Desk
I have had my desk at work for more than 2 years now. It’s nice to have a desk. It’s a wonderful place to set my computer (with its two monitors — yes, that’s how cool I am) and my other stuff.
When I worked for the daily Strib, I was kind of a floater, and I had no desk of my own. When I worked in Albert Lea, I had a desk in an office and a different desk where I did most of the actual work. Neither felt like a real desk. In Fergus Falls, I had a very small desk and I moved to a new desk once during the year-and-a-half I was there, so it was hard to get much "desk momentum" going.
Now, for the first time, I really feel like I have made myself truly at home at a desk. I was looking around my desk just now and realizing this. Partly this is because I got some bamboo and a little vase at Ikea and placed it on my desk. It’s the first time I have had a desk plant and I kind of like it. It really completes this desk thing I have going here.
Here are some of the other things I have on my desk or pinned to the slightly fuzzy walls around it:
- Two pictures of Jimmy. One is his first-grade class picture and the other is of him with a big grin on his face while he sat in a bumper car at Valleyfair a couple summers ago. It’s my favorite picture of him.
- A headline clipped from the paper that says "Whatever was Dylan thinking?" I love it. (The headline was about Bob Dylan, but it’s fun to take it totally out of context.)
- Three B. Kliban cartoons. B. Kliban, in case you didn’t know, was the greatest cartoonist ever. The three I have are one that shows a cow (fully clothed, of course) standing in a snowy landscape trying to sell copies of a newspaper called "Cow News" to the assorted penguins, polar bears and walruses that are walking around. Another has a woman scolding her husband, who is drawn all wiggly and curvy. She is saying "I want you to stop this wiggly business … it’s bad for the children!" And the third has a sober-looking man wearing a business suit and a pair of SCUBA flippers trying to take a pie away from a bearded, scruffy-looking man; the caption is "Your government in action." I love B. Kliban.
- Two clippings from "The Onion": One that says "Every time area man drops by, friend is watching The Big Lebowski" and one that says "Yeti releases abdominable crunch workout video."
- Two drawings by Jimmy: One self-portrait of him saying "Booya!" and one of a chicken playing chess with a cat. Both are pretty old.
- My sign that says "The occupant of this desk has gone __ days without getting punched in the back of the head." (Each day I hang up a scrap of paper with the updated number; today it’s 35.)
- A calendar Jimmy made for me at school.
- A wrapper I found for a vending machine product called the "Big Az Burger." I find that hilarious.
- And, items that are here for temporary stays: A toothbrush and toothpaste, a copy of the book "The Wal-Mart Effect," and a large spoon.
And thus ends the most pointless blog entry in the illustrious history of "A Place Called B.L.O.G." And that, friends, is truly saying something.
