5/28: What I Accomplished Today

1. Happy Memorial Day!

2. Worked on Pogo premium badges.

3. Watched a NetFlix movie, Grand Illusion. Remembered as we started it that we'd watched it together before, but it's still a good movie.

I realized this morning that I had forgotten to say what I meant to say about the episode of The Riches we watched last night. Since the show is essentially an exploration of the American Dream, I found last night's episode particularly interesting; the boss has disappeared on a meth bender, so Wayne signs the partnership papers and essentially co-ops the company. One thing he does is establish an open-door policy, thinking people will come in and give him ideas or vision or solutions to problems.

Instead, everybody whines about offices, parking places, and snacks.

This is one reason Americans often look bad internationally: imagine if you were from Utopia, the richest country in the world, with the most opportunities in the world. (Free education is available through the age of 18, for heaven's sake! It isn't terribly hard to arrange funding for education beyond that!) Anyone with the qualifications and ambitions is eligible for any job. Many of the class, race, gender, and genealogical barriers that have hampered humanity for millenia have been removed (well, okay, let's not kid ourselves, but progress is being made). The only restriction on owning almost anything is whether you have the money. Truly, this is a remarkable joint. This is astonishing on the world stage. We have every opportunity in the world. I mean that literally. The American Dream is Every Opportunity in the World.

And we settle for such mediocrity.

There are only two sorts of big dreams in America: I Will Have Lots of Money, or I Will Produce The Great American Work of Art. And those are both admirable. But it seems like there should be more than just those two, and it seems like more people should be aspiring to big dreams instead of Settling.

Americans are famous, on the international stage, for Settling. This is the nation where Pauly Shore became famous. He's not particularly talented or funny or handsome, but He'll Do.

Before I was hired to teach full-time, I had to pay my bills, so I taught part-time and worked full-time in a call center, eventually becoming a supervisor. This call center did customer service and tech support, so we had lots of college students, retired military personnel, and housewives. This was a fairly educated, intelligent workforce. And, honest to God, I have sat in meetings in which 15 minutes, count 'em, 15 minutes, were spent on discussing what shirts had to be tucked in and what didn't. And you sit there, and your ears bleed, and you're thinking, "I can't believe valuable brain cells are being wasted on this most trivial, idiotic, dick-wad topic." But you know what? We had to, because if we didn't, these educated, intelligent people would push the dress code. Like that was the definition of Rebel: "I will wear my square-hemmed Manga shirt and make them refine their dress code." The amount of brainpower and creativity in that building was staggering--and the vast amount of it was channeled into the stupidest, stupidest things. But if we asked for ideas or brainstorms, they looked at us blankly. It wasn't their idea to have positive, useful ideas that could benefit the entire building or even the entire company; it was their job to look for chinks in the armor and wiggle their fingers in them. Phenomenal, staggering waste of brainpower.

I totally agree that the dress code was inane; frankly, whenever possible, I would forget to enforce it, because I thought it was insulting to everyone involved. But you know what? Because there are people who think "creativity" means "Let's find loopholes!", management has to spend time closing those loopholes. Inanity breeds inanity.

I mentioned a few weeks ago the problems we had with departmental resistance to the assessment procedure for 100. Everyone in the room had the opportunity to participate in the process and help formulate the procedure. The same 12 people who always do did, however. Many of the other 58 people criticize without offering superior alternatives (sometimes they think they have, but they're almost always suggesting things that had been rejected for many reasons very early in the process). Just inanity. If you're offered the opportunity to formulate a process and you don't avail yourself of the opportunity, just shut up. (Goldman's definition of a Grade-Two Thinker from his "Thinking as a Hobby" essay is alive and well. In many ways, the entire nation is trapped at 17 years old.)

No, I don't suppose this is strictly an American phenomenon, but I do think it's more pronounced in America. At least, it seems even more tragic when this happens in America because so many fabulous things should be happening with our creativity and our lack of age-old constrictions and our free educations, and instead, we try to improve the system by seeing if our company will let us wear a T-shirt with a cartoon character so large we can't possibly tuck it in.

4. Read an issue of Academe and finished the commentary portion of Reading Judas, starting the translation.

5. Got the first three weeks of my summer 100 just about mapped out.

6. Today's BigFishGame seems to be a mystery thing. No, thank you.

7. Level 26 Night Elf Hunter. First two levels of Ormer's Revenge with Uncovering the Past. Went to the Dead Mines and finished OH, Brother, Collecting Memories, and Red Silk Bandannas by myself. Found a pretty good group and finished the Defias Brotherhood and the Underground contraption one, picking up the Unsent Letter, which I then completed, along with Bazil Thredd.

Then I returned and did the third level of Ormer. While I was working on this, I dinged 27. I noticed I hadn't gotten the 5th level of Improved Concussive Shot, so I got that.Then I bebopped over to Ashenvale and did Ancient Statuette and Ruuzel. I went to StoneTalon and worked on Deepmoss Eggs, turning in Further Instructions to pick up Gerenzo and turning in the Gaxim deliveries to pick up the Covert Ops and Castpipe tasks. Flew to the Barrens to turn in Deepmoss Eggs and called it a day.