cheating and posting this forwarded email from my dad from a few months ago. thought it was hilarious. will write about memorial day later.
BLAMESTORMING : Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was
missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on
everything, and then leaves.
ADMINISPHERE : The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the
rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often
profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to
solve.
STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
CUBE FARM : An office filled with cubicles.
PRAIRIE DOGGING : When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube
farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.
CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.
MOUSE POTATO : The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.
SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get
into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with
the kids.
SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only
to get screwed and die in the end.
SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because
magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.
PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an
electronic device to get it to work again.
GENERICA : Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no
matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and
subdivisions.
OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve
just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake).
WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks.
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From A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton:
“Maybe heaven is whatever you want it to be,” she said. “For me, it’s mothering, even the bad parts. I’m very clear about that now. For Lizzy it should be just about the whole nine yards except baths, and Mrs. Klinke’s German Shepherd. She’s gung ho about–about life. I keep telling her, ‘Hang in there Lizzy. I’ll still be your mom when I’m eighty. I’ll remember everything, absolutely everything about you, and when I get there, we’ll pick up where we left off.’”
taking notes for a book on death. can’t seem to find the file the notes are in, so it will go here for now.
this passage is from a mother whose toddler has just drowned. it would be sad if you were in a good mood, totally depressing when i put it in the context of the funk i’ve been in lately LOL. maybe i should stop reading such depressing books. finished Songs in Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris recently, gosh that was a terrible story. i really wanted someone to die. but they didn’t. main characters never die when i want them to. LOL.
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for earth day, get out went to Bass River State Park for a cleanup. really nice day! we got to go deep into the pine barrens up there. apparently people in the area used to use the spot as a dumping ground before the town started picking up certain things. we hauled out ancient kitchen appliances, (some of which had been used as target practice!) roofing shingles, cement blocks and even some old carpeting that had been there so long that the roots from the trees had become intertwined with the shag (shag!).
the park employees figured that people dumped their garbage there before the townships picked up things like that. ellen said that her neighborhood recently started to collect those kinds of things, and the trash & garbage in the neighborhood & the parks has gone down quite a bit since they started doing that. cynthia, the park ranger from bass river in charge of the cleanup project, said that the townships in that area picked up everything now, and that most of the garbage that needs to be picked up is very old. she said there were a few dump sites like this one in the park. getting volunteers out to clean up is difficult. good to remember….
interesting note, some of the trash we had to leave because it would have interfered with the ecosystem, like the rug that had roots. we removed some of it but left the rest. they would clean up a little more next time. one pile of roofing shingles was buried under years and years’ worth of pine needles; only a few were sticking out, so when chris & i pulled that first layer out, the second layer sent about a million ants into a tizzy. so we left the rest there, uncovered, so the ants would have a place to live still. someone will pick them up next time. maybe it will be us :)
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