A few random odds and ends...

Happy Friday, everyone! It’s been another exciting, fun-filled week of mountain climbing and spelunking and scuba diving and sky diving and bungee jumping and pogo stick racing… um, okay, I’ve actually never done any of those things… and honestly, I don’t think I WANT to do any of them. (Well, maybe the pogo stick racing… I mean, I totally made that up, but I’m betting that SOMEone, SOMEwhere, has challenged a friend to a pogo stick race once or twice…)

So in reality, it was a rather non-eventful week. Although Rick did have a job interview this morning, which lately is kind of a big deal around here. It’s something he feels pretty hopeful about, so we’ll see what happens with that…

What’s funny is that if you go to Yahoo.com today (go ahead, I’ll wait…) there’s a story about “America’s best cities for jobs.” And the little picture over to the left is the 360 bridge here in Austin. Austin is number 8 on the list – apparently we’ve ADDED 3,300 jobs in the last year, while most other cities in the country have lost jobs. But that doesn’t make much sense to me, since I know of at least ONE company, in particular, that probably single-handedly laid off a few thousand people. (I suppose said company should remain nameless for the time being…) So does that mean Austin actually added somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 jobs?? Because if 3,000 people were laid off, but we added 3,000 jobs, then that just means we broke even…

Interestingly, the best city in the country for jobs right now is Huntsville, Alabama – the city where Rick was born. (The city where I was born – Buffalo, New York – is nowhere to be seen… hmmm… :))

So yesterday I was trying to think of something to write for my Facebook “status update.” In case anyone doesn’t use Facebook (Faisal, I’m looking your way – get with the times already… everybody’s doing it… are you susceptible to peer pressure?? :)), a status update is just a little blurb you can write at the top of your page so people know what you’re doing or how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking at any given time – and you can write them in the third person, which is just loads of fun. (And I’m being totally serious here – I love talking about myself in the third person… Lisa thinks it’s fun… Lisa likes to talk about herself as if she’s a spectator observing from a balcony…) And sometimes you update your status with whatever you are literally doing at that moment (Lisa is doing the laundry… Lisa is cooking dinner… Lisa is heading out to see a movie…). But other times you simply make random observations about your life (Lisa is quite wary of the germ-laden tables at fast food restaurants… Lisa would like to eat infinite amounts of chocolate and never gain a pound… Lisa is terrified of strawberry seeds…).

You see how it works, right? So as I was saying, I was trying to think of something to write yesterday, and my mind was totally blank. I had no idea what to write in my “status update” box. So that’s what I wrote – “Lisa wants to update her status, but can’t think of anything interesting to say.” My Aunt Carol commented that it was interesting that I had nothing to say – which, actually, IS rather interesting, considering that I was just now able to come up with half a dozen decent status updates in the last couple paragraphs. I may have to update my Facebook page again and use one of them…

But that comment made me think about how even though I’m one of the LEAST talkative people I know (yes, Lisa knows Lisa quite well), I’m also one of the MOST talkative people I know. It’s this funny sort of paradox – I don’t talk much when I talk, but I definitely talk a lot when I write. I don’t SAY much, but I have a lot to say. I may get tongue-tied now and then, but I never seem to get… uh… finger-tied?? And it all goes back to my assertion that writing is just as valid a form of communication as talking – although some people seem to have a different opinion about that…

Now if you’ll excuse her, Lisa is off to update her Facebook status…