It’s Sunday night, the last day of February, since 2010 is a leap year since 2010 is NOT a leap year (my friend Krys brought this error to my attention, saying, “You really were losing it in the end.”). Tomorrow is March 1st, and the first day of my last week at the job I’ve had since October 2005.
I started this job with a massive sense of gratitude and excitement; the job I had before was pretty awful and not related to my personal interests at all. I’d only taken it because my unemployment (from previous job with company that went bankrupt) ran out. So, in October 2005, I was thrilled – ridiculously thrilled – to be starting a job, in marketing, with a publishing house. Working on travel books! And craft books! Yay! Personal interests all over the place! But after four years, I’ve gotten to that point where I’m comfortable… and after comfort comes complacency. The space between comfort and complacency is a dangerous place to be, especially when you’re still relatively young (I’m 31). The time has come to move on, and I am doing so. It’s not easy, but it’s the right move, a good move and a smart move (my supremely supportive manager agreed on that point).
For the last 4+ years, I’ve enjoyed my job tremendously. I’ve enjoyed all the people I’ve worked with and have learned a lot from all of them in one way or another. I’ve gotten something positive and/or useful from even the more stressful and less enjoyable times–whether that’s been an understanding of frustratingly complex systems, troubleshooting technological barriers, or just crazy deadlines. I’ve also enjoyed almost everything that I’ve made a part of my job. It’s a (bad) habit of mine: if I can do something, I do it. I don’t ask whether I should or not; I just do because I am capable of doing it. In smaller doses, I think they call this “being a self-starter.” In large doses, it’s called, “overachievers making themselves INSANE.” I’ve also received immensely valuable career advice from the people I’ve worked with–sometimes through observing how they tick/operate and sometimes through direct conversation about issues we face, especially as female professionals (because there are some issues that men just don’t face – beyond the question of nude tights in the summer or appropriate nail polish shades for the office).
There are differences.
One conversation (from whence the title of this post is derived) came about while I was preparing for a presentation. I was invited to speak about social media during a seminar-type session where I’d be presenting alongside two people at a director level–and here I was, a lowly associate marketing manager! What was I doing there? While creating some Powerpoint slides to combine with those provided by my presentation partner, a director of ebiz stuffity stuff (not an official title), I started to freak out a bit; his slides had graphs with spokes and nodes and flowcharts and social media connectivity metrics… and I was feeling out of my depth.
Before a full-fledged freak-out ensued, I phoned up the woman (an associate director) who had invited me to present at this session and asked her whether I was on the right track with the slides I was preparing; slides that were more hands-on, case study based and which provided more down-and-dirty information for people who might not have used social media at ALL in their business lives.
She assured me that this was the right way to go, and that it would be a good balance for the high-level biz speak my partner would be presenting, and that I would do extremely well. I sighed a sigh of relief, thanked her, and told her I was feeling less nervous about it, and then made a joke about bringing cupcakes to the session in case my presentation tanked. The next sentence out of her mouth was spoken with much more passion than I would ever have expected for a sentence containing the word “cupcake.”
“Eva, do NOT be the girl who brings the cupcakes.”
Thus began a conversation that made a lot of things click inside my head for the first time in my professional life. The gist of it was this: as women, we are conditioned to be nice (we know this) and that it’s something we all struggle with, but that we have to reserve our nice, nurturing natures for our personal lives and friends. In the workplace, being seen as “nice” devalues us as professionals (even if we don’t think it seriously does); it devalues our work and our professional standing. Sure, you might be the most brilliant marketer/financier/programmer/lawyer ever, but that will be completely overshadowed by your desire to be thought of as “nice.”
Bringing cupcakes to a meeting is an act of self-sabotage!!!
The Cupcake Parable
(That last line was for comedic effect). Of course, this is a parable and your ‘cupcake’ could be a mannerism or habit that you think is “nice”, or a way of dressing or speaking or dealing with co-workers. She told me that her rule of thumb when deciding how to proceed in a professional environment was this: if she couldn’t see the VP (a man) doing it, she didn’t do it. This applied to seemingly innocuous details such as whether or not to use exclamation points in email, ever (don’t!), overuse of words that modify/soften meaning (“I was just checking…”) in written and spoken communication (stop it) whether to be the person who brings treats to a meeting (nope) and how to handle decision-making (don’t apologize or second-guess yourself).
After I hung up the phone, I felt at least a foot taller. I was struck by the fact that this woman, someone I admire both professionally and personally, contends with the very same issues that I contend with (at my junior level) — juggling a desire to be personable and nice with a desire to succeed and be taken seriously as a professional — and that these issues influence her decisions on something as seemingly trivial as how to sign her email.
I sat on the train, analyzing, thinking, and feeling strangely empowered. “If at her level,” I thought to myself, “she’s still mindful of these little things and is struggling with the nice girl thing, I’m in pretty good company. It’s not a sign that I’m ill-prepared for bigger and better things. It just means I have to be mindful of these things, too.” I’m young-ish, and I look much younger than I am. My Polish genes have given me big cheeks that pretty much guarantee I’ll be considered “cute” forever. I sometimes come across as “nice” even when I’m being a bitch. I have to be mindful of these things.
That night, I decided I’d start putting these techniques to work – no exclamation points, no apologies or acts of contrition, cutting down on extraneous “thanks!”, etc. Small changes, but every time I caught myself falling into one of those habits, I would remember why it was important to keep at it and focus on the work at hand. This could be an entire business self-help book if I went into all the different things I caught in my day-to-day activity, how I strayed or didn’t hold as firm as I’d have liked, blah blah blah. I learned that lesson, though, and that will travel with me to my new job and to whatever comes after it… and I will employ these lessons. Even if they didn’t directly cause my upward mobility, they gave me a huge boost of confidence and that definitely gave me the cojones to do a lot of things I wouldn’t have considered six months ago.
Lessons learned in the last four years:
Just because I can do something doesn’t mean that I should.
Being highly valued should not be confused with being a bargain. This is a corollary to the first lesson. If you become known as the person who knows/does everything, you diminish yourself; your memorable trait is doing everything and anything (a type of office promiscuity). Don’t give it away.
Don’t be the girl who brings the cupcakes. We covered this. At length.
“Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.”
(I adore geeky design videos. Or design videos. Or geeky videos.)
I rather like the op art inspired pictograms from Mexico City 1968, but I really don’t like the Munich pictograms that Heller calls “smart, elegant.” I also disagree with him on the Athens 2004 pictograms -- “delightfully comic and smartly primitive”? They look messy to me. I do like the Beijing ones quite a bit; in addition to being understandable, they give a nod to Chinese culture with lines and shapes that evoke Chinese hanzi or sinography.
If there’s one activity that monopolizes my time, it’s reading. Reading RSS feeds to catch up on news and culture and randomness, reading magazines, reading books and reading more books.
Within the last year, I’ve fallen in love with Cormac McCarthy. Or his writing, anyway. The Road blew me away (the movie, by contrast, was pretty awful. I do not advise it). I read All the Pretty Horses and decided I could jump right in to the rest of The Border Trilogy, so I did. I am now about a third of the way through The Crossing. If you’ve read McCarthy, you know that his prose is rather sparse. You don’t get long-winded narratives or descriptions (you’ll get a lot of run-on sentences, but there’s a reason for that, too, when it happens). You’re lucky if the dialogue has anyone speaking anything more than a five word sentence at a go. My boiled down “example” (inspired by The Road) is this: “Dad, are we going to die?” “No, son.” “Okay.”
So, in the midst of that sparse, western (not as a genre, but as a flavor) prose, it’s a bit overwhelming to come across the shocking moments in The Road or the beautiful (but still tidy) descriptions I came across in The Crossing. I’ve got examples!
“The indian took it and squatted before the fire with that same marionette’s effortlessness and set the cloth on the ground before him and opened it and lifted out the beans and set the cup by the coals to warm and then took up one of the biscuits and bit into it.”
“He stood twinned in those dark wells with hair so pale, so thin and strange, the selfsame child. As if it were some cognate child to him that had been lost who now stood windowed away in another world where the red sun sank eternally.”
Emphasis mine to point out the words that hooked me somewhere behind my solar plexus. I was discussing this effect with a friend at work and how my favorite writers are the ones that manage to do this. People have recommended “book club” books to me in the past and I’ve found that I don’t really like them; they’re usually very story-focused and the stories are usually written in a way that tells you how to feel. Sort of like sad violins in a movie. Or happy trumpets. But they lack original or beautiful wordsmithing; I’ve read The Time Traveler’s Wife; it’s OK, but the words are there to tell the story. They’re not inextricably linked to one another and working to accomplish the same goal. The words are just friggin’ lazy, really.
I can take or leave a “good story”, honestly. I want to get lost in the words themselves; if the wordsmithing is part of an engaging or compelling story (like Lolita or most books by Ian McEwan), that’s just a bonus. I fixate on phrases and how they convey (or evoke) such a vivid and unique image. I mean, “marionette’s effortlessness”? That’s incredible. You don’t need the rest of the sentence or the novel to picture what that motion looks like and the set of emotions that accompany it.
Which leaves me thinking that I need to get back to writing – poetry is my medium. I say this at least once a year, but when I sit down to write, I start second-guessing myself and realize that I’m always writing the same thing and drawing on the same emotions or stories. And I also find my writing confidence evaporating when I read a great poem or a great novel and think that I might be able to come up with a phrase, but I doubt I could sustain it.
Still, the one lesson I learned in all my creative writing classes in college was to write every day, no matter what it is and no matter how crappy you think it is. Just write. Last week, I was inspired to cobble together some haiku verse, inspired by my commute on NJ Transit. This is my favorite:
Red nails, greasy bag
This woman clearly enjoys
Her garlic plantains.
Please – I know it’s nothing to crow about, but we’ve all got to start somewhere.
NOTE: I’m still trying to figure out why Chrome hates this WordPress template. It looks fine on Firefox and IE, but is apparently not Chrome-compatible. Just so you know – I’m not that lax about aesthetics.
Holy crap, have I been this negligent? I suppose it would matter more if I had a rabid blog following, but considering that I DON’T, it’s perfectly OK to disappear for, um, more than a year.
Since I got hit with 2 feet of snow Thursday into Friday and then more Friday into today, the prospect of sitting in front of the computer instead of shoveling seemed quite satisfactory. Here are some photos of the insanity Mother Nature chose to share:
The Field of Public Service
I call him Chubb-cicle.
I haven’t decided what my new “beat” or “hook” will be for this iteration of the blog, but I’ll think on it and get back to you.
I’ll come up with something. I’m starting a new job on March 15th and things are going to be changing a lot – A LOT. It’s that combination of being terror and excitement that is commonly called, “exhiliration.”
There was a blizzard. I grabbed a Ziploc bag, my point-and-shoot camera, and went outside to see what I could see. Not the greatest, but with a little Photoshop love to turn up the contrast, it’s not bad:
Wow. Last post: April 30. Huh. Really? I guess so. Well, here I am.
I’ve been more than a little preoccupied with social media and related topics at work for the last 8 million weeks, so my energy and desire to pursue these personal ventures and forays into a digital medium have been a little less than strong. Honestly, it gets pretty tiring. When a large part of your day is spent thinking about what to do with Twitter and Facebook and podcasts and blogs and Flickr and YouTube and everything else under the sun, it’s hard to get home and think about the rest of your world… while staring at the computer screen.
One thing that totally got me away from that a few months ago was my first outdoor climbing experience at the Gunks (Shawangunk Mountains) nears New Paltz, NY. Here’s a photo I took from a few hundred feet up (click to embiggen):
Yup. That’s about as far away from sitting at my desk as I could get on a day trip. Believe me when I tell you I was dreaming about this that night. Cheesy? Perhaps. But lovely.
Perhaps there will be more out of me soon. I can show off some more of my pictures. I got myself a small new camera of the high quality point-and-shoot variety so I can be a slave to the moments more easily and capture EVERYTHING my eyes notice. Well, more than I’m catching right now. I have several friends who throw out the “memory is the best camera” line, but until technology advances much further than it has right now, I can’t share memories in my mind’s eye with anyone else, can I? At least not so they see what I see.
Well. That’s still corny. And even cornier will be this idea – think about the quotidian, ordinary things you see that other people really wouldn’t notice unless you pointed them out or caught them on film. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, by any means. I notice the graffiti that’s on the brick walls lining my train’s path to work every morning. There’s a section where someone spray-painted something beautiful, resembling koi in a Japanese woodcut. No one beyond commuters on NJ Transit trains (or people who play on train tracks recessed about 20 feet below street level behind fences) really gets to see it.
I’m always surprised; there’s more of that kind of beauty than I ever think.
It’s been a while since I’ve felt myself slipping down into a depression; I hope this isn’t happening now and that this is just stress taking its toll and that having at least one weekend day to recuperate before doing it for another five days will help. I need a break.
Right now, all I can think about it how much I have to do, how everything seems insurmountable, how I can’t shut off my brain, how I need to find some sleeping pills or I’m really screwed for tomorrow, how isolated and disconnected and alone I’ve been feeling lately. Part of it is this modern age; part of it is how I function.
I’m not firing on all cylinders. I’m forgetting things. I’m making mistakes. I’m fidgety and anxious and emotional. My mental and verbal filters aren’t functioning properly. I am exhausted. I am angry. I am sad. I can’t sleep. I have no appetite. I open the fridge and stare at the shelves full of food but find myself disgusted at the thought of any of it. I am hungry. I am uncomfortable and unsettled. I lack the desire to do anything. I am entertaining the idea of canceling weekend plans and have already bowed out of two upcoming events because I know I won’t be able to deal with large groups of people in this mental state. I’m done with this.
All I can hope is that this is stress-induced and not “the real thing.” Because that would really suck.
My friend Krys pointed out that haven’t blogged in ages. I am aware of this, but I’ve been operating under the “if you don’t anything interesting to say, don’t say anything at all” model.
However, on this rainy Wednesday afternoon, I find myself sitting with 30 minutes to kill (that I will not use to do work I could also be doing) while waiting to board a flight to San Francisco (for work). JetBlue provides free WiFi in this terminal, so I’m taking advantage.
Anyway – yeah. I may have to pay $7 for a blanket later, but at least I’m getting free internets right now. Unsecured. Sure. I’ll just stay away from online banking for a half hour.
I was thinking of posting about a matter that crossed my mind a few weeks ago when I got a haircut – the speed with which some relationships can go from handshake to hug. There are very few industries and interactions that allow you to make this jump. But I’ll expand on that another time.
Other thoughts: I’m way stressed. It’s not any one thing, but rather an overwhelming sense over the last few months that my time is not my own to divide and use. I wake up in order to prepare for work so I can get to the train on time. I fit my breakfast in before my morning meetings. I get lunch when I can and often have to cut it short to run to my afternoon meetings. I have to leave work within a 10 minute window of time if I want to catch my train and get a seat. Depending on the night, I have to fit in doing laundry, rock-climbing, visit with the doctor, etc. — or sometimes working from home or running errands. I maybe have one night a week that I can just sit and watch a movie. My Netflix return history is a testament to this; I recently returned two films I’d been trying to watch since February 12th.
My weekends are a nice break since I get away and visit with friends, but this respite from the crappitude of life is bookended by more time pressure and scheduling; if I want to beat the traffic on Friday afternoon, I have to leave work either before or after a certain time… but still have to finish what I need to finish. Friday nights and Saturdays are restful and fine. But when I wake up on Sunday, I’m already getting anxious about the drive home and how that translates… if I leave at x:00 hour, I get home approx 2.5 hours later, then I can unpack, do laundry, etc. and go to sleep by a certain time so I can wake up in order to prepare for work and get to the train on time.
There is no wiggle room – except for part of the weekend.
So – I’m in the midst of a 12-day stretch of work (including a trip to California, but that will be work, too) and then it will be another week before I can have a restful weekend. So, I’m looking ahead at 20 days of run-run-run, from day to day, from work to home to errands, from meeting to meeting, from deadline to deadline, from familial obligation to familial obligation… and I just need a break.
It’s time for a vacation. The plan is to take a week… a full week… and use that time to do what I want to do, with no schedule or pressure. I mean, routines are good. I love routines. They stabilize me and my moods in a nice way – but routines like seeing friends are positive; the other stuff? Just stressful.
Anyway, we’ll be boarding soon. Let’s see what else the internets have to offer.
Since last night, the wind here in northern New Jersey has been fierce. FIERCE. Loud and long and constantly hissing or screaming or howling. It didn’t keep me awake last night, but other things did. Not worries or concerns or anything. Just random stuff.
I was up until almost 4 in the morning and had to get up at 7, whether I wanted to or not. It was a rough day. I’m going to try to make it through until a more appropriate bedtime so that I can sleep through the night.
The stream of consciousness that was flowing during this particular bout of insomnia was kind of entertaining. I started by burrowing my head into the mound of four pillows that I have (for myself alone – I only use one, but I like having four for reading and propping purposes) and could hear my heartbeat in my ears. Then I noticed that the pulse in my neck was just barely making the sheets move and causing them to whisper a little. And that that whispering almost seemed to be rhythmic – but the rhythm of a waltz. Which is impossible because that would indicate a rather disturbing arrhythmia, no? Still, I was thinking about the waltz and things in 3/4 time, and then 4/4 and then 5/4. And I was thinking about how little I know about music and that the only song I can name in 5/4 time is Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five.”
(P.S. I now know that I know more… thanks to this very helpful article on musical works in unusual time signatures on Wikipedia. I could have figured out that Radiohead didn’t stick to 4/4 for everything, but 7/4 ["2+2=5"] Or 10/4 ["Go To Sleep"] Hey, guys – nice! Thanks for learnin’ me somethin’. And Nick Drake’s “River Man”, also in 5/4. I love that song.)
Then I moved onto thinking about words and meanings and semiotics and how, beyond never actually being able to understand each other when we’re all sane, lucid individuals, it’s frightening to think about how little it takes to separate us from the rest of the world in terms of comprehension and expression of meaning. A friend told me about a play she saw about a woman and her schizophrenic brother, and we were talking about the breakdown in language and meaning and comprehension in schizophrenics or people with dementia and other loss of brain function. This carried over into another conversation with friends last night about the same thing… and so when I couldn’t sleep last night, I was just marveling at how incredible it really is that we can communicate with each other and that we have the capacity to learn other languages and comprehend units of meaning in a way that allows us to cross those communication bridges — and how tragic it really is to lose that particular ability. It closes you off from the world entirely when you can’t make those connections between an object, the word for that object and that object’s meaning to you or someone else. And I was thinking about aphasia, agnosia and apraxia (Wikipedia does a good job of explaining those too, as well…)
Aphasia: is a loss of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language, due to injury to brain areas specialized for these functions
Apraxia: is a neurological disorder characterized by loss of the ability to execute or carry out learned purposeful movements, despite having the desire and the physical ability to perform the movements
Agnosia: is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss
Besides being really awesome words (sorry – word nerd), they’re pretty terrifying as far as what they mean for an individual affected by them. An inability to produce or comprehend language – where you’re speaking nonsense but have no idea that no one else can understand you, or finding that everything other people are saying is gibberish to you. A loss of ability to recognize things, despite the fact that you see, feel, hear and taste it all… you just can’t put it together and grasp it.
So I was sort of sitting there in bed at 3 in the morning, scaring myself thinking about that and how tenuous our whole world of communication is – and how terrifying it would be if that broke down. It sounds like something Jose Saramago could turn into a novel, like he did with Blindness or Seeing. Except there would have to be some terrific allegorical and political meaning. Otherwise, I’d write the fucking thing.
I was always fascinated by how Annie Sullivan was able to teach Helen Keller (you remember The Miracle Worker, right?) to name and recognize objects without the benefit of sight or hearing. While that was enough of an obstacle, imagine trying to do that when the person you were teaching was (or if you yourself were) incapable of making the connection between the taste in your mouth and the word/symbol for it. There are therapists who work on this with stroke victims or victims of head trauma, and that’s just incredible to me. Seems almost Sisyphean.
Anyways. I’m way exhausted and don’t feel like this thought process is working itself out in the most elegant fashion, but maybe if I ever feel like I have it in me to write a novel, I could work that angle. I’d be surprised, though, if someone hadn’t already done that.
Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. — Albert Einstein
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