I'm not a devotee of The Simpsons, so it's probably not the finest moment in the show's history, but a 12-second clip of my favorite of the ones I know is above. It's a work meeting. The big bosses have been outlining their stupid proposal. A guy interrupts to say, mildly and without rancor, "Excuse me, but aren't 'paradigm' and 'proactive' just buzz words that dumb people use to sound important?" No one says anything for a second. Then he says, "I'm fired, aren't I?"
I had around 30,000 chances to be such a hero and turned them all down. A wasted career. I remember now that one of my many bosses was fond of forming adjectives by adding -ful to the most ordinary nouns. For example, instead of achieving proactivity with plans, she urged us to be planful. An idea too banal even to mention—we should have a plan!—was thus transfigured into something like a Zen state of being.
Back when they went to school, my kids had lessons in "mindfulness" administered by, I believe, the staff mindfulness specialist. Maybe this is so that they don't feel the need to smoke pot? I asked the older one about it, because I figured the younger one would not have been sufficiently in the moment to remember anything about her mindfulness training, but she (the older one) just shrugged her shoulders. Not that that is an unusual response to my questions about school. I think educators understand what's "extra" because distance learning appears to be mainly math, science, reading, and social studies. Though a new term is about to start and one of my kids is registered for "choir." I'm a little curious about how that works over the internet, but most likely the teacher has been planful about the paradigm shift.
Maybe she—I know it's a she—should work in the Trump administration as it seems there was never a "testing plan" and, now that a vaccine is available, it seems there isn't a plan to get it injected into arms, either. I'm not the kind of smart ass who is against having a plan.
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