The year is winding down and my responsibilities to it are almost finished. I have about two more weeks of going to work, one more of these columns (vacations will cause me to miss the next two weeks) and a lot of the shopping is already done. This must be making me more playful or something, because my abilities to remain serious about anything have been seriously waning.

I spent the entire day of work on Friday talking to people. Meetings, lunch and informal chats. The amount of work done: almost zero. But the things I learned were, of course, invaluable.

1. Coming up with a nice turn of phrase goes a long way in terms of goodwill. While working on a committee project, I submitted "tar pits of mediocrity" along with a few other well-formed metaphors. Everyone wants to tattoo the phrase on their forehead now. Not as many were as enthusiastic about my extended metaphor of "dipping our tea bags into the deep ocean of marketing and spreading the leaves to find the answers" (my personal favorite, labeled as "the poetic one" by our committee head), maybe because it is too long to fit on anyone's forehead.

2. It's a good idea to be close friends with the co-worker you work with the most. My project manager and I skipped a large company lunch gathering and snuck off to our own little pow-wow. There we discussed the state of the company as well as other important topics. Because she schedules and organizes the projects I do, she has to deal with my sometimes moody and erratic behavior. Luckily, she knows that no matter what I feel like from day to day, I'll still get my work done. So we have a nice yin yang thing going. I stumble into work and ask her what day it is, and she always knows! I think the one thing we always end up agreeing about is it would be really hard for either of us to do our job well without the other as backup.

3. Interns are still idealistic about work after college. I try to encourage a bit of idealism, but I also like to stress a bit of realism. During an early afternoon chat with one of our interns (the one I usually don't work with--she's attached to a different team which seems to love giving her busy work), I found there is still a hope of finding a job somehow within the perimeters of her major. She is a marketing major--apparently rather popular at UNM these days. I can't remember if there were a ton of marketing majors when I was going to school, but I do remember that a large percentage of journalism majors I worked with at the school paper ended up in marketing. I've had jobs in both of these fields, and I know there's money in marketing and not so much in journalism. I guess college students are more practical these days than I was. Of course, maybe I've never really been very practical.

4. Dating in your 30s isn't as easy as dating in college. While discussing the pending events of our weekends with another of my co-workers (a fellow thirty-something), I realized (once again) there is a lot more leeway and compromise involved in successful dating than I usually give. In college, there is an almost unlimited supply of willing partners. The number begins to diminish as everyone gets older. People get married, cohabitate, stop going out or get lost in their jobs. And the ones left available are filled with a relatively large set of baggage. My co-worker, who is rather new to town, was a bit distressed about not being able to suggest a good place to eat (because he hasn't been out in this town much). He always has to defer to his date. I pointed out that this might be the best approach anyway. The last thing anyone wants is for the entire conversation to revolve around all the reasons why your date hates the restaurant you are eating at.

5. Pimpin' ain't easy. After a long day of selling my ideas and self to my co-workers and managers, I get a little tired of being so damn polite. It's nice to go out for drinks and food and let the waitresses take care of me. Not that I'm mean to the girls, but I'm not trying so hard to make them love me. As long as the tip is good, they're fine. And I can relax, slump into a buzz and stop selling myself. Let me take a little breather and think about how good it feels to be free of commitment...

...yeah, that's the stuff.

Matt Worley is only a part-time pimp. He's got other skillz to pay the billz.