Let's try thinking, or at least writing, about anything else.

* It is the new year, so we have to start contemplating the layoff scythe. My boss confided: our group was left off of an org chart for a new project. Of course she saw the org chart because... she was in the meeting for the new project. So she is paranoid and now I have the unease and ( Read more... )

Once upon a time, children, many years ago, the happy people of LiveJournal-land made clever, funny, and intelligent posts, and all the world could collect these finest of pearls. But on one bleak day, LiveJournal-land was invaded by the evil forces of coworkers, colleagues, and (soon to be ex-) wives and husbands. Now LiveJournal-land lies ( Read more... )

I suppose there is beauty in clarity, in finally perceiving how things really are. The smiling, nosy cleaning lady at my mom's building just blithely saying to the neighbor across the hall - "those Democrats, they just want to give benefits to illegal aliens, can you believe that?" - yes, the people you thought had some sort of kindliness or ( Read more... )

I feel, as I often do, like I have had a profound insight or "aha!" moment about something. A couple of things, really. So I am in that nice moment of thinking about it, before discovering the 256,245 other people who have thought and written about the same topic with greater depth, thoroughness, and clarity than I ever will, causing me to want to ( Read more... )

For some reason, Chrome stopped working for me. I can do "incognito" windows and it's fine, but regular Chrome times out trying to anything. This wouldn't be a problem except that in "incognito" mode, it pretends you are a brand new person every time, so you have to log in to everything. And the auto-fill passwords I had for LJ were wrong. And it ( Read more... )

My aunt finally passed late last night ( Read more... )

**I concocted all of the below before discovering that this book already exists: https://www.amazon.com/Assholes-Theory-Donald-Aaron-James/dp/0385542038/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8. So I'm not especially clever, but in the hopes that ( Read more... )

Welcome back, everyone! Some of us never quite left.

I delivered this at my minyan at Germantown Jewish Centre yesterday. I worked on it pretty hard and I think I more or less like it, although (as always) while I'm giving it I'm thinking, "this is so vapid and obvious." But because it represents (concisely!) what I've been able to absorb of Laclau after studying him for so long, I thought it might ( Read more... )

I have plans again, which is a good sign. And you're part of them, LJ. Just letting you know.