Structures of My Day

I had a little bit of trouble waking up this morning. I think of myself as a morning person, and in general I am, but the truth is, these days are happening more and more often. I talk about myself as if I still bounce out of bed every morning at 7am and immediately start work, but if I take a cold, hard look at my behavior, that’s no longer true.

When I was an undergraduate, and for much of graduate school (exceptions being when I was too in love to stick to a schedule), I did get out of bed early and followed a fairly rigid pattern. I always thought that as I got older, this would not only remain true, but become more so. In fact, the opposite has happened. Life has become less structured, more chaotic, less predictable. And I’m tired more often! I wouldn’t go back for ANYthing, my goodness, the wisdom and perspective are more than worth the tiredness, but I struggle with it. I think in my ideal day, I’d know what I was doing in advance and I’d do it.

For example:

7am-8am yoga

8am-9am get ready for work

9am-5pm work, no unexpected breaks or meetings, all meetings predictable, all work scheduled in its allotted time slot

etc.

This is how I ran my life during the busiest parts of undergrad. Now, tasks never fit in their allotted time, I’m too tired to exercise in the morning (although I exercise nearly every day, sometimes more than once a day, which is such a blessing) and unexpected things and people are ALWAYS happening!

And more significantly, to me, although everything gets done, when I impose a structure on myself I can’t stick to it. It’s like I’ve gotten sassy with myself now that I know that I CAN and still survive and thrive in my business and personal life. Certainly not the direction I expected to go!

Local Food (And Other Food Restrictions) Makes Choosing Easy

So, I have written several times about various food movements, fake food allergies etc. There’s another thing that I’m noticing about food social movements. In a world of infinite choice, they help us narrow down. As someone who was vegetarian up until very recently, I never had more than a few things to choose from on a mainstream menu. I know what I liked, so it was never hard. I still only eat organic, ethically-raised meat, and that not very often, but it has opened up my choices, and that has helped me realize how much I appreciated NOT having too many choices. I feel the same way about the food coop where I buy my groceries. It is small, especially compared with the huge grocery stories in many parts of US, and that helps me to have less panic about choosing the right thing.

I’m not saying that local food movements aren’t important ethical choices, as are choices to be vegetarian or vegan. But isn’t it also a nice effect that they make life a little easier? Ever since the popularizing of studies showing that when people have TOO MANY choices, they tend not to buy things, it makes sense as a business model to limit those choices, and this is what I believe many niche food marketers have started to understand.

All Girls are Princesses, All Women Are Divas

Queen Latifah wants you to be the most important person to you. Or something like that, is what the subway says to me. I’m not picking on Queen Latifah, I like her a whole whole bunch for lots of reasons. And I get that’s she’s supporting her book ‘Put on Your Crown: Life-Changing Moments on the Path to Queendom’. I just gotta get my critique on, even though I know I’m not the first feminist on this kvetch-wagon.

After being at a Disney resort (see previous post), I’m keenly aware of the discourse around princess-ness for little girls. The commodification of the desire to be special, the weird perversion of the parenting style that emphasizes that everyone is special. As long as it’s not taken to extremes, I think that the type of parenting that springs from a really good intention around self-esteem, multicultural celebration and other positive messages about diversity and self-worth is pretty great. But I also see how it combines with children’s simple understandings of the world (and gender) to create the deep desire to be a Princess. Which is okay for sometimes, and with an understanding that what princess means is ‘your parents love you’ rather than anything brattier or more commodified.

I love that ‘diva’ has some connotation that fat women are be beautiful, which is so so true but not at all what the media says, and therefore is fun and counterhegemonic. However, it also equates self-esteem with over-the-top feminine performativity–not necessarily the best thing for adult women.  I worry that there’s a lot of magical thinking in the idea that all women are queens or divas, rather than drawing self-esteem from a reality-based source, or at least one that is realistic.

On being a grownup

Disclaimer: superdyke actually edited and sent this after returning from said business trip, during which she got some bad news and did not get a chance to finish.

I’m on a ‘business trip’ right now, and even though I do this often (too often, some would argue) THIS particular trip is really highlighting for me how grown up I feel when I take these trips. The conference I’m presenting at is at a Disney Resort, a place that is fundamentally about children and childhood–especially about how we imagine children and idealize childhood. So I am really feeling it that I am not here AS a child or with my own children–I am not here to play, I am here to work.

I really enjoy that I am wearing a business suit while others are wearing bathing suits. I get a real charge from knowing that the charges for my meals are covered by the place that I work. This is of particular delight to this grown up because it seems to say in a small way ‘you are so smart we promise to feed you?’  and also, ‘damn, girl, you worked your ass off for years and now you are rewarded. With french fries that we paid for and a conference in the sun.’

Simultaneously, though, I feel like I’m only PRETENDING to be a grownup, I’m getting away with things. Like charging french fries, or even better, a chocolate bar, to the place I work (what? don’t look at me like that–it’s food!) There is part of me that goes, what, me? Sent to a conference? Much less a conference in a place organized  around FUN! It’s not about feeling like a fraud, as a young woman who is also an authority figure of a sort I had to get over that years ago. It’s about acknowledging that in some sense, I have arrived at such a grown up place, such a secure place in that authority, that I can relax a little bit while I do my job.

Not the New Kid on the Block Anymore

As my consulting business matures, I’ve noticed some changes in it. I’m working more and more with the same people and organizations, all of whom now fall into more or less the same social and professional network. It’s nice in that I can be slightly less formal about the work and I feel like I’m part of this particular network. I like feeling like I belong somewhere even as I rove from project to project. But I’m also realizing there’s something specifically hard about not being new to my clients anymore, and it reminds me of a similar process that happens to shiny new people who move to town and take a community by storm and then suddenly find they are less interesting and new than they used to be.

The longer you work or play with the same people, the more you let your hair down and the more time they have to see your true strengths and weaknesses. We first show off our good side and are praised for it–as consultants, it’s how we get business, as new kids in town, it’s how we make friends and establish a social network. Also, people enjoy new things and then at some point, the novelty just wears off. It’s a vulnerable feeling once you’ve messed up the first (or third, or tenth) time and people have noticed, even commented, and also when you realize that everyone can see your weaknesses as well as your strengths. It’s also vulnerable when people start to take my good qualities for granted and not see me as shiny and new. What it’s meant for me as a consulting professional is that the initial reaction I got–you hung the moon, you are the smartest person ever–has given way to more criticism (you are good at x but less good at y) and in some cases, people passing me over for new jobs.

I don’t know what I expected would happen as my business grew and matured; I don’t think I had any specific expectations. But I was somewhat unprepared for THIS phenomenon. I guess I thought that since I am constantly taking new jobs as a consultant that I would constantly meet new people and go through a similar process over and over again of making new relationships, impressing people with my best face, and leaving before they realized too many of my faults or before the novelty wore off. It’s nice to see the same people and to watch the projects grow, but I wasn’t really prepared for how it feels to be passed over for a job not because people don’t know how good you are (which is how it feels when strangers don’t hire me), but because they know me too well.

What will the next phase be, I wonder? Are people such neophiles that eventually I’ll stop being hired by the same group at all and have to find a whole new set of clients? Or will we settle in and I’ll be hired for some jobs, but maybe not the ones I’d have been hired for if I were still shiny?

On Multitasking

Like many productive, high functioning women, I’m very good at multitasking and I spend most of my working life doing it. Whatever you believe about how multitasking is or isn’t productive, it’s an important feature of my life and I’m spending time right now thinking about WHY and HOW I multitask.

I multitask because my experience is that it’s more productive. I do understand that one can’t genuinely and literally do more than one thing at a time, but one can do one passive thing (wait on the phone, for example, for someone to say something interesting on the phone or for the insane elevator music to be over and the person to come on the line and help me) or work in quick bursts on alternating tasks (good for certain types of problem solving and not others, since some problems are better solved through long, persistent work– I am, of course, by my nature better at solving the former than the latter). I am also easily bored; multitasking keeps my insane fear and hatred of boredom at bay.

More importantly, I multitask for an other emotional reason. Working on more than one thing blunts the impact of things that are difficult or make me anxious. A great example is conference calls. I multitask on conference calls partly because I CAN (ain’t it great working from home), because it’s efficient, but also because they make me a little nervous, and if I’m thinking about and doing other things, they make me less nervous.

Both of these things make multitasking somewhat addictive. When in-person meetings get tense or boring, and I can’t do anything about it, I long to be able to do something to blunt the anxiety or boredom. Would I be innured to it if I didn’t so often have the ‘out’ I have on conference calls of working on other things? Or would I just be bored and anxious more often? And less productive?

Thoughts? On multitasking?

Despite (or perhaps because of) our differences

I have a history of counter-intuitive friendships with heterodox or conservative older white guys. These are the types of people that you’d expect me NEVER to associate with, given that I’m a young liberal hipster queer.

Currently, I consider myself a friend of a certain gentleman who holds a high rank in the NYPD. He has never been a beat cop, but he shares many of the political views you’d associate with police officers and has a particular hatred for Hillary Clinton (it’s not misogyny, however, he blames her for underfunding work that matters to him in the police). He, I think, knows that I am gay–he certainly knows I worked in gay organizations–but we don’t talk about it and sometimes our little luncheons and coffees have the quality of a grandfather or older uncle taking his young relative out to assure her future is on the right course.

In his case, this often takes the form of interruptosaurus-style lectures on politics, which end with him asking me ‘So you’re voting Republican, right?’ and me saying, ‘I don’t think so.’ I think they end that way because I nod when I listen, even when I don’t agree, but also because I do understand his worldview and his logic, even though I disagree with his fundamental premises, which include things like ‘people cannot be trusted because they will always act in their own interests or those of their closest relatives’ and ‘government will always by definition be full of waste’. 

I really enjoy these exchanges, though, because they keep me from getting to smug and insular and encourage me to be empathetic across important differences. What about you? Counter-intuitive friendships? Thoughts on empathy for diverse opinions?

Giving Away Money

So, last year, as my business took off (yep, that’s part of why the posts slowed, then stopped) I started to think about social responsibility and how I could potentially make money and do good. There are lots of organizations that do that, from the GAP, with its RED campaign to small giving from individuals who just feel they have more than they need. I started going to events with Resource Generation (http://www.resourcegeneration.org/home.html) an organization for young people with wealth (which is something people self-define) who are interested in progressive and/or radical philanthropy.  I really enjoyed having a place to think about my values and to talk about money, which is taboo in so much of our culture. I have not made a formal giving plan, although I would like to, but I am giving away money more thoughtfully and intentionally. I don’t have a TON of money, and all the money I give away is money that I made through my consulting business, so it feels very personal and connected to my day to day life. I often struggle with whether to take clients who pay more but are more work and less interesting (so that I can give away more money, knowing that I will also be tired) or whether to do sliding scale and probono work that’s more interesting and needed. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Here are some things that matter to me in donating to organizations:

1. The organization serves VERY marginalized people. Undocumented immigrants, low income transgender people, people doing organizing in countries with young or non-existent democracies are examples of groups that move me and are also very marginalized.

2. It serves a unique niche (does not duplicate the services of other organizations). Unpopular though it is, I believe that there are actually TOO MANY nonprofits in most sectors doing the same things.

3. It shares my values. This is sometimes hard to pin down; I value inclusiveness in decision-making, but also community autonomy, which are values that are sometimes in conflict, as are efficiency and democracy, which are also values that are important to me. I find that rather than reading the organizations’ official stance, watching people involved with the organization function helps me to clarify this, and I try to do it without getting in the way or being a high-maintenance donor.

4. It is transparent about how money is used.

5. The organization (or person) asks for money. I am not sure why this is so important to me, but it is.

I also tend to give to organizations where people I know work or receive services. I tend to give monthly in consistent amounts and I respond to stated needs (another intern would make a big difference) but not so much to crisis fundraising (the exception being earthquakes and the like–not fiscal crises).

Where I grew up, most people were Southern Baptist and many tithed 10% of their income. That is the number that I strive for, although sometimes I over or under-shoot, depending upon what’s going on in my life. I do think that if we even gave 10% of our discretionary income (the amount above food, shelter and other basic necessities) that we’d catch up with the Right Wing faster.

Do you give away money? Time? Other things? What helps you decide who to give to and how?

All That Mind/Body Stuff

After posting about sleep deprivation, I wanted to also post about something positive. As many of you know, I have chronic issues with my joints, which acrobatic activity helps (c’mon, trapeze is totally low impact and works your core, for real) but which never really goes away. MANY MANY people in my world have suggested particular psychological causes for my joint pain. I can’t discount any of these things totally, even though some are improbable: You hold your stress in your iliotibial band (for those of you who don’t know, it connects the knee and hip), your right side hurts because you have issues with your father (apparently the right side is masculinity). Others make a lot of sense to me: my doctor’s diagnosis that I have a pain syndrome related to my experiences of stress which causes me to somatize tension into my shoulders and back, causing my wrists to hurt, my own observation that when I get intensely connected to my work my body sort of disappears, meaning I fail to rest it and overstress my typing muscles.

My own specific experiences aside, there are many scientific studies, not to mention faith traditions and personal stories, that attest to a connection between the mind and the body.I’m just not sure that these observations can be extrapolated to explain all types of bodily experiences. For example, we all can agree that if I get food poisoning, it’s not because of emotional issues. Similarly, if I was born with crappy knees and a resulting tendency towards iliotibial band tightness that makes my back hurt, that doesn’t mean that I’m carrying my tension there. I could be wearing bad shoes! Not that tension wouldn’t, say, cause the pain to spread up my back into my shoulders, or make my experience of pain more profound or severe. But biology matters, yes?

So here’s the positive: I’m really stressed out, but my joints are doing well. I feel very in tune with them, aware of what I need to do as I bang away at the report I’m writing, so that they don’t wear out. I attribute that to conscientious effort to do physical therapy, increasing body awareness as a result of my acrobatics practice, and determination to stay active despite being tired and stressed. What are your experiences of the body-mind connection? What particular things do you experience as connecting these two and what operates independently?

Sleep Deprivation

This is not the usual state for me, but I am currently suffering from serious sleep deprivation. Despite the addition of some magical medical assistance to insure the quality of my sleep, somehow I just can’t catch up. I have very good sleep hygiene (I go to bed and get up at the same time each night and morning, have rarely done anything in bed except for, um, the two things beds are for, follow all the recommendations about no caffiene after noon etc. etc.). Basically, I remain sleep deprived because I’m busy and keyed up and take some time to unwind from all of that–I’m sure it’s similar to many of you.

Sleep deprivation, according to All Known Science, is very bad for you and is also endemic in the United States. MOST people are sleep deprived. I keep up on Sleep News in general, especially after taking the ginormous psych 101 class at Cornell my freshman year (it has 2000 people in it, you can imagine that’s some high learning quality and good value for money, snark snark, but that’s another story for another day) and reading the professor’s sleep book. Like most people, I find myself less able to solve problems, less patient, and less kind when I have not had enough sleep. How, I wonder, does this country function if ALL of us, or nearly all, are behaving this way?