How to make a good thing better: salad for lunch edition.

1. Make sure your salad is first rate to begin with. I recommend your finer greens with a solid heap of arugula, blood oranges, fennel, celery, those sweet little Armenian cucumbers, and a blue cheese vinaigrette.

2. Make sure there's a lot of salad. Lots of it.

3. Let it sit in your office awhile. I don't know, hours.

4. Do the student consultations for two hours.

5. Go to the writing center for one hour.

6. Think about retrieving the salad from your office before you go to a meeting, but then remember: you can only slide in for about 25 minutes of the meeting, and fetching the salad will make you late. So: no salad.

7. Go teach a workshop for an hour and a half.

8. NOW fetch the salad.

9. It's four o'clock? SO WHAT. At room, which is to say office, temperature, marinating (let's be honest) in its little tupperware, this salad is going to taste like God's own culinary masterpiece.

10. Don't bother eating like a lady. You're ravenous! Fork that salad in.

11. It's the state of ravenousness--that's what makes the salad amazing. Thrilling. Spectacular!

12. Go ahead and eat the salad with a chaser of Greek yogurt. Why not?

13. The deferred salad will power you through your four o'clock meeting, although not without a small bout of despair, a tiny internal meltdown, and a miraculous recovery, all within the space of a nanosecond. Your mileage may vary--I'm just going on what happened while I ate my four o'clock salad.

14. The postponed salad, plus yogurt chaser, will power you through your second workout. That's because you are t-o-u-g-h tough.

15. And then, when you get home, sweaty and triumphant, leftover Indian food will totally seal the deal, hunger-wise.

The Six Sigma of Idaho.

Remember this?



30 Rock Six Sigma from Bob Burtowsky on Vimeo.


Apparently, the real Six Sigma is an actual business thing, that tons of businesses do, that has to do with consistency, as demonstrated by the following graphic, which I totally understand which is why I made this screen capture of it from Wikipedia:

It apparently "seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes." (also quoting Wikipedia. I am pretty sure it is the best source of information for topics like these, especially for blogging purposes.) Six Sigma is also apparently really funny. Tina Fey says so.


Well, in order to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects for your future vacation in Idaho, I offer the following Six Sigmas (I know: the Sigma isn't  plural; moreover, the Sigma aren't things and have nothing to do with teamwork, insight, brutality, male enhancement, handshakery or play hard. But I'm pretending that they do, for blogging purposes) of Idaho:

• reclining
• indolence
• cookie eating
• book reading improvement
• snackery
• sleep hard

(Sorry there's no graph or chart, but my improvement of process outputs (see above) does not allow time for this kind of chart-making frippery.)


I am awarding myself a Black Belt in Six Sigma of Idaho. I think I deserve it.