I’ve been thinking a lot about how I present myself to other people. I tend to sort-of explode at a person I’ve just met: lots of gesticulation, weird references, excitability. Part of me wonders whether my self-expression is a queer thing, that the explosion is a result of having kept stuff inside for too long. This week I wanted to run a sort-of test. I wrote to the TNG staff, “Ever had somebody you just met go “tell me about yourself?”

For this week’s staff survey, we turned the reigns over to Katie Omberg, the author of TNG’s great workplace comic, Office Bitch. Unsurprisingly, Katie came up with a work related question.

What are the top 2 things that keep you in the city you live in? Friends, family, job, weather? If you aren’t happy in your city, and are looking to move to another city, what’s the number one requirement for you to find happiness in your new city?

Our TNG staff bears the revealing secrets of enjoying a good guilty pleasure. Some may surprise you and some you might automatically connect with. Enjoy this weeks Staff Survey and don’d be afraid to share a guilty secret of your own!

We live in historic times. A silly mantra, perhaps, but accurate! Watching the world pivot around the turmoil in a single country has got the TNG crew in a historical frame of mind. While our current times are indeed exciting and interesting, what if you could lift yourself out of time and place and land anywhere? If your surrounding were limited only by your imagination, would you transport yourself to another point in history?

The winter solstice is more than a month distant, and while the amount of sunlight we get each day is getting greater and greater, the winter itself is far from over. Next week we find out from the groundhog how much winter we have left this year, and we know he’s never right. East coasters are struggling through inches (or feet!) of snow, at times like this it seems that spring might never come. We thought we’d re-inaugurate the Friday Staff Survey with some uplifting tips for how to survive winter:
How do you banish the winter blahs?

With the advent of Hulu and Netflix On-Demand, so much good old TV from the past is now available for free whenever you want it. Personally, I’ve been enjoying re-watching all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I don’t know that I want my friends to find out about it. What is your fave guilty pleasure TV show?

Answers below.

This week, Raphael thought it would be interesting to see how we all felt about digital music. He asked the group: Given how most of us on TNG have a special place in our lives for music, how do you feel about downloading vs. paying for music? Do you download stuff illegallly, buy MP3s online from iTunes or Amazon, or still buy CDs or, gasp, vinyl?

Check out the variety of opinions below.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine featured a story on 4/4/10 on the shocking recent discovery that there is a lot of same-sex coupling going on in the animal kingdom. Conservatives condemn gay sex as “unnatural” until we find it occurring naturally in other species. Then they say that animals can also be cannibalistic (rival chimpanzee gangs often eat their rivals infants) or just outright gross (gorillas throwing their feces at one another), and that we should rise above the natural order of animals. While we already know what TNG’s Topher Burns thinks on the matter, what do you think about the prevalence of naturally occurring gay sex in the animal kingdom?

With Easter and passover this week, I thought I’d check in with the staff to see how they’re feeling about religion this week. See their answers below.

With both Easter and Passover this week, it’s an appropriate time to ask: what’s your take on religion? Important social construct or ridiculous social crutch? Something in between? How do you identify? (I guess that was more than one question. Whatevs.)