OK, I really am acquiring books faster than I can read them, and I should stop, but I know I probably won’t. Today: Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth (on Philip McFee’s recommendation, and after the first five, I was not disappointed… I didn’t want to put it down to work on my independent study student’s sonnet assignment), which is billed as fiction but has to be poetry, and Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions.

I had an extraordinarily bad day, as the day job is feeling less like a job and more like a series of temporary crises. I know this will even out when a) student registration ends, and b) I get back to being fully staffed. I hate the abuse that my co-workers are taking until such time as a) and b) are met. I have some more work to do tonight, but I believe I’ll be blowing it off in favor of Letters to Wendy’s. Take that, responsibility!

The most difficult part of management is not giving credit where credit is due; that is easy. The most difficult part is falling on your sword. When an employee fails spectacularly, you simply must do this. March into a supervisor’s office, or that of a client, and fall on your sword. Care must be taken with the sword, however; it must be unsheathed and placed in some manner of integument which will hold it at roughly a forty-five degree angle. This integument must be bolted to the floor, and if the client is unaccustomed to seeing such displays of atonement or blame, you may have to do the bolting yourself. Should the sword be placed at a poor angle, or the holding device unstable, the cut will not be clean when you fall upon the sword. If the cut is not clean, how will you heal quickly enough to smile at the failed employee through gritted teeth? How will you have the presence of mind, when you prop yourself up slowly off the sword, to ask the client, “Would you like me to remove these bolts, and this jeweled sword-holder”? Will you be thinking of the ragged and long wound, or will you be listening when he says to you, “No, I think you can leave it…”?