there is no point to this post.

Except to say this:

Consider Frost's "The Road Not Taken". ( for those who don't know it -- )

A nice poem, sure, though I've felt cheated by the last two lines almost since the first time I read them. It's not fair to consider something trite when it was the first thing to be what it is and it's all the lame-ass imitations since then that have turned it into a cliché, so mainly I try to think of the last two lines as less sing-song (etc.) than they actually seem. I make the effort, I mean.

Because there's no good reason for Frost to have written something weak. "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" ( here )

gives me goosebumps damn near every time. (The same sort of goosebumps, incidentally, that I get from Sondheim when he's at the top of his form. Because jgesteve has been talking about Assassins, I'll mention that one of my favorite Sondheim moments ever is in the last verse of "The Ballad of Czolgosz", where the Balladeer sings "Yes, and there's nowhere more fitting than in the Temple of Music by the Tower of Light between the Fountain of Abundance and the Court of Lilies at the Great Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo." [Emphasis is mine, but lack of commas is Steve's.])

But aside from the last-two-line issues I have with "The Road Not Taken", the real reason I brought it up was this:

Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet, knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

For some reason, every time I read or hear or think that line -- I doubted if I should ever come back, every time -- it makes me sad. Not pensive, or nostalgic, or philosophical, or anything like that. Actually sad. Somehow it never fails to strike me as one of the saddest things ever, ever, ever.

okay, let's do this thing.

lifted, at this point, from everyone in creation:

Part of being on Livejournal.com is inevitably gaining a number of LJ buddies. Unfortunately, as time wears on, it's easy to forget where all of them came from. Post this in your journal and have your friends respond with how they recall first 'meeting' you.

memo

to: G-the-associate
from: fox
re: various

you know how A-the-lead-litigator on this case just sent around a memo saying the client wants us to operate more efficiently? they didn't mean that you, a mid-to-senior associate, should start doing paralegal tasks. STOP DOING MY JOB kthnx.