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Tuesday, November 8, 2005

There’s an upside down buffalo on one of the stamps I put on an outgoing envelope I was working on at the end of the day, but that’s what you get for nudging me outside my comfort zone. It’s a long and pointless story, but there’s a short version: I was tired. I put the stamp on upside down. (And it’s not even the right stamp. I was looking for a 20c stamp, but the closest I had was a 21c stamp, which has a buffalo on it.)

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the right line of work. (Sometimes?) The construction trade is a paranoid world that is against everything I stand for. Okay, not everything I stand for, but everything I wish I stood for. Even though I’m sometimes a little pessimistic, I’m never paranoid. That’s not a contradiction, no matter how it looks. I can feel down in the dumps without believing everyone is out to get me.

Not the Boss, though, and not anybody else in this business. There’s paperwork on top of paperwork to cover every contingency (and every ass). The Boss always thinks he’s not going to get paid for work that we’ve done. That’s why we file every possible provisional form whenever we enter into a contract, so that we can “go after” somebody when they don’t pay us. (The fact that they always do pay us hasn’t convinced him that people are mostly honest, because he can always come up with a scenario that’s worse than the worst case scenario.)




30 October 2005

Cloud puffs.



So here I am after 5:00 pm, and it’s pitch black outside, and I’m getting all the paperwork ready to file a preliminary notice on a company who has told me they’ve already put the check in the mail. (And I believe them!) It’s not as if I need something else to keep me busy, especially since the phone started ringing well before I was half awake this morning. Even working on almost no sleep, though, I won’t let them make me as paranoid as the Boss. They’re trying. They’re closing in all around me, but I won’t let them do it to me.




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Stuff

As of this moment (it's 11:00 pm now), with 55% of the votes counted, all of the measures on the California ballot are losing (including the ones I supported). Many are too close to call, but of the ones that have been decided, two of the four propositions included in the governor’s “reform” program have definitely been defeated. Arnold staked his political reputation on these four propositions, which means that a year from now we could be seeing a new governor elected. That might be the most important outcome of anything decided tonight. The victory goes to the people, because he tried to go over the heads of their elected representatives and use the initiative process to turn a fairly progressive state to the right. No matter how the final tally shakes down, that cynical maneuver didn’t work. I haven’t felt this good about political trends since 1996.

For other journal recommendations, check out the links page.


One year ago: Two Steps Back
"I don’t feel qualified to comment on specific military operations, except to say that it seems to me if they had any confidence that this would be a success, they would have moved in before the election instead of six days after."


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