Dedicated to Lincoln Phayze who always goes with the flow except for the times when he doesn’t.  Both of us are lost…

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/b37bd4f91ab74c2b5be4a419893cfda7/

That was an advice from somebody like me.  The gentleman in question works in the arts (I almost said “arts industry” and I was appalled by the ugliness of the expression).  Correction:  he used to work in the arts, but now he is in as much mess as I am.  He told me that once he was taking the program “The Artist’s Way” and one of the requirements was keeping a diary.  Yes, a diary.  Keeping a diary in order to awaken one’s creativity, reconnect with one’s creativity, and welcome one’s creativity back.  So the rules were simple enough – you wake up and write three pages without letting the pen stop.  The rule to remember is “Don’t get it right, get it written…”

It is a very catchy and encouraging phrase.  But no matter how encouraging a phrase may be, it still took me a while to actually start writing in my diary.  But I did.  I have some “volumes” completed, mostly filled with crap worth only getting rid of (by shredding, this detail is very important! LOL), but it does not matter.  It was not right, it was written.  My web-site contains very little of my private diary entries, it is more polished and edited. Of course.  Which course?  Moving on…

Of course. Which course? Do we know where we go?

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/kallini2002/d09d182bdef53d9a4b384576a47df417/

Am I creative?  We all are supposed to be creative, by the way…

Well, anyway, when I started this web-site, it was nearly impossible to find things to write about, and I stopped almost as soon I started.  Then I came back to it and I was more or less consistent.  There were some large gaps due to my mood swings.  When I am depressed, I feel like drowning, when I am high, I feel as if I am resurfacing…and what does it have to do with water I have no idea…  Maybe because I am a Water Sign?  Sometimes I dream that I fly so high and so skillfully…

In my dreams I fly so much higher

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/9f878a2f026418e54ca53b7917b261e9/

Coming back to the gaps.  There some of them, all due to polarity of my moods, doubts, losing faith, not really knowing what to do.  The last one started early in May when I finally found a part-time job, started dancing more and generally was busy with I don’t even remember what.  But I tried to come back.  There must be something about writing that I either like or need or maybe both.  Self-expression?  Letting out the pain?  Sharing my experience?  Pleasure of typing? LOL – yeah, that must be it, “pleasure of typing” – exercising my fine motor skills.

Exercising fine motor skills

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/kallini2002/5dc33cf6576d5f43e0de16fa8bf43253/

But the idea of “not getting it right, but getting it written” is very appealing.  I was reading some of my own posts from January and it turned out to be pleasant enough.  I have already forgotten the pain and the joy and details.  And it was nice to come back and see – my insanity (at one point), my pain, my suffering, and the progress I made.  So the verdict is “YES”, the point may very well be ZERO, but I should keep at it.  My diary, my web-site, “My life, my universe and everything”.  Life goes on and diary is only a reflection.  We all love mirrors, don’t we?

Or yes, we do.  Reflections, reflections, reflections…

By Igor Shchegolev

There are many opinions about the question, “Why don’t people work?”

Aesop’s famous fable clearly illustrates what the result of not working is.  The ant and grasshopper are opposites in that one of them doesn’t want to work.  People of many generations have accepted the moral of Aesop’s fable as the rule.

According t Aesop’s moral, the ant was right, and the grasshopper was not because it did not work during the summer.  It was singing and dancing all the time and didn’t anticipate what would happen in the winter.  That is a simple moral.  It is also too idealistic.  For Aesop, the world is divided into two groups – the ants and the grasshoppers.  However, people in real life are more varied and complex than the ant and the grasshopper.  Maugham tried to depict the world in more realistic colours.  He showed two brothers, one of whom didn’t work but was still rewarded.  It is the way life is.  So, Aesop defined a rule and Maugham showed that people don’t always want to live by the rules.  Why?  Life is more complicated than an Aesop’s fable because there is a big difference between labour and work.

Most people consider labour as a way to exist, to provide themselves with the necessities of life.  They work in order to live – even if they hate their jobs – and they would not work if they could manage not to.  A work ethic and moral rules have been created by society.  Political orientation does not matter; in any case, society will create conditions that require people to work hard.  In “The Work Ethic is Underemployed”, Daniel Yankelovich considers three conceptions of work: first, as labor, as a way to exist; second, as a way to improve one’s level of life; and third, as a moral necessity.  Some people accept these rules.  They work hard and consider this way of living as the only right one.  They believe that their labor will eventually be rewarded.  They are obvious characters of Aesop’s fable.  They are ants.  And they do labour, not work.

There is another reason that people work.  It doesn’t fit into any of Yankelovich’s definitions of work.  There are some people who work not for money, not for the best possible material life, not because of a moral necessity or society’s rules – but because they cannot live without working.  For them, work is a natural necessity that has nothing to do with either morals or money.

There are three good examples of people who illustrate that work is different from labour.  A good example of someone who could not live without working was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the great Viennese musician and composer.  He could not accept life without making music.  To live without creating music was meaningless to him.  Jack London, a great American writer, spent his entire life in an effort to describe people with strong personalities and willpower, people who were trying to realize the truth about life.  Roald Amundsen, the great Norwegian explorer, sacrificed his life for the work of exploration.  He was the first person to reach the South Pole.

The people I have been talking about lived in order to work.  They considered work something very interesting.  It made existence more exciting; it gave meaning to their lives.  Life and work were the same for them.  However, they don’t fit into the characters of Aesop’s ant or Yankelovich’s workers.  The three of them spent long periods of time without working.  These were times of terrible depression, stress, and even the threat of madness.  Mozart was under a depression after his mother’s death.  The last years of his life, he drank heavily and he died in poverty.  Jack London wasn’t more successful: alcoholism and financial problems led him to commit suicide at the age of 40.  Roald Amundsen was killed during the air search for an Italian explorer, Umberto Nobile.  It would be very simple to say that these people didn’t do any real work because they were lazy or because they could not handle problems due to a weak will.  However, like a glowworm, which does nothing at all, they made a beautiful light through their work.  The light they made illuminated whole generations.

I believe that the difference between work and labour can explain a lot of things.  Sometimes it is difficult to recognize the difference between them, but it is important to do so.  Since earliest times humans have created.  Their creativity has brought the greatest advances and inventions into the world.  Uncreative work, or labour, leaves no trace in history.  The majestic pyramids of Egypt, built through the labour of thousands of slaves but the work of only a few architects, still stand today as a monument to creative work.  They are a combination of work and labour.  So, why are we trying to differentiate the two terms?  First, it is important the difference between work and labour.  Second, it is important t work rather than labour in order to create rather than merely produce.

Work cited:

Yankelovich, Daniel.  “The Work Ethic is Underemployed.”  Psychology Today  (May 1982)

This article is taken from the book “Write to be Read. Reading, Reflection, and Writing” by William R. Smaller, page 102 – 103.  It is an essay written by a student from Azerbaijan.

by Donald Hall (1928 – )

What’s Good, What’s Bad

The claims I make for fiction are large: that it alerts and enlarges our minds, our connections with each other past and present, our understanding of our feelings.  These claims apply to excellent literature only.  This suggests that some fiction is better than other fiction, and that some narratives are not literature at all.  Even if judgments are always subject to reversal, even if there is no way we can be certain of being correct, evaluation lives at the center of literary study.

When I was nineteen, I liked to read everything: science fiction, Russian novels, mystery stories, great poems, adventure magazines.  Then for six months after an accident, sentenced to a hospital bed and a body cast, I set myself a reading list, all serious books I had been thinking about getting to.  Of course there was a background to this choice: I had been taught by a good teacher who had directed and encouraged and stimulated my reading.  I read through Shakespeare, the Bible in the King James version, novels by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Toward the end of six months, taking physical therapy, I hurried to finish the books I had assigned myself; I looked forward to taking a vacation among private detectives and adventurers of the twenty-fourth century.  I thought I would take a holiday of light reading.

When I tried to read the light things, I experienced one of those “turning points in life” we are asked to describe in freshman composition.  I remember the dismay, the abject melancholy that crept over me as I realized – restless, turning from book to book in search of entertainment – that these books bored me; that I was ruined for life, that I would never again lose myself to stick-figure characters and artificial suspense.  Literature ruined me for light reading…

I don’t mean to say that I was able to give reasons why Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel about a murder was better than Agatha Christie’s or why Aldous Huxley’s view of the future, thought less exciting, was more satisfying than Astounding Science Fiction’s.  But I began a lifetime of trying to figure out why.  What is it that makes Chekhov so valuable to us?  The struggle to name reasons for value – to evaluate works of art – is lifelong, and although we may never arrive at satisfactory explanations, the struggle makes the mind more sensitive, more receptive to the next work of literature it encounters.  And the mind becomes more sensitive and receptive to literature, it may become more receptive to all sorts of things.

By Donald Hall (1928 – )

When we learn to read fiction, we acquire pleasure and a resource we never lose.  Although literary study is impractical in one sense – few people make their living reading books – in another sense it is almost as practical as breathing.  Literature records and embodies centuries of human thought and feeling, preserving for us the minds of people who lived before us, who were like us and unlike us, against whom we can measure our common humanity and our historical difference.  And when we read the stories of our contemporaries they illuminate the world all of us share.

When we read great literature, something changes in us that stays changed.  Literature remembered becomes material to think with.  No on who has read The Death of Ivan Ilych well is quite the same again.  Reading adds tools by which we observe, measure, and judge the people and the properties of our universe; we understand the actions and motives of others and of ourselves.

In the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, the wise ant builds his storehouse against winter and prospers; the foolish grasshopper saves nothing and perishes.  Anyone who dismisses the study of literature on the ground that it will not be useful – to a chemist or an engineer, to a foreman or an X-ray technician – imitates the grasshopper.  When we shut from our lives everything except food and shelter, part of us starves to death.  Food for this hunger is music, painting, film, plays, poems, stories, and novels.  Much writing in newspapers, magazines, and popular novels is not literature, if we reserve that word for work of high quality.  This reading gives us as little nourishment as most television and most fast food.  For the long winters and energetic summers of our lives, we require the sustenance of literature.

Reading fiction old and new – taking into ourselves the work of nineteenth-century Russian, contemporary English, Irish, and especially American storytellers – we build a storehouse of knowledge and we entertain ourselves as well.  But to take pleasure and understanding from fiction we have to learn how to read it.  No one expects to walk to a computer and be able to program it without first learning something about computers.  For some reason – perhaps because we are familiar with words from childhood and take them for granted – we tend to think that a quick glance at the written word should reward us, and that if we do not take instant satisfaction the work is beyond us, or not worth it, or irrelevant or boring.  But all our lives, in other skills, we have needed instruction and practice – to be able to ride a bicycle, drive a car, play guitar, shoot baskets, typewrite, dance.

The knowledge we derive from literature can seem confusing.  Equally great works may contradict each other in the generalizations we derive from them.  One work may recommend solitude, another society.  One may advise us to seize the moment, another to live a life of contemplation.  Or, two good readers may disagree about the implication of a work and each argue convincingly, with detailed references to the writing, in support of contrary interpretations.  A complex work of fiction cannot be reduced to a simple, correct meaning.  In an elementary arithmetic text, the answers may be printed in the back of the book.  There are no answers to be printed in the back of any collection of literature.

Such nebulousness, or ambiguity, disturbs some students.  After an hour’s class discussion of a short story, with varying interpretations offered, they want to know “But what does it mean?”  We must admit that literature is inexact, and its truth is not easily verifiable.  Probably the story means several things at once, and not one thing at all.  This is not to say, however, that it means anything that anybody finds in it.  Although differing, equally defensible opinions are common, error is even more common.

When we speak of truth in the modern world, we usually mean something scientific or tautological.  Arithmetic contains the truth of tautology; two and two make four because our definitions of two and four say so.  In laboratories we encounter the truth of statistics and the truth of observation.  If we smoke cigarettes heavily, it is true we have one chance in four to develop lung cancer.  When we heat copper wire over a […] burner, the flame turns blue.

But there is an older sense of truth, in which statements apparently opposite can be valid.  In this older tradition, truth is dependent on context and circumstance, on the agreement of sensible men and women – like “Guilty” or “Not Guilty” verdict of a jury.  Because this literary (or philosophical, or legal, or historical) truth is inexact, changeable, and subject to argument, literature can seem nebulous to minds accustomed to arithmetical certainty.

Let me argue this:  if literature is nebulous or inexact; if it is impossible to determine, with scientific precision, the value or the meaning of art, this inexactness is the price literature pays for representing whole human beings.  Human beings themselves, in their feelings and thoughts, in the wandering of their short lives, are ambiguous and ambivalent, shifting mixtures of permanence and change, direction and disorder.  Because literature is true to life, true to complexities of human feeling, different people will read the same work with different responses.  And the storyteller’s art will sometimes affirm that opposite things are both true because they are.  Such condition is not tidy; it is perhaps regrettable – but it is human nature.

Little white lies: lies about trivial matters, like false excuses to spare a person’s feelings; flattery; “how are you feeling”; “how’s it going”; etc. – these lies must be truly harmless and inconsequential, never intended to be given a second thought.

Placebos: deceptions to make a person feel better (like sugar pills); euphemisms; some self-help gimmickry; false reassurance.

Pufferies: inflation and exaggeration to make something sound better than it is; false praise; false encouragement; false support.

Misdirections: false recommendations; intentional incorrect or incomplete answers.

Bluffs: fake resumes; false credentials.

Protections String-Alongs: lies to protect a colleague; lies t protect a client lies t liars (to teach them a lesson; to give them a taste of their own medicine).

Snow Jobs: lies to enemies.

Terminological Inexactitudes: lies to the boss (this term was first use Winston Churchill!); also knows as “soft-soaps”.

Defensive Lies: lies in a crisis when innocent lives, health, or safety are at risk.  (may be morally justifiable if the lie can pass the “publicity test”.)

The source: that was in my ENGL 225 handout “Ethics and Professional Communications or You Want Me to Write What?”

Protecting from Unnecessary Hurt

By Donald W. McCullogh

Taken from “Write to be Read” (Reading, Reflection, and Writing) by William R. Smalzer

Verna claims that I said her baby was ugly.  I can’t imagine being that insensitive, though it was a long time ago and my memory isn’t exact in these matters.  I do recall Verna holding up her newborn and saying, “Isn’t she cute?”  And I, seeing a splotchy, scrunched little face and being committed to complete honesty, must have said something like “Well, she really is … a baby?”  Or maybe, “It takes an infant a few months before she can really be considered cute.”  Or I suppose there is a small possibility I said, “Strictly speaking, she is kind of ugly at the moment but will undoubtedly become a ravishing beauty.”

Nearly thirty years have passed, but whenever I run into Verna she reminds me that I called her baby ugly.  I don’t know her daughter; for all I know she became Miss Universe or perhaps my words lodged in her tiny subconscious and she has spent the last fifteen years in psychoanalysis working on low self-esteem.  In any event, I now wish I had lied.  It would have saved all of us a lot of grief.

Occasionally, courtesy calls for a lie.  Let me hasten to stress I’m talking about white lies, not black or gray or even off-white lies.  Show-white lies.  But even so, I realize I’ve just launched this chapter into very dangerous waters, with though ethical questions all around us.  We had better navigate through this subject very carefully, wit a firm grip on the tiller…

… How can we speak truthfully about lying?  The ancient philosopher Aristotle may be of help to us.  He said that honesty was more than unloading everything to everyone.  Rather, it is speaking the right truth to the right person at the right time in the right way for the right reason.

Not every truth is mine to tell: a truth shared in confidence and a truth that would needlessly hurt another is not mine to tell.  Not every person has a right to know the truth.  Some willfully distort what they hear; some use facts to cover a larger, more important truth: some have blabbermouths with unrelenting and undiscriminating tongues.  Not every time is appropriate for the truth: some seasons call for tactful silence: they day your friend’s daughter dropped out of school is not the day to tell her about your daughter making the honour roll.  Not every way of communicating honours the truth.  Sometimes the manner in which something is said subverts reality, as when a preacher says all the right words about God’s love but through a tone of voice and a concluding string of “oughts” (therefore we ought to do this and we ought to do that) that makes you feel guiltier than ever.  Not every reason deserves the use of truth: some motives for telling the truth are simply too destructive to deserve the respectability of being clothed in the truth.  Some expressions of “honesty” are really attempts to demean and belittle another person.

When it is the wrong truth or the wrong person or the wrong time or the wrong way or the wrong reason, a white lie may have more integrity than a facile, insensitive “honesty”.  But when does a white lie begin to turn a slight shade of gray?  When does it cross over and become an immoral act of dishonesty?

Perhaps a good test would be to ask, Does this lie protect the other person or does it protect me?  Let’s waste no time in admitting that it’s not easy to tell the difference.  On the surface, a lie may appear t protect another person from unnecessary pain; on closer examination, however, it’s actually an attempt to save me from uncomfortable exposure.  In Graham Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter”, a police officer in a West African colony during the war has an affair, and in an effort to “protect” his wife from the pain of the truth, walks down a road of falsehood that leads to disaster.  Greene’s story may be fiction but it’s a profound truth reenacted everyday.  It’s easy to convince ourselves we’re guarding the feelings of another when we’re only trying to protect ourselves – and this sort of deception often ends in more complication and more lying and more pain than we could have ever imagined.

But just because it’s difficult to tell the difference between and appropriate lie and a morally unacceptable lie does not mean we give up the attempt to make the distinction.  Life, after all, is difficult.  So we press on, doing our best, knowing we’re not God, and counting on the grace of God when we blow it.  Though committed to honesty, we know that sometimes courtesy calls for creative stretching the truth.

Dear Natasha & Jonathan!

Take a deep breath (or better a hot bath followed by a cocktail) for this is going to be a long story…

This gift is to mark the occasion that we’ve missed all of your important occasions so far such as Christmas, the New Year’s Eve, the 10^th anniversary of you being happily not married, Jonathan’s birthday, Natasha’s graduation, and the new arrival of your cats (I do not remember their names, but these days I am not quite sure I remember mine).

So, we are clear with the purpose of this gift (not that every gift needs a purpose, but this one happens to have one).  As for its combination, it was unwittingly left at my discretion as Natasha refused categorically to give me any hints.  So, if you do not like it, you have a choice of being more cooperative next time or being stuck with my taste (questionable no doubt, as all tastes are).  Maybe we will get you a nice “dust collector” next time (you are going to have a place of your own, after all, and those usually have ample space for storing dust collectors.  Paying mortgage must have some rewards!)

Anyway, they say it is not the gift that counts, but the thought.  So mine went this path…

“The gift will help Natasha and Jonathan set the mood for the party of planning their next trip to see us.  They sit on a couch (they do not pick up the phone and are deaf to the requests from their numerous relatives and friends), relax, have a drink, put some music on, look at some pictures in the photo album and think “remember (Natasha, Jonathan) we have some friends who live in Toronto.  It is not all that far.  We will go visit them.  We know that we are not only invited but also welcome, which is not necessarily mutually exclusive.  Maybe we manage to see them before fall … (see the card)”

Some Q&A to follow:

Q: Oh, but they have a baby… A: We know that having a baby may not be a major attraction especially given your recent loss of a water fountain, but when you come visit us, all the damage can only be done to our place (think about it!)

Q: Oh, but they are on a diet…A: We agree that all that dieting might be off-putting to normal people, but it will be over soon.  Nikolai’s ETA at the “Being Supermodel” destination is end of April, and mine is end of May.  And we know that it will take you at least a couple of months to get ready and come to Toronto.

Q: Oh, but Svetlana cannot cook…  A: My marginal cooking skills should not be an excuse either.  After all, who could prepare a decent dinner, if one has to exclude pea soup, boiled eggs, mayonnaise, store-bought dressings, squash and potatoes?  Only Jonathan with his Chef’s degree.  But do not you worry, we can go out or, maybe, stay in and have some nice fresh cauliflower and a couple of grapefruits (Natasha loves those, I know!)

So, now you have to come.  And maybe this time we will win a game of billiard.

There are only a couple thoughts left (you may now refill your glasses).  The bear baby on the gift bag is not a distasteful hint (“where is yours?”), but simply an oversight on my part, I did not notice it as it was hiding in the folding.  You can consider it (the bear on the bag) a little spy we sent to check if you are trying to get ready for the trip to visit us.

And my English is not perfect, never was, never will be, so please excuse all the pronoun shifting, run-ons, bad spelling, and grammar.  The lack of thoughts clarity is however not language related, but you can excuse it, too, now that you are hopefully in the good mood.

So, please come and see us, both of you, we will be looking forward to it.

Svetlana, Nikolai, and Daniel

Thank you for being there for me.  I appreciate both what you said and what you did yesterday.  Despite the fact that I might make you as uncomfortable as everybody else you are the only one in our group who did not run away from me like from a poisonous snake.  You helped me.  How?  You smiled and you laughed and you went to see art, even though at the moment you may needed your cup of tea more.

But the most helpful part of your help was that you made an effort.  You listened, you understood, you did not criticize my “torturing” strangers.  This guy Christian who did not have to, and did not want to, but with some coaching “went with the program”.  He did tell a joke, didn’t he?  I said I had a really bad day and all I asked for was to help.  The trick is how.  Help me my way, the way that I need, because I already know that if you succeed it will work.  It will work for me. I do not give you any instructions. You figure it out to make your way through the maze.  Not only Christian succeeded but also he did an A+ job.  He made me laugh.  But not only.  He could not have possibly known that his joke would turn out to be very relevant to my situation.  The way I see the point of his story is this.  The family guy could not handle being with others because he thought they were the reason that he felt frustrated (stressed, irritated, unhappy, you name it).  But when isolated and left alone he could handle it even less.  The imagery was gross but it made me listen.  It engaged me on a personal level.  I do not like that type of jokes.   So inside I have this sensation …oh, yuck, I do not like the way it is going…this is really disgusting…  But it was me who initiated “the process”, so I stayed and listened.  I did not ask Christian to make me like the joke.  Well, you were there.  What did I learn from that experience?  Nothing that I did not already know, but something I just could not get without it

I am the problem, when I figure out how to help myself; only then I can help others.  Or not help.

And you told me it was better to do it sooner than later.  Yes, you nailed it, girl. Right on the money.  I consider myself to be shrewd and perceptive, yet it took me only fifteen years to finally see the obvious.  Stop trying to find an understanding where it could not be found.  No matter how much I want to and no matter how hard I try I cannot make a blind person see and a deaf person hear.  It always had the choice to help or not to, a choice to sacrifice my needs for the needs of others.  So from now on, when I feel the urge to help others, I will pause and ask the question “Is it something that I really want to do?” So my action plan is stop helping people.  They can manage.  The trained professionals told me to “feel the fear and do it anyway”.  I did. I made a change today. I can not find words to describe the hurt…  But I managed with the help of people like you.  You do not need a diploma in psychology; you already know how to help people.  Can you do it?  You already did.  You succeeded where a “professional” failed. Next time you need a story in order to prove that you can help people, use this one.

I was totally wrong about the class.  Even though Girl # 7 said that she worked as a social worker and she could help people, I did not believe her claim.  Why?  I do know, but she proved me wrong today and I am glad that she did.   I already sensed that the only relationship Girl # 3 has with Gold is that she has a heart of one. And look at her face when she smiles, it radiates light; it is so beautiful, that I cannot take my eyes of.  And yet she struggles and struggles and struggles, and my god she deserves better.  I was wrong about the girls, at least some of them.  But I sensed the other thing right.  Going to school to learn how to help people cannot teach you if you do not have a heart.

Did you like the story about Tolerance?  Do you think that it describes you accurately as a Cancer?  I did not think that I fit the profile.  Not until today.

-          

I am the Scorpio who came first and did not take tolerance because it cannot be used for torture.  That is right.  I do not need tolerance.  Honestly is enough.  Brutal honesty, that is.

Many pairs of words imply each other. Finish implies complete, so completely finsish is redundant. So are many other pairs of words:

1. past memories

2. various differences

3. each individual

4. basic fundamentals

5. true facts

6. important essentials

7. future plans

8. sudden crisis

9. terrible tragedy

10. end result

11. final outcome

12. free gift

13. past history

14. unexpected surprise

Example: Before the travel agent was completely able to finish explaining the various differences between all of the many vacation packages her travel agency was offering, the customer changed his future plans.

Revised: Before the travel agent finished explaining the differences between the vacation packages her travel agency was offering, the customer changed his plans.

Any of you who have been asked to produce a letter of recommendation might find yourselves wondering how to describe your subject’s less-than-sterling qualities.

Here are some phrases you might find useful.

It was given to me by Julian Craft, my instructor for ENGL 225 (Professional Writing) course at DeVry.

For an employee who is so unproductive that the job is better left unfilled:

“I can assure you that no person would be better for the job.”

For an employee with no ambition:

“He could not care less about the number of hours he had to put in.”

“You would indeed be fortunate to get this person to work for you.”

For a stupid employee:

“There is nothing you can teach a man like him.”

“I most enthusiastically recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever.”

For a dishonest employee:

“Her true ability was deceiving.”

“He’s an unbelievable worker.”

For a employee who is not worth further consideration as a job candidate:

“I would urge you to waste no time in making this candidate an offer of employment.”

“All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this candidate or recommend him too highly.”

For the chronically absent:
”A man like him is hard to find.”

“”It seemed her career was just taking off.”

For the office drunk:

“I feel his real talent is wasted here.”

“We generally found him loaded with work to do.”

“Every hour with him was a happy hour.”