This is something that has been developing or crystalizing or coming into focus for some time: I'm beginning to become suspicious of this one girl in the office of the building I live in. She's been really nice to me lately, like she might be playing video games in my apartment when I am gone. I think the likelihood of this is slim (I "worked at home" on Wednesday and there was no awkward encounter where she casually comes into my apartment while I am doing Nina Simone karaoke in a garbage sack cocktail dress and Kleenex box high-heels [that's what I do on my pretend days off - "My baby don't care for clothes/ My baby just cares for me!"]). But I've noticed that I'm something of a minority in my building, since there's a number of old people, some "hip" married people (I have seen one child, so there's an outside chance I'll have a trick or treater), a few gay couples, some mid-30s to mid-40s single women, a few of that age as men, and just a soupcon of both under 30. So an alternative thesis is that she is starved for attention from people who might be able to relate to her generationally, and not wracked with guilt for taking my sodas and eating my Fig Newtons. My apartment is probably the last one you'd do that, too, anyway, since I'd guess that it is probably more depressing ("real") than any of my neighbors and has less real ("not laden with sugar") food.
I've begun to notice more of the awkward, navel-gazing self-analysis happening at my current job. My old one had it all the damn time. I think there were people whose entire job was to come up with weird presentations about "the journey of our brand" and figure out ways to use every style of chart Excel offers, without regards to whether it makes any sense. Anyway, at my current job it has been more of these short, 1 to 3 page Word document manifesto-type things. My theory is that the sender wants to convey "THIS IS A REPORT AND REPORTS ARE IMPORTANT OKAY". The psychic bridge you cross when you have to open an attachment, yeah? I like to write my own parodies of these things, using the voice of self-appointed authority that they often use to describe things like how the company views peeing or a each of a laundry list of facial hair styles and whether they are consistent with our company's vision. No one else gets to see them, but writing them up manages to make me look busy for a little while each day. There's also a particular email template that they use to send out widely distributed email that. I hate this template so much, because it just looks like there was a meeting where someone who likes watching "Two and a Half Men" said "I think we should have a template for company-wide email. I will oversee this initiative. I will call it Project Orion. I will send out at least a dozen vague, jargon-riddled status report emails to an email list of 1,500 people and no one will know what I am talking about. In large meetings I will effusively thank 20 to 30 people to make it look like I am managing an enormous and difficult thing." Somedays I wish I could invert myself and to go The Invertedverse where all this bland stupid shit is replaced with awesome things.
