Theoretically, I don't work Tuesdays and Thursdays. So, today I won't be going down to headquarters until about six, and I'll spend most of my day building a flyer for the campaign. Which leads me to two observations.

I somehow have to make designing a flyer for a presidential campaign (if anyone from the FEC asks, it's a flyer for the DNC) look like I'm working on my American Literature chapters. Which is pretty easy. Actually doing the classwork is hard. I have to read about "Thomas Paine's deep religious faith." Yuck. In his autobiography, Ben Franklin mentions that the first time his future wife saw him in Philadelphia, she thought him awkward and ridiculous. My textbook author thinks this "serves as a good example of how Franklin lived his life: whenever he saw a potential challenge, he rose up to meet it."

Great. Ben Franklin's an after school special, and Thomas Paine is the son of a preacher man. Observation 1: If you want to pass an American Literature course, under no circumstance go in having read any American literature.

Anyhoodles, yesterday I did a flyer for my boss. We're having a "Debate Party" at HQ, inviting the public to eat free food and watch the debates on a big screen. I made a flyer, using some of the ground rules my drama teacher made us use, when we did flyers for the school play. Keep it simple. Don't embellish. Get to the point: time, date and such in big letters.

Naturally, the flyer was good, and now my boss's boss has asked me to do a flyer for her. It's a "side-by-side comparison of the candidates," focusing on "the real issues." With all the complexity, embellishment and pointlessness of such documents. Observation 2: In politics, promotion is not a sign of virtue.

Anyway, I'm getting obtuse. Apologies. Here's a funny story, from a random thread in the web:

A buddy of mine in college was taking ROTC classes. When he graduated, he would become a lieutenant in the Army. I asked him one day what he'd learned in class that week. "We learned how to cross a minefield," he told me. I had no idea how one might go about this, so I asked him how you do it.

"You turn to your sergeant," he said, "and you say, 'Sergeant! Get these men across that minefield.'"

Post a Comment