Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "They resembled posh Klansmen, or the cast of a Broadway musical, should Broadway ever decide to do the Moloch Pagan Cult of Sacrifice story." - Jon Ronson, describing the Bohemian Grove owl burning ceremony

Reading: Barbara D'Amato, Hard Evidence

Listening to: a mix CD, through which I have decided that I must have the collected works of Trilogy. Or at least listen to "Snow Shanty" for the next three months.

Decluttering accomplishments: threw out a bunch of expired coupons

2 December 2002 - Work As a Foreign Language

I'm not officially doing Holidailies, but I'm sort of thinking about it. I only have one day this month that I can't write, at least as my calendar currently stands. That is always subject to change, though. Days when I'm just too lazy to write are another matter.

I've done nothing more on the redesign, but I did put up a slightly annotated playlist of the mix tape I was working on last month. It's really for the benefit of the people who received the tape, but you're free to look at it if you want to.

I've recently noticed just how odd some of the vocabulary we use at work can be. Not long ago one of my colleagues came into the office and said to me, "I'm just back from the seance and I need you to make me a ducky-horsie chart." The really sad part is that this sentence made perfect sense to me. For the record, a seance is an informal meeting before the real decision making meeting, used to get a sort of sense of the group. And a ducky-horsie chart is a briefing chart that is down to the elementary school level, as in "this is a ducky and that is a horsie." I know who I picked the term up from, though I'm not sure he invented it. But we all use it. People do think you're way strange when you say things like that in a room full of the uninitiated.

The favorite non-work topic of conversation around the office right now is the weather. We haven't gotten snow yet, but it's bloody cold. I checked the average conditions for the D.C. area and, not only is it not supposed to be this cold now, it's not supposed to be this cold here ever. Actually, today wasn't horribly bad by the time I left work. But there's a birdbath in the courtyard of my apartment complex and I swear I saw starlings strapping on ice skates this morning. I may need to change my vacation strategy and spend all of the next month in, say, Brazil. Instead, I've made ice hotel plans and am busily researching Azerbaijan, having become slightly obsessed with the existence of a significant Jewish community in a place called Krasnaya Sloboda. And I hear that the oil field flares are lovely this time of year.

Um, I am joking about the latter, just in case you needed the ducky-horsie version.