In Which I Absolutely Refuse to Give Into Many, Many Homonym Jokes

So in my daily wanderings about the internet, scavenging for absolute metaphors that I can drop into conversation in order to give off the appearance of knowing "things", I came across what passes as an interesting nugget these days: the CEO of the Build-a-Bear Workshop is called the Chief Executive Bear. Her blog of "musings" is pretty much in line with the type of person who describes her week as "PAWSOME" (needless to say, emphasis hers); we're hardly talking some Seinfeldian universal-relating here, but if you're in the business of constructing anthropomorphic animals, it's a decent toilet read.

"I'm at risk for heart disease! Yay!"

Groan if you will, but you too would have to develop a pretty sophisticated emotional defense mechanism if your daily grind involved hundreds of gutted creatures parading past your eyes, so I think that inventing a word like "PAWSOME" shows some pretty impressive portmanteau-ing in the face of morbidity: it's now neck-and-neck with "chortle" in my rankings, just above Tribeca, and leagues above that piece of shit "vlog", which is still out there, saving dozens of internerds the milliseconds they'll need to tend to their sex life.

Now, this woman is not only the CEB--one of my other organs just punched my womb in the face as I abbreviated that--of the company, but she's also the founder, which is pretty unsurprising; I imagine the title throws a lot jobseekers off from the position. If some Harvard MBA does ascend to a position of power in the Build-a-Bear Corporation, they'd likely have to print their business cards on straight twenty dollar bills just to get a little respect at the alumni mixers. When the time does come for Ms. Clark to move on to that great beehive in the sky--I only hope the mortician appreciates the irony at the time of the embalming--I can't imagine anyone would begrudge her a little nepotism in passing the title on down the family line.

Our definition of "cuddly" is different than Eleanor's.

I actually think Ms. Clark might be a lot more cunning then people give her credit for. Imagine if you built a multimillion-dollar company based entirely on the sale of the unfinished products of another multimillion-dollar industry? Like, Ivory spends more than a century perfecting their 99.44 in order to keep that soft little naked baby fed, and then I just swoop in and start selling people sacks of lard and lye and make a mint. Or, if someone parked a wheelbarrow of sleeves outside of Gap and people came running. There's got to be some hard feelings there, right? Surely at some point, Ms. Clark thought of the consequences her business venture would have on Big Teddy Bear and feared for her safety?

For years, decades, Christ, centuries, kids have just fucking loved them some stuffed bears, and companies went crazy trying to make a dime off of them. They stole honey, we found it endearing. They stared, we bit. You'd think that the second people found themselves shelling out to watch bears simply mind their manners, the jig would be up, but we kept coming back for more, and the industry kept throwing shit against the wall. Then this broad comes along and sells us incomplete bears, and we throw money at her. I walk past the Build-a-Bear Workshop in New York City several times a week, and there's so many children holding hollow bear carcasses that I expect to see Sacajawea passing out juice boxes.

Bedtime Bear: the catchall bear for children that were neither cheery, lucky, nor capable of loving-a-lot.

On a note that is either completely related or one of the scariest non sequiturs ever, I would definitely go to a Build-a-Human Workshop.