Straight-leg 501 fire

It is 12:35 and you are out walking the many intersecting sidewalks of your campus. Making your way at your own pace and canter to your next class, your car, your humble abode, your point B. You just may be even walking with a friend or with Beyonce crooning in your ear but the point is that you are walking. About 20 yards up the sidewalk that obviously is filled with other transitional students you see a young man round the corner. He is sporting a pair of 501 jeans and a teal green jacket that looks like it keeps him sufficiently warm. He has got his backpack on, and it’s strapped down tight around his waist and chest but it doesn’t keep it from bouncing, it’s bouncing because he is running. Yes, he is rounding the corner at full gallop, not a brisk walk, or even a speed walk. He is lifting his legs and leaning into the wind while pumping those arms. The sound he is making from all the fabric he is rubbing together and the backpack thumping is not doing anything to help him not attract attention. The whole sidewalk population has noticed his awkward dash and is either gawking or veering off to the side to give this man a straight shot. Why shouldn’t we stare? While the whole surrounding population found a way to adjust their schedule to allow comfortable traveling time, our sprinter decides to see he can start a friction fire in his jeans. It’s a slight offense against the jovial code of student transitional activities. Punishable by the countless faces that will stare at this Olympian hopeful with expressions of misunderstanding and entertainment at his expense. In the end I learnt a great lesson from this sad fast man. If I am late for something I will find a deserted and probably longer forest path of which I can make haste without invited the disdain that I am sure everyone is so willing to stare out, as I was.

Caught me catching you

You walk past someone in the computer lab and their view screen is facing you but you can’t see their face. You look at their screen as you pass by and to your unexpectant surprise this person is looking at your facebook page. You stutter in your step and look down at the shoulders, neck and coiffure of the person so shamefully caught facebook stalking. Your surprise turning into curiosity and a bit of alarm as you notice that you do not know this person. Their shoulders draped in a winter jacket do not bring any acquaintances to mind. The style of their hair brings no friends or enemies alike to your memory. You can’t just stay standing behind them for fear of them catching you catching them, so you find a seat. But this seat offers no vantage point, no use to unmask your profile stalker. All you can see is their hand moving the mouse, click click click there goes your spring vacation album. Click click click now the stalker has full knowledge of your music tastes and your poignant motivational quotes. Click click click the unrelenting digger digs out your hometown city and can easily see your current where abouts. Click click click this person knows if you are looking for love, angry at it, satisfied by it, or desperate for it. Click click click this person will tell your children of all the photos of you doing things you wouldn’t want them to do. Click click click this person now knows more about you right now through your status post then your own mother. You sit there, you can’t do anything its unethical you can’t just run up to his screen and throw it off the table, you want to but you say I put that up there for people to see, it is not his fault its mine. But you want to fight back but how and can you now? You stand up and you go walking determinedly towards this unstoppable vile sneek, but possibly with the hint of a guilty 6th sense the person clicks the home page, evidence gone. You are no longer able to call this person on the gross and baseless activity you have witnessed on their behalf. You sit back down and think to yourself as the person logs off and walks away, am I safe now? Is the unidentifiable raping of my viral personality over? Can I go back to normal now? Was this the first time? Was this the last time....?

A POEM

Curse thy name thou art the spawn of pure evil.

A great and terrible contraption

Procurer of smut, anarchy and pure dribble

Thou art not benign

Leaving taste of cyanide

To be written in despicable lore

In Babylon thou would be a whore

From shores east to west

In guise a hideous portrayal

Thou art baseless relative incest

Burn thy records scratch thy mark

Between ocean beasts and thee

I will sleep with the shark

In lies thou elate

In truth thou defame

The sewer thy cradle

Thy taste, the same

In lack of all that is holy

Have thou a name?

Thou art the “iclicker”

I'll be your entertainment today ladies

There are times in your life when you can see a situation and the different forms it can take very clearly. It almost becomes like a multiple choice question, will the next few moments play out like plan A or plan B? In these moments there may be very plain and simple measures to be taken which will force the plan of your choice to surpass. In other more unfortunate cases there is little you can do and anything you try to do has almost no guarantee of changing the outcome. I pondered this as I stood in front of my cash register today at the beginning of our little Thursday lunch rush. I like Thursdays at work of a few reasons. 1. Thursday is chicken pot pie soup day, and I like that soup. 2. The incredibly attractive group of training dental hygienists that with German efficiency and Italian predictability come in to eat every fourth day of the week. There are about six of these little dentally trained vixens and yes I do get a tad giddy inside when their little wolf pack pops in through the door. As I watched this host heavenly hygienists get in line I became excruciatingly aware of what was going to happen. Plan A. I remain the sole cashier and I get to take the order of every single hungry lady in that group. The line was growing as expected during the lunch rush and to my right is an extra cash register to be used in this very lunch rush occasion. Plan B. If this extra register is made active by a fellow employee, I will only treat at most half of those scrub wearing beauties to my bad one liners. So with this terrible reality facing me I try my hardest to get the line as fast through the ordering process as I can. Price accuracy suffered for those ten minutes. But as I said earlier, sometimes you can do everything possible and it just won’t stop the titanic from smashing that iceberg. My shift leader boss, bless her efficient soul pulls herself up to that day-damaging device of a cash register and runs the line right through. I am so disappointed inside my beating heart, that when three of the Cleopatra’s to my Alexander self come up to make their order, I’ve got nothing. I can’t shoot out one witty line to any of their mundane comments that will leave them a bit surprised that yes; I can turn a phrase and your head all from behind this counter. It is not like I will ever ask one of these girls out, I order their food and they eat the food. Dinner and a show is the effect I am going for, not their digits. But there will always be another Thursday and another chance to impress.

Professional Opinion

Take a moment and ponder upon this interesting question. If you have a “Professional Opinion”, what would it be exactly? Of course to have any fun with this little jitta-bug we would have to dissect the compound phrase of Professional Opinion. The noun (person, place or thing) is definitely “Opinion”. These tend to be annoying and quite easy to form and toss around, drawing as much avoidance and annoyance from surrounding people as the common flu. If you are not careful you may even confuse the two because really they act so much alike. “Opinions are the limits of one’s abilities to find enjoyment in things”, I so botched that quote but I feel it gets the point across. But why not see the magical transformation that opinion performs when it is conjoined with the adjective (thing that describes a noun) “Professional”. Professional is derived from profession, or the task that we perform for certain reasons ie. To buy milk and eggs, help your fellow man, get out of the house, or to stay on parole. Dumbing it down and straightening it out, this service that you perform is so valuable that your superiors will pay you do to it. Thereby making you a professional at whatever task you are performing. Your technical knowledge at your profession and physical capability to do it is better than anyone at the receiving end of your service, so you say. Think professional athletes and just know yours is less interesting but possibly less vain also. Now we add them together, and at last your opinion is no longer avoided like a common house-hold plague. It is actually required at moments and nearly always respected when used within your sphere of professionalism. Our opinion has eaten its wheaties or spinach and now its power is really, well powerful. If you really want to bend things in a new gravity then notice that every moment of history is spurred and created by someone’s professional opinion. In reality, acting upon the professional opinion. Hitler was believed to have a sturdy and worthwhile professional opinion on the supremacy of one race over others. Take it too far you say, I think not. Doctors have so highly regarded professional opinions that they have developed a unique way of sustaining or opposing it amongst themselves. “Start him on two drops of nitro-selaphane and put him in traction; do you concur Dr. Hill?” Lawyer’s suits and plumber’s wrenches fit and clamp thanks to their professional opinions. They are paid to do their service so whatever savoir-faire they voice in conjunction with their profession now has enough weight to sink it to the bottom of any lake. So what is your professional opinion? When can you voice it? How powerful is it really? My professional opinion encompasses all that can be inquired about and announced from behind a cash register. I can be your swaying vote towards choosing sourdough over wheat to go with your tomato basil soup. I will be the reason you took a penny out of your own purse instead out of our Styrofoam penny jar. You would have not bought that overpriced pretzel if I had not professionally up-sale’d it to you. I really don’t want to dwell on the current sphere my professional opinion allows me, but more on the life long quest to up-grade and augment the value of our professional opinion. What is college but really a place that once you jump through their hoops you can say to potential paying bosses, “I have the makings of a nice professional opinion. This professional opinion will make our clientele pay, and therefore line your silver pockets”. But do not under any circumstances take anything written here for a cold, hard, unforgiving fact. Because as much as I try to fake it, no one is paying me for this so my opinion does not have a monetary value. In the vainest sense, it does not have value.

Dime a Million

There is a man and his name is Mr. Jones. By all conventional reasons anyone would think that Mr. Jones is a normal man. Anyone would be right for interpreting the conventional reasons in that manner. No he is not the literary image of the normal man, in the way that by reading about him you see that he is so normal in his ways that he becomes an odd conglomerate of all joe-schmo stereotypes. He is just a regular man. This man won’t be found in any story as the focus unless; of course he is acted upon by the inciting incident. Please keep in mind that this man is not so normal that he is found odd, as would be shown in any cinematic fashion. His lifestyle is stereotypical but not to a humorous degree. Some days he eats toast for breakfast some days it’s frosted mini-wheats and some days he is just too busy in the morning to eat the most important meal of the day. To put it in the clearest way possible, this is the kind of man that you would meet when you went over to a friend’s house and the dad came home from work. You’ll think, “oh Mr. Jones is home”. While he will think, “oh so we are feeding one more kid tonight”. Normal like that. The inciting incident of course happens on this man’s birthday. Some of the guys at the office bought Mr. Jones a lottery ticket. As inciting incidents go, Mr. Jones is a lucky man and wins. Mr. Jones is one of those silent types while winning 7.3 million post-taxes. Lots of pushing and shoving goes on between cubicles, as his friends rejoice in the turn of events. Those not in the vicinity only slightly raise themselves out of their roller chairs just enough to see over the cubicle wall but still bending at the knees as a personal reassurance that yes they are “still working”. As explained before Mr. Jones is the quiet type in these situations, he just can’t let these shocks sink in quick. Mr. Jones is elated as the boss in what he thinks was a very smart managerial decision sends him home for the rest of the day. Wouldn’t want the whole office going ape and losing a day’s work to one of the state Gov attempts at easing budget troubles through chance games. The guys from the office promise to call later to see how Mrs. Jones took the shock. The Misses is home already getting ready to pick up the kids from soccer, she of course lets out squeals and tears and just can’t stop hugging her lucky husband. Somewhere during the 6th or 7th go over of the bright yellow decorative winning ticket, Mrs. Jones catches the catch. Wither the winning of the lottery or the appliance of the catch to the life of Mr. Jones is the inciting incident is up to any organized and informed discussion. The catch, in fact can be caught easily in the title by which it is named. Dime a Million. Now there has to be someone or some group that makes up the themes for each lottery game. Obviously this lottery brain-trust thought it witty to change Dime a Dozen and to Dime a million. Whoever thought it would be a good marketing ploy to actually bring that phrase to a literal fruition must have a slight grudge against humanity akin to any Genocide mastermind. But yes the Jones couple caught onto the catch that the 7.3 million post-taxes they would be receiving would be completely in dimes. How the completely everyday Mr. Jones will adjust to cede inciting incident will be the topic of discussion in any future post.

Mean that Yoda did not...

One thing that I really really do not like at all is those posters that are nicely framed in a stainless steel square in all offices. You might see them when you go in for an interview or in the front office at a high school. These are the posters with a stunning panoramic view of the some awe-inspiring natural landscape. Near the bottom about 4 inches above that stainless steel frame is a confidence inducing word with a possible explanation or a famous quote by someone who historically possessed the described virtue. I am not a fan of these things one bit, it would not surprise me if the same man who came up with these “hangable” pep talks was somehow related to a high ranking propaganda official in post under Lenin. They just give off that same vibe, the hollow and devoid of roots attempt to urge the working man to new heights of productivity. It’s not someone you respect that is telling you to work harder it’s a laminated dime a dozen picture of the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is respectable but hardly in the same ways. With this said I do find myself walking the same line when it comes to pep talks. I am in writing this trying to slice the pep talk in a different direction, I really just want to explore in my head the power of trying.
Yoda has been quoted and I feel slightly misinterpreted quite often whilst training the young skywalker to use the force. The X-wing is stuck in the mucky ponds of the dagoba system’s mired surface. When luke says I’ll try in response to the newly presented challenge, then Yoda throws down the big one, “No, do or do not, there is no try”. Here in lies the misinterpretation, luke tries and fails and then makes excuses and receives a guilt trip that only one strong in the force can provide, “that is why you fail”. Now anyone who says I’ll give it a try will receive this quoted line probably from one of the friends who owns three lightsabers and has a lot more free cash because he doesn’t get to take many girls out. Yoda I feel was condemning not the act of trying but the fact that there was no confidence attached to the try. There is a large difference in saying you’ll try and giving it your all just before you fall flat on your face and, saying you’ll try only because you are not confident that you’ll succeed. The difference between the two is the first is a statement of an attempt regardless of the outcome; the second is a statement of an attempt with an excuse if it fails. The beautiful nearly atoning power of all out attempt without care of failure vilifies the pathetic excusing statement that people use when they fear failure so they don’t give a definite statement.
With this said I owe everything to trying. I don’t think there has ever been one time in my life where I performed successfully on the first attempt. Failure, though it will never be a choice state of being is something so beautiful when it is seen in its true teaching form. It only requires the drive to get your broken face back above your shoulders and going at it again, and then failure becomes your teacher. To finish this off I would propose two quotes from both parental units in my life to be made into one of those inspirational socialist posters. The one from my mother will feature a picture of Chicago just after the fire, and it will read “rock bottom is a college education”. Father’s will feature Hiroshima just after big boy dropped in and just four inches above the frame it will read, “school of hardknocks”. To which I will add my own, “Try/fail = Try/succeed”.