Oddments of High Unimportance

The Night Stalker movies and TV series aired during my junior high school years. Not ashamed to say that Darren McGavin made me want to sling a tape recorder over my shoulder, wear a straw hat, and be a hard-bitten reporter.

Lithub’s Crime Reads hub has a wonderful appreciation of the movie that started it all, a movie that remains a tasty Halloween treat.

Today’s Pome was too good not to share:

Pattern

Your dress waving in the wind.
This
is the only flag I love.

Garous Abdolmalekian
trans. Idra Novey and Ahmad Nadalizadeh (2020)

1. Imaginative experiment 1: Think back to when you were 7 or 8 years old. You’re at a dinner surrounded by parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents. Someone asks you, “What will you be when you grow up?” Answer as if you were that 7-year-old. What’s the reaction of your family around the table? Laughter? Teasing? Disbelief? Scoffing? What’s your reaction to what your 7-year-old self said? Whose reaction is most important to you? Source: [The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide] (https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Ultimate-Anti-Career-Guide-Audiobook/B002VA8HD4?qid=1642099378&sr=1-1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=83218cca-c308-412f-bfcf-90198b687a2f&pf_rd_r=4NWGK7Y15THH5ZEYCXSH)
2. Imaginative experiment 2: You’re at your retirement party. Your colleagues are celebrating your life and career. What are they celebrating you for? Were you a great manager? A visionary? A great teacher? A skilled navigator of the bureaucracy? What footprint did you leave behind in their lives?
3. Where do you want to work? Use LinkedIn to find contacts there and invite someone out for a coffee meeting. Don’t talk about yourself: ask about their work, what interests them about it, what keeps them there, etc. Make friends, don’t network. Schedule 3 or 4 coffee meetings a month, let people know you’re out there and you’re interested. Source: Ask the Headhunter, and a few other places.
4. In my 20s-40s, I switched jobs every four years, it seemed. By that time, I’d figured out the job, was bored, and wanted to be tested and challenged elsewhere. Think in terms of job adventures. Don’t hone a set of skills so specialized and local that they make you the perfect employee at your current job. When you start a new job, start looking for the next job. Maybe apply for jobs via LinkedIn to see if the marketplace values your current skillset.
5. Don’t worry too much about this mythical thing called “a career.” Look after the little things, like doing work you find valuable and worthwhile. The career will look after itself.

Etaoin Shrdlu is a somewhat infamous phrase among language enthusiasts. It is pronounced “eh-tay-oh-in shird-loo” and is believed to be the twelve most common letters in English, in order of most frequently used to least frequently used. The expression came about from linotype typesetting machines. Were one to run a finger down the first and then second left-hand vertical banks of six keys on a linotype machine, it would produce the words etaoin shrdlu. Linotype machines were sometimes tested in this manner. Once in a while, a careless linotype machine operator would fail to throw his test lines away, and that phrase would mysteriously show up in published material. The full sequence is etaoin shrdlu cmfgyp wbvkxj qz.

Source

We are all outcasts; that is what drives advertising. All hoping to become swans, not knowing that we already are.

Vicki Woodyard

My heart was broken recently and I keep the pieces on the back step in a bucket. A heart can mend but unlike the liver it cannot regenerate. A heart mends but the break line is always visible. Humans are not axolotels; axolotels grow new limbs. A broken heart will mend in time, but one of the contradictions of being human is that we have so little time for the mending we must do. It takes years to know anything, years to achieve anything, years to learn how to love, years to learn how to let love go when it has worn out, years to find that loneliness is the name for the intense secret you can’t share. Years to share what you can share. Years to be hurt. Years to heal.

Jeannette Winterson

Airbnb outsourced a shoddy background check on my account using only two pieces of data – my name and birthdate. This simple and lazy check found four arrest records scattered throughout the US (one to a man of a different race, and two others where the middle name was never given – only an initial). This was enough to trip Airbnb’s algorithms. So, despite my history as a good customer with excellent reviews from our hosts, they deactivated my account 7 days before our leave date. I filed disputes. We pivoted and booked a place with VRBO using my wife’s account. Amazon and Google could just as easily flip a switch and cut me off from services I use and depend on, with no way to dispute or appeal the action. I’m caught in a web I willingly walked into.

Friday was spent running errands, Friday night was caroling in Mary Fran and Stefan’s backyard, Saturday lunch and afternoon were spent doing essential catching-up with Sue (recently moved back to NC from Santa Rosa), and Saturday evening spent with our Bull City Commons brethren and cistern with a chummy and cheery happy hour at the Bartlett’s common room/patio. Sitting there and watching the rain come down and wash the streets, smelling that fresh air – who needs TV? Afterward, a post-Happy Hour get-together in Jackie and David’s apartment with some yummy Spaghetti Bolognese.

Much eating, drinking, and socializing over the last two days gifted us with restless sleep and the need to pull the covers around ourselves on Sunday. Given that cohousing attracts introverts, we have a saying after we’ve spent lots of essential energy socializing: “I need to introvert.”

So that’s what today is about: introverting. Puttering about, writing Christmas cards, maybe shopping for groceries. Gathering energy for next week.