Moolah

So, Readers, now that we are safely out of the range of New Year’s resolutions, I have another resolution to tell you about. I made it quietly. It wasn’t a sneak-up-on-you resolution like the one I eased into about morning sun salutations. This one is an actual resolution I made, and kept to myself. I know, that’s amazing, right, considering how many things I do tell you? Well, this one was bigger and scarier to me, so I had to keep it quiet, until I was ready to do something about it. I made a promise to myself that I would get a grip on finances. You may recall, from earlier posts, that I have a little problem dealing with finances and moolah. Perhaps I mentioned that under professional advice, I stepped away from paying the bills and turned that over to the husband. This wasn’t because I’m incapable of paying them. It was because I was having panic attacks every time I considered our financial situation. Indeed, under professional advice, I  even stepped away from the husband when he paid the bills, because I had to sit someplace soft with my head between my knees. 

Healthy, no?

NO? 

Well, we could argue about that all day. The fact remains that I was instructed to leave it alone for my own sanity, and so I gladly did. However, that was a few months ago - a few dozen months ago, if I’m honest - which I am, to a fault. As a grown up feminist female, I feel that part of success is handling moolah. So I quietly and silently promised myself that I would take it up again. Look into things. At least check our bank balances. 

I know, a major step. Perhaps you are sputtering at me through the Interwebs. You are sputtering, “Hope, you don’t even check your bank balances?” I am wiping your judgemental spittle off my cheek, Readers. I can only do my best, and even if that best is quite poor, well, it is my best. This goal, getting a grip on the moolah and finances, is a multi-step process. 

So with that in mind, I am proud to tell you that I have just returned from an event called High Anxiety: New York Gen X and Baby Boomers Struggle with Stress, Savings and Security. I went for three reasons:

1. What I said above - to prove I can begin to take control.
2. A writer colleague who helped organize the event lured me by saying it could be blog fodder
3. The husband and I have an appointment with our accountant this afternoon (yet another positive development, I might add,) so I figured I could debrief there.

4. I had to dress nicely, which is something I enjoy.

So, pat, pat, pat. I have taken another step towards financial bravery. 

Ok, to come clean, this event was hosted by the AARP. Which I am apparently eligible to join. (Shhhh, don’t tell the husband. He thinks I’m thirty-nine.) That in itself is embarrassing. Oh, bother, why go there. 

The event was part of a campaign by the AARP to promote a state-facilitated retirement savings option for everyone. The idea would be that part of every paycheck would go into these accounts automatically, the way it might go into a pension if you were lucky enough to work someplace with a pension. This would help keep millions of senior Gen Xers and Boomers off of public assistance in their declining years. Something like that. Basically, the kind of thing that usually sends me into my handbag for the Xanax. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this, but one of my deepest fears is that I’m going to spend my final years impoverished and alone in some state-run nursing home, propped in a collapsible wheelchair dribbling onto a paper bib. Well, the event went over the results of a survey about how worried Gen X and Boomers are about being able to retire.The upshot is that apparently, I am not alone in my anxiety about finances. Apparently 74% of Gen Xers and 67% of Boomers are worried about not saving enough. But the bad news is that there is reason to worry. We are not saving enough. 30% of GenXers in NY have no retirement savings at all.

However, I came away not rattled or needing a Xanax. I came away even more determined to figure out this financial stuff. 

So, pat, pat, pat, I pat myself on the back.

I also took the 11th grader to the bank and opened a new account for her, instructing her to deposit at least 10 percent of her allowance into savings every time.   

Baby steps for you, Readers, perhaps, and baby steps for me, too, it turns out. But - steps. 

Annals of Successful Parenting: Scout the Parakeet

One of my intermittent fantasies is that I’m an animal-loving, root-chakra, earth-mother with an open-door, anything goes, seat-of-the-pants approach to life. A woman equally comfortable in a put-together outfit and the unnaturally natural make-up look AND with a bird on my shoulder, a dog at my feet, and a steady stream of children revolving in and out of the house while I grind flax and chia seeds in my mortar and pestle for delicious, homemade food.

Then I remember about germs and therapy. But a fantasy’s a fantasy, right? So, the 12-year old wanted a pet. She’s wanted a pet, besides the dog, for a long time. And we’ve had many words and explorations about what kind. A couple years ago, she wanted a chinchilla. I considered this, until I learned that chinchillas live 25 years or more, and require cool slabs of marble for sleep, as well as specially imported volcanic dust for bathing. So she settled for crayfish. Two. Then one ate the other. Then, eventually, the survivor, who had not only eaten his only companion but also had regenerated his own claw, the survivor went caput.

I stopped the husband on his way to flushing Shrimpy. The child, who was 11 at the time, was wet-eyed and red-nostrilled.

"You cannot flush Shrimpy," I said. "She’s upset. She loved him."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Be a father. Bury the crayfish."

And that was it, for a while. However, recently, the 12-year old began agitating for a pet. Fish seemed good, until she found out that they require work. Suddenly they were too boring. Eventually we settled on maybe a bird, one that doesn’t live 80 years, one that doesn’t squawk. One that can’t peck out my eyes. A parakeet.

At that point, I realized I had a real Parenting Lesson in front of me. You see, the 12-year old wanted that bird. Wanted, wanted, wanted that bird. Asked every day. Multiple times a day. Yes, this corresponded to the build up to the start of school. I was aware of that. I was aware that possibly hyperfocusing on this want of bird was much more pleasant than focusing on starting school, especially the challenging math class she’d be doing. But, if my pop psych is too fascile to be true, there is this truth: She wanted something. That something cost money. Therefore, here was an opportunity. Because I wanted something, too. Weeding done. So she had to weed for a certain number of hours at $10 per hour, to pay for the bird. This felt like Good Parenting.

I know I developed a feel for the value of a dollar on the late side. Like around 45, when we bought a house and two cars and had to cancel cable and limit eating out to pizza once a month and I had a mini nervous breakdown. I want my children to do better, but haven’t usually got a clue how to teach them. 90 percent of the time we forget to give them their allowance. So telling them to save 10 percent of their allowance isn’t particularly useful. What usually happens is that when the children want something, we work out some kind of arrangement based on how much allowance they’ve forgotten to collect and I’ve forgotten to distribute. This makes money an even more abstract concept than it already is. And contributes to my conviction that we are raising two grasshoppers, not industrious ants, and since the husband and I seem more grasshopper than ant, I’m going to end up dribbling onto a bib in a shabby nursing home somewhere. State run, if the state runs anything anymore; otherwise, run by some kind of half-assed Samaritan agency.  

So for $10 an hour, the 12-year old weeded. She did a thorough job:

Anyway, three hundred dollars later, we had a parakeet. Scout the Parakeet, the bird paid for by the child, everything else paid for by VISA.

The dog was thrilled. 

Very thrilled. So we borrowed a fence to put around the cage, and worked on finding things even more thrilling for the dog than watching the bird. It was working. We’d gotten to a certain level of calm. That is, when we ignored the bird, the dog did, too. The minute we approached Scout, however, or if Scout got a little flappy, Milo was nosing up to the gate and whining.

So everyone was learning.

And this is what I typed for you readers, last Friday afternoon, one week after we obtained Scout, shortly before I left to drive the ballet carpool, shortly before I left the 12-year old home with Scout the Parakeet. And Milo the dog:

Currently, I am typing to the gentle sound of Scout cracking seeds in her food dish. This is a positive development, since Milo is sleeping under the table, right by my chair, and not whining and obsessively peering at her from behind the fence around her cage, his tail quivering on high alert. So that’s promising. Next step is to be able to approach the cage and talk to the bird without having him rush up as well. It’s mellowed here, so that he only pays attention to the bird when we do.

Unfortunately, while I was driving the ballet carpool, this learning experience turned into one of those learning experiences parents don’t want their children to have. Of course I take some responsibility. I stifled my last minute warning to leave the bird in the cage until I returned home. She wouldn’t do it, I thought.

Alas, poor Scout is no more. Now the 12-year old has learned a terrible lesson of responsibility and guilt. And regret. Let’s not forget that one. And I had to learn a lesson, too. I had to practice just being there, with the arm out, saying nothing much, listening to the child learning remorse.  

This time, the husband knew what to do. After he dug the perfect grave, we placed the bird in it and said a few words: You were loved; I am sorry; Your life was too short, but it was good.

Dress for Success

"What’s this focus on French chic?” The husband asked the other day. I was embarrassed he’d noticed. Although, really, how could he not have? Instead of reading our book club book for our upcoming meeting, I’d read three books on fashion and style. Plus, I'd been spending a lot of time reading style blogs by women over forty. 

How to articulate? The vision of a simple, elegant low-heeled shoe, the capstone (foundation stone?) of a simple, elegant outfit came to mind. Something dressier than, say, yoga pants and sneakers. I’ve had this vision since we were in the Rome airport. An older woman walked by, dressed a standard deviation or two above the norm for travel. We were surrounded by a large group of American college athletes, so you know what the dress code was. Sweats and jeans, leggings and sweats. This older woman was obviously not American. So maybe it’s not fair to compare. But I thought, I’m halfway between that – the schlumpy students – and that – the elegant older lady, and I want to be more like her when I grow up, than like the older version of these college kids.

But my interest predated that. Packing for the trip triggered a lot of thoughts about clothes and style. Some of it is certainly related to the ongoing trauma of turning fifty. It’s not like I want to start wearing couture. That’s boring and stuffy. But there is certainly an aspect of this interest that has to do with last ditch efforts before my face falls into my neck. As I told my sister the psychoanalyst, I’m not giving up without a fight.

And then a couple of women I know, about my age, returned to work, part time or full time, and that triggered thoughts, about my connection with the outside world of commerce and responsibility, about financial freedom, and about - for lack of a better word - “lifestyle.” I felt envious of these women. Their need to dress up a bit. Their need to exercise different parts of their brains and to have colleagues and eat at lunch trucks and wear shoes that click-clack when they walk. I found myself actually kind of yearning for that.

And I thought, well, am I sick of my book? Am I giving up on my book? Am I doing what I’ve usually done when I get sick of and despairing about my writing: focusing on something that seems easier, like getting a “real” job and earning some actual money?

Maybe the solution is to do both. The kids don’t need me in the same way. I can work while they are around. But I need to earn money. I want to. Not just for more, but to save for retirement and so on. I feel afraid of the future, for sure, and I want to do something about it. Also, I want the mental and social engagement with the world.  Sure, in my dreams, I’m traveling around giving readings and appearing on talk shows and so on, but let’s be real. The book has come along discouragingly slowly, and I’ve been playing the whole, I’ll wait until I get the proposal done and out before looking for work thing for a couple of years now. That's getting old.

Another thing this dressing and style thing-o reminds me of is that old saying to “dress for the job you want.” This worked for me right out of college, when I was a receptionist at a law firm. Quickly, the boss promoted me to paralegal. It turned out that neither of those jobs were jobs I wanted, but that’s another drumbeat. After that it was thrift-store finds, jeans, t-shirts, and pretty soon I was doing data entry, writing novels, and eventually, unemployed. In short, it worked.  Anyhoo, now I’m feeling like being more part of the world, and so I’m dressing for that and hoping to create opportunities.

While I felt called out by the husband, it was only because I felt some shame. All this focus on appearance felt important, but also really, really shallow. Really, it's both symbolic and literal. Part of the interest is about upgrading my wardrobe; however, part of my style obsession definitely has to do with shoring myself up from the outside, since I’ve been feeling discouraged inside. One of the themes of these books is that building a good façade helps us feel good inside. Taking time to care for self, health, diet, skin, and wardrobe cultivates feeling “bien dans votre peau” or something – happy in your own skin, roughly translated. If I can build confidence in one area, it bleeds into other areas, too. So.

That’s what’s with the focus on French chic.

Success and the Inner Rabbit

November is over. NaNoWriMo is over. And apparently, so is my writing habit. I know, say it isn’t so. Well, look, I accomplished the goal of writing 50K words of a first draft in November. Fifty thousand words - and some. I wrote at least 1,667 words every day but one. (1,667 X 30=50,000). It felt great. And then December hit. 

What happened? I thought I’d developed my habit. A habit takes about twenty-one days to establish. The daily words didn’t even take all that long, since what I was writing mostly was drivel. I say that without having looked back over my work, yet; but I am sure most of it is drivel. And I haven’t finished my draft. Therefore, I need to produce more drivel. I can work with drivel. Drivel I can revise. But now that the companionship of the other 300,000 people who signed up for NaNoWriMo has dwindled, my writing habit has gone pffffft. Part of it has to do with the busy season. The children have started all their end of semester performances. There are all kinds of things that end up sliding into the work week hours, therefore, because the weekends are taken up with rehearsals and performances. Also, the husband is on call right now, which means interrupted sleep on top of perimenopausal interrupted sleep.

But these are excuses. The real reason is that fear has slowed me down. Once the artificial deadline and word count goal of November 30^th passed, my structure disappeared. November was squeezing through a narrow passageway that took all my focus to inch through, doubts and fears about my eventual accomplishment notwithstanding; and then December was

One of many distractions....

coming out the other side of the passage into a vast open space. I’m like a little rabbit, paralyzed by the shadow of a predator overhead.

I’m not sure, in this analogy, what the overhead predator stands for in my life; but you get the idea, Readers, don’t you? My point is the wide open spaces and the blinding light are too much for my Inner Rabbit. The answer seems to be to dart hither and yon until I can create another tunnel-like situation for myself, a place to burrow and write that squeezes the self doubt and fears, if not out entirely, because frankly that seems impossible, to the side.

The question becomes, then, how to do that? Recently, I read a book called Saved, by Ben Hewitt, a journalist who spent a year hanging out with a friend of his who lives off the grid. The financial crisis of 2008 awakened in him the realization that he didn’t know anything about money. So he wanted to follow around this happy go lucky dude who had almost zero of the filthy stuff. Anyway, my takeaway from Ben’s experience was a new understanding of the phrase, “Time is money.” When he looked closely at his friend Eric, bartering for whatever he couldn’t do or get for himself, he saw a free person. Free because he chose what was important enough for him to spend his time - his days, his hours, his minutes doing. Most of those things had nothing to do with earning money. There were many, many ways he could spend his hours and end up earning money; but they weren’t worth the trade off to Eric. Hanging out with Eric, Ben began to think about how many hours it would take of money-earning work to afford, for example, a new car, and began to consider whether that trade was worth making. Because, how you spend your time is how you live. It’s how you pass your life. Maybe a used car would be better. Or a bike.

Whatever we need to do to get that sense of urgency, maybe we should do it. Maybe it’s procrastination. I know, that sounds just plain contrary. But maybe scrunching up against a deadline is the best way to produce a result. I don’t really think so, actually, and I just read somebody’s article about realizing how procrastination was damaging her career because she never produced her best work, just work that met the deadline.

So what would be best would be to have that understanding of life being finite all the time, so you can make sure you focus. That sounds awful, just like those lifeline timers you can download to your desktop that tell you how much longer you have to live. Yikes.

I’m conflating two needs here. (I’m allowed to do that. It’s my blog.) There’s the need to accomplish stuff. Stuff seems to get done best with a sense of urgency, a looming deadline breathing down the neck. I can just hear my former housemate from East Germany ridiculing my very American emphasis on progress and producing. Is it possible not to have a need to accomplish at least something?

The other need is to appreciate the value of life. This could actually lead to ignoring deadlines altogether and channeling one’s inner Ferdinand. Smelling the flowers, being in the moment, or – of this my former housemate from East Germany would approve – drinking beer and having involved conversations with friends about appreciating the value of life. Appreciating the value of life, unfortunately, often requires a shock involving realization of mortality. The beautiful mundane never seems so beautiful as when you wake up after surgery, for example, and discover you are still here.

Good thing I don’t like beer. Because if there’s one thing that sidelines my drive to accomplish stuff, it’s fear. Which brings me back where I started. I do want to finish my sh**ty first draft. So I will simply have to find another tunnel.

Am I a Millenial?

Too much luggage under the eyes to show my face...

A couple months ago, I decided I needed to read actual news articles, not just opinion pieces about news. I thought, since I’m a big girl now, that it might behoove me to read facts presented to me and draw my own conclusions about them, rather than let other people tell me what to think about selected facts. That meant that I resisted what had been my favorite section of The New York Times – the Sunday Review – in favor of that thing in which they wrap the Sunday Review. I think it’s called the front page?  

And it was good. Indeed, just two weeks ago I read an incredible story about a death that appeared to be suicide, but may have been murder from domestic violence. This story, which I saved, would make a fantastic novel. And just before I saw that article I was thinking about how I’d love to write another novel, only I don’t have a plot. I am not good with plot. Well, this front page article contained a plot, let me tell you. I wish Elmore Leonard were still around. He would write a doozy of a novel about that.

Does that sound callous? It does, doesn’t it, Readers? I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be callous.

My point is that last weekend I caved and read the Sunday Review. There were two pieces that resonated with me. One was about the Real Humanities Crisis. Here is it is, if you want to read it. The other one was about the Millenials, who are, FYI, defined as people born between 1980 and 2000, which also means they are Generation Y, which means there are two names for them, which seems unfair. Although come to think of it, there are two names for my generation, Generation X. Namely, Gen X and Slackers. And before you whip out your calculators, classmates, I know that technically I am a Baby Boomer, but there is just nothing about baby boomers that relates to me, and everything about Generation X that does. Here is that article for your edification.

One article is about how the Millenials are searchers, looking for a new definition of success and for lives full of meaning. Which means that perhaps I am actually a Millenial, because – hello - I am a searcher and I’ve been reframing success. This article, by the way, starts out by characterizing the millenials as the”most self-absorbed generation, ever.” But I distinctly recall the Me Generation being called that. And come to think of it, just who are the Me Generation? I have a sinking feeling that is also my generation.

The conclusion to draw here is that every older generation looks at the twenty somethings coming up behind it and thinks these twenty-somethings are the most selfish ever. That's simple envy: underemployed twenty-somethings have a lot more time to dawdle in cafés and grow beards than fully grown up folk.

But the article goes on to say that in fact these Millenials have been “forced to rethink success so that it’s less about material prosperity and more about something else.” And that something else is, apparently, meaning. They want to make a difference. They want to do good. Indeed, more than happiness, they want meaning in their lives.

And my researches on success lead me to conclude that, therefore, they will succeed.

Then there’s the other article, called, “The Real Humanities Crisis.” This is about the plight of most creative people, as well as about jobs in K-12 education, which should fall under the rubric Ways for Creatives to Earn a Decent Living Doing Something Meaningful.  Sad to say, now those jobs are being strangled by standardized testing, and any parent of a public school student knows how beleaguered The Arts are, since there’s not a direct link between arts education and friggin’ test scores. There is a link, though – don’t get me started. I don’t have room here for that discussion.

“Most creative artists, even successful ones, are not able to earn a living.” That’s what the article says. You know, it’s good to see that in print. And bad. Most of all, it’s a relief. Of course it’s the final dousing of any idea I had of, um, making a living from my writing. From my creative writing, that is. But it lifts one burden of failure from me. If most creative artists can’t make a living from their creations, then failure to make a living is not a sign of failure as a creative artist. It’s just failure to make a living.

I am sure I’ve mentioned this before, but when the financial crisis happened in 2008, New York Times columnist Judith Warner wrote about commuting into NYC on the train surrounded by Wall Streeters and lawyers and how she had come to feel diminished or unappreciated for being a journalist. She saw herself as surrounded by people who felt that choosing to do a job that didn’t maximize one’s income potential was morally suspect. Or at least idiotic. Now that these people, some of them, were out of jobs, she thought maybe people like her, or people who had chosen helping professions that didn’t have super high incomes, might come to be respected again. At least that’s what I think she wrote. Memory does strange things, though. Perhaps she said nothing of the sort. Perhaps I’m putting my own words into her pen.

I certainly relate to that sentiment. I’ve both imbibed that message and struggle against it. It’s one of my biggest conflicts: choosing to do what I love and think is important (writing and being a full time mom) makes me feel that I’ve done something misguided and foolish. Sometimes. The opportunity costs seem too high. Sometimes.

Maybe the Millenials won’t struggle with the same conflict. As the article says, they have been forced to look beyond making money to find satisfaction. According to the article, studies show that when economic times are pinched, young people turn to helping others. When economic times are expansive, I guess, they tend to fill their pots with money - screw meaning.  But times are not so expansive. Thus, people are reconsidering how they spend their days. “The point of work should not be just to provide the material goods we need to survive,” says philosopher Gary Cutting. “Since work typically takes the largest part of our time, it should also be an important part of what gives your life meaning.”

Hooray for the searchers, I say! I also say thank you in advance, since they – those Millenials – are the largest generation since the Baby Boomers and they’re going to have to help support me when I’m old.  I’m pretty sure the government isn’t about to start handing out pensions to mothers and writers. But I could be wrong. 

5 Secrets of Success Illustrated by Billy Jean King

In 1973, when Billy Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, I was an overexcited nine year old, more thrilled by the phrases “male chauvinist pig” and “battle of the sexes” than by the symbolism of the match. Nevertheless, the match imprinted on my brain as part of the general consciousness-raising that was going on in 1970s U.S. culture. Billy Jean King and Free To Be You and Me represented Women’s Lib to me. Forty years later, it turns out Billy Jean King (BJK) is an excellent example for me – for us – once again, this time of success redefined as extending beyond money and power.

She’s been in the news again lately, because it’s the fortieth anniversary of that famous tennis match, as well as of the founding of what became the Women’s Tennis Association, and of equal prize money awards for men and women at the U.S. Open, all things in which BJK was instrumental. She’s been interviewed in print, on radio, and on film, and her life story reads like a primer on success. So let’s look at what she can teach us.

First, there’s BJK the player of tennis. For starters, she won twenty Wimbledon trophies in singles and doubles, so that’s pretty great. In talking about how she prepared for a match, she said she used a lot of visualization. She would visualize all the things that could go wrong, and then she would visualize how she would handle them. She would think about all the elements that were out of her control, and then visualize how she would handle those.

During play, she would set practical, specific goals like returning a serve into a specific part of the court. She would picture where she wanted the ball to go as she hit it. Aside from her visualization, she focused on her side of the net, not on her opponent, on standing up tall, and on letting go of mistakes. She focused on the present. Key, she said, was to forget about the past and the future, and to focus only on what was happening in that moment. Voilá, much money and power eventually arrived.

Then there’s BJK off the court. This is where the story gets interesting. While she loved the game, and was a fierce competitor, she saw tennis as a platform. It was not the only thing that mattered to her. In fact, part of why tennis success mattered to her was that it provided her a way to promote the cause she most believed in: equality. She said, “I knew as a youngster I wanted to be No. 1 in tennis. I knew by 12 my platform would be tennis, but my real life was going to be wrapped around equality and social justice. I felt like I had a tremendous sense of destiny.” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/2013/09/10/billie-jean-king-40th-anniversary-battle-of-the-sexes-bobby-riggs/2792861/)

Towards those ideals, BJK organized the first women’s tennis league, lobbied for sponsors, and worked hard to establish equal prize money for men and women and equal treatment on tennis tours.

Regarding that infamous match with Bobby Riggs, BJK says she never intended to play him, but then he played another top female player, Margaret Cort, and beat her. After that, BJK felt that she had to play him and she had to win. Why? Because she was working so hard to bring respect to the Women’s Tennis Association, which she helped found, and because Title IX had just passed, and she thought the cause of women’s lib and equality would be hurt if she didn’t. So this is significant because it shows her life’s work was in alignment with deep personal values linked to improving the world.

How did she accomplish so much? Did she arrive fully formed on a clam shell? Was she just a fluke, a tennis genius, a born leader? Certainly genetics came into play. But also, she had help. First, from parents who encouraged her athleticism. Later, when she became a leader among tennis players, her husband encouraged her to set up the women’s league. The common trope of success is “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” but this trope is a myth. Look behind – or beside – anyone with sustained, meaningful success and you will find that champions have champions urging them on.

Billy Jean King is a great role model for a sustainable, holistic definition of success that includes more than money and power. She pursued greatness on the court in service of her ideals, not just to win. Once she retired from professional play, she channeled her passion into a new, but related path, behind the scenes. She started co-ed World Team Tennis “the day she retired.” Professional team members include Venus Williams and Andy Roddick. It’s a place for amateurs and professionals to train, and BJK believes that having participants and spectators – families – children – experience men and women playing together teaches a broader lesson about equality.

Does she have power and money? Yes, you bet. But if power and money were the only important metrics to her, she could have quit long ago. Instead, she risked it all when she was outed as a lesbian in the early 1980s, and decided to open up about it. The result was that she lost all of her sponsorships. However, she continued to work towards her goals, recouped her money, and created a legacy as a fighter for social justice.

Featuring My Voice on The Huffington Post

Last Friday night, The Huffington Post informed me that they’d published a blog entry – mine. This is so cool, so exciting, such a breakthrough, you say! Wow! You say. Unless you’re a journalist, perhaps. (See below.)

Okay, it felt great. For a while. From the time the blog editor accepted my post and told me they’d edit it and let me know when it would be published, until the time I clicked on the link the editor’s assistant sent me, it felt great. Then I noticed that the post had actually already been up on the site for two days, which I hadn’t known. Since it was what I’d sent them, word for word, I assume they decided it didn’t need editing, and just posted it. It was a blip. An instant. Over before they remembered to inform me.

Now Readers, I am grateful – don’t get me wrong. The Huffington Post has a lot of readers. However, since I didn’t realize my post was up, I didn’t advertise it until it was no longer front of the queue. If that’s even how The Huff Post operates. Nor did they tweet it, as far as I can tell. So it was a blip on the front page of HuffPostWomen, and now it’s searchable. Which means it’s there but I never saw it there There. Still, it’s there There, and you can click on my name and see my bio and my headshot, which the husband took on his iPhone outside the piano store where the kids were having their recital. We were going to use the real camera, but someone forgot to put the battery in it. (Me.)

Don’t worry, fame hasn’t changed me a bit. Maybe that’s because I didn’t exactly achieve fame. Or maybe it’s because the group of writers I see for the occasional lunch consists mostly of journalists. I am not a journalist. If you ever need a head resizing for swelled head syndrome – you know, when you start to think you’re really hot and you’re going somewhere and your capella starts to swella – I have the cure. Just tell a group of journalists you’re publishing a blog post on The Huffington Post. Their reaction will return your head to its usual size - pinhead.

See, journalists are professionals who expect this thing called “payment” for their writing when it appears on a large media outlet. That bozos like me are willing to slave for hours crafting work as fine as they are able for free is pretty much journalists’ idea of one of the major things wrong with the field today. And I agree. So, yeah, I told a group of journalists, who were just not that impressed. And I don’t blame them a bit. On the other hand, I am a fiction writer who has turned to non-fiction and blogging. I’ve come to expect near zero monetary payment for my efforts; but recognition is payment, too. It doesn’t put money in the college savings account, but it feeds the soul.  Dale Carnegie said so.

And it sounds good to you, right, Readers?  On the continuum of total failure to hugest imaginable success, publication on the Huff Post falls  - where? I am not sure. I mean, it’s a media machine. They publish lots of blog posts. On the other hand, it’s a huge site with tons of readers. It’s just kind of hard to gage. It is definitely on the continuum. Of that I am sure.

So how did this happen? Well, as I mention in the actual post, a high school classmate (thank you, Amy!) sent me the video of Arianna Huffington giving the commencement address at Smith on Redefining Success. So I watched it and found it very moving and exciting. Afterwards, I sent her an email thanking her for her speech, and for bringing this conversation about success and women and making a new women’s movement into the mainstream. I didn’t labor over the email, or send a big request – or any request, actually. I just wrote a thank you. Of course I mentioned my blog. There’s a link to it in my email signature, so that was available to her. And then a couple of days later, a response from Arianna H arrived in my inbox, with an invitation to “feature my voice” on the HP.

To sum up: I took a chance and I wrote. She replied. I took another chance and wrote a post. My post went up. I can send in others. That is cool, I have to say.

Hello

I was all set to post a new blog post about this picture, but I woke up yesterday to the Boston lockdown, and frankly, I was riveted. I, along with almost everyone else, was relieved and happy that Dzhokar Tsarnaev was taken alive into custody.

Considering the way the week has gone, with two people being terribly successful at doing bad things, it's ironic that my previous post was about the powerful connection between doing good and being successful. Although last week I poked fun at overachieving Adam Grant for the potentially pathological origins of his urge to help others, I am really very happy to believe that humans tend towards the good, biologically speaking. If scientists confirm the existence of the rumored "altruism gene," I will be delighted. I was one of the zillions of people who shared the Mr. Rogers quotation about looking for the helpers in times of tragedy, because they are always there.

I also recalled listening to the Dalai Lama talking about how the newsworthiness of terrible events like the marathon bombing is proof that humans are inherently good. These horrific events shock and anger us - not to mention, make front page news - because they are rare. They are not the norm. They are extraordinary. Ordinary people aim for the good.

Nevertheless, the mug pretty well sums up how I'm feeling. Despite the capture of the Marathon bombers, the fact remains that overall the news has been bad. Shitty, really. Bombs in Beantown, bums in the Senate. Booms in Texas. And my arms, from those allergy shots: They are swollen, hot, and itchy.

But I didn't just post this picture of Grumpy Cat because I'm grumpy. I posted it because the mug makes me smile. Everything in the picture makes me smile, as a matter of fact, and while it may seem a stretch at times of national strife, one thing I've learned is that if you want to feel better, you have to smile. You don't even have to FEEL the smile. You can just use your smile muscles. The Buddha said so, and so did Daniel Kahneman in his incredible book, Thinking Fast or Slow. Studies show that just holding a pencil between your teeth - which activates your smile muscles - will make you trend optimistic.

I'm not a Grumpy Cat fan. Grumpy Cat is a meme, and I know what a meme is because my children have told me. The mug makes me smile, though, because I won it. When I say I won it, I mean I won it in a random drawing on a funny blog I read, so that makes me smile. And the box next to it, and the vintage pin come from excellent friends who visited from Boston last weekend, so they make me smile, too. The box, by the way, holds a musical egg timer. You refrigerate the timer with your eggs, then put it in the pot when you hard boil them, and the egg, which is painted to look like mini Delft china because it's Dutch, plays the Dutch national anthem when the eggs are done. Supposedly. My eggs weren't as done as I would have liked, but that is probably because they are fat American eggs, not slim, Dutch bicycling eggs. Still, the whole business was very entertaining. Plus, all the instructions are in Dutch, which is funny to try to pronounce, if you're me.

I put all those things together because they remind me that despite the bad news, I notice myself straining to find something good. Straining is the right word, here, because effort is involved. I'm no Pollyanna, but I do want to find a way back to good when something terrible happens. I don't think I've always felt this way. There have been times when I have been overwhelmed by traumatic events and pretty much pummeled by them. Readers, I believe this trend towards optimism in me is a result of my struggle to define success. I've changed. I think it's all the reading I've done about success, motivation, positive thinking, intelligence, and happiness, and meditation. Possible simply due to meditation, if what I've been learning about meditation's effects on the brain is true.

Whatever has caused this change, I'm grateful for it. I feel more resilient. If I didn't have that sense of possibility inside me somewhere, I might not be able to see those helpers. Sure, they're in the paper. But I mean, if I didn't have the little light of optimism, I would probably be overwhelmed by a sense of the helpers' ultimate futility.

So I am grateful, so grateful not to feel that way, not to feel that bad. I'm as grateful for that as I am for the helpers.

Thursday morning, I went to my NIA class, and the teacher, who is a friend, told the group that that day, instead of a particular body focus, she wanted us to have a focus on gratitude. Because of the bombing in Boston, about which she felt so angry and sad, she felt it was important to be grateful for our legs and feet and bodies, for the chance to move them around at will. It made me cry. Then I danced.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: Or, Why Faucets Are the Key to Success

Right now I’m a little perplexed. See, I read this book, Shop Craft as Soulcraft, at the recommendation of friends who know I’m on this success thing. Well, he’s an unusual thinker, this guy, the author. He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, but dropped out of his Ph.D program and went back to what he’d done to support himself through college – being a mechanic. Specializing in motorcycles.

Matthew Crawley, a.k.a. Dan Stevens via Wikimedia Commons

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, is by Matthew B. Crawford, whose name is somewhat like Matthew Crawley, as fans of Downton Abbey will recognize.  Matthew Crawley, would, I think, be right on board with Crawford’s argument, as he likes to see himself as a working fellow and not beholden to the wealth he may (or may not) inherit from Lord and Lady Grantham. But I digress, readers.

Now, I’ve bought Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and not read it. Twice. But this book I read. Why? Because my friends recommended it, natch. 

What is it about motorcycle mechanics? Who knew they were so cerebral?

Cerebral mechanics prove one of the author’s points (stay with me, Readers, especially those who tune in for the story portion of my posts)- that people underestimate the intellectual challenge of manual labor, when it’s skilled manual labor. Another of his points is that we’ve done a disservice to ourselves by creating a dichotomy in schools between technical/vocation and academic training. This argument is part of the author’s largest point, which is that we are all f**cked - pardon the French - because we’ve identified being successful in life with academic credentials and high paying white collar work, at the same time that we’ve turned skilled manual work into unskilled manual work and thereby deprived people of the satisfaction of jobs where they have the opportunity to fix something/do something/put effort into something and see the result. So many people are miserable at their white collar jobs because they are essentially working towards abstract goals like customer satisfaction, without any concrete means to produce this satisfaction. They never feel successful, even if they achieve many credentials and earn many dollars. Meanwhile, schools have phased out shop class and other practical elements of high school education in past decades like home economics, because manual labor is now so devalued that white collar folks are not supposed to want or to need to have anything to do with it.

It’s really kind of rough to read a book pointing out that the entire aim of your education, and of your life, is probably going to lead you to existential despair, and that you’re directing your children to the same pit of misery by sending them to school instead of to the local garage for a few pointers. I mean, who wants to hear that? Not I. Thus, my perplexity.

So I have to point out the giant flaw in this book. Okay, maybe it’s a rather small flaw, actually, but it’s the flaw the broke the camel’s argument, at least for this reader.

Crawford says that automatic faucets in public restrooms are the Devil’s work. That is right. Apparently, we’d be better people if we had to work at the little stuff, like turning on and off the faucets, which gives us more autonomy because we have control over our environment.

Okay, Readers, he didn’t actually say anything about the Devil. Here’s what he says of these automatic items:

Why should there not be a handle?....It's true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality. (p. 56)

Offends the spirited personality? No, it does not.

Hello. I consider myself a spirited personality. I, for one, love an automatic faucet. Heck, I’m fond of automatic soap dispensers, too. Automatic flush toilets, when they don’t flush at inopportune moments or refuse to flush at crucial ones are high on my list of likes, too. And bathroom doors that push open, so you don’t have to touch a door handle. You know, if you want to install automatic doors on public restrooms, I am not going to feel my autonomy is threatened in any way. Go ahead.

Clearly, this author has never spent much time in public restrooms. More specifically, he hasn’t spent time in public restrooms with small children. Why should there not be a handle? Let me tell you why: germs. 

Now, I may wax more vocal on the subject of germs and small children than others, but I know I am not alone in my mysophobic tendencies. When I have doubted this and have wondered if I need to embark on a series of cognitive behavior therapy sessions, all I have to do is visit a public restroom. I need spend only a moment or two in said facility, before a mother with a small child enters a stall, and I hear, “Don’t touch anything.” The tone and emphases vary. “Do. Not. Touch. Anything.” “Don’t touch ANYthing.” “Do NOT touch anything.” And the volume varies, too. The words, never. They always bring a smile to my face, as well as a warm sunburst of compassion for the person who is busily papering over the entire stall before allowing her small fry to do his or her business. I vividly recall accompanying my cousin while she took her first child, then potty training, to a public restroom. This was long before I had children. She practically mummified the toilet before putting her child on it and saying (loudly and with equal emphasis on each word, the mommy mantra, “Do Not Touch Anything.)

So I am then reminded that I am not in fact crazy. (Or, I suppose, that crazy runs in my family, but at least I am not alone.) And then I get the bleep out of those tiled germ holes, using only my forearms to push open the door, or grasping the door handle with my shirtsleeve pulled over my hand, and trying not to inhale too deeply.

I think I’ve proved my point.

Or maybe Matthew Crawford’s.

Because, really, it's perfect for this post, too, I'm reusing this picture and its caption:
I encourage my children to use sharp tools.

Okay, listen, I may be guilty of reductio ad absurdum here. That’s my right. It’s my blog. Frankly, it's one of my specialties. 

I will admit that dealing with faucets and knobs while evading germs has given me a certain satisfaction derived from my ingenuity and dexterity with paper towels and shirt sleeves, and if I never had to do that again, I’d be robbed of that sort of direct feedback on my autonomous efforts to avoid gross stuff in bathrooms. Beyond that, I see the satisfaction the 5^th grader gets from using the can opener and the sharp knives to make tuna salad for us. I do see Crawford’s point. Even as I cringe upstairs in my bedroom while she chops a carrot, the sharp knock of the blade on the cutting board ringing through the house. Autonomy, the ability to use one’s intellect, and the chance to physically produce a result, when combined lead to a feeling of deep success and satisfaction.  But you’re never going to win me over with that automatic faucet argument. 

The Dough Followed the Bread!

The first full week of school finds me a little calmer than last week. The refrigerator is here—or most of it. There’s just a toe plate missing, but hey, did you expect the whole thing to arrive at once? I didn’t. The thing works, and the produce is now in the humidity-controlled produce bins and not crammed amongst the milk bottles. The 9^th grader has found people with whom to eat lunch, and one of them is even named “Silken,” so that’s good. The 5^th grader has exchanged gifts with her “boyfriend,” so that’s good. (?) And I’ve triumphed over bureaucracy, too. The transportation people listened to my suggestion about the bus route and are implementing it, starting tomorrow.  Yay, me!  I’ve only had one unnecessary visit to the doctor, who very gently told me that armpit pain and fatigue don’t fit the rubric for West Nile Virus as much as for, uh, muscular pain brought on by too many Sun Salutations, and fatigue because of, possibly, too little vitamin D or sleep, or just because of life.  So, you know, overall, things are better. Although who can be sure it’s not something worse than West Nile Virus? I mean, besides the doctor? No one, I tell you. No one. But I’m fine, readers, really.

And then there was the baker I interviewed for the food co-op newsletter. An Amazon of a woman, mother of three, who is piloting the new bread program at the co-op. She works four nights a week from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. or something insane, then goes home and sees her children off to school, and tries to sleep.  When I interviewed her, she’d been up all night, but she was so enthusiastic about her bread and all the beautiful details she puts into it, and how she studies the customers’ buying patterns to determine what sells and how she lovingly arranges her loaves in a display with accompanying greens, that she practically blew me off my chair. So I asked her how she was managing the scheduling, and she said that becoming a baker was a recent career choice, and that before she’d had kids, she’d worked in healthcare and started nursing school, and now that her kids are in middle school and high school she felt like she could look at her professional life again. She decided that even though nursing would be a more practical choice, she was going to go for what she loved to do. And then, as if she were a living testimonial ripped from the pages of Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow, she said that after she went to culinary school, she spent several months figuring out how to get a job as a baker. One day she came to the co-op and just decided, on a whim, to ask if they needed one. It turned out they'd just decided to start the bread program, so she had a job. Then, on top of that, she said that because she was doing what she loved to do, the hard parts, like working nights, and like feeling like getting three whole hours of sleep in one twenty-four hour period was “wow,” things were going to fall into place. 

"When you do what you love," she said (with no prompting from me), "things shift." You work with a "different purpose," and the inconveniences are not problems. "I know in future everything will fall into place," she said. 

As I listened to her rapid-fire speech and considered her shiny, bright-eyed, sleep-deprived face, the thought--drugs-- did occur to me. But that was uncharitable. This dame was powered by pure satisfaction.  Could I have asked for a more serendipitous interview? 

I'm Doing What I Want, but Where is the Money?

This week, I was supposed to go to Boston for a job training, but it was cancelled. Saved me six hours round trip in the car, but it bummed me out. I was all packed, checked my email one last time, and there was the message. "Client's needs changed," whatever. Yadda yadda. Lucky I checked.

Everything happens for a reason, passed through my brain.

Um, yeah.

I thought it was funny that phrase passed through my brain, since I'm not one of your crunchy-airy-believing-in-signs kind of people, much as I would like to be. Yes, really, I would. Life seems so much more thrilling, or at least meaningful, to people who believe that way.

I observed the phrase flitting through my mind--result of lots of mindfulness meditation practice, ability to notice these passing thoughts with dispassion. I also observed the retort that followed along right after. Yeah, everything happens for a reason, but it just so happens that the reason has nothing to do with you.

Then I recalled the 3 queries I recently sent to agents for a project and the 3 rejections that came sailing back to me, practically instantaneously. After that, I lay down for two days and read Broken Harbor by Tana French. I also decided the husband was annoying, I am fat, and the world is grey.

Today I'd had enough wallowing. I ran. I showered. I opened up Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow, by Marsha Sinetar.  Heard of that book? That old chestnut? I've been joking about that title for years. Decades, even."I'm doing what I love, but if the money's following, it's sure a long way behind"...and so on. It was published in 1987, just when I decided not to go to law school and to work for a phone sex company instead.  Excellent decision.

I opened at random to a section about three aspects to the "the money will follow" part of the title: letting go; waiting; and inner wealth.  The specific part I put my finger on was this: "in the critical months and years of 'waiting' for the money to follow, the person who ventures into the loved, not-yet-successful work area faces the risk that not only will the money be delayed, but also that he will feel he has experienced a failure.... This is, in the final analysis, a very personal judgement call, and no book can give the formula for when to stay or quit."

Aw, hell.  Why not? That's why I'm reading this book. I want the freakin' formula.

Sinetar continues on the next page, "We must become good readers of our own situation."

Isn't that just like every single self-help book you've ever read? They fob off the really hard work, usually the problem that has brought you to buy this book, by telling you it's up to you to figure out the nubbin at the core of the situation. I mean, if I could read my situation well, lady, I wouldn't need your book.

So I ask you, readers, how do I read my situation? The potential job fell through, which is perhaps a sign that I ought to commit myself to my creative pursuits more confidently and thoroughly. However, I am three for three with those agent queries, which suggests that I ought to conduct a much more thorough job search than I've done so far, and leave my creative pursuits behind.

Perhaps it's time to pull out the I Ching....Or can someone just give me the name of a decent psychic?

The Habits of Highly Effective Mormons (With a Little Mysticism Added)

"Did you see the article on Romney that mentions Stephen Covey?" The husband asked me Sunday.

I had not. Not only was it on the front page--and who reads the front page of the Sunday Times?-- but also it was about Mitt Romney. Since I am as likely to vote for Mitt Romney as I am for my mittens, I tend to avoid articles about him. Perhaps this is foolish. Perhaps it is willful head-in-the-sand behavior. So be it. I also avoid op-ed columnists who write about him. So much more efficient than reading them. I'm either going to agree with them, after all, or want to shoot them, so why not take a longer look at the photo-spread of the contact sheets of the photo shoot for the album cover of "Heroes" by David Bowie? And then throw in another load of laundry. (The husband told me about that article, too, by the way. He seems way too relaxed on Sundays.)  I do, however, always check with the husband that Gail Collins mentions the story about Mitt's family dog on the car roof in every piece she writes on him. He says, yes, she did, and then I am free to enjoy a knowing chuckle at cocktail parties when people mention Gail Collins. Or Mitt Romney. Although I don't spend a lot of time around people who mention Mitt Romney. Or at cocktail parties. Indeed, I don't think I've been to a cocktail party since 1995. Safe in my little bubble, I am.

Anyhoo, the article, by Jodi Kantor, was about Romney's faith. Her thesis is that while he hardly mentions his Mormonism in public, it is the bedrock of his existence. While in public, he's practically secular, in private, he's "demonstrative about his faith." Or if not only in private, at least away from the "spotlight."  She gives several examples, including him bursting into song about Jesus and meddling--well, that's a loaded word isn't it?--but, yes, meddling in the affairs of a married couple who felt they both needed jobs to live in the Boston area.  Mitt's commitment to doing good extended to helping the couple redraw their budget, so that the poor woman, pregnant with her first child, wouldn't have to work outside the home. One wonders how far out of Boston they had to move to achieve this little dream?

But this article isn't about Mitt Romney. It's about someone a little more important. See, in this article, Kantor mentions that "Mormons have a long tradition of achieving success by sharing secular versions of their tenets." This is according to a book by one Matthew Bowman. This Bowman says Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is "Latter-day Saint theology repackaged as career advice." 

Wh-whaaa?

Not that this information about his religion is hidden. About a minute on the interwebs verified it. Did you know he used to preach on the Boston Common? Did you know he opposes same sex marriage? Did you know he has one wife, 9 kids, and 52 grandkids? Now you do.

So the really weird thing about this information is that I was just the other day wondering where Stephen Covey came up with his whole theory. I mean, before he was the success guru, he was just Stephen Covey. Stephen Covey, Mormon, apparently. You might even say I asked the universe a question, and the universe answered.

Come to think of it, there was another question I asked the universe just last week, too. I went to the dentist, and I was sitting there getting scraped and polished, and I thought, I wonder what my teeth would look like if I never went to the dentist. And then I went to interview my next subject for the newsletter I write for every month, and I got my answer. The universe provided AGAIN. (FYI, picture this: you take a piece of soft cheese, like Laughing Cow, and you hold it under your tongue and then squish the cheese so it extrudes around your teeth. Then you let that stuff harden. That's what you look like if you don't go to the dentist. Nice guy, though. A priest. Probably has no dental insurance. Ask the universe. The universe provides. Sometimes.)

I digress. You know, Stephen Covey started an international business called Franklin Covey. He has an online community, which you are free to visit, and perhaps to join. Aside from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which you've heard of even if you've never read it--like The Book of Mormon--he has several other best selling books. And he is Mormon. Then there's Mitt Romney. If any of you is tempted to rail about The Illuminati, can we just take the spotlight off the Jews, and turn it towards the Mormons? Do you have to be a Mormon or play a Mormon on TV to achieve worldly success?

Does it matter that Stephen Covey is Mormon? No, it does not. As long as he remains secular in public. He's not foisting his Mormonism upon his readers. Nor is his religion the only religion that stresses leading a life of principle. Nor is following a religion at all necessary for living a life of principal, I might add. 

Perhaps he was hoping to knead his readers into nicely rounded dough balls through all his 7 habits, and then to pop them into the Latter Day Saints' oven and pull them out as nicely browned Mormons, one by one, once they'd finished the book. The book's been out for a long time, however, and I haven't seen any reports about a vast increase in the number of Mormons.* So I think we're safe to assume that the secular life is still possible, even if you're reading Stephen Covey.

image via Wikipedia

Possibly, people just don't want anything to do with that special Mormon underwear. I know I sure don't. I tried it. It itches.

*Holy Molloly: Alerted by an alert reader, I must report the following, from today's NYTimes: "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has experienced explosive worldwide growth through its missionary work, particularly in countries with large black populations. In the United States, it is the second-fastest growing religion, according to a recently released decennial census of religions."