This chair showed up in my house the other day . . .
“It’s the most comfortable chair ever!” my son raves.
“How much did it cost?” I ask him.
“I dunno. Mom handled the paying part.”
The dog seems to like it as well . . .
We Have a New Chair
Never Mind
Video shows workers abusing pigs
WHAT THAT IS OUTRAFEOUS WHO WOULSD DO SUCH A THING TO APUGS
IM SO MAD I CANT EVEN TYPE
Wait, what — pigs?! Well that’s not good either but on the other hand pigs are not man’s best friend and they are also delicious . . .
— Lightning 
No One Listens to Me
My wife is on the warpath this morning . . .
“Can you believe this?” she says to no one in particular. “I hate that printer. I’m throwing it away. It ran out of ink again! I’m trying to print something and now I have to go buy more ink!”
So I say, “You print a lot of documents. Do you get rid of your car when it runs out of gas?”
“Oh I can’t wait to throw away that printer,” she says, storming off . . .
The Downside of Effective Communication
What I re-learned in Crucial Conversations class is that you can have “better” conversations with people if you’re able to control your initial emotional reactions and apply some learnable communication skills.
I say “re-learned” because I got the same takeaway years ago from reading How to Win Friends and Influence People and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
And while it’s been my experience that these techniques really do work, I haven’t used them as much I could have because they also seem to take a lot of the zest out of being alive.
For example: Several years ago, we had an electrical problem at the house, where we weren’t getting power in any of the front rooms.
My wife was home when the electrician came out — I was at work — and he fixed the problem in five minutes.
When I got home, she was unhappy that he’d charged us 50 dollars for five minutes of work.
My first thought was, “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What should we do? Save 50 bucks and sit in the dark for the rest of our lives? What do you care how long it took him? He fixed the problem.”
As it happens though, I had just finished reading the Mars/Venus book, in which I learned that while men like to solve problems, women prefer a little empathy, so what I actually said was, “Gee honey, that must have been very upsetting.”
Well, that absolutely floored her. And as she stood there gaping at me, I said, “I mean it. That sounds very upsetting.”
So I sidestepped a colossal argument but I also realized that I couldn’t do that on a regular basis because I’d wind up listening to a lot of nonsense, throwing myself on conversational grenades and keeping all of my best lines to myself.
BYU 59, UCLA 0
OMG the UCLA bandwagon has crashed so hard, they’re still trying to identify the victims.
Karl Dorrell must be high-fiving people till his arm hurts.
FIGHT ON!
Another Difference Between Dogs and Cats
Pugs for McCain
Nothing is inevitable here. We’re pugs, and we never give up! We never quit! Pugs never hide from history. Pugs make history!
Sarah Palin OMG hottest governor ever.
Woof Woof!
— Lightning
Stories
[S]tories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. . . . Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.
You Don’t Say
One of our exercises in Crucial Conversations training was to “think of a person who is really frustrating to work with,” and to describe in writing a recent interaction with that person in terms of what was actually said, and what you were thinking or feeling but didn’t say.
My responses included the following:
- What I Actually Said
- This project presents some unique challenges.
- What I Didn’t Say
- I have a lot of experience managing IT projects, but not in running a day care center or a mental institution, which is what this project requires.
- What I Actually Said
- That’s not quite the way I would have phrased it.
- What I Didn’t Say
- Everyone else in these meetings seems to feel constrained by a sense of professionalism and decency that you appear not to possess.
One of my colleagues at our table of four claimed that based on those responses, she could identify the person I was writing about.
Since she and I and the person in question have never worked on anything together, I said she couldn’t, but much to my amazement, she did.
A Paradox
When we give up trying to convince, we become more convincing.
So — I should give up trying to convince in an effort to become more convincing?
Will They Pay My Relo?
Iced Tea and Lemonade
Arnold Palmer may have won a lot of golf tournaments, but his greatest accomplishment in my opinion was to say, “Hey, let’s mix some lemonade in with the iced tea.”
Nothing better on a hot day!
Thanks, Arnie!
Chick’s vs. Dick’s
Last year, Dick’s Sporting Goods bought Chick’s Sporting Goods. According to the Orange County Register, the four Chick’s locations in Orange County, including the one in Tustin that I shop at, will all be replaced by Dick’s by the second half of 2009.
I’m not happy about this. Oh, I know there are people who like Dick’s, and there are people who are 50-50 on the matter and can go either way, but there are also a lot of people like me who really prefer Chick’s.
In fact, I’ve been doing Chick’s for so long that I don’t see how I’m ever going to get used to Dick’s.
Sarah Palin
As Warner Baxter said to Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street:
You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!
Finally, a breath of fresh Alaskan air!
Not yet another Ivy League lawyer, yet another warmed-over political hack, yet another condescending, posturing, preening, pandering, pontificating blowhard who’s lost sight of the fact that politicians are employees. We hire them, we pay them, we give them trillions of dollars to spend any way they want to . . . if we didn’t hold them to such ridiculously low standards of accountability, it might be easier to remember who works for whom.
And hockey moms are hot! Why? Because hockey’s an expensive sport, so hockey dads have to knock down a pretty good income, which in our materialistic society allows them to be more selective in the spouse department.
My wife is sort of a hockey mom, in that she has a kid who plays hockey, even though she hardly ever goes to the games or the practices.
But she supports McCain-Palin! And she’s looking forward to seeing Mrs. Palin kick Joe Biden’s ass in the vice-presidential debate.
“Argue with a woman?!” she shouts, shaking both fists in the air. “HA HA HA! You are just going to lose and lose!”
What We Choose
I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.
Little-Known College Football Fact of the Week
Kentucky and Louisville play each other for the Governor’s Cup.
Why the governor needs to wear a cup I don’t know, nor can I figure out why anybody else would want it.
“Congratulations, boys!” the governor says, reaching into his trousers. “I’ve got a little something for you. And it ain’t fried chicken!”
How I Met Your Mother
From Michelle “There is no safety net for anybody” Obama’s DNC speech:
You know, what struck me when I first met Barack was that even though he had this funny name, even though he’d grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine. He was raised by grandparents who were working class folks just like my parents, and by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills just like we did.
Well . . . if you take all that at face value — and why wouldn’t you? — it only goes to show how shallow I am, because what struck me when I first met my wife was what a nice ass she had.
Thoughts on the DNC
I never have been able to buy into the whole liberal worldview — as expressed by Michelle “Our souls are broken in this nation” Obama and James “We are an 80 percent wrong-track country” Carville — where nobody ever has a nice day, everything is always wrong, vote for us and we’ll fix it all immediately . . . then not only do they not fix anything, they actually make everything worse, taking away another batch of precious freedoms and hard-earned dollars in the process . . .
I Love Money
As my kid and I were watching Beverly Hills Cop on VH1 last night, we kept seeing ads for a show called I Love Money, in which fat, unattractive people are having a spitting contest for distance.
Two questions: What is the target market for this — fat, ugly spitters and the people who love them? And a question I wonder about a lot: Were people this stupid before television?
How Not to Succeed in Business
Come to the office on a weekend — when you’re not allowed to be there — not to work, but to store some of your personal belongings. Fall down a flight of stairs. Then file a worker’s comp claim.
I’m not saying I know someone who actually did this . . .