Tagged: puttingwordstogether

I often feel I spend too much of my time at work talking people out of stupid and unnecessary requests. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t, but it’s always an exasperating process. We’re so busy and slammed with work so much of the time that having someone request something useless or idiotic is crazy-making. People in my team joke about “Liz says no” and “Marcom says no” as standard responses to such requests. We don’t have time for wasting. We have handled more jobs/requests/tickets this year so far than we handled all of last year and there’s still a month...

I think the pandemic is bringing out my antisocial tendencies. Maybe I was born to be a hermit and this is just exacerbating my proclivity. How many 4-syllable words am I allowed to use before you smite me? Hee. We are on our third week of working solely from home, and I’ve kind of resigned myself to being alone all the time now. At least I get to read my book at lunch and go out on the porch when I need a break. I was thinking maybe I could turn my monitor screen around so that I can watch...

No one knows how to just listen anymore. Every conversation, at least ones that I am often part of, seems to turn into a sort of subtle one-upmanship. I don’t think people do it on purpose. I certainly don’t do it on purpose. But I find myself doing it too, and it bothers me, both when I do it, and when people do it to me. The fact that they do it unconsciously bothers me, too. It’s as though no one is actually listening to anything you talk about except in the context of how it applies to them and...

“We’re in a time machine…you and I, right now. It’s stuck in one gear and it’s slow as hell, but it works. It’s bringing us into the future.”* That’s a line I just passed in a book I am reading and it struck me quite hard. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and I love stories about time travel, and all the different ways that different authors handle the idea of time travel; what the possibilities are, what it might MEAN, how it would work or not work. But this is the first time I’ve read something...

I got involved in an interesting conversation the other day among a bunch of online writer friends, and have been thinking about it on and off all week. I’m putting it all down here because it’s an important conversation for me and I don’t want it lost on FB. One friend posted about someone (a friend) who had been spouting lots of rather repulsive opinions and my friend, who was only trying to relay what had happened and how he had felt about it, ended by saying that the guy was entitled to his dumb opinions. I didn’t know it...