pantoum's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE TRUE MEANING OF OKRA

This poem is from today's Writer's Almanac. I love the line about okra (and that's coming from someone who has convinced more than one person who claims to HATE okra that s/he actually likes it and just needed to try it prepared South Carolina style, which is NOT slimy).

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
By Lynn Powell

The radio's replaying last night's winners
and the gratitude of the glamorous,
everyone thanking everybody for making everything
so possible, until I want to shush
the faucet, dry my hands, join in right here
at the cluttered podium of the sink, and thank

my mother for teaching me the true meaning of okra,
my children for putting back the growl in hunger,
my husband, primo uomo of dinner, for not
begrudging me this starring role—

without all of them, I know this soup
would not be here tonight.

And let me just add that I could not
have made it without the marrow bone, that blood—
brother to the broth, and the tomatoes
who opened up their hearts, and the self-effacing limas,
the blonde sorority of corn, the cayenne
and oregano who dashed in
in the nick of time.

Special thanks, as always, to the salt—
you know who you are—and to the knife,
who revealed the ripe beneath the rind,
the clean truth underneath the dirty peel.

—I hope I've not forgotten anyone—
oh, yes, to the celery and the parsnip,
those bit players only there to swell the scene,
let me just say: sometimes I know exactly how you feel.

But not tonight, not when it's all
coming to something and the heat is on and
I'm basking in another round
of blue applause.

•

I left my house thirty minutes early this morning so I could deposit a check and stop for a latte. The credit union is less than a mile away from my house and the coffee shop typically adds ten minutes or less to my commute, but I was still eighteen minutes late arriving this morning! Got behind the wrong car at the drive-through and watched the confused woman send forms back and forth to the clerk four different times. I had SUCH an urge to scream"Jebus Fucking H. Christ. Go the fuck inside!," but the nice me stifled this urge and tried to notice the lovely hazy sky instead, reminded myself that it really doesn't matter in the overall scheme of things if I sit in the line for five minutes longer than expected.

Sometimes I am at war with myself, but at least the part of me that sees beauty wins the skirmish a little more often these days, especially since I incorporated the three-breath technique into my life.

I'll explain this Tibetan principle. See, the stressors of the world, the mundanities—or, in my case, the frantic deadlines—can take over our lives, but, lucky us, these moments are interrupted by grace—by moments when we see beauty or feel peace or feel love or laugh from our gut or absorb transcendence or see something so wonderful that it stops us in our tracks. The grace breaks through the mundane and reminds us of the beauty of our lives.

Whenever that happens, I try to absorb the wonder for three full breaths before I let anything steal it away from me.

Anyway, today is going to be stressful, so I'm staring at my river rocks and trying to get centered before I deal with a couple of crises.

First, I need to be a hard-ass boss to an editor who has had a twenty-page bulletin for almost three weeks and is still not done editing it.

No excuse. None. Even a substantive edit does not require a day per page.

I was under the impression that she sent these edits to the author last week, but now she says she told me that she was going to and really believed that she was going to when she said it, but then she got busy on other tasks and didn't follow up.

I want to know what those tasks were and why she made a decision to focus on them instead of meeting the deadline that she reported to me. And I want to make her squirm as I await her answer so she remembers her discomfort.

Really, it is time I give a, um, pep talk to everyone in our next production meeting, something along these lines:

I don't want to be the kind of boss who micromanages each of you and can't imagine that you want me to be that kind of boss. But, when I get productivity figures like the ones I received this week and see jobs that were scheduled to be with authors by now just still sitting on your desks as you read a Yahoo! news story or read a personal email, then what choice do I have?

I know what good work we are capable of doing. I know we have high standards and that we usually meet them. But the work is not getting done as well as it can and should be done and this is unacceptable.

Our clients expect timely publications. Our authors expect timely publications. The dean expects them. And I expect them.

I expect everyone in this room to meet or exceed our production standards, to manage your time in a manner that allows you to deliver your jobs on schedule. To focus on these jobs and to monitor the time you spent on email and the Web and other nonbillable tasks. And I expect honesty.

If I ask you about a job, then I need to know that you are leveling with me. If you fail to mention that you are having difficulty with a manuscript or that the footnotes are a mess or that the syntax is worse than you thought it would be or the figures all need to be resized or WHATEVER—if you do not come to me to assess some issue that might slow you down so that we have some chance of reassessing priorities so that we can meet our deadlines—then that job should be delivered to the author on time, as scheduled. Without excuses. This is your responsibility.

Blah, blah, blah.

•

Meanwhile, Monday marks one year since I found the Ginger with creepy Dickboy.

SELECTED SPAM: savant corrugate

10:50 a.m. - 2005-07-22

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next