A short December…

Yeah in and year out, December regularly has the lowest readership of any month of the year. Everyone is busy and that’s to be expected while they’re attempting to fill the world with their personal version of holiday cheer. I mean, I can’t really expect everyone to drop their Christmas planning just because a new post or two show up on the internet. The logical result is that December became something of a dumping ground around here. Since the numbers weren’t on my side, posts got less frequent, shorter, and weren’t exactly “A” level material in a lot of cases. I like to think more recent Decembers have seen that trend reverse a bit as I try to keep the focus on delivering quality pith every day of the year.

December 2007 was seriously short on posts. It looks like I was only managing to get my act together every three or four days back then… and what did show up was often super short and lacked the snark that I think helps define jeffreytharp.com.

What does that mean to you? Well, instead of dribbling them out over two weeks, I’ve taken the unprecedented step of posting the entire month’s worth of material in one go. With these 10 posts, we can bring 2007 to an end. Next sunday, I hope you’ll join me as we launch headlong into 2008. With only ten months and 14,000 words of archive material left to post, this little project is closer to its end than its beginning. I still think it’s been a worthwhile effort if only to remind me about how ridiculous our own pasts can sound when we have the benefit of hindsight.

What you get…

What you get when you’ve got a guy who’s a little too attached to his routine and an extra day off every week is a list of things that usually takes until mid-day Sunday to accomplish being done before noon on Saturday. That’s not the worst problem to have, of course, but it does point towards needing to revise the weekly to do list to account for an additional 24 hours of non-scheduled time. I told myself I’d get down to the business of outlining a few potential ideas for a new book, but from this post you can imagine for yourself how that’s going so far.

So yeah, here we are on Saturday afternoon with absolutely nothing pressing to get into. I’m flipping through my three-ring binder of comfort food recipes trying to light onto something that sounds good for dinner tonight. As for the rest, it looks like maybe I’ll get some reading done and get some quality time with the kids… or maybe I can get started on building the bigger tortoise habitat that I sketched out a few months ago. Seriously, having this much regular free time on on hands is freaking me out a little.

What I did on my Furlough Friday…

I really should just be staying home, conserving resources, and bitching online about the monumental contempt in which I hold the elected “leaders” of this country, but instead I cooked an actual breakfast this morning and knocked around with the dogs. Washed some clothes, did some dishes, and made myself presentable. I trolled around a few of the local pawn shops looking for deals on a couple of specific items and found out that grocery shopping at 1PM on a Friday is every bit as good as 8AM on Sunday. I’ll be keeping that little secret in mind for the next nine weeks. I cut the grass and decided even I’m not obsessive enough to do an hour’s worth of trimming in 100 degree heat. No worries, this weekend still has two more days and I’m sure obsession will trump heat at some point.

So now that everyone else has started their weekend too, here I sit, nursing a Red Stripe, trying hard to coax a few hundred words onto the page. If I’m bluntly honest with everyone, the beer is disappearing far faster than the words are showing up, so there probably won’t be much to salvage by the time it wraps up this evening. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after that. Fortunately, the words always seem to show up eventually, even when I don’t know exactly where they’re coming from. However it happens, I’ll take them all.

So yeah, Furlough Friday #2 (or Saturday Part 1 if you prefer) was as much of a success as one can reasonably expect under the circumstances. It’s still new and different. Ask me a month from now and you’ll likely hear a different opinion.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Responsibility. As a grown ass adult, you have certain responsibilities. One of those is to be where you’re supposed to be, when you’re supposed to be there. That goes double if you’re going to try passing yourself off as a professional. Yep, sometimes that means you’re going to have to play hurt, or when you have other things on your mind. It’s the way of the world, so suck it up, Rolling Stone Bomberbuttercup. When you’re the only one impacted by your piss poor decision making skills, I say do what you want and God bless… but when your decision make someone else deal with the consequences, you’re pretty much just as asshat.

2. Rolling Stone. From the perspective of having any tact or class as an organization, Rolling Stone has basically let the world know for sure that they have none. Look, if they want to run a magazine with the Boston bomber on the cover, they’re perfectly within their rights. All I’d ask is that don’t hide behind the cover of being responsible journalists tackling a hard story head on. If they came out and admitted they put that douchenozzle on the cover because they thought they were going to sell a gagillion copies of it, I’d say thanks for the truth and God bless. They’d be right and it would collectively be our fault because we Americans will buy up those magazines by the bushel basket. The only reason that smug bastard is looking out at us from the newsstand is because we’ll eat it up and pay for the privilege. Rolling Stone knows that… and we live through another example of the citizens of this fine country not having the common sense God gave a goose.

3. Standing by to stand by. I think by now we all know how I feel about meetings in general. In a decade’s worth of work, I’ve attended less than a handful that left me feeling like they were time well spent. That’s situation normal in the bureaucracy. What really grinds my gears, though is the mentality that the average drone has nothing better to do than sit around and wait for the next meeting to start. Don’t schedule something at 11:00, then slip it to 11:30, then pass the word to wait and see, and to be prepared to stand by to stand by until further notice. In a world of 32 hour work weeks and 80% pay, the least we can expect is that the limited time we do have on the clock is respected and used productively. Or maybe that’s a bridge too far.

Focus…

I’ve been having one of those days where it has been impossible to focus on anything for more than a minute or two at a clip. I wish I could blame it on some kind of external distraction, but I can’t. It’s all my own brain jumping from one thing to the next without any apparent rhyme or reason. It’s bad enough sitting here at the kitchen table trying to get through a blog post. It was downright crippling sitting at my desk trying to exercise my renowned skills as a tab-wearing PowerPoint Ranger.

Everyone’s entitled to an “off” day now and then, but when you make your living with your brain instead of your hands, it’s a little disconcerting when you never quite manage to get things into focus. I’ve had days like this before and I’m sure I’ll have them again, but at the moment all I’m hoping to do is make it through New Friday to Saturday (Part 1) and see if maybe a weekend can get my head straightened out.

If you’re not early…

I’m an early bird. I don’t just mean that I get up early even on mornings when it’s not strictly necessary. I mean I’m early to damned near everything. Meetings, doctor’s appointments, oil changes, you name it. I’m the guy who shows up well in advance of the designated time. Even movies, where we all know the listed “start time” is fictional at best, I’m in my seat sometimes even before they start running the pre-film advertainment. Admittedly even I can accept that there’s no good reason for that one.

This compulsion to be early if possible and on time at a minimum leads to an inordinate amount of sitting around waiting for other people, which ironically, is one of the most visceral of my pet peeves. Experience has taught me that expecting from others what I expect from myself is good in practice, but lousy in theory. While I don’t envision many of my lifetime habits changing at this late date, I’m doing my best to scale back my expectation that others at least make a minimal effort to be on time if there’s no possible way for them to be a few minutes early.

While I’m coming to grips with the fact that most people seem to go through life in a constant state of late for everything, that doesn’t mean I’m not quietly judging you based on your distinct lack of time management skills. If we’re on friendly terms, I probably won’t make a big deal out of it, but I’ll still think you need to invest in a watch and actually consult it now and then. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re not early you’re already late.

Casting around…

After spending two years milling about with Nobody Told Me… The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees and a few months hashing out What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2012 in Review, it feels a bit odd to be sitting here without a current work in progress. Not a bad odd, just a different one. I should be putting this time to good use on something, but so far I have no earthly idea what that will be at the moment. Of course there will be a 2013 eBook edition of What Annoys Jeff this Week, but with 24 regular weekly installments yet to be written, I’m nowhere near interested in putting the cart so far out in advance of the horse. In the meantime, I’ll just sit here hoping that inspiration strikes in a big way.

For a few weeks there I was tinkering around with the idea of working up a survival guide for new teachers, but that experience is so far in the past, getting somewhere beyond the obvious was a problem. I wish I would have kept better notes of the pitfalls and foibles of my brief brush with the teaching profession. Sadly, I didn’t start keeping detailed book until I shifted careers and realized the true value of documenting most everything. Since fiction doesn’t really feel like my genre and God knows I don’t want to get bogged down into a multi-year long research project, I’ll keep casting around until I land on something that can hold my interest for 20 or 30,000 words.

If anyone has ideas, consider this your opportunity to become part of the process.

Racing towards the end of the year…

I’ve spent the last twenty minutes blowing the dust of five posts from the archives and couldn’t help but notice that we’ve worked almost all of the way through 2007. The last of the November posts are up and December has made it’s first appearance. Time flies when you’re having fun. Especially when you’re posting material from before the point when you got the ridiculous idea that posting every day was a good idea.

This week is the usual assortment of minutia, complaints about the onrushing Christmas holiday, and a fun little post from a time in my life when I was still professionally ambitious. Those always make me smile. It never ceases to amaze me how much your Give-a-Shit level can change in six short years.

Enjoy the archive posts and be sure to check back tomorrow for brand new gripes and complaints.

Wellington…

I’ve been reading alot about the 1st Duke of Wellington this weekend. Say what you want about the duke, but the guy lived a life. From colonial Ireland to the wars in India, Portugal, Spain, and France to post-Napoleonic politics, he kept himself busy. Now I’m a busy guy too, but somehow I don’t think Arthur was much worried about keeping the lawn trimmed back home or making sure dinner was on the table by 5PM on the dot. It seems the problem with reading biographies is that every now and then they remind you of all the incredible stuff you’re not out there doing yourself. Then again, the Iron Duke seemed to be a bit preoccupied with exactly those kind of details, so maybe I’m just getting too much sleep.

Furlough Friday: Take 1…

And so, the first Furlough Friday of FY13 draws slowly to a close. Some of you might be wondering how it went. Although I didn’t have a to do list for the day, here are some of the highlights:

– Wake up, roll over, and tell the alarm clock to go fuck itself

– Brew and drink at least a pot of coffee

– Send hostile and antagonistic message to local members of Congress

– Write at least 500 words before leaving the house

– Pick up groceries

– Watch four episodes of The Sopranos

– Attempt to write a creative and snarky blog post (mostly unsuccessfully)

– Eat dinner

– Find something on TV that doesn’t make me want to pummel myself into unconsciousness

– Go to bed, wake up, and repeat weekly as required.

As much as I would like to say that Furlough Friday was a endless field of excitement, alas it was not. The good news is that despite the furlough the electricity remains on, the fridge is still cold, and inside it is enough tasty hops flavored beverage to see me through to another Furlough Friday.