The banner line shows up in the main board format (dark background), but it does not show up on the dashboard comment interface.

On that interface, the first line of your comment is “I’ve seen horrors…horrors that you’ve seen.”

To avoid this, I never use a banner line that continues on into a comment. The old paragraph mark still works for me.

…on the banner line, so I don’t quite understand what your remarks mean.

The long quote comes from a monolog Marlon Brando unloads on the Martin Sheen character. “The horror, the horror…” are Kurtz’s last words before he dies.

“The horror, the horror…” originally come from the Joseph Conrad novel on which “Apocalypse” is very loosely based, “Heart of Darkness”. The latter is set in the 19th century Belgian Congo. The Ivory trader Kurtz mutters those words just before he dies. If you’ve never read “Heart”, you should try it. It’s probably cheap on Kindle, being public domain. Like “Apocalypse”, it is a long, gradual descent into hell via a long river journey.

Fortunately, I was familiar with both the quote and your career.

I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget.

And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly.

You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

You very well might wish you had continued this as Alice used to wish she had maintained her license. You might wish that you had become the next John Frieda.

Or you might wish you had done something completely different. You have demonstrated over and over that you are clever enough to have done nearly anything you set your mind to doing.

You are always included Jody, but take care to stand clear of the frequent circle jerks around here.

Believe me, after my father died, my mother had to do that, and I saw the toll it took on her. Among other humiliations and indignities she had to endure in the business world, she repeatedly saw the jerks she worked for get promotions over her head, when it was her skills and knowledge of the business that made them look good. And the excuse she was given was “these men were breadwinners for their families”, as if she wasn’t.

It was her sacrificing herself for me that allowed me to have the luxury to pursue a career. If you read between the lines on my posts, I think you’ll see at least one man who knows who to thank for his success.

Besides, I think I emphasized careers too much in my original post. I think Frank’s response was much more in line with what I originally meant to discuss. But of course, like too many men, I too often confuse my work with my life. They are related, but they are not the same. As a retiree, that is stating to become clearer to me every single day.

As a woman who chose the career to raise a family, I have a tendency to feel I don’t belong in discussions of careers.