The Three (Hundred) Faces of Shawn

Somehow it happened. Three-hundred posts passed through this blog. This is No. 300.

My apologies for every single one.

Yet who am I to ignore this milestone?! Who but I would note it?! So I celebrate with faces and musings from 2013. Again, my apologies.

Unsure from the start what this blog was supposed to be, I reach this milestone still unclear. I think it was to be an easy way to showcase my art, but much of my art requires explanation so I wrote about it too. Some of my art defies explanation but that hasn't stopped me from trying.

Put me before a keyboard and you can't shut me up. I do my best talking out of my fingertips, with time and isolation and a handy dictionary and a delete key.

The face — that Opie pie face, the logo for my business — was born of innocence. It's my actual fifth grade class photo. You laugh, perhaps, but let me suggest the indignity of lugging a hoop around your head all day long at school; let me further note the prescience of eyeglasses, which I didn't need until high school (a blog post for another day). Maybe now you're impressed, or you feel bad for me.

It was a burgundy-and-white world back then.

The face became an easy tool for my rants and raves and low trivia. It's my big-nosed barometer, from which you can know my mood without all them wordy words.

From the look on my face, for example, you could tell the tragic arc of the San Francisco Giants, my team, as it lost Opening Day when Dodgers starting pitcher Clayton Kershaw hit the go-ahead home run.

Optimism held steady for a few months …

But then the Giants could do no right and my face lost its structure. As the Giants melted down the stretch, so did I. Finally I had to grieve and let go.

Among you faithful who read this blog, fewer faithful read the baseball posts. Maybe you're bored with baseball. Maybe you're not a Giants fan. Maybe you rightly know the waste of time and energy in caring so much about something that wastes so much time and energy and money.

More of you read when I spout off, without reason or right, about What the Hell's Wrong with Things.

About our government. About our place in the world. About our collective insanity or apathy.

About our helplessness.

Were I judged as a news reporter, I'd have fired myself by now: I rarely follow up my rants, rarely find closure.

When a young man shot up Sandy Hook Elementary School before Christmas last year, I shot my mouth off and literally painted my blog blood red with indignation, then again when I got mad at how nothing was being done.

Nothing is still being done and I've stopped writing about it. Nothing except people are still being shot and killed, and still at schools. A student allegedly shot three students leaving a high school in Pittsburgh, Pa., just yesterday.

Last month, a teenager brought a gun to school in Sparks, Nev., two hours away, and killed a teacher, wounded two students, then killed himself.

The killings go on, nothing gets done about it. My words didn't help.

The country spies on you and me and the rest of the world. I took many words to conclude, "Whatcha gonna do?" It ain't the country of our constitutional ideals. It ain't even our country. It's the country of who holds the money and the information. My words don't help.

Syria enraged me, as you can see. The death, destruction and displacement of Syria and its people is what should really be enraging me, but instead it was the possibility that our country would ensnare itself in yet another war following Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons.

Then a too-good-to-be-true thing happened, and Syria agreed to inspections and eventual dismantling of its chemical weapons supplies.

I had moved on already. Maybe good news creeps me out. Maybe I don't believe it. Maybe something else got my attention.

Like the government shutdown. I vented a good bit of patriotic rage over that, and defended the Affordable Care Act, the straw dog over which government services, research, care and recreation came to a halt.

It turns out the Affordable Care Act may in fact be made from
straw and suckage, stitched together with false promises and 20th Century technical know-how in a 21st Century world. The Web site's continuing to get better, the government keeps saying. Sometimes you can't keep your health care plan, the president is saying, even though he promised you could. (Breaking news, apparently: You can keep your old plan!)

Three coders working from four desks in San Francisco, meanwhile, just created a buy-your-plan Web site in three days.

I wrote about swimming or some such instead. Busy busy, you know.

The only real-world issue I followed through to the end was Scouting's relationship with gays in the ranks.

Scouting moved a massive millimeter this year, allowing Scouts who are gay to join, but barring adult leader who are gay. Because being gay is a youthful indiscretion that a 10-mile hike will sweat out of you? I dunno. I remain perplexed but prepared to trot my likeness out next time Scouting's glacier of decision nudges forward.

Three-hundred posts, all personal, many trivial, maybe a couple phoned in but the rest written with a shard of my soul. Each a welcome to my little world of illustration and side gigs and swimming and the stuff that's been part of me. Some days I simply shared something you might like.

Thank you — and condolences — for reading any and all.

A toast: To 300 more. I wonder what they'll be about.

Liam Turner photo

About face

Hello, my name is Shawn, and I'm an emoticon addict.

It started with the small stuff, just a little tweak to take the edge off. I swear, no harm was gonna come to this sweet, innocent logo:

The realistic bits — the Fred Flintstone nose, the Charles Nelson Reilly glasses, the Opie Taylor T-shirt, eyes floating flounderish on one side of my head — would all grow back.

I just needed something to boost the mood for my blog posts, in case I wasn't making myself clear. A pick-me-up … or a bring-me-down. Whatever.

They were gonna be like little postage stamps, just to reinforce, "I'm outraged! …"

Or, "My bad! …"

Or, "WTF?!"

Or, "How dare you!? …"

Or, "Um …"

Or, "We are not amused …"

That was gonna be it. Just a nice little stash of emoticons. Use 'em every once in a while, that's all. Just when I really, really needed them. I was in control.

No, I WASN'T! Who am I kidding? It wasn't enough! It's never enough. I needed more! I needed them bigger! These just weren't doing the trick anymore.

None of these could say what I wanted about El Día de los Muertos, for example, because suddenly I needed to say something about El Día de los Muertos:

Then it was swimming. Swimming this, swimming that. You're sick of me talk about swimming, I know, but I couldn't stop myself:

Enough to make your eyes bleed. Look if you must:

I disintegrated. After a while, it lost all context (I was admiring swimmers from around the world here. OK?! What's so wrong with that??):

Then I found out the high was higher on the rocks:
 

When that lost its thrill, baseball came along. Damn you, Giants:

It got, well, ridiculous. I'm ashamed …

 

I'm not gonna lie. The Giants had me on a roller coaster for a long time. It was a gooooooood ride:

Then it was baseball and Halloween. I was getting into some dangerous mixing:

It wasn't long before I crashed:

The time came for serious self-examination:

And reflection … 

I went through the five stages of grief:

OK, it was mostly anger:

Eventually, though, I may have found a new way of life:

Keep your fingers crossed — I think … I may be … on the road to recovery:

 And I can quit anytime I want:

(Hey kids! Print this out and make your own Shawn face flipbook! The first hit is free!)

Worst slogan ever

Hang onto your wallet. The following sexy words will make you lose it and your mind …

You ready? OK, I warned you:

"By combining the best practices of thousands of member companies with our advanced research methodologies and human capital analytics, we equip senior leaders and their teams with insight and actionable solutions to transform operations."

You're twitterpated, right? Your pulse races! You want whatever this is, right now, or you'll die! It had you at "human capital analytics," right?

No?!

Or maybe you consider it one of the worst business slogans ever devised? Something for which a Dilbert would need to be invented, if Scott Adams hadn't already, so he could prick this bag of wind? Yeah, that's what I think.

I heard this over a National Public Radio station a week or so ago. I'm sure it had been repeated for weeks before I finally paid attention. You NPR listeners know how it is; you're hoping weeks of subconscious listening, of auditory osmosis, will turn you into an expert on the Syrian crisis for the next dinner party, when the names and nuances spill out of your mouth to everyone's surprise, including yours.

The sponsors' spiels spill over you until all you hear is the cadence — Angie's List™… Novo Nordisk© … Sit4Less and the exclusive Herman Miller Aeron® chair in True Black™©®. They're not even things or services, not even words, just sounds, onomatopoeia. When sponsors stop sponsoring, that's when you notice them. Or by the oddest bit of what is supposed to be the English language.

One day I heard the announcer say "actionable solutions." What in hell is an actionable solution? Is that anything like a plain old unadorned solution? Is actionable anything like workable, a perfectly workable word?

I had to look up the sponsor by googling®™© the words that snagged my ear ("actionable solutions to transform operations"); it turns out, sadly, the phrase is not unique. Among the small pile of possible sponsors, I found the one responsible: Corporate Executive Board, CEB for short. It's "the leading member-based advisory company."

Whatever that is.

I looked around and have concluded maybe they might kind of be consultants, sort of. Hard to tell. Consultant, as in someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, as someone, somewhere, once said.

Except I'm not so sure; the rest of CEB's slogan is, "This distinctive approach, pioneered by CEB, enables executives to harness peer perspectives and tap intro breakthrough innovation and improvement without costly consulting or reinvention." So CEB doesn't consult? What … does … it … do …?

I'm sure CEB doesn't care if I know what it does. High in the corporate stratosphere, where gobbledy and gook spill freely from corporate mouths, people understand. And that's fine.

But why burden NPR listeners with it? Why not substitute a slogan in English for us listeners, who are used to NPR reporters, and Ira Glass, speaking plain English?

Once I was asked to help a company name itself. Before the Internet bust, this company was going to take businesses where they needed to be on the Web. It was back when such companies called themselves "information architects." Yeah, that long ago.

The new company's principals, all very bright, type A+ personalities, rich in experience even in so young a tech über industry, still couldn't tell me what their company did. Not in 10 words, not in more than 100 polysyllabic words, rat-a-tat like Martin Scorsese. They spoke English, I think, but it all came out … well, a lot like the CEB slogan. I didn't end up helping name the company, because it was the company that could not be named.

Another time, I took part in forging a mission statement for the organization where I worked. "Forged" is the correct term, all of us swinging hammers, trying to connect noble words with the chains of articles and punctuation into an inspiring whole.

We brainstormed at special meetings with inviolate rules. We rearranged words and phrase snippets at other meetings with even stricter rules. We contemplated and rearranged. We said the results aloud over and over, in unison, our mantra, until the result sounded like they could be English.

The result was exactly what you would expect if 14 people convened to write a sonnet. Or made magnetic poetry on your refrigerator, with lots of adverbial suffixes.

I have to wonder: What would Dilbert do?