The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same

Or maybe they're completely different.

Yesterday in my triangle we had a "Strategic Planning Session" lead by Al Gore in the afternoon. I was unexpectedly asked to stay for it, which made me cranky as I already have to go in early on Mondays and this made my workday unexpectedly long*. I was not into strategic planning at BCFG, although I did participate in the "game" where we pretended to be companies competing against BCFG and had to give presentations pointing out BCFG's weaknesses**

During the strategic planning I got to thinking about how that kind of thing was something that I would have eaten up during my time at The Big P. I was always a nerd at company functions and very eager to participate and share and all that stuff. I had no desire to do so yesterday. I was wondering why that was. Was it simply a matter of growing up? (In school, especially high school, college and my time at The Big P I always wanted to be the enigmatic cool kid who is smart, but doesn't feel the need to constantly share, but I could never stop myself from talking.) I was also wondering if working for The Man beat me down so much that I don't value my own ideas any more. Or it may be a case of not really caring about the strategy of BCFG because I feel like all I will ever be is a little worker bee and that what I do, while essential, doesn't really matter. I don't have an answer, these were just the things that I was thinking about while everyone else was working on the equation to figure out how many prospects they needed to have each year if they were going to have X number of sales.

There is sad news tonight regarding my friend R's husband. The cancer that has spread to his stomach and liver is Stage 4, inoperable and terminal. They are going to start chemo on Monday to try and buy him some more time, but this is nasty stuff that is growing really fast--none of these tumors were even there about three months ago. R took the morning off today so that she and her husband could start "putting their affairs in order." I can't imagine saying those words now--R's husband is 33 (a year younger than I am).

I do believe that this is possible, so please join me in praying for a miracle.

*like that sentence just was--and I used "unexpected" twice, which I thing is wrong.
**Yes, Al Gore went all out for this thing. He also used one of those giant post-it pads that go on an easel and hung up the giant post its all around the work room. They were still there when I arrived today.