All vows

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins Sunday at sundown. It’s the day when Jews prepare for the New Year by fasting, considering their actions over the past months and making efforts to acknowledge and amend the wrongs they’ve committed. Kind of like steps four through nine of the AA 12-step process.

The deal is that God opens the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah and inscribes your name in it, but doesn’t close-and-seal it until the end of Yom Kippur. You have those ten Days of Awe to get your ducks in a row.

I really like this concept: devoting serious time to reflect, measure, acknowledge transgressions and resolving to do better. We all need to be reminded of this, to go through the cycle at regular intervals and to take steps to maybe not keep doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results.

In honor of this holiday, today’s earworm is Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidre”, arranged for cello and orchestra. Kol Nidre is from the Ashkenazi tradition of Judaism; it’s sung in the synagogue just before sundown on Yom Kippur. It’s a mixture of Aramaic and Hebrew, declaring null any oaths or commitments made to God from one Yom Kippur to the next, and asking for pardon for shortcomings in fulfilling those vows. The idea, as I understand it, is to mitigate the sin of failing to fulfill a vow that might have been made rashly. (It also annulled any vows associated with forced conversion to Christianity, which was a thing for a long time.)

Cellist Mischa Maisky performs with and conducts the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra in this recording.

May your name be sealed in the Book of Life.

 

 

Gripping question

I’ve only bought makeup (aside from mascara) twice in my life (last time being 10 years ago), so I really need to know:

Is foundation being like putty a thing? A good thing?

 

Going nuts

Okay, I was a little nonplussed yesterday when I was buying walnut pieces at Trader Joe’s. Because every bag on the shelf looked like this:

Doesn’t buying a bag of something that’s only half full make you a little…suspicious?

I weighed it when I got home, and it was a skosh over one pound, so okay. (But when I switched to metric, it was 468g, not the 454 stated on the bag; that seems odd.)

But still. Optics.

 

 

Plus ça change…

I interviewed for a position with a cybersec startup last week—the recruiter had reached out to me and it looked like it could be interesting.

However, the VP of Product Management (who, 10 years ago owned and managed a tree removal service and whose LinkedIn profile still enumerates very minor tasks he performed for unrelated work early in his career) was clearly looking for someone more technical than I, so I knew that would be the end of it.

His shop, his call; fair enough.

However, I had found a typo in the data sheet the recruiter had sent me as prep for the VP call (she said it was a white paper, but I do know the difference between the two), so when I sent her my thank-you (since they’d masked the VP’s email address), I said—very nicely—that I’d found a typo and someone in their marketing department would probably want to correct that.

(The company has fewer than 150 employees; I reckoned that the marketing “department” might be the CMO plus one general dogsbody. Interestingly, when I looked up the CMO on LinkedIn, I discovered she has a BA; in “English—Technical Writing”. Well, we all make mistakes.)

I didn’t point out that this particular typo should have been caught by spellcheck in the first draft. I seriously do not know how it made it past what should have been multiple sets of eyeballs on the screen.

Two days later I received the thanks-but-no-thanks email from the recruiter’s email address. It was possibly a systems-generated (or maybe they’re using AI) effort; no mention of my editorial assist and the signature was just the company name.

Bless their hearts.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: clouds

I’ll confess that I’m having trouble rounding up gratitude today. Developers are about to get the full go-ahead from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to slap 82 three- and 4-story townhouses on five acres of the corporate campus behind me. Last week I looked at the Planning Commission staff report and saw the renderings of what they expect these things to look like and the only word that came to mind was “abomination”.

I cannot tell you how sick I feel. This campus is the only green space left along a 12-mile stretch of the People’s Republic, and the county is just going to let these slimeballs pave it over.

I don’t want to live.

So today I’m pulling gratitude for the clouds I saw yesterday morning on my walk, because they were gorgeous. (Also, that first one looks like Jabba the Hutt.)