Pen-Elayne on the Web

I Remember Doing the Time Warp

Back at work, and of course it's immediately as though my vacation never happened. Not only because it wasn't the ideal week off, what with the tooth extraction and the boobies and the Blogathon exhaustion and the ga-HEY, LADY!, but because nothing seemed to progress here while I was away. Everyone was just too busy, I was told. They all have this sort of wild look of exasperation on their faces, and now mine has one to match. In addition to getting through snail mail and e-mail (that was pretty much my morning) I've typed a last-minute itinerary from scratch, made two hotel reservations, one airline res, taken two dictations (finally got my hands-free headset!), spoken to three state licensing departments, sent out one courier package, recorded three messages for the office answering machine and I still can't shake the feeling that I'm slacking even though I've been going non-stop. But I'm thinking, if they had a whole week and did very little with what I left (and darned if my in-box wasn't more or less totally empty a week ago Friday), I'm not going to kill myself hurrying to finish this paperwork for which I need their direction anyway only they're too busy to give it to me just now, le sigh.

So with two hours left in my workday, I take a little breath and start to peruse the blogroll (to which I've added a few folks here and there based on the referrals section of Extreme's very cool tracking stats) and I find this interesting article via Cindy Roy (link at sidebar) dealing with the "ancient code of insult and revenge that is still prevalent in the American South." And if I think I'm in a time-warp going back to before my vacation, that's nothing compared to the warp that writer Paul Robinson (assistant director of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull, who has also served as an intelligence officer in the British and Canadian armies) sees the US currently undergoing that echoes the Civil War era. So I guess everything old is new again. It does make one wonder when we're going to socially evolve into the 20th century, let alone the 21st.