Have You Had Your Flu Shot Today??

This sign was posted in about 20 places inside the Tom Thumb down the street. Apparently, this grocery store's pharmacist thinks you should have a daily flu shot to stay healthy. Ouch.

Playing on the Slide

Please send your good thoughts and vibes

My friend Lorna is having a double mastectomy today. I'm thinking about you, Lorna.

Disconnect

I never in a million years would have thought that I would be a marketing professional. When I first started working in this field and someone would ask me what I did for a living I would apologize. In college, I wouldn't take marketing classes because I thought they were teaching the dark underbelly of knowledge of how to make people want to buy products they don't want/need. I did take one class called "Psychology of Advertising" that was very interesting. Learned that most ads play on people's fear of death, fear of rejection, desire to escape negative emotions, and desire to have sex/be sexy. Also learned about how some large companies will conduct psychological research to create an ad campaign that will subconsciously evoke specific thoughts in their target audience.

Marketers want to send the right message to the right people at the right time via the right medium, and do this as efficiently as possible to keep profits up. It's not a secret and it makes sense.

I've been working in marketing for the last 5 years or so, and now I get it. Marketing is a necessary evil. If you have a great product/program/charity/whatever you have to have a way of letting people know about it. In and of itself, it's not a bad thing. It can be a very good thing in fact.

My main issue with marketing that leaves me with an uneasy feeling is the disconnect between the marketing of a product and the product. There is no necessary correlation between the quality of the product and the quality of the ad. They have very little to do with each other. You can have an amazing product and a crappy marketing campaign (or vice versa). But if a person's only exposure to the product is that ad, then chances are they are going to equate the quality of the product to the effectiveness of the ad.

Marketing isn't the only field with this disconnection problem. It also affects politics, the legal system, etc. I wonder if this is something specific to Western society. Plato talks about his great dislike for the Sophists, so using rhetorical skills to convey truth has been around since at least the 5th century BCE.

Last year I went on a job interview at a large insurance company. Towards the end the director of marketing asked me how I went from a degree in philosophy/psychology to marketing. I told him that I went to the dark side of the force, and that I'm using my knowledge for evil instead of good. He just looked at me with a blank stare. As an interesting side note, I got the job, but I turned it down.

The strangest thing happened last night

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and had to pee (nothing strange here so far). When I got out of bed Zoë, who was in bed with us, wanted to go to the bathroom with me. She got out of bed and she held my hand as we walked to the bathroom. She stood next to me while I was on the toilet with her hand on my leg. I washed my hands. I turned around to dry my hands with a towel and Zoë wasn't there. It was dark in the bathroom. I turned on the light, and I couldn't see her. It was really strange because she's loud when she moves around and I didn't hear anything while I was washing my hands. I checked the bedroom thinking that maybe she went back to bed. Skip was in bed asleep, but no Zoë. I turned the lamp on in the living room. She wasn't there either. And she wasn't in the kitchen. I was getting worried at this point. It was like she vanished. I went back in the bathroom. I looked under the sink, in the bathtub, and in the cat's litter box. I was about to wake up Skip and call out a search party, when I realized that I hadn't looked in her room. It was dark in her room and I didn't see her at first, but there she was... fast asleep in her crib.

So what happened? Most likely I was sleep walking (or sleep peeing, whatever you call it) and woke up when I was washing my hands. It's the most logical explanation, but it felt so real. I felt her standing next to me and her little hand in mind as we walked into the bathroom.

The less likely explanation, but the one that keeps popping into my head is that Zoë was astral projecting. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. She is still new to being a human. She's only been in her current body (outside the womb) for 15 months. That's not very long. She's still learning how to master what we call basic skills (like getting around, communicating with others, using tools, etc). What if somewhere along the evolutionary chain humans had the ability to astral project, but we forgot how to use it. It's not that far fetched an idea. Maybe it was a skill that we used before spoken language was perfected, and once spoken language became the main way of communicating we used astral projection less and less until we forgot how to access the controls.

She had the motivation. Like all little ones, she would prefer to sleep in our bed. Skip told me that he didn't bring Zoë into our room last night and neither did I, so I'm going to assume that she never left her crib. If she was in a deep sleep and really wanted to be with mommy and daddy maybe she figured out how to do it.

Whatever happened it was a really strange experience.

You might be a redneck if...

North Carolina pair feud over leg

13 Times

I must be insane. We are moving into our new apartment on Tuesday, and while I found myself surrounded by boxes (again!) I wondered how many times I've moved. It turns out 13 moves in 15 years. I'm a gypsy.

- 1992: moved into an apartment with my mother in Carrollton
- 1993: moved into my dad's house in Dallas
- 1996: moved in with my mom in Lewisville
- 1996: moved into the UNT dorm in Denten
- 1997: got an apartment with my cousin Shawn in Lewisville
- 1998: got an apartment with my friend Angie in Flower Mound
- 1998: got an apartment with my friend Cori in Lewisville
- 1999: Skip and I lived together in our first place in Plano
- 2001: Skip and I moved to Addison
- 2002: Skip and I moved to a nicer apartment in Addison
- 2003: We moved to Hoboken, NJ
- 2007: Skip, Zoe and I moved to Grapevine
- 2007: Moving to Plano next week. It's a 6 month lease. We'll move in March 2008.
- 2008: ???

I'm really sick of moving.