calendar as iconoclast

During today's big meeting, the one where shrewd business analysis was supposed to single-handedly get our organization out of the trouble posed by this crap economy, my attention kept wandering to the decorations on the walls: leftover jack-o-lanterns and ghosts from Halloween. It felt odd to me to be putting our fingers to the pulse of February 2010 with the decor calendar set back 5 months.

It reminded me of times that for whatever quasi-traumatic reason I've stopped advancing, years in which I've gotten stuck, 1982, 1993, 1997, 2000 and others. A person can get out of those jams, but it usually takes a couple years. I wonder if the person in charge of the decorations got laid off in early November, and the windows'll be that way for ever. I wonder if the decorations are older than 5 months old, maybe a year and a half, etc.

Today I just wanted to peel them off the windows, but a) I had nothing to replace them with (fuck it, shamrocks?) and b) I thought it might seem a little creepy, a full-grown man walking around the conference room with a handful of pumpkins and ghouls during a serious business conversation.