Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

The Corporation, always on the lookout for ways to ruin what little joy they've been unable to steal from our lives, has decided our Performance Reviews are due now instead of mid-January. I guess the thinking is in January we are already numb to the horrors of work after the holidays. This evening, after having the previous six days off, I was faced with the soul-grinding task of updating my review. It largely consists of arbitrary goals, cascaded down from above, with little or no connection to what I actually do. Done six months ago and forgotten until each deadline, I once again turn my prodigious writing skills to describing my turd of a career in terms that make it sound like fertilizer. So now my review will fester in my supervisor's in-box until he gets around to having to process these steaming piles, then we will have a one-on-one, where by he tells me how he likes me personally but finds my professional life a shade less than mediocre. As I sat grinding out nonsens...

The trouble with days off is that, like many other pain-killers, too many and you run the risk of becoming habituated. Then when the pain-killer runs out, withdrawal sets in. It's now the Monday night after Thanksgiving and I've been off since Wednesday. Tomorrow I have to appear back in the office. God, what an awful thought. The only thing lessening this horror is that my supervisor (who, darn it, I like --I just don't like working for him) is out of the office until Wednesday. It's sort of like being sent to hell but getting to stand in the lobby for a few eons as you get acclimated. Or something like that. Thanksgiving was sort of a wild day and set the tone for the days ahead. The Wife got the bug to visit her sister (in London) and scored a free airline pass from a friend who retired from American Airlines. Long story short, she's left Ed and me bachelors for the next month. We drove her to the airport on Thanksgiving Day while listening to Alice's Restaur...

I swear I must be the last person to hear anything. This morning D called to me from the bedroom to ask if I'd heard that Karl Rove had been hired as a columnist at Newsweek . The man known as "Bush's Brain" and "Turd Blossom" thinks he'll acquire a veneer of respectability at the hands of Newsweek. Sorry assholes, not going to work for me. I replied, "I guess we'll be cancelling our subscription." I went to the Newsweek site (you're going to have to Google for it, I refuse to link to them) to find subscriber services and saw I was not the only outraged reader -- all of the comments for the current issue were about this deal born of the devil. More telling was how slow the subscriber services site was -- it took about 10 minutes to load. Must be, ahem, experiencing higher than usual load. I have no problem with conservative commentators. Karl Rove is not a commentator; he's a political thug, a Machiavellian hitman who has shown ther...

New discovery today: Shelley the Republican: the Freedom Blog . Cringe-inducing it is, all the way up until you realize it's arch satire, complete with misspellings and typos. This is farming ground Stephen Colbert goes after, just ratcheted up several notches. Good intro: the page entitled God's Hitlist , complete with several entries labeled "God won." Included under the section "Wrong Choices --( God hates people that belong to one of the groups below because they harm America! " are Gays, Liberals, Linux Users, and Hybrid Cars (and a whole lot more). Mean-spirited in the best of ways.

Once again I've fallen for the lure of the ultimate writing challenge -- 50,000 words in thirty days -- that is NaNoWriMo . So far I'm, er, a little behind target. I should, by all that is reasonable, be writing now: to date I've got about half the word count that I should at this point. Still, I'm making progress, albeit slowly. Not to get into plot divulging, but this year's effort has several story elements well known to me: computers, the arts, selling one's soul, etc. The drippy romantic subplot stuff sucks at this point (but will get better in the rewrites). I'm taking the tack that this rough draft is more or less a glorified skeleton of the plot -- it's light on texture and nuance. Again, that will be fleshed out on subsequent drafts. This year's primary challenge: my real job, which continues to nick away at my life essence.