Spheres of influence

Last night my lovable, goofy son managed to make me a little sad that he's getting older and growing up. I was helping him get his backpack ready for school in the morning and he was kind of singing to himself, so at first I didn't catch on to the words coming out of his mouth. But then he repeated it, a bit louder, and I just stopped what I was doing and stood there for a minute, a little surprised. I couldn't quite belive what I'd heard so I asked him to repeat it again. Then, since I knew I couldn't be the only one to have to bear witness to the corruption of my impressionable child, I asked him to go in the living room and sing it to his dad. Apparently, the song wasn't enough - he had to get into character for this "performance". So, what song was my darling first grader singing, decked out in gold mardi gras beads, a backwards ball cap and oversized sunglasses? Flo-Rida's "Low". The part where the lyrics go "Shawty had them apple bottom jeans (jeans)/Boots with the fur (with the fur)/The whole club was lookin at her/She hit the flo (she hit the flo)/Next thing u kno/Shawty got low low low low low low low low".

I had to look the lyrics up - I thought that song was by Usher. As you can probably figure, my husband and I aren't huge fans of hip hop (my son gets his love of "rocking out" and playing air guitar from his father's collection of classic rock and hair band music...he gets his fondness for They Might Be Giants from yours truly). After that delightful display (complete with dance moves, to boot), we had to ask where he picked that routine up. We figured it would have been in his after school program. But we were wrong. The little friend that he sits with at lunch taught him the song and the moves, as well as introducing him to that exaggerated hip hop style that he is treating as a costume - so far. I had to give my son a small lecture about how some things are for kids and some things - like that song- really aren't, just to make myself feel like I was having a positive affect on a kid who will now be more greatly influenced by his peers than by his parents. It's bad enough he's been asking for a skateboard for months, and has started to gravitate towards clothes that I see mini skater punks twice his age wearing. I'm losing my kid to the inexorable influence of the wider world. I'll just have to work even harder to instill good judgement in him, now. But I draw the line at saggy, drawer-bearing pants and hypersexualized mysoginy, no matter what!

I heard you missed me. I'm back.

I've been busy getting ready for an upcoming vacation - a much needed vacation. Of course, I'm all stressed about all the things that will need to be done this week at work so that nothing goes terribly wrong next week when I'm not here. I also had to go out and buy some cold weather clothes, since down here it is in the 60's and we consider that "chilly". I just checked the 10 day forcast for our destination, and right now it is predicted to snow. SNOW! You have no idea how excited this makes me. Even if there are just flurries (which, considering that it'll be raining the first part of the week, it may be some actual decent flurries), this would be special because my son has never seen snow. My husband is having second thoughts about his decision to not buy thermals, so this week we get to rush around trying to find some, and I want everyone to get boots since it's probably going to be muddy.

I was recently shocked to discover that Target has appropriated the Japanese advertising mascot Domo-kun into their in-store Halloween advertising. Did no one from their marketing department bother to Google Domo before doing this? Seriously...

For those who aren't familiar, the most common (infamous) Domo-related image to be found on the internet is a photoshopped image of Domo chasing a kitten with the tagline "Every time you masturbate ... God kills a kitten." In internet years, it's quite old, too - been around since the at least the early 2000's. Of course, looking at what we've done to the Sanrio brand, none of it surprises me at all. I'm thinking of buying a Domo doll and putting it in my office (orrr...someone could get me one for Christmas??).


Now for the serious stuff...

In the wake of Colin Powell's late-in-the-game endorsement of Barack Obama (for which Rush Limbaugh is calling the retired United States General and former member of President Bush's administration who donated to McCain's faltering campaign last year an "ungrateful racist"...because Limbaugh isn't either of those two things himself, obviously ...eyeroll...), one of the forums I frequent *a little too frequently sometimes* has devolved into a battleground, divided between a small group spewing vicious jingoistic rhetoric - armed to their sharp little teeth with bigotry and somewhere between seriously questionable judgement and downright ignorance - and the rest of the forum posters, who now get to deal with fending off or downright refuting a rabid chorus of claims of racism and the prediction of the fall of "white society" to socialism and a minority-favoring welfare state full of "traitors".
It actually scares me a little, that the mindset of some people has sunk to that level and actaully spreads to others, ratcheting up their collective vitriol and misplaced anger or sense of middle class "injustices".
I like to think that even though everyone carries a little grain if some kind of biases against others, that there are enough reasonsed, rational people who won't fall for the tactics that are being employed by certain groups...and that in a couple of weeks the majority of citizens of this country will overcome their differences and make the right choice for the future of the nation, so that we aren't represented by those who would drag us down to be mired into this "us vs them" mentality that will reinforce and even encourage divisivness. We haven't come this far as a people and a nation to let ourselves be dragged to the brink of the resurrection of McCarthyism and extreme racial and social discord, have we? We're better than this!

It's always something...and at the same time, a whole lotta nothin'

Tomorrow I have an appointment to get new glasses. Last night I somehow got a giant scratch on one of my lenses, which just capped off a very frustrating day. My son isn't doing as well in school as he should (and can), and this is causing a little tension as my husband and I struggle with how to address it. We have different approaches to parenting and discipline, and it's creating a little bit of conflict. Also, I've officially OD'd on campaign coverage. The running joke in my house is that every time we see Anderson Cooper on tv one of us has to yell out "Super Duper"...then the other one has to respond with something tactless ending in "pooper". I'll leave it to your imaginations, although I can hint that it's usually referencing buggery. My husband and I are keeping it classy, as always.

Speaking of classy...

ROLFMAO:




Our neighbor is allowing the homeless addict who mows his lawn to now sleep in a broken down van in his back yard. So it's not down by the river, and there seems to be a lot of beer and not a too much government cheese, but when I realized what was going on just beyod my fenceline the other night I was...less than pleased. I guess our neighbor the crazy cat man has graduated on to collecting people.

I've come to the realization that there is just no pleasing some people. The boss's assistant was using a really old computer that has been having issues - because the ditz occupying that space before her took the computer that was there and we had to scramble to find a machine since we didn't have funds to purchase a new tower at that time - so I recently made the suggestion that she switch her computer out for one of the newer models that recently became surplus. Now she has a newer, faster machine with upgraded versions of the old programs she was running. And all she can do is complain about how she can't find any of her documents and she had to relearn these programs and wahh wahh wahhh. Not to mention the reminders about how the chair she's using is borrowed, and needs to be returned to the office it came from. I told her yesterday that another office was getting rid of some chairs, and she should go and check them out to see if there was anything that might work for her, but I think she'd rather play chair-martyr because she's holding out for brand new. Knowing that she's applying for other jobs and considering the luck we've had keeping a body planted at that desk for more than six months at a time for the last couple of years, I'm not entertaining the thought of making that kind of investment just to see turn over in that position yet again.

RANDOM LEGO STEPHEN HAWKING!!!

Brace for impact

I am sans bosses for the remainder of the week. Which is cool. But also...less than motivating, for some reason. Plus, my office is cold, and that always puts a damper on my work ethic. Being cold makes me want to curl up under my desk and take a nap, but I have to be here to put out the inevitable fires (including the ones I start myself...). We had training sessions all day yesterday, and one of the upstairs managers came down earlier to ask our opinion of the training - if it was helpful or not, and I had to say it was. What I don't understand is that when we get to the subject of recordkeeping, people who have been here longer than me act all flustered and frustrated, like they have no clue how to make it work and react as if we haven't been having these conversations about improving the systems for over a year now. There's a rumor making the rounds that some of us may see merit increases at some point later in the year. Whether this scuttlebutt is true and even if I'd see an extra penny remains to be seen.

I just spent the better part of the late morning dealing with a state inspector, a state-employed customer service rep who made me want to reach through the phone and commit a violent act, and some of my coworkers who just spent an inordinant amount of time pointing fingers at one another and lieing through their teeth. I even had to call people at home on their vacation! Your tax dollars at work.

The vacation countdown has begun. Currently at 16 days and holding - it can't come soon enough (fall foliage here we come).

I have my CDP mix-tape trade project to finish Friday night. I was excited by the prospects of the theme I was given ('I used to love you, baby, but you got real ugly'), since I immediately hit on the exact tone and vibe I wanted for the collection of songs, and the story I wanted to tell. I'm running behind (as usual - when am I on time for anything, ever?), but the objective is to actually get the CD in the mail - by Monday afternoon, no later. Just mailing the thing out will be, in my mind, quite the accomplishment, since I failed in the very first trade to meet my obligation and screwed someone out of a CD of righteous tunage.

I got an e-mail for participating in the local Race for the Cure event this past weekend. Ummm...

Yeah. We were there, right M? ;)

Oh, and the *ecomony* is still staying afloat, somehow. It's muscles are seizing and it's barely treading water, but it hasn't gone under for good yet.

(The US economy - setting records and breaking clocks, daily!)

So, in case there are tough times ahead...My husband taught himself to make home made mayonnaise and I'm baking our bread, and the garden for next spring is already being plotted since we were given some carrot and squash seeds recently. I'm teaching myself to sew, and knitting may come next. I was playing some post-war jazz on Pandora last night, and my husband said he felt like we're going back in time. I told him to STFU and go play Zelda on his brand new Wii while contemplating the Mac he wants to get next year.

"Poised for growth" is another way of saying "you're not going anywhere"

Sometimes I think it's easier to get acknowledged when something goes wrong at work than when the corporate machine is chugging along on all cylinders. When I'm just doing things right and there are no problems, I have very minimal interaction with my boss. I have to assume he prefers that, since he's never taken action to initiate more meetings. I try to stay a step ahead of him sometimes by trying to pick up on conversations around the workplace that might indicate what kinds of information he could need. This is certainly not an easy task...especially when we don't meet regularly - I'm constantly relying on rumormilling and third-party information to gauge the direction my data needs to be adjusted. I recently took a coworker's assumptions about a project at face value, and something got really screwed up. I'm left holding the bag and looking foolish, like I don't know what I'm doing, and if I were more ruthlessly ambitious and lacking personal ethics, that coworker would feel the immense pressure of the grinding wheels of the proverbial bus I would have thrown her under. But I don't do that. I accepted misinformation without a secondary confirmation, so I will take the brunt of the responsibility for this error. Hopefully, it can be fixed. Of course, this same coworker is applying for other jobs within the company (which is in direct contrast to what she says about not having an ambition above her current position). She's not being very smart about it, seeing as she left an internal application in the shared printer this week. Ooops. Again - if I were a different person, the boss would be aware that she doesn't appreciate the job she has (which she was given as an alternative to a layoff), since it bothers me when people attempt to be sneaky about things like this. She's the boss's assistant, so I think she owes it to him to be upfront about her intentions, although her staying or going would have very little affect on me.

The rumor is making the rounds that there's a restructure happening upstairs, and that I am not a part of it. Which, at this point, after all of the jerking around I feel has taken place, and doing the "networking" my boss suggested and hearing the things I have about the administrative unit...I think I'm okay with it, in all honesty. I just have to button up, not make careless and costly errors, and continue to make the case for the importance of my position and what I personally bring to the company. The honest way will take longer than the deceptive, climb-the-ladder-at-all-costs method, but I'll be able to sleep at night - even if I don't have as much disposable income. Shopping therapy will just have to be put on hold for a while.

All of my coworkers are acting super flakey lately. I had one call me - on speakerphone, which I hate with the firey passion of the enflamed Halls of Hades!! - and apparently forget she had even dialed my number, because I could hear her carrying on a conversation with someone sitting across the room. I listened to a lot of nothing for a good five minutes (while riffling through papers and typing on my keyboard really loudly to see if she'd realize I was still on the line) before getting bored and hanging up. The sound of the dial tone probably made her pee her pants. I had another coworker end a phone conversation today with "That's the name of that tuna". I hung up the phone and sat there a little baffled about what credit card charges had to do with the chicken of the sea before realizing that he was putting what he must've thought was a cute little spin on the phrase "That's the name of that tune". Wackos. The whole lot of 'em...

I have nothing of any relevance to say about the VP debate last night that isn't already being trumpeted from the four corners of the internets today (thanks Almost-President Al Gore, for our blessed internets!):

So, instead of insightful and thoughtful commentary, here are some visual aids. Go, ahead - LOL. While you still can!

And, for the sake of nostalgia...what we'll *hopefully* be "missing" - and I use that word in the most sarcastic and insincere sense possible - come this time next year (ohpleasedeargodmakeitso):