Category: Things I Write For Work

(There is no Hemingway in this post.)

• I mentioned, I think, going to Tool last week.
• I went to Dallas, saw them with my sister and brother-in-law.
• Was a heck of a show. Not a single unwanted song.
• Which is always awesome.
• How many times have you gone to a concert they played a song and you thought either, “What? This one? Ugh,” or, “What the heck is this song?”
• Almost every one, right?
• Not all bands can pull that off.
• Metallica, for instance, has never let me down.
• In fact, the answer to the “best concert I’ve ever attended” question you didn’t ask would be a Metallica show.
• I saw them in 1989 (omg, old) at the Pavilion on the And Justice for All … tour.
• Was the first concert I’d gone to without adults, and I can’t remember who all went other than my buddy Steve because we were the only two who stuck together.
• Whoever handled the set-up for the Pavilion was obviously not familiar with Metallica, because they set the floor up with rows of folding metal chairs.
• Queensryche was the opener.
• We arrived early enough to worm our way to the first 10 or 12 rows.
• While the opener played, the whole crowd chanted “Metallica” over and over again, which, if you’re Queensryche, had to stink.
• Then the set-change hit and the place got restless.
• People started pushing forward, crowding the aisles.
• Soon as the lights went out for Metallica, the folding chairs became a sliding sea of metal foot traps.
• You had to push to keep people off of you, fight to keep your feet from getting sucked down into the pincers of chomping chair legs.
• We ended up standing on two chairs that had somehow managed to stay on their feet, right on the edge of the mosh pit, a promontory over a maelstrom of flailing bodies.
• Steve kept pushing people back into the pit with his foot.
• And Metallica played all our favorite songs while the statue of Lady Justice fell to pieces on stage.
• Was pretty glorious, all things considered.
• They sounded the best when I saw them at the BOK center in 2018.
• Bunch of “old” dudes who still got it.
• They are all a decade older than me. I use them as my “what can an X age person still do” barometer.
• I have seen them eight or nine times.
• I’ve lost count. Might be more than that, but not less.
• That’s my band. I’ll go see them until they stop playing. Or the tinnitus wins.
• I mean, I got kicked out of my ninth grade English class for wearing one of their shirts.
• To combine age-related issues with today’s theme, which is concerts … I tested out four different kinds of ear plugs at the Tool show.
• Flare Audio Isolates, Eargasms, Loops, and cheapo foam ear plugs.
• My tinnitus is so bad when things get loud, all I hear is a buzz.
• The Loops were the winners, by far. Did the best job of straddling the line between muffled and hearing, and kept the buzzing to a minimum.
• And since I just did a product review, it’s probably time to stop.
• Have a Wednesday.

(Image borrowed from Getty Images; thanks, Google search!)

• I’m Mondaying through my Monday.
• Not like last Monday, but …
• Had half the bullets written and realized, no, dude, you can’t say any of that.
• I mean, I could, but consequences.
• Definitely not something Ted would do.
• We started watching Ted Lasso this weekend, and it’s pretty spectacular.
• Almost literally every line in that show is gold for every character.
• And the actors nail them every time.
• There is an abundance of NSFW language in it.
• If that offends you, you’ll want to skip.
• But man, I have not laughed at a show like this in … decades.
• Because I don’t laugh.
• That would be breaking character.
• I don’t know what happens in the second season, but I’m already certain it deserves every accolade it can get.
• If it weren’t Monday, I’d be home on the couch bingeing the rest of the series.
• What would our world be like without all our creative people?
• No Ted Lassos.
• No movies, no stories.
• No books or songs on the radio.
• No fancy interior design schemes.
• Or elegantly designed homes to decorate.
• No dances to watch in a darkened theatre.
• No colorful murals on your favorite city walls.
• The list of things that make our lives worth living, that enrich and enhance, distract and dissuade, is so long I can’t even come up with all the categories.
• I’m saying I’m thankful this morning for creative people, no matter their medium.
• And I’m blaming Ted Lasso.
• And his da … rned optimism.
• Funny, then, I’d come across this specific article at this specific time.
• (It’s like they are reading my word document in real time.)
• 1984.
• Panopticon.
• I mean, they can’t be, right?
• What kind of societal trust would there be if literally every word we said in any medium was monitored?
• And what is the point of that monitoring?
• And why do we volunteer for it?
• I’m tripping over the line again.
• But maybe Monday mornings can use some more deep thoughts about modern society.
• Or maybe we should stick to the superficial.
• Like James Bond.
• We watched the trailer for the new Bond movie that allegedly opens in a couple of weeks.
• The Teenager thought it looked great, so she suggested we do a Daniel Craig Bond movie marathon over the weekend.
• (It sounds like all I did was watch stuff.)
• There were bike rides. And a birthday dinner.
• I did things.
• Do things on your Monday.

• I had the thought, briefly, I’d make today’s list literally a playlist.
• Just a bunch of YouTube links to songs you could click one after another.
• I suppose I could probably make a YouTube playlist for you, and share the link.
• But then you’d know my YouTube handle and we would not be maintaining separation of work and self.
• Still …
• Making and sharing a playlist is the modern day equivalent of making a CD for someone.
• Or, to go all ‘80s on you, a mixtape.
• I assume the “kids” these days make and share playlists.
• It was a big way of expressing ourselves back in the day.
• For me, anyway.
• Like writing with someone else’s words.
• Hoping to express a mood, feeling or intention to another person purely through melody and chords.
• Giving someone a playlist/CD/mixtape is asking someone else to see you, or letting them peek inside, and perhaps a small ask for affirmation.
• “Oh, yeah, man, that song was dope.”
• Slang.
• Music’s on my brain because every morning, driving the Teenager to school, we listen to that weird shared playlist I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the one that skips from Muse to Billie to Imagine Dragons to Fitz and the Tantrums to The Chainsmokers to Metallica.
• That was this morning’s drive.
• Well, I did skip Fallout Boy.
• When I find out who in my house is listening to Fallout Boy, there’s going to be a reckoning.
• I am also not a fan of Imagine Dragons.
• I would not take a free ticket to go see them.
• The girls can go without me, is what I’m saying.
• Maybe … and that train of thought left the station.
• Seriously. Answered a Teams chat and I now I have no idea where I was going.
• Typical, right?
• The not knowing where I’m going part, not the Teams chat.
• Teams has been my favorite work thing to come out of the pandemic.
• Well, and TCC Today, obvs.
• So where do you stand on fast food breakfasts?
• I told someone my all-time favorite fast food breakfast was the BoB from Whataburger (sausage, not bacon).
• Because what’s not to like about all that greasy diner food with Whataburger magic cheese?
• Yes, yes, I’m too old to eat like that.
• I mean, I haven’t had one of those in over a year, so …
• But holy cow it sounds amazing right now.
• And there’s a Whataburger right across the street …
• Have a great weekend, gang.

• I have never been comfortable using most slang.
• Even back when I was a kid, I never used skater speak.
• Other than “dude.”
• I still address most people as “dude.”
• (No gender implied, obviously.)
• (But certainly not in the ordained sense, either.)
• When I see certain slang used in headlines, it makes me … cringe.
• Which the kids would say, “is cringe.”
• Or something.
• I’m not quite clear on the usage.
• The one that started me off on this language rant is “slaps.”
• As in, “And yes, Dev Patel slaps.”
• That was a sub-headline on Lithub.
• Made my left eye twitch.
• (Always the left eye that’s twitchy.)
• I mean, I get it.
• You can’t really be a language purist.
• Language is a living thing.
• It changes minute by minute, from people to people, person to person.
• But there’s that fine line between evolution and …
• Looking at someone and thinking, “Did you mean that for real, or are you using it ironically?”
• I dunno. It’s probably just me.
• After all, I get embarrassed for characters in movies.
• That headline made me embarrassed for whoever wrote it.
• It could also just be the feeling of outside you get when you see a certain demographic using language you don’t.
• Inspires you to feel … other.
• This makes me think that studying language would be a cool profession, especially in a sociological sense.
• But can someone do that anymore?
• Does higher ed push that kind of thing, or is the end goal how economically productive they can make a person?
• Just posing the question. Don’t freak out on me.
• Speaking of Dev Patel … I still haven’t seen The Green Knight, but I keep hearing great things about it.
• It’s on the List.
• Over the holiday weekend, I spent one of my days reading on the couch.
• Read a real book (not Kindle) cover to cover, in fact.
• I’ve been stumbling around from book to book trying to find a sticking place for months.
• Took a page turner to do it.
• It was amazing to me how relaxing that was, once I got over the “you’re wasting a whole day reading” guilt.
• Literary Hub may be my favorite site to have stumbled upon in years.
• If you’re into the books, anyway.
• When I say books, I mean fiction.
• I don’t do a lot of non-fiction reading unless it’s research for something I’m writing.
• “Research.”
• I read to go away, to relax, to experience a different perspective, and because I crave stories.
• If there were a Question of the Day place around here, that’d be today’s question:
• “What do you crave?”
• “What do you need?”
• Or, perhaps slightly less risky, “What’s the last book you read in one day?”
• (And if you’ve never read a book in one day, well, you’re missing out.)
• Have a Wednesday, people.

I write these lists for work three times a week, so they’re sanitized for work audiences. Still, kinda fun to do.

• What is happening.
• That’s more rhetorical as I’m not really asking.
• I don’t expect you to answer, but a greeting of some sort on a Monday morning seems … proper.
• I’d ask you if you were sitting in my office. Or if we were sharing a phone call.
• Or a Teams chat.
• Holy cow, Teams.
• I still love Teams. Best collaboration tool I’ve ever used professionally.
• Don’t call me on my phone. Call me on Teams, is what I’m saying.
• And by call, I mean send me a chat message.
• Talking is the worst.
• Watched Reminiscence Saturday night.
• Meh.
• Trying too hard to be sci-fi Chinatown.
• Makes me wonder if Noir is dead.
• Setting was awesome. Characters were fine.
• Movie was meh.
• Someone gave me a hard time last week.
• They said something like, “You went from movie critic to ‘it was okay.’”
• After doing the movie critic thing for 11 years, I quit cold turkey.
• I debating coming back to it.
• Even started a blog.
• Reviewed like, two, maybe three movies on the blog.
• Quit again.
• Film criticism seems outdated and unnecessary.
• I wrote my Master’s thesis on film critics, mind you.
• But it’s hard to compete with a Rotten Tomatoes rating.
• Film criticism has been democratized.
• I think if there are any viable film critics left out there, it’s only because people like them for their voice.
• And it trips hard into gatekeeping.
• “If you don’t like such-and-such movie, you clearly don’t know anything about movies.”
• Bah. Watch whatever you want. Like whatever you want.
• If you need an opinion before you commit, find someone you know who has similar tastes.
• I have managed to get the Teenager turned onto movies other than Marvel recently.
• I employed Mr. Hanks, showed her The Terminal and Catch Me If You Can back-to-back.
• Last night, she said, “Hey, let’s watch a movie.”
• The wife and I were stunned because she either doesn’t want to watch movies, or only Marvel movies.
• “Okay, what do you want to watch,” I said.
• “I don’t know. You pick. You’ve done a good job picking movies lately,” she said.
• …
• …
• So I threw on The Adjustment Bureau (which is not Tom Hanks, obviously, but we’d talked about watching Stillwater all weekend, so a Matt Damon flick the kid might watch seemed in order.)
• Movie Monday, I guess.
• Before we get past that, however … Tom Hanks has made a truckload of good movies.
• He is a national treasure.
• You guys follow his socials, right?
• Totally would have dinner with Tom Hanks.
• I really, really did not mean to only write about movies today.
• Gonna be a hot week.
• Do your exercise indoors?

Disclaimer: I write these for work. Figured I’d get some extra mileage out of them. But some of it won’t make sense here. What you gonna do? Edit? Pssh.