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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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, 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?