Marley and Me

Tuesday was a date night for Cindy and I. We take turns planning them and it was my turn. I was in the mood for a little light-hearted comedy (especially one with animals) so I thought Marley and Me would fit the bill. It started out very funny; especially for those who have experienced owning a dog firsthand. Then about halfway through, I’m convinced that some other director took over because it did a complete 180. Don’t’ read this if you plan on seeing this movie but first, Jennifer Aniston has a miscarriage, then she has to quit her job and then her and Owen Wilson start to fight constantly and he starts going through a mid-life crisis while she is going through hell at home and they are on the verge of splitting. Then it starts to get depressing. Marley starts to get old and at one point twists his stomach and goes out into the rainy night to die. Owen Wilson manages to find him but the veterinarian says he probably won’t even live through the night.

At this point I have developed a lump in my throat that lasts pretty much the rest of the movie. Marley lives through his condition and we have to watch his health deteriorate more and more until finally he has to be euthanized. And we have to watch every gruesome detail of it with the goodbye speech and the needle and the eyes slowly closing for the last time… I’m pretty sure this was the saddest movie I’ve ever seen in my life! I was depressed pretty much the rest of the night.

The next night, I watch Million Dollar Baby, which many consider to be one of the saddest movies ever. It was a very good movie but really didn’t make me that sad at all. It really got me thinking. Isn’t this completely illogical? Here we have a woman in the prime of her life who is seconds away from fulfilling her dream of winning a championship boxing title having a horrible accident and becoming completely paralyzed. Then, all she wants to do is die so she asks her coach to kill her and keeps trying to bite on her tongue and commit suicide until he finally gives in and EUTHANIZES her with what looks like the same needle that is used on the dog. This is a much more tragic story than a dog that has a very happy life and then is put down peacefully in old age is it not?
What is it about animals? You can watch 1,000 people get tortured or shot or stabbed or blown up and it doesn’t even faze you, but watch 1 animal go through the same thing and you are traumatized. Is that not incredibly strange to anyone? I would almost think of myself as a bad person except that everyone I’ve asked has felt the same way. Poor Marley…

The Demented Wizard of Oz

So I stumbled upon this site at www.audiobooksforfree.com. Anyone who knows me knows that if it’s free it’s for me and audio books usually cost at least $25. The selection is not that great but there are a lot of classics on there and this ought to keep me entertained for a while. Out of curiosity and because I haven’t seen the movie in so long, I’ve been slowly listening to the original Wizard of Oz at work. This must be a pretty tiny book because the audio is only about 3 and a half hours long. It seems like the average novel has more like 20 hours of audio. I’m a little over halfway through now and I’m actually kind of shocked and disturbed for several reasons.

First of all, you know how they say that the book is always better than the movie? Simply not true. This book is awful! A lot of parts are a lot different from the movie and thank goodness because there are some truly ludicrous storylines in this thing. There is also some stuff that is incredibly violent and that maybe kids shouldn’t be reading. For instance, do you know how the tin man really became the tin man? The Wicked Witch of the East put a curse on him that caused him to hack off all of his body parts one by one, then his head and then whatever was left of his torso after that until a tin worker came along and found this bloody mess and saved his ass by turning him to tin. I’m not kidding! It’s kind of demented really.

Then there are all these crazy violent battle scenes in the book. The cheerful, sweet Tin Man you know from the movie is pretty much more like the Terminator in the book and decapitates whatever he can get his axe on, including dozens and dozens of wolves, a poor wild cat just trying to catch a little mouse for dinner and even himself! The Scarecrow isn’t much better though. I just listened to a scene where a bunch of crows try to peck him and he kills like 50 of them by squeezing and twisting their necks until they die. I’m not making any of this up… read it yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s making me kind of sick because I don’t like woodland creatures being slaughtered by the hundreds like this. This book is kind of evil and I’m afraid what gruesome and disturbing thing these supposedly loveable characters are going to do next.
I want to know what was going on in the head of the crazy dude who decided 70 years ago that this was the best material to use for the next great family musical. I also want to know how it is possibly possible that it actually worked out in the end.

Work

As much as most of us like to talk about how much we hate work, it can also be a very therapeutic place. All other aspects of your life can be overflowing with chaos and uncertainty, but when you come to the office, it’s just business as usual for a while and it can really calm you down and get you thinking more clearly. I can think of plenty of times in my life when I was going through a rough patch and I craved work. I would even show up to work for no pay just for the distraction and that sense of calm. That’s all… just a short observation.

Hooray for corporate policies!

There are things about working for a giant corporation that are just maddeningly absurd!

Basically, the company requires all employees to submit their goals for the year to their boss. Then the employee review and rating at the end of the year will depend partly on whether we are able to accomplish these goals. It sounds logical enough but the system is horrible.

First of all, we don’t get to customize our goals based on what we actually do… oh no. Our leaders send us our goals and we pretty much put our names on them and send them right back. The idea is supposed to be that we can do some revisions and even add some personal goals of your own but I’m convinced that the horrible form we use for this makes people just give up on attempting to make changes of any kind. To illustrate, the form was created in MS Word and has boxes where you fill the information in. The goals and descriptions that are already there fit the boxes perfectly. But here’s the fantastic part—these boxes DON’T get any bigger or smaller when you modify the data. In fact, if you add text to a box it will push all of the text from the whole column down so that it starts a huge trainwreck of overlapping boxes. Want to add new rows of goals? Good luck unless you are an MS Word expert and can manually insert extra text boxes to the form.

But it gets far worse than just the form. Our goals are basically the same for all employees with the same title in the department. This is fine for other teams that handle the normal workload, but I’m on the SPECIAL team. The truth is we often don’t have a single clue what we will be doing day in and day out. We might have no special projects that need to be completed in a day (rare) and can help with the regular workload or we might be losing our minds from all the work that is popping up. And everyone on our team specializes in a certain area so we are almost never actually working on the same project. Yet, here’s the kicker… the company requires everyone on the same team to have the same goals! And mind you these aren’t general “Complete all necessary work quickly and efficiently” goals… they have to be very specific about the quantity of work being done. For the teams handling the regular workload, this is fine. They do pretty much the same thing all day every day.
But of course they attempt to come up with a list of the same goals for our team as well, an IMPOSSIBILITY. It’s like trying to base the performance of cops, firefighters, security guards, and medics on the exact same criteria. Yes, they all serve the public but in completely different ways. So in order to get the best rating for the year, one of my goals from the geniuses at the top is to work an average of 3 files per day. The regular teams can do that… no problem; their files aren’t nearly as complex and time consuming as ours. People on my team might even manage that if they get lucky and get small, simple files and don’t have any special projects they are working on. But the fact is, we rarely even GET that many special files per day let alone work them! I’m so busy with my special projects that I’m lucky if I complete 3 files in a WEEK! Of course we complain to our leaders about this and they complain to their leaders, who complain to their leaders but it all comes down to “our goals are due now so just turn them in as is.” So I just sent goals stating the equivalent of “I am a doctor who will treat 300 random patients this year and my goals for the year are to cure 900 patients of salmonella.” Fantastic…

I’d say my spilling average is about as low as most people. Maybe 1 major spill every 3 months and 1 minor spill every 2 weeks. Even though there are only 2 categories of spills, spill math can be kind of difficult. For instance, if I sit down with a bowl of cereal and it slips out of my hand and covers me with soggy cereal, is that a major spill or a minor spill. The answer depends on many factors which involve many questions. What am I wearing? Do I have to be anywhere soon? Are we low on paper towels or stocked? Carpet or wood floor? Dogs nearby? Milk/cereal ratio? Shirt absorbtion? Embarrasment factor—Anyone around? I have been in this scenario multiple times and, depending on these factors, they’ve been both major and minor spills.

My major spill of the last 3 months involved not tightening the lid on a carton of liquid laundry detergent enough while leaving it on its side overnight. I don’t remember a spill of any kind in January but yesterday and today, I have spilled no less than 3 times. And if you add in the embarrassment factor mentioned above of all these being work spills, they could all be put into the “major” category. When you put all this together, it looks like I am not allowed to spill again until 2010.

First, I’m at my co-workers desk yesterday while she is on break searching for certain papers when I knock over her mug of iced tea. I am a really talented spiller so I managed to avoid any essential paperwork or electronics and keep the pool contained around the mouse pad, which absorbed much of it. I desperately hurried to get it cleaned up before she got back, which I actually managed to do, but there was no hiding the soaked mouse pad. Busted!

Today, I am grabbing my yummy (and healthy) lunch of minestrone soup out of the fridge and as I’m carrying it back to my desk partly by the tupperware lid (terrible way to carry something), it comes plopping off and the soup goes all over the very center of the carpeted aisle. After scraping as much as I could into the garbage, the remainder sat right where every person in the room walks past it probably a dozen times per day looking like fresh puke. Apparently the maintenance crew had better things to do than MAINTAIN a clean work environment because they didn’t show up for their work order all day.

Oh and I wasn’t done yet… I still hadn’t even touched my own desk yet. So after getting my replacement lunch and a coke from the cafeteria, I promptly gave the bottle a nice elbowing and emptied a quarter of it over my desk with that nice loud carbonation fiz sound that can be heard several cubicles away. It’s just a good thing that I am an amazingly talented spiller and somehow the pool of sticky soda literally stopped millimeters short of my important paperwork. Amazingly no one seemed to notice this last one so people only think I’m really clumsy rather than incredibly clumsy.

Blogging Responsibly

3 and a half years. That’s how long it has been since I have made a single blog post of any kind. Why? I really don’t know. I love to blog. I spent countless hours in my early college years blogging. I may have spent more time blogging than studying. So maybe I quit for the best. I don’t think people understand what an all-consuming addiction blogging can be. I was part of a blogging community where everyone has their blogs on this single message board and everyone was great friends so what you would do EVERY SINGLE DAY is, first of all, write in your blog. Then you would read everyone else’s blog. Then you comment on everyone else’s blog. Then you would go back to your blog and see what comments had been written about your blog. Then you would respond to those comments about your blog. Then you would see how others responded to your comments in their blog. Then you would respond to their comments on your comments about their blog. Then you would go back to your blog…

Okay, enough, I think you get the idea now. I remember spending several hours at a time doing this without even realizing it. One day I had had enough and I never went back to that evil blog community again. And now it doesn’t even exist anymore. Thank the lord someone destroyed that terrible place! My new policy is blogging in moderation! Anyways, if you’re going to blog, I’ve always found blogspot to be a nice, reliable place to do it. They still have my old blog from my big study-abroad trip in London in 2005. Check it out at www.lukeinlondon.blogspot.com.

Another great blog on this site is cousin Sally’s, which I do read religiously. I mean who doesn’t? She is not the only Dorris to blog here but she is definitely the most consistent. Check it out at www.sansoms.blogspot.com. Kudos to her for almost always having photographs to go along with almost every post. I’m much too lazy for that and I’m not making any promises but I’ll post as regularly as I can.