3 posts tagged “work”

My work group just put on this huge (190 attendees) fundraising dinner, which was held last night, featuring a local luminary and with many, many bigwigs in attendance (including the guy whose foot Red stepped on yesterday afternoon. He seemed none the worse for wear).

The lead-up to this thing was just incredible, combining many of the most taxing features of and requiring all the skills necessary to plan an ornate wedding and a successful invasion of a small Southeast Asian country.

The thing went off with almost military precision, because my boss is crazy, but in mostly a good way. A few choice details:

The response was so large that the original venue was going to be too small to seat everyone for dinner, so we had a coctail reception there and moved the dinner to a larger venue in a different building four blocks away. Therefore, we hired three buses to move everybody from one place to another, AND the two school mascots, who showed up in full costume to help move the crowd away from the free booze (no small feat) and onto the waiting buses, where they were whisked away to dinner.

At dinner, all the tables were numbered (naturally). People's name tags were decorated with an old-timey football player. The number on his jersey was Photoshopped (not by me, because I ain't that crazy) to match their table number. In case they got confused (refer to the "free booze" of the previous paragraph), tucked into the back of their nametag was a map of the banquet hall with the tables labeled and numbered, and theirs marked.

There were many such details, large, small, and miniscule. Like I said, these folks were crazy, and I was just along for the ride. But things went off well, it didn't even rain on them when they were getting into the buses, and everybody seemed to have a good time. I guess I can't argue with results, but I do know that event planning is not a field I have any desire to get into. Although I can now skirt a table and tie little bows on placecards like nobody's business.

And the big boss was EXTREMELY happy with how everything turned out, so that's always a good thing.

One of my cousins (20 years old, living at home, working her way through college) had this to say on her Facebook page today:

I think this country is doomed....ever read the Left Behind Series? Be prepared to choose.

I shared this with Redz and my sweetie who, completely independently of one another said, "yeah, that's how I felt in 2000." Me, too. Except of course for the Left Behind reference - I think our imagined dystopia was much more along the lines of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale than Tim LaHaye's lurid reinterpretation of the End Times,  (loosely) inspired by Revelation, by far the craziest book in the Bible.

Unfortunately, I don't have any kind of real conversation going with this cousin, so I don't know of a way to *gently* share this perspective with her. If I did, though, I'd probably say something like this:

I thought it was the end of America as I knew it, but after all, the world didn't end with eight years of George W. Bush. Sure, our country started two wars, one of them on completely fabricated evidence. That's bad, and there are thousands dead on both sides and many thousands more whose lives are forever changed because of our country's eagerness to go to war. Yes, we have seen an unprecedented erosion of our civil rights in this country (much worse than the McCarthy years, according to some experts). Yes, our country's good name has been soiled by torture, imprisonment without trial, and various other human rights violations perpetrated by the Bush administration. Yes, Bush has squandered the budget surplus he inherited from the Clinton administration on tax cuts for extremely wealthy people, and racked up a staggering national debt (much of it financed by a Communist country, China - who was supporting socialism again?) which our children and their children will have to inherit and pay for. Yes, our country has been divided again and again by fear.

All of that is true. It has been a terrible eight years. But in each of those long eight years there was work to do for people of good will -- not just political work, but the simple work of helping other people who need it.

There is even more work ahead of all of us: the hard and rewarding work of making peace after almost a decade of war, for instance. The difficult work of bringing real justice to those who have been imprisoned indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay (starting with fair and speedy trials). The courageous work of restoring habeaus corpus and reining in the excesses and incursions of the Bush administration on our legal rights (hint: we have more of them than the right to bear arms and freely practice our religion). The daunting work of turning around centuries of damage to our planet wrought by our greed and overconsumption, to clean up our air, water, and soil for ourselves and our future generations.

Those tasks have been flagged as "liberal," which is unfortunate, because we are going to need everybody to get them done. But if you are a Christian conservative and can't get behind those, there is always feeding the poor, visiting the sick and those in prison, and in general loving your neighbor as yourself (without forgetting that our neighbors are Afghani, Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, Iranian, Mexican, North Korean, Venezuelan; some of them are homeless "bums," some of them are lazy and undeserving and violent and misguided and unchristian).

Start anywhere; there is enough to be done that none of us will run out of things to do in this lifetime. And before you know it, four or eight years will have passed, and you will again have a chance to help choose the next president. And in the meantime, you may have discovered that the world has changed. Even if it hasn't, you will have changed.

I've had a series of Very Busy Days at work - despite having last Friday off. I'm talking ten-hour days combined with mind-crushingly boring multi-hour meetings, many deadlines, and the soft rabbitty nibbles of a thousand small projects (none of which would take more than an hour or two, but taken together are a bit overwhelming).

Maybe it's just because I'm wearing a black concert t-shirt, but as I looked in the restroom mirror a moment ago, I thought, "It would be a great day to quit my job and become a roadie."

Of course, the bands I like best are unlikely to ever make enough money to be able to hire a roadie (and those that have made that much money are often acoustic solo and duo performers who wouldn't need a roadie, anyway). But still. I could lift and carry heavy things. I could say "Check" into a microphone. I could shovel a drunk/stoned/spaced-out lead singer into the back of a car and get them to the show on time. I can even tune and restring guitars.

Maybe I'll take a sabbatical and look for a temporary roadie gig...or maybe I'll just cart my own damn guitar to the acoustic jam and/or the open mic night right here in town.

There's even a guidebook...at least I can read about being a roadie.