Cartoon by Dave Walker.
It's far too easy to insult me:- Wait for a day on which I've gotten to bed at 05:30 AM after a week of intensive seminars, a conference, a day of playing firewoman for neglected clients, and a few hours of sorting out my own paperwork at home.
- Pound on my door at 7:00 AM.
- Give me a letter in which you butcher your own country's law about fifteen ways to heaven's kitchen's loading dock.
- Ensure that said letter contradicts itself solidly enough to make my head spin.
- For extra pleasure, the only phrases that make sense are mere repetitions of issues regulated elsewhere, never in dispute.
- Waking me by pounding on my door not only hurts me physically, but ensures that I'll second-guess my initial assessment of your opus until I've recovered, granting you a day or so of me being willing to believe that something you wrote might have some influence on some aspect of something relevant.
- That's apparently a feeling you don't get very often, so I'm pleased to suffer for you to gain a foretaste of whatever you're so desperately needing and haven't thought of finding elsewhere.
- Have slacker Hausmeister stand there as your witness. Your fears and fantasies about how I'm out to get you make him feel strong and manly, a feeling he relishes.
(Question though, about having a "witness": Why would I deny that you personally gave me asinine blarney in writing?)
- Yell that I have to tell you before the cleaning lady I've hired comes. (To deep-clean stuff you've, well, never cleaned.)
- And that I have to stay with said the entire time.
Thank you for giving me the chance to learn and practice tonglen. I apparently need further practice, given this lapse into less-than-loving sarcasm.
P.S. The cleaning lady came today.
