Ironically inappropriate

There's a conference in town this week that I've attended in the past, but didn't feel the need to attend this year, given the new job and all. But, I crashed the networking part yesterday evening and I attended a dinner with about 20 other company representatives in Boston's North End.

Of course, we went to a little Italian restaurant that served some decent pasta and chicken marsala. The other entree option was veal marsala, which had several of the sustainability professionals all buzzing. "Veal? How inhumane! And no vegetarian dish? I cannot believe it!"

But after several bottles of wine, we let down our guards and started talking about anything and everything, often making some pretty un-PC jokes that are tangentially related to our line of work.

It's a funny thing, being in the business of "doing good." We sort of feel like we know the proper way to comport ourselves, and it's clear that on some level we all care about the planet and our communities, so we have license to say whatever off-color thing we want. So let's just go ahead and make jokes about mountain top removal mining, child labor and discriminatory hiring practices! We all know it's not right - we speak with irony!