Liam Dynes

Just to show that no matter how much you supposedly ‘grow up’, there’s still all kinds of proof to the contrary, specially if you choose a ‘creative’ field to get into. I spend a great deal of time at work thinking. Just thinking. I’ve always worked like that. Ideas come in bursts. Or rather the implementation of ideas goes in bursts. I’ll spend a good couple of hours figuring out precisely how I want to word something, or what sort of spin I want to put on the particular (generally educational or financial institutionally-related) project I’m working on, then bang it out quick before the idea runs away.

This is what I look like at work. Or at least what I am allowed to look like should I not feel like, y’know, cleaning myself up a little bit.

But in my defense, when one of the other fine fellows here at work can regularly sport a t-shirt with a cupcake who threatens that he ‘unna eet choo!’, I figure I can rock the old band tee and three day face.

P.S. The song is “Let’s Dance to Joy Division” by The Wombats (already pimped on the sidebar there), or possibly “Soundtrack for the Night” by Joel Plaskett Emergency. Love that my work investment was a nice pair of headphones. I also tend to keep track of what song inspires particularly good work ideas. “A Horse With No Name” and “The Blower’s Daughter” by Neil Young and Damien Rice, respectively, have sparked an especially good Humber College idea.

P.P.S. Yes, that is Philip J Fry breakdancing behind me, and yes, he is accompanied by dinosaurs. I have a cool desk.

A conundrum:

How do you gracefully ask this question (multiple choice, two of five answers are correct, but they do not have to be paired together to be correct)?

“A student may be immediately dismissed from class only if they jeopardize one of which two of the following?”

I’ve spent about an hour today (when I probably have other, more important, or at least bigger, work to do) staring at that single sentence, which I wrote, trying to figure out a more graceful way to say it. To say it’s playing havoc with my mild obsessiveness and affinity for language is understating things a little.

But seeing these sorts of things done incorrectly drives me bonkers, so being the one who gets to make sure it is correct before being plastered all over the world is also the reason I love my job.

P.S. I just discovered the karmic reason why the Old 97s have become my favourite band of all time.

I always knew Rhett Miller (the lead singer/songwriter) was super-literate and a creative writing fiend, but I never knew we shared so many similar obscure loves of beat-down Americana.

On top of the DeLillo references elsewhere, and the overall whiskey-soaked, dust-caked imagery all over their stuff, I just downloaded one of the few songs I was missing from their various albums, titled “What We Talk About.” As is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Frickin’ Carver. Carver, the generally disliked (by Beth and others in my English classes anyway) minimalist who drank himself to death, and in whose stories not much ever happens, was one of my first literary caches.

It makes absolute perfect sense that he influence the Old 97s, and knowing it for certain now, I can see his soggy fingerprints everywhere.