Optimisticality

Recently, I gave a friend some advice. She is generally a very positive person and usually keeps a small group of us feeling the glass is half full. I think I just endured a fairly terrifying experience and I'm happy to report I stand behind my advice; In fact I took it.

The world of DoD contract work can be ... less secure[pun intended] than regular commercial work. In fact the process of acquiring a security clearance can be very time consuming. My company dropped the ball on my clearance and a few days ago I was placed in a status of no jurisdiction. Basically that means I could no longer work around classified material. Since that's pretty much all I do that meant I couldn't work. So I go through the humiliation of being escorted from the building and having local middle management throw around terms like leave without pay.

Proudly, rather than go on the offence I chose to simply be a part of the solution. I provided documentation showing I had been inquiring for months as to my clearance status. As it turns out, I was a casualty of our company security officer's negligence. So, conference calls were arranged and my clearance process should begin again in a day or so. In the mean time my interim status will be reinstated and I can begin working again. Throughout the ordeal I remained positive and kept the glass half full.

Considering I kept that outlook in the face of what seemed like I was loosing the job all together, I'm pretty proud of that.

It was kinda fun traveling the road less traveled, thanks Hope ;P

Book recommendation (poetry)

Everything Preserved
by Landis Everson edited by Ben Mazer

Amazon Link

From Publishers Weekly

Everson, who makes his book-length debut in his 70's as winner of the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson first book award, swapped poems with a young Jack Spicer and John Ashbery, then stopped writing for 43 years until a recent creative outburst. This volume-divided into two sections, one for nine poems written between 1955 and 1960, and the other comprising the remaining 66, written since 2003-quickly establishes the charms of the playful early work, as in a poem that describes "at least twenty deer" driven by famine to graze on the speaker's pillow and other "poor, unfamiliar pastures." There is a plainspoken, aphoristic strangeness at the heart of many of these early poems-set to subtle music. "The perfect form of woman is a ghost," Everson writes in his last and most ambitious early piece, "The Little Ghost I Played With." The recent work is much more uneven-though much of it has been published in major literary magazines-and there are still plenty of pleasures to be found. Everson evokes the ordinary with a continually surprising touch: percussive language evokes longing for a deceased lover ("I'll take your long legs and / the afterthought of thunderstorms / or sex all day rolled up"); a lemon tree in Eden "hides the smell / of new babies"; and a space probe begets thoughts on onions and innocence. "I am / written on thoroughly, a lost novel / found again," Everson writes, as if starting an autobiography, then turns unexpectedly: "I remember the predictable plot too late, / realize the silly sad urgency of moss."

Folks this read is only for serious poetry lovers, there are many advanced elements in this one.