random round-up

My insurance agent has posters on the wall that I imagine are intended to inspire.

The poster nearest me features a photograph of sunbeams filtering through several tall evergreen trees in the mid-ground. Your eye starts at the sun and follows its beams down to the foreground, where there is a flag stuck in a golf hole. Then you notice that the green is covered with silvery frost, and there are green footprints like random stamps. The footprints concentrate around the flag.

Underneath the photo is the word SUCCESS in all caps, followed by a message in smaller type: “Some people dream of success… while others wake up and work hard at it.”

I’m struggling to connect the image and the words, to decipher how the image represents success, and working hard at it. I guess it’s a morning scene, with the light frost and lowish sun. But a golf course? I’ve heard of the cliché that all major decisions and negotiations are made on the golf course, but it’s really a leisure activity in my books, and an exclusive one at that. I don’t like golf, and I don’t like the amount of water and chemicals required to maintain a pristine green. It seems like an awfully good way to ruin the planet. But that’s besides the point, I guess. Are the footprints meant to represent the people "working" while the rest of sleep, away from this hive of productivity?

It occurs to me that this poster is not so much to inspire as to placate those already conventionally successful, to comfort: don’t feel bad about being rich when so many are much, much poorer, because poor people just haven’t worked as hard as you.

The other poster, over the agent’s computer shows a photograph of a misty morning farm scene; maybe there was snow. The details are foggy, literally in the photograph, and figuratively in my memory. The caption is in a cursive sort of font: “Without dreams there is no need to work. Without work there is no need to dream.”

I can sort of get the first sentence, because when I dreamed as a teenager about competing as an equestrian in the Olympics, I still had to shovel shit. But the second sentence? Seems wrong and depressing to me. Still, I suppose there are a lot of people out there doing soulless jobs to pay the bills and their dreams are what keep them plodding away and sane (and hey, both Sugar D and I have been there and done that). But must work always be something that requires escape, even if its only in your dreams? I suppose so… I’ve said it in this very space before that if I became independently wealthy somehow, I’d drop my job in a heartbeat…

What is up with this insurance agency and its hardcore work ethic? What stake does an insurance agency have in people working hard?

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Is it normal for a two-year-old to have insomnia? Swee'pea just laid awake in bed for hours last night, sometimes chewing his soother, or stroking the wall, or poking and kicking me. It was very annoying and a little distressing to wonder what keeps a two-year-old awake at night when he hasn't had chocolate or sugar or caffeine of any kind.

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In happier news, I'm one of the five finalists in the Best Photo/Art blog category of the Canadian Blog Awards!! Hurrah! I really didn't expect to make it... but I've checked out a lot of the other blogs and it seems I've been pimping A LOT more than anyone else in the category. Round Two of voting starts tomorrow. I think it's the same as Round One, except there are only five blogs to choose from now. So if I could trouble you a bit more, I'd love it if you could vote for me again starting tomorrow.

In the Best Family Blog category, the category that nearly killed me with so many of my favourite reads and only two votes to spread between them (one at work and one at home), I'm pleased to see that Dani and Beck have both made it into the finals. I'm very sad that Bubandpie and Mad and Bon did not.