about impossible standards

She was added to an email thread that began 24 hours ago, and she jumps into the shit show. Her favorite thing to do. She wants to be involved. She likes to be in the fray. 

She pounds out a long email that tries to get at the heart of the issue. She wants to know what is happening. What is happening!? More importantly, How did this happen?! 

Her initial dive into the breach is executed with a lot of force. Exclamation points. Italics. Maybe even underlining.

Punctuation and formatting choices nobody in their right mind, in most situations, would make. You might say the tone is—hysterical.

But it gets a response. She’s involved. And now she has more context, more background information. But the information isn’t good!

She needs to set people straight. Here are the rules, and here is how it should be done. More importantly, here is how you all deviated from The Right Way To Do This.

It takes a few of these kinds of emails—plus some separate emails she fires off to some other people—but she gets through.

Okay, they say. You are involved now. You are a part of this. Help us out, they say. Make this right.

Hold on now. It isn’t her problem. And she says so. If this is how they do things, and it works for them, that’s fine. Just let her know what’s what from the get-go. Just copy her.

They are confused now. They thought she wanted to be involved in this thing. They thought she needed to be involved. There has to be a process here.

Not exactly, she says. She has guidance to offer. A perspective. A wealth of experience to draw from, to impart. And that is what is happening now. Not some other thing.

That’s what this whole thing was about.

But—it’s her obligation to point out now that something else is wrong with all this, with what they are doing, with how they are going about it. There is a whole other side to this thing. Another box they need to check. Have they checked it? She doubts it.

Emergency. Or hysteria. Email traffic dies down. Everyone is ready to go about the business of finishing this thing and go their separate ways.

Now that all the excitement is over with.

Note: Was thinking of a Raymond Caver style.

something about working among the masses

She zipped from the leafy greens to the citrus, where she paused for 70 seconds to honor her device, then slipped from the citrus to the potatoes and onions, where again she bowed her head. Produce to dairy, back to produce; to soups and canned meats, back to dairy—on and on like this, squatting in prime Safeway real estate a minute at a time. The other Safeway shoppers sidestepped her or took detours. I found her cart blocking the tuna cans; as I reached for the StarKist, I read a sheet of paper in her cart: “Instacart Do Not Touch” written in Sharpie. She was working, and this was business. The rest of us were just running an errand.

 

and quotes something about movie stars

Marc Maron had George Clooney on his podcast not too long ago and tried to ask Clooney about being the movie-star-style leading man, like a Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart—actors who are always kind of the same in each role. Clooney says he is always still Clooney-ish in his roles because he lacks the talent to lose himself in a character. Clooney's humility, which Maron called out as bullshit, often produced unsatisfying conversation. (But how do you describe star quality? A star is born.) The unsatisfying interview moved me to reread Truman Capote's short sketch of Humphrey Bogart.

If one listens attentively to any man’s vocabulary, it will be noticed that certain key-to-character words recur. With Bogart, whose pungent personal thesaurus was by and large unspeakably unprintable, “bum” and “professional” were two such verbal signposts. A most moral—by a bit exaggerating you might say “prim”—man, he employed “professional” as a platinum medal to be distributed among persons whose behavior he sanctioned; “bum,” the reverse of an accolade, conveyed, when spoken by him, almost scarifying displeasure. “My old man,” he once remarked of his father, who had been a reputable New York doctor, “died ten thousand dollars in debt, and I had to pay off every cent. A guy who doesn’t leave his wife and kids provided for, he’s a bum.” Bums, too, were guys who cheated on their wives, cheated on their taxes, and all whiners, gossipists, most politicians, most writers, women who Drank, women who were scornful of men who Drank; but the bum true-blue was any fellow who shirked his job, was not, in meticulous style, a “pro” in his work. God knows he was. Never mind that he might play poker until dawn and swallow a brandy before breakfast; he was always on time on the set, in make-up and letter-perfect in his part (forever the same part, to be sure, still there is nothing more difficult to interestingly sustain than repetition). No, there was never a mite of bum-hokum about Bogart; he was an actor without theories (well, one: that he should be highly paid), without temper but not without temperament; and because he understood that discipline was the better part of artistic survival, he lasted, he left his mark.

 

something about "My Life in and out of the Rough," by John Daly

The first professional golfer to catch my attention was John Daly. He was fat and could drive the hell out of the ball. Golf television broadcasters alluded to Daly's unconventional ways, which, of course, invites the viewer's curiosity. My curiosity was mostly satisfied by a 60 Minutes profile in 2006. The profile painted, unsurprisingly, a pretty accurate picture. Daly's full story is told in his autobiography, My Life in and out of the Rough (I assume, given the timing of its publication, that the book likely inspired 60 Minutes to profile Daly for the show).

Daly, with writing help from Glen Waggoner, turns in a breezy read. Daly's life is told in his honest, colloquial voice. A couple of chapters were just question-and-answer style, and one consisted only of bits of numerical trivia. The most interesting parts are when Daly declares that he does not think he is an alcoholic, despite the fact that he drinks a ton and has tried to cut down or stop. This is an autobiography that makes no demands and centers on a one-of-a-kind in his sport. I felt a little disappointed because Daly is not insightful in his thin moments of introspection. But, overall, this is not a bad read.

about quitting time

The Earth was nudged some, bringing us to late afternoon. I wanted to leave work without being noticed. I wanted to spend the weekend unnoticeable. What choice is there but to acknowledge the impulse to feel shame for such wants? We'll give that impulse a half-hearted exploration over the next three days. When nothing interests you and you do not have fun, what else is there to do?

About being capable of feeling great affection

I hate everything about the way this guy looks: the golf shirt tucked into his "nice jeans," leaving just enough give to hip-swivel 20 degrees (engineered and tested before leaving the house); his low-profile sunglasses; and his perma-shape pompadour, three shades above black, a bubble blown from a sharp part. This turd aspires to fitness without strain. Jeremy. Jeremy thinks calling his boss "boss" boosts his ego, and Jeremy likes exercising that little bit of control over his superior's emotions. Doing so also, he thinks, curries favor.