No forwarding address

It’s funny how many words there are for “dead.”

In a newspaper article, you may be a fatality. In another sort of newspaper article, you may be the late Mr. Walker. To your sister, you have passed away. To your pastor, you are the dearly departed. The post office prefers “deceased”.

Today at work I got a piece of returned mail with that word scrawled on it. Below was the post office’s sticker:

MOVED

LEFT NO FORWARDING ADDRESS

The modern workday

I just started three months of temp work for Oxfam America, which is great so far. I love the cause, I love the people, I even love the commute. But when you get down to it, data entry is always going to be data entry. And I had forgotten that when I’ve been doing monotonous computer work for a while, I start humming.

I think the lack of modern work songs is a big problem. Our ancestors had songs for laundry, marching, hoeing, weaving, working on chain gangs, you name it. Our modern monotonous tasks don’t have songs, but I find I’ve got to have something to occupy my mind a bit while my hands are doing their own thing on the keyboard.

The best attempt at this, of course, is Stan Rogers’ (dated) “White Collar Holler”:

Well, I rise up every mornin' at a quarter to eight,
Some woman who's my wife tells me not to be late.
I kiss the kids goodbye, can't remember their names,
And week after week it's always the same.

And it's whoa boys, can you code it (huh!)
Program it right,
Nothin' ever happens in this life of mine,
I'm haulin up the data on the Xerox line.

And it's code in the data, give the keyboard a punch.
Then cross-correlate and break for some lunch.
Correlate, tabulate, process and screen,
Program, printout, regress to the mean.

So, at the risk of driving the person at the next desk crazy, what songs do we need? I’ve long wanted a photocopying song.

The green one

Scene: Election day. Julia is standing the required 150 feet away from her polling place with a sign reading "Yes on 4! Save the economy and the planet."

Security guard: Hey, what's question four?

Julia: It's asking the legislature to take subsidies away from industries that pollute a lot and give the subsidies to building green jobs instead.

Guard: That sounds good. All that green stuff. You know, I bought a truck the other week, and the guy at the lot says you can have it in two colors, the blue one or the green one. (With a wise smile.) And I says to him, I'll take the green one. It seems like things are going in that direction, you know?

Uh, sir? It doesn't actually work like that.

Jobless but not idle

Two months of unemployment has made me insecure and scared. But on the up side, it does give me time to go looking through other people's trash for things like old blankets and then make them into clothes.

Focus

I've been reading about the difference between "entertaining" (focused on impressing people with your house, your fancy food, etc.) and "hospitality (focused on other people, not yourself).

I'm finding this especially relevant to planning the wedding. The wedding industrial complex is extraordinarily good at getting people to spend lots of money on goofy stuff they don't need.

I keep trying to remind myself: in ten years none of these people will remember what kind of flowers I had on the table, or if there were flowers at all. They won't care what my colors were or whether the plates matched. (Although since this mania is marketed peculiarly towards women, I do know any displeasure my aunts feel about the arrangements will be directed at me and not Jeff). This is not about me showing off. It's about people enjoying themselves and each other, yes, but that shouldn't center on how the cake was decorated. It should be about hospitality.

When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. Luke 14:12-14

I'm not sure about maimed or blind, but we are at least inviting a lot of college students . . .

Mrs.

This week I got my first phone call for "Mrs. Kaufman". I warily told the voice on the other end that there was no one here by that name, and she said she actually wanted Jeffrey Kaufman. Of course! A woman answering the phone at Jeffrey Kaufman's house must be Mrs. Kaufman. Actually, the people living in the house are currently two Mr. Kaufmans, one Ms. Thomforde, one Ms. Wise, one Mr. Aderer, and sometimes two Ms. Kaufmans but definitely no Mrs. Kaufmans. The last person to bear that name was Jeff's grandmother, who is long dead.

I have doubts about adding another variable to this mishmash by keeping my name, but it seems simpler than making the transition to Julia Kaufman. Also, there would be something weird about being Mrs. Kaufman when Jeff's mother isn't. I don't feel strongly about it as a feminist issue - I'm keeping the name of my father and his father and his father, none of whom are people I particularly want to be named after. In fact, I originally wanted to change my name and Jeff was one of the people who talked me out of it.

I just wish he would stop answering the phone with "Thomforde, Kaufman, and Wise", which makes us sound like a law firm.