As you may remember, my sister gave my mom a card for her birthday and I felt she’d chosen an unfairly cute card which is totally the kind of thing she does. This is the card:

Well I’m happy to report that I held my own, card-wise, with the following:

In other news, I seem to have fallen into whatever-you-want-to-call-it where unless I’m in motion I’m kind of depressed. This is a particularly undesirable place to be because what it means to me is that I’m not really okay with my thoughts and myself and my current everything. Could I be less specific and less articulate? I could, just you wait. See, I had meetings in LA yesterday and the day before because I’m very important and while to-and-fro-ing I felt like I was accomplishing stuff and doing what I should be doing and here we go and I’m on my way and I’m not stagnating and etc. But today I have less on the agenda so I feel blah, but actually what I feel is that I should be dealing with all the moving stuff I need to deal with, which I really don’t want to deal with. So I guess what I’m saying is it’s less about being in motion than about my not wanting to deal with moving. Also, I have a lot of articulate and thought provoking and philosophical things to say about myriad topics including moving, Marvin, door slamming, adulthood and other stuff so you should probably clear your schedule.

Not genuine passion, but passion as buzzword. It was the topic of my latest McSweeney’s column. You should probably read it!

And then last night while looking at Twitter I discovered that at the Westin, each employee’s nametag includes their passion (it’s a policy that goes back to 2008 apparently). I retweeted the aforementioned tweet and received a direct message from the person who tweeted it, thanking me for the retweet. I felt sort of bad since my retweeting was coming from a place of “look at this bullshit, it’s everything wrong with the world and specifically what I lampooned in my column” as opposed “I think this tweet is awesome and want to share it with my followers.” I didn’t feel TOO bad though as I’m pretty sure the direct message was automatic. (I realize this paragraph makes no sense and sounds like the death cries of an epileptic toucan if you aren’t on twitter.)

Anyway, what exactly is my problem with passion anyway? It’s the disingenuity of the way it’s being used. It’s the flattening of personality. It’s the commodification of enthusiasm. It’s entirely sales driven. The people who won’t shut up about passion don’t give a fuck about your passion, they just want you to have one because it helps the bottom line.

Don’t believe me? Read this about the Westin’s passion tags.

Dismounting my high horse now.