the school treated their employees when I parted ways with the institution, but who are now all “Ooh, let’s sign oh-so-effective online petitions, and look at my cool Tumblr account, and I’ll stop my $25 gift this year, that’ll show ‘em.” Most of them have no clue what the hell they’re talking about.
The whole thing makes me ill. I really don’t want to talk about it, even though I do have an opinion on it. If you’re desperate to argue with me, just e-mail me, because I’m going to delete comments that mention it.
We’re trying to keep the house somewhat in order in advance of the girls leaving for 6 days at camp at the end of this week. This will be the first overnight camp they’ve attended, so it’s a good thing that they are going with each other, even though they may be split up a lot of the time. Living where we do, the girls don’t get a chance to make a lot of friends outside of school.
I’ve got a phone interview on Wednesday which could lead to something halfway nice. As I said to some friends, I don’t mind talking about things like this, since I’m SO beyond thinking that it’ll jinx me. And, in related news, I just saw a posting for a position that I’m completely qualified for. Great, right? Well, they’ve posted it before, and I applied. Of course, I wasn’t interviewed. It’s this, employers, which give your HR departments bad names, and drive applicants bat shit crazy.
Oh, if you’re a potential employer? I don’t mean you. You are the most wonderful company that has yet been invented, and I am sure that you would never, ever do something like this.
Wow, I did go a little bit off the reservation there, didn’t I?
Anyway, one more thing. The Wife and I have been watching a cool little PBS series, Craft in America. It profiles a bunch of people in the traditional arts in this country, but is not so earnest that it’s a turn-off. We’re on episode three of eight, and it’s a nice, calming thing to watch at the end of the day. All the eps are on PBS video.
I hope that you’re getting through the heat all right. On my way to the library today, I drove by a firetruck assisting a car at a major intersection. No accident, but it appeared as if a senior citizen had some sort of heat-related reaction. So, keep watered, people.
