Tuesday, December 10, 2002


Evolution of Cathy's understanding of the main chorus in Tori Amos's song, "A Sorta Fairy Tale"


  1. It's so definitive

  2. It's a sordid fairy tale

  3. It's a sorta fantasy

  4. It's a sorta fairy tale


FYI: I can't even figure out the rest of the song. I'll have to pull the lyrics off the internet to see what she is saying for the whole song. But the crazy thing is, I do like the song. When I sing along I tend to put in nonsense words but I like the tune and the emotion in the song. Sometimes I like going back to what I first heard ... it's so definitive. If you ever catch me asking you over and over again what you are saying its because I have something like this going on. I'm hearing one thing and can't get torn away from it enough to understand what you are really saying.


I almost finished cleaning the living room on Sunday. I got the forest of paper off of the dining room table and took all the sweatshirts and coats I had thrown willy nilly all over the living room furniture up to my room and hung them up. Now the living room is neat if not clean. Dusting and vacuuming is still left to be done.


I released three books into the wilderness last night (see bookcrossing.com). For some reason I felt very furtive leaving the books in the locations I chose as if I was doing something wrong. I left one in the post office lobby, one in the Red Rock Coffee shop, and one on top of the phone at the bus stop near the Caltrain station. I tried to find some books at the Safeway but someone else must have already picked them up as I couldn't find any there. I don't know that I am going to find any books as so far the ones released near me are not ones I want to read. Just for grins I would like to find one book I want to read, read it on the airplane on the way to Houghton, MI, and then release it in Houghton! I'll have to see if anyone has released a book in Houghton yet. This is all still new and exciting to me. I wonder if I will tire of it eventually.


I had to sit through a four hour presentation for managers on how to give feedback and receive feedback this morning. It was mostly free form lecturing where you had the freedom to interupt whenever you wanted to ask questions or make comments. I enjoyed the first couple of hours but grew restless and bored the last two hours. I'm not sure if I know how to give or receive feedback any better than I did before but I do have interesting ideas percolating in my head. The lecturer talked a bunch about filters people have when they listen to you and that 80% of the time they don't really hear you the first time so you need to repeat it more than once before the feedback will sink in. The main gist of the lecture was giving feedback is hard and makes people uncomfortable in the short run but in the long run it helps people grow.