Friday, July 18, 2008

My Life as a Motivational Poster

It's Friday, finally, so I'm not going to write about anything that has any redeeming social or family value. (familial value?) And I'm not even going to stop and refer to Chicago Manual of Style or Grammar Girl to figure out whether it should be family or familial.

I get occasional Wailing List e-mails from Despair.com that cause me to laugh out loud. The one this week made me actually consider buying the poster before I remembered my current financial situation and decided just to share it with you here.


This poster just set me to giggling. If you can't read the text, it says:

Hundreds of years from now,
It will not matter what my bank account was,
The sort of house I lived in,
Or the kind of car I drove. . .
But the world may be different
because I did something so bafflingly crazy
that my ruins became a tourist attraction.

The tongue-in-cheek poster is based upon the motivational poster on Successories.com, shown here:



The text is "A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove...but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child."

In my current state, I'm thinking people are going to drive by my house on Chula Vista Drive in Tucson fifty years from now, point, laugh their silly heads off, and tell their children, "Look, look. That's the house that insane woman paid that guy forty thousand dollars to take off her hands. She could have just stopped making her mortgage payments and let the house go into foreclosure, but she was lousy with integrity and did The Right Thing instead."

Happy Friday!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I LOVE despair.com! And fear that the "priorities" poster may indeed become my legacy too. You make people giggle though and that is a gift that truly is priceless!

Anonymous said...

Jan - I have a full spread of despair.com goodies including the "half-empty" coffee mug.

My personal poster is a picture of a sinking ship with the phrase "Did it ever occur to you that the sole purpose of your life was to serve as a warning to others."

And the answer is of course - yes.

Stay cool -

Jan Crews said...

I actually love both of these posters — one as a guffaw and one as an "awww". I do think I'm making a difference in the lives of Boston and Ridley and that I'm very lucky to be doing so.

So maybe I should buy both posters (when I get out of real estate jail/hell) and put them on opposing walls in my cube.)