At some point in my bad attitude at work, I managed to piss off the one guy in the company that it's pretty hard to piss off. That seems to have been the consensus from peer reviews (I'm not sure who it was--I was on vacation, so a good list was selected for me): outstanding work, but the attitude's kind of a downer sometimes. Which is fine, since, as my boss points out, it's a lot easier to correct attitude than work quality. If I actually pissed people off, I wish they'd come talk to me about it; but maybe that's not how the world usually works.

My boss is wonderful and quite sympathetic--he used to have my job--but I started adjusting the attitude after Folks In Power started asking if I was going to quit. So I guess the review will be the average of the year, and I just started adjusting things a month or two ago.

Hard to describe what I've been changing; mainly, day to day, I just try not to care so much about the broken repetitive stupid situations we keep getting into. Working less makes a difference. It's a little sad, but I couldn't maintain the enthusiastic energy against a juggernaut of dumbness that everyone else has accepted. I still like the job, though: otherwise I'd quit. Interesting work like this, with a flexible company and cool cow-orkers, is hard to find.

Musician David Byrne has some comments on the movie "Jesus Camp", about the evangelical sort-of-Christian retreats the kids are going to these days.