That Dude From The Matrix Has Nothing On Mrs. Pops
Nobody dodges bullets (in super-slo-mo bullet-time!) like my wife. She came home early yesterday because of our parent-teacher whatsit thingy we had to do. While home she checked her e-mail. Her manager said he'd received an e-mail from a VP telling him that my wife's group would not be affected by the layoffs.

The breath I've been holding for a week I was finally able to exhale.

I'm not sure how many rounds of layoffs we've survived now, but it has to be approaching double digits. If you ask Mrs. Pops it's all luck, but I think she must be doing something (or someone which would bother me alot more if I didn't know how much money she made... not spectacular, but enough) right.

Having dodged these bullets though (although I'll be alot more comfortable after the layoffs end completely and we know for sure), the news that they're discontinuing the lines of products my wife works on tells me it's only a matter of time before They (we all know "They", don't we?) reload. Best not to dwell on that.

So we've survived. The Bucket, though dented somewhat emotionally spent (as buckets go), remains upright and teeming with the same festering brown composted goo that fertilizes my sickly little thoughts and turns them into full-blown rambles. Bad luck for my close personal friend MPH, but seeing as this is the third time I've linked his blog in the last week, there's really nothing more I could do short of dropping dead and willing readers to him.

But as usual on this blog here, let's turn the discussion back to me (damn limelight hogging Mrs. Pops and her fancy layoff talk!), shall we?

We shall.

That said, I am going to do something unprecedented: I'm going to re-post a comment I received. This is from my new BFF Alison.

"Just so you know, Pops, I cited your blog yesterday in English class. I'm a classmate/friend of TooFrumpyfortheTeenagePopulation (I'm the Vegan Hippie, if you read any of the blogs she links to) and we were reading Joan Didion's "Los Angeles Notebook," which is a brief essay on the Santa Ana winds (and the foehn winds, and the hamsin winds, and the sirocco winds) and their effects on human behavior. It was a weather phenomenon that most of the class had never heard of, so Diana and I asked permission to read your September 22nd post "The Curse of Santa Anna" aloud to the class, minus one word. We also encouraged folks to read "Vegetative State" for further information on the Californian climate/flora.

So now your work has been studied in a high school English class. Sort of.

P.S. Good luck with the layoff situation. I hope your wife keeps her job."

I have no idea how to take this. The first, most obvious impression is that we've finally, at long last, reached the end of American education as we know it.

My second reaction was to say something snarky and disparaging about both vegans and hippies. It's a dark, ugly, deeply-ingrained reflex and took a great deal of sweat and effort to suppress. It has nothing to do with Alison personally. The fact that I have thus far been able to restrain myself speaks volumes about the level of good feelings I have toward Alison.

Reaction number three is that this is a complete vindication for the entire existence of blogs and their subsequent abuse by the lazy and the self-absorbed. It used to be that the prerequesites for having your work discussed (in any form) in high school English classes were that you had to be 1) coherent, 2) dead (not really a prerequisite, but it helps), 3) and this is the most important part--published in any sort of printed form.

By putting this ridiculous thing out for a mere three months I have skipped over all the messy nonsense of having my work having judged by any objective standard over time. Instead I have made a single leap into the realm of Shakespeare and Keats and Wordsworth and all the other boring shit they made us read in high school.

Dickens. Steinbeck. Pops.

Forget the transcendent and the sublime. High school English classes could do with more first-draft amateur political invective, recycled pop-culture refernces and jokes about palm trees and Vietnamese hookers.

For all the people out there in the world who said America would bring about the downfall of all high culture as we know it, let me be the first to say: You were right.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.9


Pops


PS: Silliness aside, thanks to Alison. Quite flattered, me.

- posted by Pops @ 9:08 AM