Middle East Peace in a Bottle

It won't solve any religious or policy disputes, but shatta, a hot red pepper sauce used in Palestinian cuisine and having Egyptian origins, might be able to bring people together at the dinner table. I think a lot of hot sauce enthusiasts would agree that this mouth-searing condiment is fantastic. I use the Canary brand of shatta that I found at a local Middle Eastern market. It's great with hummus, pita bread, and Persian cucumbers (but any cucumbers will do).

When I had congestion problems a couple of weeks ago, I prescribed myself some shatta, and the issues cleared up. It sure tastes better than over-the-counter cold meds. Caution: It really is hot; take with a liberal amount of fluids. It's well worth the mouth and stomach burn.

Answer: To Hell in a Handbasket

Question: Where is our country headed now that the Democrats' health care legislation has passed?

Drum Roll Please

Now unveiled for the first time: a few pictures taken on a recent trip to Descanso Gardens. Which one do you like the best and why?


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Tell me what you think!

Blogger Slacker

I am a bona fide blogger slacker, not having posted since the election! My problem is that I tend to censor myself even when I have good writing ideas. Or, I put off writing for another day and that other day never comes. A few years back, I used to write morning pages to cultivate the habit of writing. Morning pages were not profound insights on life or masterful examples of word play, but simply prosaic journal pages intended to make writing an integral part of the day. Morning pages could be about anything as long as they were consistently done. I found myself writing more when I forced myself to put pen to paper.

So, in the attempt to make blogging more of a habit, I am writing today about nothing more than the fact that I haven't been blogging! However, stay tuned because this week, I will publish a few pictures I recently took at Descanso Gardens. And, I'll be asking for your opinion of which one you like the best!

Have You ...

voted? I went early this morning--7 a.m.--to avoid long lines later in the day. There was a line, but it only took 1/2 hour to get through it. Nothing disturbing at our poll place today: no fights breaking out, no voter intimidation, Mickey Mouse was not in line behind me, etc. Hopefully there's nothing funny going on at your polling place either!

Still Undecided?

In the final week of the 2008 election season, politicians are stumping on the trail and granting interviews to media outlets aggressively courting the vote of the undecided voter. But, with only seven days to go before we decide who our president will be for the next four years, who are these undecided voters? I am not the most decisive person in the world, but I figured out a long time ago who I am voting for. I watched a lot of debates, read a lot of articles, listened to analysis from a variety of sources, thought through voting records, and came to a conclusion. I know that not everyone has either the time or inclination to dedicate to the political process, and I don’t claim to be a policy wonk, so there are subtleties to issues on which I don’t have a firm grasp, but I still have enough information to make a decision between the options. Some would say that there are no real differences between the major candidates, but I beg to differ! There are definite, crucial, and substantive differences, and unless your sole voting issue is a topic on which the candidates happen to actually agree, then I don’t understand what you’re trying to sort out. And even if you don’t like either major party candidate, it would seem that you have already decided to either not vote at all or to vote for/write in a third party option. I get that. What scares me is that there will be people on November 4th, whose vote counts just as much as mine, who are going to walk into the voting booth with no clue and will base their decision on … who knows? So, here is a question for anyone who reads my blog and is still undecided: I honestly want to know, what will help you decide at this stage of the game? And, do you think you could walk into the voting booth on November 4th and make a last-minute, possibly visceral decision?

The Office

Until just recently, I worked in a sitcom-like office situation. Of course, the premise of such a situation comedy is that the incompetent will succeed and be promoted to the highest levels and the doers are those at the bottom shouldering the work that upper management happily delegates to. The peons are smarter and see right through the nonsense and the bosses are happily clueless and self-important. Hilarity ensues. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as funny when it’s real, but my co-workers and I still were able to find some humor in it (laughing ironically). Some examples (this is only a small sampling):

• “We deliver … products.” —One of my co-workers “vandalized” the mission-value statement by taping over sections of the mission that were not true. For one of the statements, after deleting anything about reliability, quality, and getting accurate results, he was left with “We deliver products.” We all laughed heartily, but didn’t think the CEO would find it as amusing.

• During a meeting, my boss (and I’m talking the owner of the company) once asked me if the entire line of hair on the top of the eyelid was called an eyelash. In disbelief, I had to tell her it wasn’t one eyelash, but many eyelashes. Please note that the company I worked for caters to an educational market!

• “Too detail-oriented”—I’ve had many reviews in my day, but when the best they can come up with is that I tried too hard to make everything correct and I have to realize that we can’t be perfect, I knew I was in trouble. The whole essence of my job was to be detail-oriented, so that made it especially comedic. All I could do was essentially promise that I would do my best not to do my best.

• The CEO never returned his e-mails. He would barely read them. Especially when they were important and absolutely required an answer. Or when I would specifically ask for an answer, the response would invariably be a vague non sequitur. However, he certainly was on the ball for the real major stuff, like when he put out an all-points bulletin to the entire company upon misplacing his university coffee mug.

• My boss (the owner again) was recruiting for a highly skilled job and sent a list of qualifications to a potential candidate. The candidate, who the company already knew had not had much of the experience required for the job, honestly acknowledged in an e-mail that she was really not qualified to take it on. My boss wrote her back and said, “Yes, you are!” Moral of the story: If you’re not competent, don’t worry; you’ll fit right in here!

• The highly paid marketing firm to which we outsourced marketing collateral was unpleasant to work with and didn’t get the job done well, but that was okay with our company. Apparently, according to my boss, they “really like to work for us,” so that’s why they were still employed. I never knew that the philosophy a company should adopt for retention of contractors was whether or not they liked to work with the hiring company. Well, I guess competence was never really the issue.

• After hearing that our jobs are not rocket science (from the owner) and even that they “suck” (courtesy of the CEO), they’re surprised when people want to leave. Fascinating.

• One day the janitors left a bag of liquid soap on the counter (the plastic bag of soap you use in industrial soap dispensers). My boss, who never uses the restroom in our area, rushed into my co-workers office, worried, and asked if anybody in the office was hurt. My co-worker, puzzled, said no. My boss then asked why there was an IV in the bathroom. I guess we’re so dedicated to the job that we don’t even want to leave work to get to the hospital when we can administer our own IVs in the office restroom!

• My boss owns the company, so the CEO reports to her. But, she has also been acting VP of my department for over a year, so she reports to the CEO. This mixed-up twist of a reporting structure makes for some interesting results. It usually means that when my boss doesn’t want to deal with something, she suddenly says the CEO is in charge, but if she wants to interject in a decision, she becomes his boss.
  

I’m fairly certain that I lost brain cells, high work standards, creativity, and motivation on that job. I did gain friends from the pool of fellow misery-stricken worker bees trying to survive the daily grind.

So, here’s to freedom (I’ll drink to that)! I finally quit to pursue a life of sanity and a healthier job, hopefully one too normal to be the very stuff of sitcoms.