the taoists tell a story:

there was a powerful king plagued by a thief.
he could not buy a fine thing and place it in his castle, without it being stolen the next evening.
he hired the best guards he could, but the thievery always continued despite his best efforts.

one night the king awoke to find the thief in his chambers, and captured the man himself.
his counsellors wanted the king to have the thief executed,
but the king retained him as his head of spies, and gave the man a rich salary that eliminated the need for any future thieving.

When a powerful enemy came and lay siege to the king's capitol, the king called in his chief of spies, and asked for advice. The thief told him not to worry, and handed him an ornate wooden box.

in the morning the king called a truce, and arranged a meeting with the enemy general.
the king gave the general the fine wooden box, and left the general alone.

when the general opened the box, he found his own pillow, (which had gone missing while he slept,) and a note that read:

"tomorrow morning, the box will contain your head."

the army withdrew that very day.

more on my workload

i am no longer neglecting my interviews, i did two today, and i'll do one more on Tuesday, the pro affirmative action interview was uplifiting, my subject had been so set upon with obstacles, and she overcame them all to become a well respected and recognized authority in her field.

the anti-affirmative action interview with a person who had lost their position was uplifting in a weird way, filled with testosterone and anger and strangely overpowering. All in all, much more negative in tone though. My subject said that since they were no longer in a university setting, they felt liberated to speak their own mind, and did not feel the pressure to be "nice" anymore. interesting. kind of like that old saying :

Only your enemies feel free enough to tell you the truth.

I am working on my "challenge the diptych" book. It's just layers of pages with designs carved in them with an x-acto (again with the knives.) they are different colors, and my "picture" is made by layering the pages and looking back and forward at the combination of shapes and colors made by the overlay. looking at the pages as a diptych only gives you a little of the picture. i hope that's challenge enough for my prof.

mystery and i finsihed cutting the ouzzle blocks out, and i melted down the crayons and painted the pages. The effect is nice, the little newsprint book takes on a weight and smell with all the wax, becoming more of an object that demands space, instead of a book that lays sterile, taking up space. But the crayons were far too pigmented, and the colors completely cover the words, with only a ghost of a poem every now and then. I like it, but for legibility, i'll have to sand off some of the encaustic. Next time, i'll "cut" the crayons with Parafin or Beeswax, to introduce some more "transparency" by adding more "Medium."

I got wax all over the inside of our pasta pot.

a catalogue

today all the normal phone reps at amazon's settle cs center were laid off.
when we were hired, we were encouraged to make our area unique, to bring in little bits of "personality," flair if you will. (It was all part of that glorious new e-econmomy thing, the new young professional that thinks of work as "play" and that tosses around a nerf football in-between cheerfully answering customer inquiries.) it was a party atmosphere in 1997.
now it is different, and as i walk through the empty rows of amazon's patented "door-desks" (desks made from door blanks, a symbol, supposedly, about how amazon.com doesn't spend money on worthless things, like office equipment.) I see the detrius left behind:

• a black and white dog puppet wearing a red "kodak" t-shirt
  
• a yellow happy face antenna ball
  
• a squishy green "stress" tube squeezie
  
• a box of toasted oatmeal squares
  
• a "powerpuff girls" party hat with a broken elastic string
  
• a "jar-jar-binks" coin bank
  
• a snow globe with a tiny santa doing a handstand
  
• a purple space ship shaped flashlight called an "illuminator X-11"
  
• a complete and actual gingerbread house
  
• a half a bag of lollipops
  
• too many pennies to count
  
• a 10" mighty morphin power ranger action figure. (the "red" ranger, of course.)
  
• lots of empty asprin bottles
  

Ill be here in this hollow doll of a service center until July, acting as a resident source of "corporate wisdom" to help the still learning reps in West Virginia and India learn how to replace me.