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Sometimes you stumble upon the perfect description.

The Unending Conversation

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

–Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 110-111

1. Went for a serious run for the first time in almost a month.  Post-flu bronchial tubes passed with flying colors.   Also, at the first sojourn along the route,
2. I successfully retrieved the housekeys I’d left behind on October 6th.
3. While one can never be 100% certain it looks like my days in Bentonville are all behind me.  Here’s hoping.

I’ll take it.

eneighblor (noun):  Pronounced \i-ˈnā-blər\.   Concatenation of ‘neighbor’ and ‘enabler.’

Over the years I have droned, overexplained, filibustered, told shaggy-dog stories, and generally subjected clients to attritional verbal badgering in a number of ways.

Today I dialed it up to a new level.

I gave a PowerPoint presentation so boring, lengthy, and monotonous that it drove one contractor in attendance to chew off several fingernails with his teeth and spit them out on the carpet.

I regret having turned this into a photoblog lately.  Perhaps it’s time to add Tumblr to the mix.

I deviated from convention at boarding time this morning, yielding to about a dozen anxious passengers who pressed forward as quickly as possible instead of outracing them.  When I arrived at my seat I discovered it was already occupied by this woman:

She already had staked out a workspace, with manila folders in the seatback pocket, on the armrest, and in her lap.  I excused myself gently and stated that she was occupying my seat.  She contradicted me, pronouncing the seat assignment she erroneously believed herself to be occupying.

I nodded, smiled, gestured, and invited her to look again at the row number stamped in the armrest and above the seat.  She chirped a dismissive apology and relocated.  Once airborne, as she chatted with a Washington University (STL) medical student, I overheard her vacuously and condescendingly tell him, with a slight Texas twang (which explained volumes), “Oh, that’s a very good school.”

Later in the flight I skimmed my King County Election Pamphlet and spied a familiar face.   After checking the passenger manifest I confirmed that it was indeed my erstwhile seat-squatter.  Naturally, she’s running for Seattle School District Director on a platform that includes “rigorous academics.”

UPDATE AUGUST 10th: She lied about her academic credentials—she never earned a degree in Statistics.

I discovered the following graphic as I perused a former colleague’s series of blog posts about being laid off several months ago.  Every aspect—the quotation, the characters’ occupations, their organizational roles, appearances, their intellectual and academic level of achievement, and so on—perfectly evokes the corporate priorities, organizational leadership structure, and value system in operation at the moment he got his pink slip.

Yep, it’s in a gas station convenience store.