Take Your Incompetence To Work Day
First, something that doesn't make me mad. Something that makes me beam: the MFA Blog from Carbondale.
One of the teaching poets at Southern Illinois University - Carbondale has established a blog to post the goings-on and accomplishments of my alma mater program and its writers. And, man: Classes of 1999/2000, let's get off our asses! We were the launch classes, yet we're getting stomped by the '02 - '05s. Wither the crafty veterans?
As they say in South Dakota (a real place!), "It's gravel time." Punks.
**
Now something that makes me furious:
Only politicians could argue that they are the answer to the quagmire they've created. Hence, the Bush Administration's argument that one should vote Republican on Tuesday. Republicans may have laid a big steaming turd across the earth, but they've got a plan to scooop it up, hey? (Does Halliburton make shovels?) Assholes.
How many other professionals could argue themselves as the cure for their errors? Priests and clerics.
But we may as well all try it. Killed a series of important deals for your corporation? Keep your job, buddy. Here's a cube with a window view. Harrassed a co-worker? Have a promotion. (Actually, that wasn't far from the truth at my former employer's office. Sleeping with higher-ups was a remarkably effective, though monstrously unimaginative, form of advance.) Spilled a pot of coffee on a patron? Here's a larger tip.
It's election Tuesday, America. It's Take Your Incompetence To Work Day!
**
Is my super-cute mother the problem with America? Here she is, plotting her potential and devasting comebacks in Chicago.
Finally, over at Lorie Stories, she wondered whether the deflating lack of Halloween spirit, if not outright rudeness, among the kids in her neighborhood was a reality or just an impression she'd developed as "a crotchety old lady." (Only someone in their 20s would dare insist she was crotchety and old. Total giveaway, Lorie!)
I feel this too, though I wouldn't describe myself as crotchety...primarily because my northern heart is unsure about using publicly any word that contains the word "crotch."
I don't think we're wrong about all this manners stuff. Maybe it really was the Cold War holding us together? Fear has that power. Jesus. We used to get "detentions" in school. Kids would cry about it. There was shame in it. Within a year of me leaving high school, detentions as we'd known them were apparently discontinued because they were considered psychologically cruel. To assign them was to risk a mental health lawsuit from the child's parent(s).
I'm not advocating spanking or anything like that. I just think we created a monster in getting way too sensitive about everything.
Lord. I recall being afraid of sixth graders when I was in fifth grade. By the time I was a high school senior, 10 year olds would ride past us on their bikes and give us the finger and shout out things far more crude than we were saying to one another.
There was this one little bastard too. I can still picture him. He was born to be a jag. He always had a giant bandage over one eye beneath his Messy Marvin glasses. And he had a bowl cut dome of straw hair. (Did he HAVE an eye beneath that patch? Why didn't they ever give him a patch? for Christ's sake!? Maybe that was why he was such a shit.) He'd ride past, finger blazing, and cry out, "You ass-fucking faggots have whore mamas!!"
Knowing my mom, who has on more than one occasion given me the finger, and who once said "When you came home" when I caught her drinking alcohol and asked when she'd started that, she probably would have told the kid, "If my son wants to have gay sex, he can have gay sex!"
So maybe it isn't the children. Maybe my mother is the problem.
(Mums, I know you're reading this. Please make sure Gram is not!)
Yes, I played the Mario Brothers games. I would still play them. I'm a puss. I listen to twee rock. I like Scandinavian and Japanese things. I have Swedish trivets. Fucking trivets!
I never even had to consider Grand Theft Auto, man. It wasn't even on the cultural map.
-cK
One of the teaching poets at Southern Illinois University - Carbondale has established a blog to post the goings-on and accomplishments of my alma mater program and its writers. And, man: Classes of 1999/2000, let's get off our asses! We were the launch classes, yet we're getting stomped by the '02 - '05s. Wither the crafty veterans?
As they say in South Dakota (a real place!), "It's gravel time." Punks.
**
Now something that makes me furious:
Only politicians could argue that they are the answer to the quagmire they've created. Hence, the Bush Administration's argument that one should vote Republican on Tuesday. Republicans may have laid a big steaming turd across the earth, but they've got a plan to scooop it up, hey? (Does Halliburton make shovels?) Assholes.
How many other professionals could argue themselves as the cure for their errors? Priests and clerics.
But we may as well all try it. Killed a series of important deals for your corporation? Keep your job, buddy. Here's a cube with a window view. Harrassed a co-worker? Have a promotion. (Actually, that wasn't far from the truth at my former employer's office. Sleeping with higher-ups was a remarkably effective, though monstrously unimaginative, form of advance.) Spilled a pot of coffee on a patron? Here's a larger tip.
It's election Tuesday, America. It's Take Your Incompetence To Work Day!
**
Is my super-cute mother the problem with America? Here she is, plotting her potential and devasting comebacks in Chicago.
Finally, over at Lorie Stories, she wondered whether the deflating lack of Halloween spirit, if not outright rudeness, among the kids in her neighborhood was a reality or just an impression she'd developed as "a crotchety old lady." (Only someone in their 20s would dare insist she was crotchety and old. Total giveaway, Lorie!)
I feel this too, though I wouldn't describe myself as crotchety...primarily because my northern heart is unsure about using publicly any word that contains the word "crotch."
I don't think we're wrong about all this manners stuff. Maybe it really was the Cold War holding us together? Fear has that power. Jesus. We used to get "detentions" in school. Kids would cry about it. There was shame in it. Within a year of me leaving high school, detentions as we'd known them were apparently discontinued because they were considered psychologically cruel. To assign them was to risk a mental health lawsuit from the child's parent(s).
I'm not advocating spanking or anything like that. I just think we created a monster in getting way too sensitive about everything.
Lord. I recall being afraid of sixth graders when I was in fifth grade. By the time I was a high school senior, 10 year olds would ride past us on their bikes and give us the finger and shout out things far more crude than we were saying to one another.
There was this one little bastard too. I can still picture him. He was born to be a jag. He always had a giant bandage over one eye beneath his Messy Marvin glasses. And he had a bowl cut dome of straw hair. (Did he HAVE an eye beneath that patch? Why didn't they ever give him a patch? for Christ's sake!? Maybe that was why he was such a shit.) He'd ride past, finger blazing, and cry out, "You ass-fucking faggots have whore mamas!!"
Knowing my mom, who has on more than one occasion given me the finger, and who once said "When you came home" when I caught her drinking alcohol and asked when she'd started that, she probably would have told the kid, "If my son wants to have gay sex, he can have gay sex!"
So maybe it isn't the children. Maybe my mother is the problem.
(Mums, I know you're reading this. Please make sure Gram is not!)
Yes, I played the Mario Brothers games. I would still play them. I'm a puss. I listen to twee rock. I like Scandinavian and Japanese things. I have Swedish trivets. Fucking trivets!
I never even had to consider Grand Theft Auto, man. It wasn't even on the cultural map.
-cK
posted by cK at 05:06
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