• You find yourself warming your hands on a stack of freshly-printed papers.
• You lower your chair to facilitate ergonomic posture while sitting with your feet tucked into your knees / under your thighs for warmth.

… any more?

I swear, every time I’m about to wake up with a full bladder, I have to dream about being pregnant first. Every. Single. Time. … or at least every time when my bladder is full of beer. Am I the only one with this kind of subconscious “there can be only ONE lower abdominal pressure” duel going on?

1. Hypothesis: Staplers reproduce asexually.
   Evidence: The Cubes (which hold five desks including mine) have a communal stapler (decorated with post-it flags with our names on ‘em, and the names of some people who don’t work here anymore, and it’s The People’s Stapler! Hoorah for the glorious stapling revolution!) which lately has been living on my desk. I just got back from a meeting and there were two staplers on my desk! Whoa.

   The question now is: was I sneezing this morning because of stapler spores?

2. The company retirement plan, which I’m just now eligible to sign on for, includes free use of a wealth manager - someone who habitually consults with millionaires and upward. EAT THE RICH YUM YUM is not listed as one of the acceptable 401(k) account options.

Today we can all pretend to be Jewish:

As I explained last year, Arrival Day is a holiday of the American Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion - a celebration of the Jewish community and its contributions to the United States. As such, non-Jews as well as Jews are welcome to join in the celebration. In the wise words of Ikram Saeed, everyone is Jewish today, just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.

Great! I’ve always thought I’d do well in the non-practicing Reform-esque tradition anyway. Hoorah for New World Judaism! Now, where are the bars offering discount pitchers of Manischewitz?

UPDATE, EVENINGISH: You know, I’ve been thinking about this off and on all day, and it seems to me that claiming “On X Day, Everyone Is X!” is very robustly equivalent to a trinketized caricature of X:

• On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish!
• For Oktoberfest, everyone is German!
• In Solvang, everyone is Danish!

The only other exception I can think of is some statements to the effect of “on 9/11, we all were Americans” - trinketized caricatures of American culture have certainly found their rightful place in campaign memorabilia but I don’t think they have much currency as 2-for-1 happy hour specials in the rest of the world. Are there more that I’m just filtering out?

Also try: “on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, everyone is black”. Can you say it without wincing?

(via Crooked Timber)

Local ethnic pseudo-group fails to act as a monolithic voting bloc! News at 11. Note to Asian-Americans: pls resolve differences and pick one (1) stereotype k thx.