Cowboy Who?

Earlier today, I asked people to share their funniest office holiday stories. I love this one with all my heart and hereby present it to you:

When I was fresh out of college, a dude in my social circle invited me to his fancy work Christmas party. He was a teacher, so I’d kind of assumed I was there as friend to act as a buffer between well-intentioned female colleagues who wanted to set him up with one another, with their daughters, etc. I was wrong! This invitation to a work Christmas party was meant to be the first date of a magical relationship between two people destined to be together. Why a magical relationship? When I opened the door, he said he’d hope we’d have a magical night leading to a magical relationship. Then HE DID A MAGIC TRICK. I was… startled.

The party was at a country club, where he drove around and around looking for a space while I said “they have valet. it’s only valet” over and over. Inside there was a coat check. He didn’t want to leave his coat–because there were additional magic tricks secreted inside. We went in, got our drink tickets and our seating assignment. I sat down at a table that was mostly single women several years older than we were. He offered to get me a drink, and I asked for a glass of any kind of wine. He came back several minutes later with a mudslide because girls love mudslides, because they’re chocolate and girls love chocolate. I don’t. But he tried! That’s sweet! Right? Over dinner, I tried to make that sort of general polite conversation people make around banquet tables with strangers. He kept jostling my arm to get my attention to show me another magic trick.

At the beginning of the evening, I really thought we were casual friends, but I was single and kind of open to dating this guy if we got on well. Maybe that hokey line was a story we’d tell our grandchildren! But it was becoming increasingly clear that this guy was Not for Me. That didn’t mean I wanted to embarrass him in front of his principal, though. I finally said something like “would you mind terribly to save those for after dinner? I’m really interested in hearing more about Harriet’s begonias, aren’t you?”

He pushed his chair back and stalked across the ballroom to a piano. He plopped down and proceeded to pound out an assortment of sad pop hits. There was Muzak-y Christmas music, but he was gonna play the piano anyway. At this point, I was embarrassed to have come with this guy. My tablemates were embarrassed for me. One of them left and came back with the glass of wine I’d asked for initially. I drank it while the middle aged ladies at our table told me all about their various bad dates. More wine showed up. Then someone asked if I like martinis and brought a martini. Apparently none of them drank, and, as my date played “You’re So Vain” while staring mournfully at me, I drank my way through pretty much all their drink tickets. I am an effusively nice drunk person. I told each and everyone of these women that they were beautiful angels shaping tomorrow’s great minds to recognize the power of sisterhood and human kindness. Or something to that general effect. My memory is a bit fuzzy, for obvious, gin-based reasons.

My date wanted to leave, so I went to coat check. I tipped the coat check person, and he reached in the tip jar to fish out my money. I thought he was going to pay the tip. Nope. He told me coat check is free. I said I know. I put my tip back in the jar and sidestepped him when he tried to help with my jacket. His department chair and her husband appeared and said that my apartment was on their way and they’d be happy to drive me. I told them they were “hashtag relationship goals” and made an actual hashtag with my fingers.

I was driven home by way of Taco Bell by these very nice strangers. A week later, the guy called to say his work friends loved me and would I like to go out again. I would not.

A few years later, a friend was telling me about a legendary party her school hosted before she got a job there. A girl nobody knew got plastered and told everyone she loved and appreciated them while her boyfriend played the piano at her and drowned out the Christmas music. I did not reveal my identity. Maybe there’re two of us? I hope there’re two of us.

the best office holiday party date story of all time was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer who was in recovery from an eating disorder and whose office had a weekly event called “Fat Friday” where people were encouraged to bring in staggering amounts of food (with themes like “meat feast”)? Here’s the update.

I have to say that your advice was very helpful and it was also so reassuring to see people’s reaction to the idea of “Fat Friday.” I felt reassured that it wasn’t just me overreacting. Most of all, everyone was so supportive and thoughtful, thank you to all of you.

Following your response, I decided to talk to a senior member of my team, who was not my direct manager but did act as a sort of mentor figure to me. I confided that I found Fat Fridays difficult and distracting because I was in recovery from an eating disorder and she immediately agreed with me that the situation wasn’t ideal. She said she hated the constant smell of food lingering. We talked it through and she very kindly asked the Fat Friday organisers to make sure food was only put out in the kitchen, away from people’s desks – without mentioning my name. It helps that around the same time I started a new anti-depressant medication that really helps manage my anxiety and obsessive thoughts.

However, ultimately I did end up telling more people about my history with eating disorders after a colleague in a different department tried to sell me diet products! Think dodgy pyramid-scheme diet shakes that probably make you very ill. In the past, this kind of incident would have sent me into a real spiral and could have triggered a relapse, but I actually ended up laughing about it with my work friends and realising how far I’d come in my personal recovery. Sometimes it really is better to be open, rather than suffer in silence!

Thank you again for all your help and advice. It gave me the confidence to speak up.

update: my office does “Fat Friday” – and I have an eating disorder was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Honestly, I'm not sure this hasn't been done already.

What do you do when you break your computer?

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
What if we are the Vogons? I mean, how would we know?

Tonight's comic is about asking for advice.

The true secret of happiness is low expectations.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Wild orchids are nice but not all that impressive, so really it's a subtle insult.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The amount of 'well... sorta...' contained in 3 panels here is pretty extraordinary. I'm proud of it.

Designing Your Second Life
Tapley
2008

So who remembers having a Second Life? I do remember trying out Second Life and finding it kind of boring. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to “do” while in this virtual world. I also made jokes about trying to improve my first life before jumping into a second.

Evidently, Second Life is still around and still has a core following, but honestly until this book showed up on my list for possible weeding, I had forgotten all about it. This book was added to the collection in 2008 and the latest checkout is 2011. It will sit proudly on the weed shelf next to books on MySpace, Friendster, and a bunch disks from AOL.

Mary

The post Your Second Life appeared first on Awful Library Books.

European ministers in charge of the ESA space agency have approved Hera, a mission that will test whether deflection could save humanity from a rogue asteroid. During the $320 million mission, ESA and partner NASA will send a pair of spacecraft to a double-asteroid system called Didymos. NASA will first crash its DART probe into the smaller asteroid (Didymoon) at a speed of around 13,320 MPH, with the event recorded by an Italian cubesat called LICIACube. Hera will arrive later to map the impact crater and measure the asteroid's mass.

Hera will carry two CubeSats that can fly extremely close to the asteroid's surface before touching down. Those briefcase-sized spacecraft will act like drones, capturing vital data about the impact crater and giving scientists data including the mass of the asteroid that will help them deduce its composition. The aim, ESA said, is to "turn asteroid deflection into a well-understood planetary defense technique."

Since Didymoon orbits its larger companion, scientists should be able to measure DART's effect on its trajectory, even if it's very small. The smaller asteroid is the size of the Great Pyramid, so it could destroy an entire city if it impacted Earth. However, it's a pretty tricky mission, because both asteroids are still relatively small and no spacecraft has ever flown to such tiny space bodies before.

While an asteroid collision is a pretty unlikely event, it's actually preventable, unlike an earthquake or volcanic explosion. "We really need to follow carefully [around 2,000 near-Earth objects] so as not to join the collection of wonderful dinosaurs here in Berlin," Max Planck Institute researcher Holger Sierks told Space.com earlier this month.

Source: ESA

Installation view, Next Exit, at ex ovo. Photography by Finn Jubak. Courtesy the artists & ex ovo

Right now, when you enter ex ovo in Dallas, a small box mounted on the wall invites you to peek in. Look inside and you’ll find a looped video of a running waterfall on a billboard. It’s a strange sight if you’re not from North Texas. But anyone from Dallas knows that billboard, and they probably have a story to tell you about it.

Next Exit is an exhibition about Dallas: the city’s idiosyncrasies, the experience of living and driving here, its landmarks and what they communicate. The result of months of in-depth conversations about the city between the artists and ex ovo director Allison Klion, the show engages with history, the present reality, and visions for the future.

Installation view of ‘Next Exit’ at ex ovo

Jonathan Molina-Garcia reimagines an iconic Dallas building, recognized for an LED exterior that functions as the biggest advertisement on the skyline. The Omni Hack (Prototype I) is a scale replica of the Omni Dallas Hotel with functional LED lighting. But this structure doesn’t flash the Mary Kay logo. “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “JORDAN EDWARDS,” “BOTHAM JEAN,” and “HABLA ESPAÑOL” appear instead. The work is fantastic, and it originated in fantasies Molina-Garcia had of hacking the programmable exterior lighting of the Omni Hotel, which has been messaging slogans and logos since it opened in 2011. In a way, it speaks for the city, but it also provides an invitation to fantasize of an alternative Dallas that recognizes victims of police shootings instead of corporate interests, and allows its residents to speak for themselves.

Two sculptures by Trey Burns point to the aspirations of Dallas’ builders to forge a great city through perpetual construction and demolition (without much preservation). La Reunion Sign is a marker for the failed mid-19th century European socialist colony. A laser etching on handmade paper shows the cemetery for the early Dallasites, and the fragility of the material emphasizes the decay of the actual historical site. Another sculpture is a construction barrier with a crayon rubbing based on his landlord’s model for West Dallas, where ex ovo and Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (the latter founded and run by Burns and Tamara Johnson) are located. Both sculptures are découpaged with photographs of quirky sightings around the city, taken mostly on iPhones by Burns and Klion.

Installation view, Next Exit, ex ovo. Photography by Finn Jubak. Courtesy the artists & ex ovo

Speaking of construction: this exhibition has ramps! They were built in the gallery space as nods to the highways that unite, or divide, the Metroplex. Videos by Burns stream in a tunnel under one ramp. During the first month of the show’s run, Burns showed a slow, poetically narrated sci-fi film. He’s switched it out for a video of a candid home tour through the Park Cities neighborhoods (which is more entertaining). 

Installation view, Next Exit, ex ovo. Photography by Trey Burns. Courtesy the artists & ex ovo

Around the corner from the main space, an installation by Harris Chowdhary creates a familiar space. Commercial furniture, plastic plants, and a Keurig make a showroom for Simple Pool, Chowdhary’s line of gaudy products that are barely parody. A catalog illustrated with renderings features furnishings for the McMansions of the North Texas suburbs, ranging from an armchair “meant for your life” to the “perfect starter column for any home, office, or backyard.” Printed and framed renderings of entire rooms allow viewers to imagine their assembled dream home, and the installation is complemented by another video box by Burns, whose content I won’t spoil here.  

Finn Jubak, Untitled, 2018. Courtesy the artist & ex ovo

A beautiful group of photographs by Finn Jubak captures interesting juxtapositions in the cityscape, but you wouldn’t recognize these views from any highway. Jubak takes these photos during walks around this pedestrian-hostile city, and in the photos, architecture and the surrounding environments share space and reveal uncomfortable relationships. One arch of the $115 million, unwalkable Margaret McDermott Bridge bends between lightly littered grass and the blue Texas sky. A stream of bricks that used to be the Ambassador Hotel, destroyed in a fire earlier this year, cascades while Bank of America Plaza lurks in the distance.

Those same bricks reappear stacked in two small Polaroids by Jubak. He’s titled them Landmark Study, 5 and 8. They’re an intimate lamentation of the neglected and now lost 115-year-old building. And they are a poignant prediction of a commemorative landmark for the Ambassador that the city could offer in the future, since nobody bothered to preserve the hotel while it stood.

Not that the artists are advocating for erecting more monuments. They’ve deconstructing existing structures with a perceptive, humorous, and appropriately critical touch. Next Exit is an intelligent show that will likely linger in your mind when you drive away down Fabrication Street, pass the hideous new developments on the way to both I-35E and I-30, and face the skyline.

Through Dec. 14, 2019 at ex ovo, Dallas

The post Landmarks and What They Communicate: ‘Next Exit’ at ex ovo appeared first on Glasstire.

But O-Zone is from Moldova. Oh well. Happy National Day, Romania!

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
This is not the least bit definitely about my wife.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Laugh all you want, but that moth is gonna have total choice of mates.

When you need help befriending someone who hates you, only one man can help.