Proposing

The new joy that has entered my life (and I mean that sarcastically, yes) is that of helping with proposals. Now, I don't have a huge problem with that -- or at least, I didn't think I would. There are actually some aspects of what we do that are cool and very worthwhile to people - so explaining how we can do stuff for them sounds like it should be a pretty reasonable and easy-to-do thing. Proposals, however, actually seem to be more in line with creative writing than anything else. They split up all the parts and divvied them out to various people to write the sections. No problem - reasonable division of work is a good thing. And then...they assign me maintenance and support. I know nothing about maintenance and support. I could probably fudge the stuff, except that we're bidding this as a task to be provided by one of our subs -- so shouldn't THEY be writing that portion? Whee. Time to just make stuff up and cross my fingers, I guess. I did stumble across a cool CMM for support that I used for the support task section - so maybe they have some default stuff that I can use to gush about how much we love support and all that great crap. I sure hope so. Otherwise this is going to really be a sucky day.

Beyond that - I would also like to propose an end to Hallmark Holidays. Mother's day in particular drives me nutsy. (Though third-cousin-twice-removed day is a really close second.) You know, if you don't appreciate your mom the other 364 days of the year, you don't give a crap about the one day you're supposed to buy her flowers. And beyond that - what about all the people in the world who aren't mothers (whether they want to be or not?) Just give us a break and let's move back to holidays that are driven solely by the Church calendar or Historic events that effected the majority of the American population at the time.

Thirdly - and on a fairly unrelated to anything note - I heard a commercial for WIC this morning on the radio. WIC stands for Women, Infants, Children and is a program designed to help pregnant mothers and small children stay healthy by providing food advice and subsidies and other social services. Anyway, they had an interesting statement. They said something along the lines that from the minute you know you're pregnant, your body is no longer just yours, but it's your baby's. And so you need to be careful to eat healthy things and they can help you know what to eat and so forth. But the first statement caught my ear and I could hear the people at NOW and NARAL screeching...isn't their whole fundamental theory that since it's your body you can do whatever you want...if your body becomes not only yours but your unborn child's then shouldn't they have a say in the whole situation (and I'm guessing most unborn children are going to vote no on the whole abortion issue.) Just fascinating the utter, amoral hippocracy we live with every day and don't even recognize, by and large.