it is what it is

feeling a bit reflective a few days back, i decided to walk home one evening in lieu of a $10 cab ride. i strolled up the street, earbuds in, aurally isolated from the world. but i did notice a display for grape nuts.

and it was complex. nuanced. or maybe just dumb.

on the poster, it had two phrases. oatmeal stout. pale ale. both of them with strikethroughs. then some whitespace and the words grape nuts. followed by "it is what it is".

which i find odd. because. i don't what grape nuts "is". they're not grapes. they're not nuts. and they're certainly not nuts that come from grapes. in fact, as a child, after seeing one of their tv commercials, what exactly grape nuts were and how in the hell they got the name grape nuts.

further, being plural, shouldn't it be "they are what they are". now i'm pretty sure what they mean is grape nuts are healthy -- no sugar, food coloring, etc. added. and i'm pretty sure the people who were working on the campaign knew exactly what they were, but for the rest of us we're pretty much in the dark on this.

here's an idea instead of giving us the existential explanation of what grape nuts are, why not just tell us straight away. i guarantee if they had done that, i'd have had several conversations the next day that started with, "hey, you know grape nuts actually are..."

Decree II: Regarding Work on Your Birthday

Decree II: All employers will be mandated by law to provide a paid holiday to be taken on the day of an employee's birthday.

Americans work too hard. Or at least they show up to the office too much. I remember my first job out of college had a month vacation -- plus five sick days. I had never heard of such a thing. Two weeks, normal. Three weeks, extravagant. But a month, unthinkable. At least for those in the 50 states (Puerto Rico? I don't know the norms there).

I later found out that our generous vacation policy was not generous at all. The company I worked for -- Barclays Global Investors -- was a subsidiary of Barclays Bank, an English-based company. And while four weeks sounds good there, it doesn't ring quite as true across the pond, where 6 weeks, and even 8 weeks, won't raise an eyebrow.

All of this amounts to me saying, companies can afford to give their employees one more day off a year. Let's be frank. Past the age of 21, and especially past the age of 30, birthdays really aren't that great. We celebrate not because of the thrill of getting older but to remind us we can still have fun, despite knees getting a little creakier, backs locking up more often, and everything slouching just a fraction closer to the floor. Have a heart, corporate America..

Decree I

hoping to spur my writing frequency, i've decided to start a new standing feature for my blog. i call it "If I Were World Czar".

the title explains it all. there are certain things that would cease to exist -- punishable by death by strangulation.

first order or business: websites are expressly forbidden from auto-playing music.

let's be honest, there are few things worse than visiting a site only to be bombarded by unexpected cacophony. speaking nothing of those times, when you are enjoying a nice track from a favored artist only to have it overlayed with some crap a web designer thought was cool two years ago when he put the site together.