Working in a Creative Environment and so Much More

I’m going to try desperately hard to keep this one short, because there is just too much to do and too few hours to do it — says the man with no family. But I’m trying to keep up with the blogs still, so here goes another rocket-powered list of the many things that have gone through my mind since the last time I made a post.

#1: Working 40 Hours a Week is Tough and Great

It’s been almost a year since I had a 40-hour-a-week position, and I’d forgotten how it forces you to schedule everything else you do. It’s a whole new life to have to race from one thing to another every day, and it’s too tempting to stop entirely when I do have an evening to myself. In fact, even though I’m home right now, I have to rocket through this blog so I can do web work before bed.

#2: Working with Those “Creative Types” is Hilarious

At the new job, I’ve spent the last week as the sole inhabitant of what has been kindly deemed “Meerkat Alley,” a square realm of inward-facing cubicles that stands in the middle of the office, has one entrance/exit, and is segregated from the rest of the team by six-foot walls that you can only barely see over when you stand on your tip-toes and stretch your neck like a meerkat scouring the horizon for airborne threats.

Today, though, two of my freelancing coworkers joined me in Meerkat Alley: a copywriter/editor and a graphic designer. It’s the greatest thing to happen to me at work since getting the position, mostly because the two of them are hysterical. And whether that’s because they’re “creative types,” because it’s simply who they are — and I got really lucky — or because they’re Christians who are therefore utterly free to laugh, it’s simply a fact that their offbeat conversations made my day today. Here’s what I learned from them:

• When you take a test and, instead of getting a letter grade, receive a grade of “the color blue,” that’s postmodern schooling — and it’s neither better nor worse than receiving “the color green;” it’s just different.
• Styrofoam is actually a brand name, like Kleenex. So what we should really be calling those hippie-maddening, earth-killing marvels of disposable coffee culture is extruded polystyrene foam cups.



• “Cows don’t milk themselves” means we should get back to work — though Joe did concede that when you add calves into the mix, cows do, in effect, milk each other.
• Shirts with wolves on them can enhance your love life.
• A surefire way to protect the lifespan of your marriage is to travel the world remarrying in every country you visit. By the time you reach ten or twelve marriage licenses in ten or twelve different nations, you’d have to be married to a drug-dealing, puppy-strangling axe-murderer to even consider the living nightmare that pursuing twelve different divorce cases would be. Besides, think of all the presents you’d get.

#3: Recorded Sermons and Lectures Are the Best

Over the last week, I’ve been listening to the Beatitude series from Mosaic Church in LA and have really benefited from the honest, gentle, and colorful way that Erwin McManus preaches. Last night my community group watched a lecture by a British guy from Sheffield, Steve Timmis, who explained the gospel foundation of church community and how everything stems out of Jesus. And I found today that the walk from my house to work is almost the perfect length of time to listen to a sermon, get in-depth analysis of a passage of scripture, and put that time of calm to use in God’s hands.

Today’s message: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
The takeaway: it takes God’s activity — through the death, resurrection, and kingship of Jesus the Messiah — to change our hearts so that we even have a hope of seeing Him, both in this life and the next. God, help us.

#4: Geckos Are Not the Sharpest Tools in the Shed

His colors might be pretty bright, but his noggin really isn’t. Lenny, my leopard gecko get’s way too excited when I feed him, which would be fine if his aim were better. As it is, he stares a worm for a minute, cocks his head up over his prey, and slams his nose down at the target. Too bad he misses three or four times before hitting it, each time smashing his little nose into whatever glass floor, wood, or stone slab might be underneath his intended victim.

The worst parts are twofold. One, I’m pretty sure that each time he does this, it costs him a few more of his meager host of braincells. And two, according to some personality/name test a friend did for me, the leopard gecko is my “power animal.” It explains a lot about my life, but it’s not very encouraging.

#5: Easy Web Design is Hard

I’m still trying to build Dan’s business site, even though I find more and more every day that I have no clue what I’m doing. After being told that I could bypass the whole problem of designing a site from the ground up by using WordPress as a CMS, I thought my problems were solved. But it seems that that’s a whole new problem of its own.

Still, I told Dan I was doing this for him, and so I will. In fact, before I call it night, spend time in the word, and go to bed, I’m going to work on making that site happen. And so, with that, I’ll say Adieu and head off into the land of website-building, mind-twisting confusion.