The article ran in USA TODAY this week, "Favorite colors test shows CEOs are different; take the test." Friend Vic took the test today, and that prompted me to do the same. The results were pretty impressive. Apparently my struggle to find any career beyond my current one had come naturally. I was okay with that idea. Color science at work!

Seriously, read the story and take the test. My results with notes:

Best Occupational Category
You're a CREATOR

Keywords
Nonconforming, Impulsive, Expressive, Romantic, Intuitive, Sensitive, and Emotional

(Friend John last week, starting a conversation about this blog with an awesomely straight face: "I enjoy watching your emotional upheaval.")

These original types place a high value on aesthetic qualities and have a great need for self-expression. They enjoy working independently, being creative, using their imagination, and constantly learning something new. Fields of interest are art, drama, music, and writing or places where they can express, assemble, or implement creative ideas.

CREATOR OCCUPATIONS
Suggested careers are Advertising Executive, Architect, Web Designer, Creative Director, Public Relations, Fine or Commercial Artist, Interior Decorator, Lawyer, Librarian, Musician, Reporter, Art Teacher, Broadcaster, Technical Writer, English Teacher, Architect, Photographer, Medical Illustrator, Corporate Trainer, Author, Editor, Landscape Architect, Exhibit Builder, and Package Designer.

(I'd never thought of being a Package Designer.)

CREATOR WORKPLACES
Consider workplaces where you can create and improve beauty and aesthetic qualities. Unstructured, flexible organizations that allow self-expression work best with your free-spirited nature.

Suggested Creator workplaces are advertising, public relations, and interior decorating firms; artistic studios, theaters and concert halls; institutions that teach crafts, universities, music, and dance schools. Other workplaces to consider are art institutes, museums, libraries, and galleries.

(Funny: When I visit job sites, Kennedy Center jobs always catch me.)

2nd Best Occupational Category
You're a PERSUADER

Keywords:
Witty, Competitive, Sociable, Talkative, Ambitious, Argumentative, and Aggressive

These enterprising types sell, persuade, and lead others. Positions of leadership, power, and status are usually their ultimate goal. Persuasive people like to take financial and interpersonal risks and to participate in competitive activities. They enjoy working with others inside organizations to accomplish goals and achieve economic success.

(Take the test, dammit.)

Posted this Sun-Times article to Facebook but wanted to put it here too. The headline — "Hansberry's white roommate tells of reading 'A Raisin in the Sun' " — is odd enough to get your attention, and the story comes through with so much more. Simply lived and told.

If you have time to read one more story, I ran across a link I'd posted here in the past to a 2004 Post story about the play's origins. That link is now dead, but you can still find the story here. The first paragraph:

There was nothing like it on Broadway, which made it all the more powerful and beautiful and mesmerizing and tender. A great billowing curtain had been thrown back on a whole people, a whole race. The whole production had a leaping, antic, ferocious quality to it, as if the playwright planned to split something wide open, right in front of that first-night audience.

My dad's photos Saturday bring consideration of the greatest D.C. snows of my life. Below, welcome to the fam's front and back yards.

February 1983. I obviously recall nothing, but photo albums show brother Rob, three months old, and I propped up in the alley behind our apartment building. If I am remembering the albums correctly.

January 1987. We get back-to-back snowstorms totaling more 21". My dad moves my Playskool playhouse to the front yard, and the family turns it into a snow fort. The pictures in the albums show more, but all I remember is how the snow had awesomely consumed my world. This aftermath the single greatest snow-affected moment of my youth.

January 1996. The single worst snow-affected moment of youth. Amid the blizzard, Gonzaga is one of the few high schools not to cancel the school week outright. The week happens to be finals week. So, every day of the week, the fourth biggest snowstorm in city history, exams threaten to come the next day. Fourth biggest storm, greatest killjoy.

February 2003. I'm in Atlanta and wish the snow would happen there.

December 2009, January 2010. First D.C. winter with two 15" storms.

Whether you're here, on Fb or on Twitter, share your snow history…

Caught up on New Yorkers this weekend. From a Sam Shepard profile:

Though Shepard lacked East Coast sophistication—he was poorly read in those days—he brought news of what he called “the whacked out corridors of broken-off America”: its blue highways, its wilderness, its wasteland, its animal kingdom, its haunted lost souls, its violence. “People want a street angel. They want a saint with a cowboy mouth,” a prescient character in one of Shepard’s early one-acts said. Shepard, it turned out, was the answer to those prayers. He got a job busing tables at the Village Gate, and began to write in earnest. “I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced,” he said. “There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer. . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.”

Outside magazine pages, friend Greg surfaced two striking quotes in his status messages last week. From Joseph Campbell, "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." From F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."

In that vein… maybe in that vein, for me at least… friend Casey posted four mash-ups for his readers' Super Bowl parties. The standout for me was Mighty Mike's Use the Same Old Song, where the Four Tops meet the Kings of Leon. I honestly haven't been able to stop listening to it.

A passage from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul leaps to mind. Marsh writes how The Same Old Song was "the immediate follow-up to the Four Tops' first big hit, I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" and the second song sounded the same as the first. Against its critics, he defends The Same Old Song as being what's known and so much more.

… The Same Old Song is a better record. If it's the same sax solo, it's bigger and brighter here; if the melody hardly varies, the bass line is bolder, the drums kick just a hair harder, and there's nothing quite as thrilling on I Can't Help Myself as The Same Old Song's vibes part. It's a probably a toss-up between the two lead vocals…. The lyrics are a big improvement over the cloying "Sugar pie honey bunch / You know that I love you" (even if they do begin "You're sweet as a honey bee."

Or maybe it's just like the song says: "I keep hearing the part that used to touch our heart."

You hear the old song, and the moon and stars end up in the pool every night. But there's a third song, a next night and new voices.

The running family gag from childhood, based on when I ran round the corner at the bottom of hill after church and passed the cutest girls in school piling into an '80s station wagon: Patrick says, "Hey, girls!" and promptly wipes out in the most ridiculous fashion possible. Feet go out from under, topsy turvy, Patrick tumbles across the Murphys' lawn. Did this happen in real life? No, but it was the dream, and it never got less funny. I supposedly got more coordinated after this. Apparently false.

Apparently, my apparent lack of coordination has been lying in wait for years, waiting to team up with left-handedness and my troubles with numbers. So, if you're a cute girl, I'm going to walk fine through the ice and snow, so I can continue to knock glasses through the air, all over you, run into half my exes at once and be the worst cards player ever.

Really? Really? I can't even estimate the odds! And yet, there we are.

Jonathan's reportedly now back in the States for a bit*, but we did get more of his first-person before he left the island. Above, via Vivi, Katz shows the wrecked AP house. Elsewhere, he talked to On the Media.

Related, Katz's dad spoke to DailyFinance, and fellow Daily alum Sam Eifling, who visited Katz last year, wrote about the Haiti reporting in the CJR: "For once, it seems that journalists are bristling on behalf of Haiti, a place usually painted by wariness and fear and resigned pity. Haitians themselves may be getting something like good press, no small development for the most maligned people in the hemisphere."

*If you're not aware of the way things work or you're inclined to hate news media, no, the AP hasn't stopped on Haiti. It's standard to rotate reporters through super-intense, 24/7 news situations, as you would teams of rescue workers, for their care and ability to go long-term.

Update: Was about to publish when I learned friend Sameer had been in Haiti after the quake. Here are two good photos copied from Fb, and the Muslim Media Network has a post about his team's work there.

The Islamic Medical Association of North America (IMANA) said today that it has helped convert the “Bojeux Parc” amusement park in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to a health care facility. The facility is being operated through a partnership between IMANA, Comprehensive Disaster Response Services (CDRS) and AIMER Haiti volunteers.

…

“On day one, an air hockey table doubled as a procedure table. Now, with our partners, we are providing services from pediatricians, obstetricians, emergency doctors, and surgeons to at least 100 patients a day. We are hoping to arrange equipment that would allow our surgeons to go from performing simple procedures to running a full mobile operating room,” said Dr. Sameer Gafoor, a volunteer physician in Port-au-Prince. Gafoor is a cardiologist at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blizzard…

Rocket Love, from Stevie Wonder's 1980 Hotter than July album. Sweat! "You took me riding in your rocket, gave me a star, but at a half a mile from heaven, you dropped me back down to this cold, cold world…"

The Harder They Come, Jimmy Cliff, for warmth and justice. "So as sure as the sun will shine, I'm gonna get my share now of what's mine…"

Lovers in the Cold, Springsteen Born to Run outtake. "Tonight we're lovers on that road, oh-oh-oh, running past the graveyards in the snow, oh-oh-oh, walking in the street with nowhere to go, oh-oh-oh…"

Mid-week snowfall. So much snow on the trees! So little on the roads!

The morning after the storm, we could each travel where we wished!

We could even think of stopping at the Key Bridge's new crepe cart!

The sky was gray but was not falling, and the world was open to us. 

The world was peaceful before the snowstorm at the end of the world.