~ 8:57 ~
Eight fifty seven.
Seventy-two minutes gone.
Four sixty-eight left…
I’m Alright Jack!
The last few weeks as a corporate cog have been a bit of a challenge, one way or another. Two phrases come to my mind, one from my British heritage in the form of the classic 1959 Boulting Brother’s comedic film, I’m Alright Jack, and the other from the more well known Kubrick adaptation of the Stephen King novel, The Shining.
It was a close run thing and although the latter inspired me to create the following artwork, I now feel more in tune with the sentiment of the earlier film’s title…
Cube World
How many more smiling faces can I stand?
It feels like I am but one more good reply from cracking
Empty how are yous and automatic responses
meant to make us feel like we are actually conversing,
even though we don’t say anything.
So few people want to really listen you wonder why they bother to ask!
Not dialogue as that requires two people to socialize.
Many don’t slow in their rush to their daily sanctuary:
a prefabricated box,
bedecked with charms and ephemera from an outside life;
a pretend personal space,
a nest in which to hide away.
How ironic it’s called a cube,
even though the fourth side is composed of a shirt back, not a wall.
~Richard
Inspirational – hardly
Today I was in a colleague’s office and saw the following inspirational wording inscribed in white text (mixed fonts obviously) on a black square:
“Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss you’ll land in the stars.”
Me being me, I couldn’t help but add in my mind: “eventually… as a corpse.” which somewhat devalues the wording, but then that’s the way it is with me 😉
Then I started thinking about the value of this as an inspirational business quote. Surely, if the target is the moon, then missing it would be abject failure. Also, considering our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light years distant (40,113,000,000,000 km) it would be a bloody long time before we’d reach a single one.
So, a quick analysis suggests it’s hardly inspiring at all really, and I am guessing it was not on the walls of NASA Mission Control during the Apollo Program!
Anyhow, I got to thinking about what useful inspirational quote I could develop for the day and I decided on the following adaptation of a well-known cliché, as it still appears meaningful, yet lofty without losing its practical value:
“IF a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing adequately”*
* and I would add that there’s a big emphasis on the word IF at the beginning of this statement that is usually ignored in the original!
self help
~ self help ~
a surprise gift on my desk today:
a small paperback
with positive color and pointing arrows,
packed full of promises
of perfecting my personality;
meant to mold it
into another corporate citizen
who will nod and smile unquestioningly
at perfunctory platitudes
that stoke the share price,
and distract us from the realization
that we ourselves are but stock
in a world of cowering complicity,
from which I willingly help myself.
Haiku: the smallest room
~ the smallest room ~
porcelain throne room
a makeshift sanctuary
from outside madness
52 week Challenge: week 10
Week 10: Portrait: Environmental – Show a subject in their natural habitat. Their place of work or hobby is a great start. Tell their story with the environment.
I found this to be the toughest assignment so far. I wanted to push my comfort zone in getting out with camera; perhaps creating some street photography. The difficulty for me came with the concept of taking this as a true portrait. I sort of misread the brief a little but I still feel that this shot does meet it as it shows this young lady in the middle of her job writing down a food order for the cook in the food truck. Our only communication was through the little Plexiglas window, which seemed like an obvious frame for the shot.
Office Poetry – Truly
For some reason I am finding Mondays the best day for this type of creativity. Here’s my second office poem of the season…
Truly
Searching the room for a face.
To catch the eye
of one who understands
the true purpose of the meeting.
Personal Relativity
Yesterday was “one of those days,” as we like to say. It’s not that anything went wrong, far from it in fact, but it was a work day which seemed to drag on for longer than it should. Why is it that the evenings and weekends seem to rush us by, like they are only half-days and yet sometimes workdays seem to have hours that contain ninety minutes instead of their allotted sixty, and you can almost hear the second hand of the clock drag itself from one digit to another?
I guess it’s a subtle form of relativity – although in this case it’s not time passing at different rates for two people in different places, but rather one person experiencing time in two different states of mind. Good times rush us by whilst the more mundane days drag.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, sometimes we even find things to support our self-inflicted mood and keep us in that state (or at least I do). Sometimes this can even be with objects that are meant to inspire us, which is perhaps yet another form of relativity. By way of example, I give you the recently decorated “inspiration wall” of our building. This is meant to reinforce our corporate ideals and keep us all aligned to the work we do.
Strangely, the one word that jumped out at me from the wall yesterday was the following:
I know it was meant to portray an unstoppable drive to a goal, or some such meaning, but yesterday it seemed an appropriate adjective to sum up a slow day.
Office Poetry – Be Longing
In order to keep up with the “philosophical” theme of this blog I’m going to periodically add a few poems to my ramblings. I don’t know how long I’ll keep this up but to start off I have a few related to being in the corporate world for 25 years. Disclaimer – they’re not usually positive.
Here’s the first:
Be Longing
Long days
Long corridors
Long faces
Long departed colleagues
Long past vacations
Long overdue praise
Long gone
~
searching4theshot 