On poofing posts (and the 48 Laws of Power)

Just poofed away a rant about TDC that I wrote this morning. It didn't reveal all that much and it was not all that scandalous, just another petty frustration really. I am not sure why I feel uncomfortable writing about TDC, uncomfortable enough to want to erase the occasional post. I know I need to vent, but I also think I may be giving this too much power. She's an asshole, yes. Most of what she does is total bullshit, yes. But so what? I cannot keep feeding the negative energy. I have to find a way to let it roll off my back--to know she is going to be a jerk about most things, to know I will have to continue to fight battles over the most basic things to do what I need to do, and to stop allowing myself to react emotionally. I have to stop letting myself get caught up in the pettiness and stupidity. If she does have an agenda to screw me over, unless I let myself get totally crazy, I can certainly outwit her, right?

Hey, maybe I should re-read that diabolical bestseller among corporate generica, the 48 Laws of Power. Do you know this book? I discovered it in grad school, when I found it on my then boyfriend's bedside table. I immediately had to buy a copy and study it with a mad intensity to see what kind of mind power he might be trying to wield over me. (I should point out that this was a completely ridiculous relationship that began in an arcade and only got more ludicrous from there.) Around the same time, my Uncle, the fundamentalist Christian with whom I have a long-standing long-distance book club, mentioned it as something I should read. I was shocked that a) two such wildly different people were reading the same book, and b) Uncle J. did not recognize the tome as the work of The Devil that it is. I also got Dr. Crazy involved in my study of the 48 laws, as she was also involved with the bassist of one of the crazy boyfriend's bands. (Was he the bassist, Dr. Crazy? Why am I remembering him as a bassist, other than the fact that I was drunk that year?) Anyway, Crazy and I began to assign one of the 48 laws to each person we knew as "signature laws." The signature law represented a person's standard operating procedure, their normal modus operandi in life, relationships, etc.--kind of like an astrological sign. The authors of 48 Laws, by the way, never mention such a thing or suggest this as one of the uses of these laws. We, being students terrorized daily by a harrowing graduate program, were just heavily into methods of divination, even those we totally made up. My signature law, for example, was Law 44: Disarm and Infuriate with The Mirror Effect. I believe Dr. Crazy's was Law 17: Keep Others in Suspended Terror by Cultivating an Air of Unpredictability.

Hee. Can you see me next year covertly trying out a new law of power on TDC each and every week? This week, in our meeting regarding assessment, I will whip out Law 37 and "Create Compelling Spectacles" in order to generate an aura of power that dazzles all. That might actually make for a very amusing academic satire, I think. What I should probably do instead is re-read Straight Man, drink some martinis, and stop taking everything so fucking seriously.