How To: Celebrate Holidays in the Office

As we all know, we live in a Christian-dominated society. Christianity is the leviathan corporation that refuses to acknowledge there are other games in town. Sort of like Comcast and cable.

Look around during Easter and Christmas. You’ll see everything decked out in red and white, bunnies and Cadbury eggs. It’s all around, suffocating you in the forced glee of the holiday season, all with the subtle reminder in the background that this is Jesus Land and, as a non-Christian, you’re going to burn in Hell. But hey, enjoy the candy canes and creme eggs while you’re here!

But never fear, dear reader, I know your pain. I’ve lived in The South for a good proportion of my life, and I know the existential, gut-wrenching chaos and yearning for the abyss that it inspires. On the flip side, I know that there are good places in the world, filled with good people who have the ability to read, and don’t fry every ounce of food that goes into their drooling, gaping maws. And thus, I know there is goodness in the world, and how to combat the bad.

And, while I’d like nothing more than to write a guide about how to celebrate Ramadan, the Hajj, Diwali, the Vernal Equinox, or the Bacchnalia in your office, but short of sacrifices and traveling to the desert, I know nothing about any of them. What I do know, though, is Judaism. And thus, in honor of the rapidly-approaching onset of Pesach, I present you with a handy how-to guide on how to celebrate holidays in an office environment.

For your added enjoyment, please read this in the voice of Troy McClure:

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How To: Deal With Rejection

Well. I can’t think of any stories to start. I don’t want to even open the behemoth that is The Canterbury Tales: Part Deux. I’m still scared of opening the Glenn Beck book to get to reading it for my review. So, it looks like I’m going to churn something out for this here site. Again.

What’s been on my mind recently, no surprise, is the severe onset of depression/self-doubt that comes with a continuous stream of rejections. It’s rough, and, more depressingly, it’s part of the glorious package of writing (along with anti-social tendencies, reading in social settings when it’s not appropriate and, at least once in your life, alcohol poisoning). But, as I’ve just read in Ender’s Game, humanity has evolved to survive. And part of surviving is coping. And because I’m human, and thus have all of the traits that lead me to not want to off myself every time I see another form rejection e-mail, I have a growing number of coping mechanisms. Further, I’m going to share them with you.

It should be noted that these coping mechanisms might just work with anything else that constitutes mild failure, but I wouldn’t know. Like Charlie Sheen, I have Adonis DNA and tiger blood, and, in everything apart from writing, well, WINNING.

Which brings us to…
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How To: Make Friends

So on Sunday, when I may or may not have been very hung over (the jury’s still out on that), I met Barton and Rachel at Centennial Park. They brought Rachel’s dog, a GeneriDog puppy named Emmet, and I brought my dog, a furry cocktail weiny named Chloe. That’s her on the right, on one of her good days.

I was kind of concerned about this, since Chloe doesn’t usually make friends with other dogs. When she first traipsed into my family’s life, I brought her over to The Across the Street Starbucks. At this time, there was an older guy who was a regular there, and he had a big, friendly, white dog that looked kind of like a husky. He brought his dog over, the two dogs sniffed, and Chloe morphed from a happy, Dug sort of behavior to a snarling I-Will-Shank-You convict. Her face contorted into a demon’s, and the growl was terrifying.

The man and his dog retreated, I apologized, and Chloe calmed down and reverted to her attention-seeking normal self. Since then, I’ve figured out that she only likes dogs she can dominate. To wit, her “friends” are a miniature dachshund, a Jack Russel Terrier slightly smaller than herself, and a… dog named Hot Dog that seems to be oblivious to most things around it.

So I got the call Sunday afternoon when I was sitting around watching a discussion about U.S. – China relations (because I am a nerd of gargantuan proportions), and was a bit weary. But, I figured, I needed to get out of the house, and this was a good excuse to do so.

So Chloe and I left, went to the park, and met up with the three of them. Emmet, the GeneriDog, immediately submitted to the terror of Chloe–a dog who, if you don’t remember, looks like this:

Ten minutes later, Chloe was ignoring Emmet, and the latter was walking around chewing sticks and plastic bottle caps.

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