Quote of the Day: Henry David Thoreau

Things do not change; we change.


I am attending to personal business today.

Quote of the Day: Arthur Calwell

"It is better to be defeated on principle than to win on lies."


It's interesting how the Five Stages of Grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance) are applicable to even the most minor disappointments.

I guess the episode of Frasier I watched late one night during a bout of insomnia was right.

Quote of the Day: Julio Cortázar

"And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?"


Soon I will explain my very temporary absence from blogging.

Quote of the Day: John Barth

"Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story."


That's all today.

Quote of the Day: James Yorke

"The most successful people are those who are good at plan B."


I swear someday I may blog again. Like tomorrow.

I am just working on something consuming all my mental energies at the moment .

Quote of the Day: Sydney Harris

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?""

There are big doings at work today and none of them good.

Quote of the Day: Meister Eckhart

"There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence."


Yes, folks, I rode an elephant.

Quote of the Day: George Santayana

"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."


I told my co-worker that this was one of the best days of my life because the little store downstairs starting carrying Diet Sunkist like I have been pleading with them to do for months. He said, "I should call Stacey and congratulate her for having such an easy to please husband."

Quote of the Day: GK Chesterton

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."


Yesterday, I won a bet for being right about seventies singer-songwriter Harry Chapin being the guy who sang "Cats in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon" and not Cat Stevens. So today, when my manager and I went to Starbucks so he could pay up and buy me my promised Orange Mango Banana Smoothie guess what CD they were selling at the counter? "Cat Stevens Greatest Hits." Talk about uncanny.

Quote of the Day: Peter Stothard

"Characters from the past never know what is coming next. That is one of the less acknowledged reasons we like to think about them."


I am waiting on some big news this week at work so I am a little too anxious to blog.

Quote of the Day: Marcel Proust

"Real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk, but of darkness and silence."


Still busy.

Quote of the Day: Teller

"Doing beautiful things is its own reward. If you do something that you're proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn't there before--you can't beat that."

I have a pretty busy week ahead.

Quote fo the Day: Pearl S Buck

"I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work."


I have finally made a big decision and even acted on it today. I will provide more details later.

Quote of the Day: Michel de Montaigne

"I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better."


I am out sick today.

Quote of the Day: George Santayana

"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."


Sometimes, I like to complain about being the one who always answers the general sales line when it rings but not today because I get to have conversations like this:

"Hello. I was just talking with you and got cut off."
"I am sorry. That might have been someone else."
"Anyway, I represent a real estate developer from Texas."
"Okay?"
"We need your help. He was quite successful until he expanded to a certain European country."
"How can my company help?"
"There's a big scandal going on right now that they cooked up against him. My client needs your help hitting back hard."
"Excuse me?"
"We are going to expose the leader of this country for what he really is: a pedophile."
"I don't see how we can help. We are a communications company. Is this a PR thing?"
"Not exactly. Look, if you are having an ethical problem you should know you could really make your name on this. I can answer any questions you have right now."
"We make software."
"Oh. Wrong number."



Five minutes later:

"Can I have ____ your CEO?" (These calls are quite common because somewhere in some directory our number got switched with the main line. They are still pretty annoying.)
"Can I ask the why?"
"This is ____ ____ the CEO of ______."
"Excuse me?"
"We're your biggest competitor."
"I know who are. I am in sales."
"I bet you do."
"Unfortunately. Here's is his admin."
(I looked up his number. It really was the guy. Maybe something big is going down.)

Quote of the Day: F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope."


In one of my the most stressful weeks of my professional career, I have learned how to make the day tolerable: getting in early enough to steal all the butterscotch discs and root beer barrels from the candy dish.

Quote of the Day: Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal."


This has got to be one of the ugliest summers in Seattle I have ever experienced. The weekend was just miserable. About the only interesting thing was when some guy mistook us for his drug dealers, or at least that was our suspicion anyway. Based in his behavior, he either thought we or the three-year-old with us was.

I was putting gas in my car Saturday afternoon on the squalid little avenue called Greenwood, when I noticed I was being watched by a thuggish looking guy with dreadlocks. He also looked like he smelled pretty bad. There were some kids running some kind of charity car wash next door so I at first I was worried about their safety but eventually I became more concerned for my own when he kept making motions like he was going to walk over to the car without actually picking his feet up off the asphalt. He kept his hand clenched around something in his pocket like it was the Holy Grail. Anyway, he kept looking at me with madness or longing in his eyes until we drove away.

And that's it. That's my story. I know it's pretty lame but such an anti-climatic story fits in quite nicely with my August so far. (Maybe I will blog about some of it later when the statute of limitations expires.)

Quote of the Day: Christopher Caldwell

"The Theodore Roosevelt Administration was a time of tumult that offers many parallels to our own. We'd do well to think more about those parallels. But such thinking needn't be accompanied by adulation for an egomaniacal weirdo who was as close to being a psycopath as anyone who ever occupied the Oval Office."


I rediscovered this quote that I've always liked a few days ago. Seriously, the guy was a lunatic.

Quote of the Day: Blaise Pascal

"A thinking reed - It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world."

A good thing to remember as one waits for his future to be decided by people who have no real stake in his existence, let alone his self-actualization.

Also, listening to Arcade Fire's new album helps.

Quote of the Day: J. Krishnamurti

“A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.”


Today, I have officially been employed at my job for two years. Boy, that seems like such a long time ago. A lot has changed. Back then, I was 190 pounds heavier, living with Mark, and as single as they come. About the only thing that hasn't changed is my generally high level of awesomeness.

Quote of the Day: William Gass

"Writing has almost always been difficult for me, something I had to do to remain sane, yet never satisfying in any ordinary sense, certainly never exhilarating, and never an activity that might satisfy Socrates’ admonition to find a logos for my life, as I felt it surely had for the authors I admired: even Malcolm Lowry’s dissolutely drunken sprees, even Hart Crane’s beatings at the hands of sailors, beatings he sought out as he ultimately sought the sea; even Céline’s meanness, a bitterness that ate through his heart before it got to his shoes and ate them, too; even these malcontents, though nothing justified their wasted ways, their anger, their multiplication of pain, might be, by their works, somewhat saved, their sins hidden under sublime blots of printer’s ink."


I just about lost a hand today. The receptionist sent out a company wide e-mail telling everyone that a cubicle had been filled up with old swag and chotskies nobody wanted since the re-branding three years ago had made them worthless.

I made the mistake of seeing what they had; and let me just say, I haven't experienced a feeding frenzy quite like that since my last trip to Ross and this almost made the constant state of anarchy reigning there look civilized. I guess bargains on ugly shirts have a special way of bringing out the savage man regardless of income level, and all the more if they're free.

Quote of the Day: Evelyn Waugh

"Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice--all the odious qualities--which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew, his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement."


I swear I have a real job, even a job I am a little proud of at times, but no one seems to believe me and it is kind of starting to bother me. I work in Enterprise Software Sales which is an actual career. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software)

I spend my day talking to or trying to talk to Senior Vice Presidents, CFO's and CEO's of Fortune 1000 companies. My job is to explain very complex solutions in simple yet compelling enough terms to get them to start talking about the possibility of giving my company millions of dollars. And I am quite good at it. I mean really good. (I hate to brag but I must.)

I swear it is a real career with a real career path just as much as an accountant or lawyer is; but for some reason, as soon as people hear software sales they either assume that I wear a blue polo shirt and hassle people with my incompetence as they shop for small electronics or that I am a telemarketer who spends his day begging for the Glengarry Leads. None of these scenarios are true but I don't really blame people for thinking I have forfeited the corporate rat race because I was only a creative writing major after all.

I just need to figure out how to convince people I have a real job without being so low-class as to whip out my pay-stub. I don't want people to know how much I make because my identity is not completely tied up in my job (in my heart I am still the greatest unpublished novelist who ever lived). I would just like a little respect especially now that I am in a new ward/congregation thanks to our new house.

Any thoughts or advice out there beyond prettying it up a bit and saying "Business Development" instead of sales?