Promise Management

While my main squeeze and I typically bicker over who's doing childcare, why the house is such a sty, and how we can avoid being late for everything, this weekend we decided to branch out into the field of linguistics. He had been talking about "promise management" and basically anything with the M word in it can be a trigger for me. I grow weary of corporate-social-worky language that seems to reduce everything to a technical problem that may be overcome (or at least contained) through proper management. Life seems too wild and kooky for that, at least in my experience.

Anyways, I gave my man a little rant questioning why people can't just use normal language to describe things, like "keep your promises" in this case. Well, as is often the case, I jumped the gun and didn't really take the time to understand what he was saying. Apparently, promise management is not so much about keeping all your promises, because you've probably made more than you could fulfill in several lifetimes. From what I now understand, it's more about learning how to juggle and renegociate your promises so that you can... well, I guess so that everybody is just sort of mad at you and you don't look too irresponsible.

I still don't think I'm getting it right, but that seems to be how it turns out for my man. He's got about a million people breathing down his neck at any given time, and he never feels like he's satisfying anyone. He ends up feeling guilty and tired all the time. He looks great, though. :)

I have my own "promise management" issues. I'm always promising to do things that I can't seem to get done. I let people down in big and small ways everyday. Even in this blog I'm vowing to eat healthier, start running, write regularly... and I'm falling short. I once heard it said that you should not talk about what you're going to do - talk about what you are doing instead. Well, I'm eating leftover pizza and writing this post! I'll manage my life better tomorrow... I promise.