How-To: The Continuing Story

Survival Tip #2

The Meeting Position

Bored of the routine? Try the Meeting Position.

Meetings are those little get-togethers always foretold of as "short affairs," and yet. You know how it goes.

And keeps going.

Ooohhhh.

Reliable? Every Wednesday.

Rigid? Often.

Romantic? Probably not.

Restless? Pick me.

Ok, so include "Resourcefulness," category "Rescue Devices," and see what happens:

1. "The Notebook," welcomed for notes of the meeting, of course, and with endless possibilities. Consider:

• Connect-the-Dot creations: anything goes...is that a lampshade of so and so's face?
• Gestural Drawing: a particularly ingenious option as the object is to draw nearby people without looking at one's paper. Oddly placed facial features make this gratifying every time.
• Flip books using the corner of the notebook pages. Perhaps wait to flip them gleefully in all of their animated glory till after the meeting.
• Ongoing games of M.A.S.H. Remember all the ways you learned to manipulate the game as a 4th grader, and the ones you perfected last meeting.
• Grocery lists for the pragmatic, weary, and hungry.
• Doodles that allow release of all those pent up "work emotions," everything from boredom (lazy leafy patterns) to rage (hangman gone very apathetic).
• As I said, the possibilities are hard to expire. Have at it...

2. Secret signs and symbols: For best results, share collective agreement on interpretations.

Unless confusion and chaos is desired, as it very well might be.

• Hand-motions: colloquial and common, everything from thumb's up to slashing movements across important arteries work.
• Eye brows: wriggles, skips, waves, culminating in the classical cocked stance. Generally, this codes for "Oh my g...STRANGE."
• Mouth: pursed, mobile corners (imagine they are hooking with thread and pull on the strings), or open abyss/yawn when things get especially windy.
• Various twitches, ticks, shrugs, stretches, and bone-cracking techniques when you just have to MOVE and hear something besides so and so...
• Mimes: "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame," "Moby Dick," and the "Birth of Shiva."

3. Borrowing...Thieving

• Waterbottles
• Pens
• Other people's precious notebooks
• Computers
• Bags
• Money
• Wallets
• Social Security Cards

*These items will be kept only until the owner notices, which could be for a very long time depending on execution, and if the item belongs to the group "absent minded professor."

4. The Meeting Position. Ah yes, here it is.

Ambiguous, yet effective in nearly all situations.

Throw down this moves when all else fails, or just for pure pleasure.

Meeting attendee should:

• assume a position of interest, even of intense fascination in what is being discussed.
• slowly, almost imperceptibly, this position should melt, slowly.
• most logically be lying on the floor in the end, the puddle stage. Eyes closed.
• maintain this position for at least three minutes for maximum effect.
• enter a meditative state, which is what's been desired all day. Delightful.

Best of luck and do let me know how it goes.