Once the “weird” label took off, I thought it would lose some of its power because it was being used so much.

But damn. There’s no other way to put it. This is weird.

My sense is it’s getting at “what’s an overated candy flavor”

I’m gonna make some hedgehog stew today

WHO IS THIS PERSON

I really wish the nomenclature was consistent. If you say “shreds”, it’d better be documents in a literal paper shredder, perhaps in service of obstruction of justice.

If you’re just referring to people saying “Trump bad”, please use “slam” or “blast” so I know to ignore it.

Cornholio Paradox

I thought most hoes would be quite easy to plow

When referring to a difficult task: “That’s a tough road to hold”, or “a tough road to hoe”, or “a tough road to [travel on]” or “a tough road to… [trails off awkwardly…]”, or just “a tough road”.

It’s a tough row to hoe.

It’s an agricultural metaphor. The row is a line of dirt in a field where you plant seeds. You use a hoe to dig the lines, remove weeds, and create little holes where you drop the seeds. Hoeing may be difficult if the soil is too hard or too full of rocks and weeds. Such a row would be a tough one to hoe.

They look like they’ll glow and make a soft bell noise if I stand next to them and press “A”.

To me, this says that your workplace has acknowledged and accepted that the way they do business is leading to burnout, at least for some people. But rather than using that as evidence that their business practices need to change, they’ve instead opted to individualize the problem. Our growth projections aren’t unreasonably ambitious, you just need to do more deep breathing.

It’s like how I’m told to take a vacation to relax, only to return to the same (or an even larger) pile of to-dos that I left behind.

Edit: If this resonates with you, check out the book “McMindfulness” by Ronald Purser.

Whatever it was, I forgot what it was today

Me, looking for technical writing jobs after writing a highly fucking technical dissertation: I have a PhD but I’m pretty burned out on being a try-hard so I’m just looking for a straightforward 9-to-5.

Them: We’re worried you’ll be bored.

Me: Anyone would get bored doing this, at least I’ll be good at it.

Them: No.

He was a terrific athlete

That’s fair. I won’t dispute that sometimes they’re helpful. If I spend more time typing the message than it’d take to just talk it out, then meeting up is a viable option.

But gosh, the number of meetings I’ve had where I send the email, we meet anyway, and I simply read the email to them and they go “Ohhhh”… Sigh.

I find it interesting that “attend meetings” is said in the same breath as “walk around” and “take lunch or bathroom breaks”.

Meetings are way worse for productivity than breaks and water cooler bullshitting, at least in my experience. There’s more of them, they take longer, and they tend to leave me with a vague sense that nothing’s really getting done and everybody’s sort of okay with that. AND they’re treated as an obligation in a way that taking breaks is not.

At least when I get back to my desk after walking around, I feel a bit more refreshed and ready to get back to work. In fact, it’s usually meeting burnout that prompts the walk-around in the first place.

>demonizes childless cat ladies
>won’t let you get IVF
>makes memes about protecting cats

what do they want from us

This makes my bones hurt

I swear a social studies teacher told us that most rivers tend to flow north to south. Young impressionable child I was, I of course filed it away as a long-term core memory – right there next to PEMDAS, FOIL, and so on.

Then I mentioned it in college and got fucking embarrassed.