Book Report: The Art of Thank You by Connie Leas (2002)

Book cover

This book is not an art book even though it says so right in the title. Instead, it’s almost 200 pages talking about etiquette for thank you notes, including numerous examples. The examples make up a quarter to a third of the page total, actually. I suppose I could count them for you, but I’m inherently too lazy to do so.

I’m a little surprised that the author could get so many pages out of the topic, but she’s an old technical writer. Basically, it boils down to write thank you notes and use nice stationery if you can, but the little folded Thank You cards are all right for less formal occasions. Also, send thank you notes for job interviews.

You know, I’ve been pretty dilligent for writing thank you notes for gifts I have received, which is not had since I don’t get that many gifts. My brother and I wrote out thank you notes after my mother’s funeral to everyone who came or sent flowers. So I’m already up on the basics of thank you writing.

But perhaps I could up my game by getting some custom letterhead and writing out thank you notes to people who have done nice things for me, nice things I’ve seen, or things I’ve enjoyed. I understand that gratitude is one of the self-help trends of the day–along with mindfulness–but I really could be better in perhaps brightening someone’s day with a little thank you note.

If they could even read it. Perhaps I should work on my penmanship first.

At any rate, this book is a bit long for the topic it covers–you could get the gist of it from an article in a women’s magazine–but it didn’t take too long to read.

On the other hand, this book makes an excellent gift if you’re passive-aggressive.

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Follow the Logic In My Humor, Here

So my beautiful wife is working her way through computer Spanish lessons, and yesterday, as we were driving, we passed some daisies, her favorite flower.

“What is the Spanish word for daisy?” she asked me because I took Spanish for four years in high school and a year and a half in college.

To be honest, although Dr. Pasero told me I probably could have tested out of college Spanish–that is, taken a test to prove I had enough knowledge of Spanish equivalent to the required two years of Spanish at the university–I took the college Spanish anyway, mainly because hauling myself from my corner of Milwaukee to the campus early in the morning for the test was a pain to my pre-Freshman mind (although I eventually got pretty good at it as my college career progressed).

I even took an extra Spanish class because it was taught by the brother of a fellow who worked with me at the grocery store, and I often got chided for deploying my sense of humor by directly translating from the English idiom to Spanish. That is, the absurd things we say as Americans that are clearly made ridiculous to non-native speakers.

But I digress.

“What is the Spanish word for daisy?” my beautiful wife asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. It’s true: My Spanish vocabulary was never that good, even in my Spanish class days. It eroded over time, but it got a little bump when my children were really little and had a number of bi-lingual board books. But as a couple of recent birthdays have illustrated, that was also a while ago, so my Spanish vocabulario has dwindled again. You make your conversation that fits your knowledge; if I had to, I would simply call it flor. But I am digressing again.

“I don’t know,” I said, and note: here is the joke: “I still call her Ciela.”

Now, let me explain:

In the television program Agents of SHIELD, this one character is called Skye for a while, until she meets her parents and discovers they named her Daisy.

Now, everyone on the program calls her Daisy. It took me a half season to do it, too.

You see, Ciela is a feminization of the Spanish word for sky. So I was saying I still say sky instead of daisy.

Well, I guess you had to be there.

My wife got it after a moment. So I got that going for me.

So if you read me savaging modern comedies and saying, “Why don’t you try it if you think it’s so bad?”

Because, gentle reader, my humor often requires a particular set of arcane knowledge–say, the Spanish language and familiarity with the Marvel television universe–and perhaps footnotes and flow charts. So I cannot write a screenplay with jokes everyone will get. Heaven knows I wrote a full evening play full of obscure jokes that crack me up but might be lost on many people.

And, besides, the perfect, sophisticated comedy film has already been written.

9 1/2 Ninjas. I have seen that movie more times than I can count. Or probably should.

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A Few Thoughts On Ted

DVD cover

As I mentioned, I recently got a membership at the video store, and I’ve been renting (although the “renting” there is like a dollar for a week, and sometimes the guy behind the counter finds discounts where I don’t have to pay at all).

As with most trips to the video store, one wanders the aisles debating the pros and cons of various movies. Me, I like to stick to the two-for-a-dollar films which are a little older than the new releases or the almost new releases, so I have a wide variety of slasher films and older actioners to choose from. And it never fails: I spend ten minutes milling about, finding films that I am interested in watching immediately, and it takes me a while to get the two I’m going to rent. After that, I find bunches of films I’d like to watch, too. So I’ve started writing them down and keeping a running list of things to rent in upcoming visits to cut down on my loitering. Also, this explains why all of them start with the letter R or later in the alphabet: That’s where I was when I thought of it.

At any rate, one of the things I put on the list was Ted, the movie about the talking teddy bear. After watching a couple of actioners lately (Sahara and Soldier, both in the S section, see?), I thought I’d try a comedy. Both discs they had for Ted were the unrated edition, and given the topic matter, I thought I’d go with the theatrical release when viewing it.

Boy, howdy. I expected it to be crass, but this crass? I think I’m not going to enjoy any comedies, especially R-rated comedies, made after 2000.

This film made me long for the sophistication of Adam Sandler, word. Listen, in Adam Sandler, the man-boy is presented as an aberration, and through the events of the film, he grows up somewhat and learns a life lesson. In this film, the protagonist and the bear go through some adventures and maybe learn a little, but at the end, the status quo of the man-boy is restored. Well, there is a little change, but it’s lost amid the drug use and swearing.

The presence of Sam Jones, the star of the film Flash Gordon, was an amusing touch, but that’s about the only thing I found slightly amusing in the movie.

Ah, well, back to the actioners for me.

Every time they release another one of these R-rated comedies, it bombs at the box office late. Which is good because hopefully they’ll stop making them. Unfortunately, the intelligence and sophistication of old comedies is probably beyond the reach of the current man-boys making movies, never to be recovered. So we descend closer and closer to Idiocracy‘s Ow, My Balls.

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What Does Facebook Know About Me That I Do Not?

Everyone’s worried about Facebook knowing too much about you. If that’s the case, why did it insist on showing me this ad for weeks?

A Spanish language advertisement for WIC? But Pepita and I were just friends!

Perhaps Facebook was feeding me this to see if the state spending money advertising social programs in a foreign language would trigger a rant as I can think of better uses of my tax money, but if the state weren’t burning it on the easy, arts and science degree jobs like this one, it would spend the money on a different set of advertising/communication/marketing/make work and not on, you know, infrastructure or something.

Wait, it almost did trigger a rant there. Never mind, I shall return to whatever else I was doing.

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