Editing

Coming at you live from the intersection of Philosophy and Writing.

This happened.

Challenge 36: Wow, August

Wow. The end of the last challenge went through my life like a meat grinder. Mediation Workshops, threats of nuclear war, Personal Relationship Crumbling, Charlottesville. Thank goodness I have the NF community and the habits I've built with you guys over the past few years. One of the things that I know is that we will do it together, and we will go farther than we ever could have imagined. 

#Writing: After attending the Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop, I applied for and got accepted into the Queens University MFA in Creative writing. This means that I have to read and write every day. I started a scheduled structure, and stick to it mostly. I need to continue it so that it is a solid habit. First submission due: September 1. I also need to submit a piece to a contest or so, since it would be a wonderful thing to get a cash award, and the validation wouldn't be awful. But the writing is the thing. Feel free to check out my progress in my tracking spreadsheet (two tabs).  Also, I have a paper on American Exceptionalism to write that I got an extension on, and that needs to be swept up. #Writers Life

#Mediation certification: I took all the required training seminars last challenge, and will spend this challenge getting the required practicums -- observations and co-mediation -- taken care of. Hopefully the court certification will be finalized by the end of this challenge. #FingersCrossed. 

#Communication with Vivian. My daily calls with my daughter were suspended when we went to court on July 6. This hurts, and she was in tears over it. The appeal hearing was moved to the end of October (two challenges from now, I think, but maybe three -- this is how I measure things). I'm now limited to calling on Monday and Wednesday. I wrote her a Garden Report and included a garden word search along with the pictures I took and mailed it to her, and thus began a habit of mailing her something most days. Harvey mails some days too. It's our way to stay in touch now. I send a puzzle or coloring page or whathaveyou. And then I'm going to write my pen pal, who is in prison. #SnailMailRules

#Employment I interview for a position to teach GED classes at the regional jail. This resonates with me in ways that don't really make any sense, but in a very positive, contributory way. Part time. I'm thinking of it as a work-study component to the writing classes. #WishMeLuck

#Self-care 

• Nightly sleep I need to take care of myself by making certain I'm getting enough rest. If I'm worn out and exhausted, I can't be a good student / parent / friend. I need to be in bed no later than 9 p.m. 
• Daily Sauna or hot bath
• Meetings A few meetings a week, especially on Wednesday, then therapy on Thursday and then the Friends Meeting every Sunday.
• Water reestablish the habit.
• Walking. My steps fell to hell as the office job progressed. I went from a ten mile a day habit to barely a mile, and lost the habit of walking thirty minutes every day as well. I'm hoping to put it back. 
   

#FinancialPlanning with the attorney: Financial worry is soul-crushing. Bankruptcy filing in Monday, August 14. #Acceptance leads to #balance. #Balance leads to #harmony. #Harmony leads to #peace.

Challenge 35: Hashtag

35: The Hashtag Challenge

I don't have a clue when I last posted -- I know that the #BigHeavyWeight of it all wrapped itself around my shoulders on June 19 and I have been working my way through a bit of hell ever since. Anton Chekhov wrote that "Any idiot can handle a crisis. It's the day to day living that wears you out." And I've had about three weeks of living in that space. The good news is that I am brave enough to say I'm tired, brave enough to quit pretending all is well, brave enough to rest and to begin to heal. Another wonderful man once said "This is not the end, and not even the beginning of the end, but it might be the end of the beginning." #KeepSwimming

My employment ended on June 3o, the afternoon after a demonstration by a company that can do everything I do, only from India. I texted my partner that I was pretty certain that I was going to be outsourced, and sure enough, I was shown the door the next day. #MoreTimeToWrite.

#Writing: After attending the Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop, I've decided to formalize my path as a writer. This is weird and vulnerable and scary for me. I need to keep a log of pieces that I have submitted (a New Thing That Just Happened on Monday) and pieces that need rework. I hope to have a submission, rework and new work every day, along with reading. Stay tuned. Feel free to check out my progress in my tracking spreadsheet (two tabs).

#Mediation certification: I will be taking the Domestic Violence and the Family seminar on July 21, and then the Family Mediation Training in Richmond in August (next challenge). I'm still waiting to make progress on the General Court observation, but it will come in due time. The Family Mediation Certification will likely come at the end of August (also next challenge). It feels good to have progress on this.

#Communication with Vivian. My daily calls with my daughter were suspended when we went to court on July 6. This hurts, and she was in tears over it. We go back to court in September (two challenges from now, I think, but maybe three -- this is how I measure things). I'm now limited to calling on Monday and Wednesday, which doesn't really make any sense, since the argument they presented was that I was inappropriate on the phone, so why would it be ok to be inappropriate two times a week? #MovingOn. When we were on the phone on Monday, we started talking about the garden and how it's coming along and she got a little sad. I said I could send her pictures, and she brightened up and said she would love that. So there it is, in the midst of the dark, the single star to guide me through. I wrote her a Garden Report and included a garden word search along with the pictures I took and mailed it yesterday. I'm going to write her every day, including a puzzle or coloring page or whathaveyou. And then I'm going to write my pen pal, who is in prison. #SnailMailRules

#Self-care 

• Nightly sleep I need to take care of myself by making certain I'm getting enough rest. If I'm worn out and exhausted, I can't be a good student / parent / friend. I need to be in bed no later than 9 p.m. 
• Daily Sauna or hot bath
• Daily Meetings Reason 417 that not having a job is grand for me is that I get to return to my lunchtime meeting. It meets at 12:15 seven days a week, and I'm thinking of adding Saturday to the mix when my partner has overtime or a seminar. It fits perfectly after my writing workshop meeting at 9:30 at the local library, and then the Friends Meeting every Sunday.
• Water reestablish the habit.
• Walking. My steps fell to hell as the office job progressed. I went from a ten mile a day habit to barely a mile, and lost the habit of walking thirty minutes every day as well. I'm hoping to put it back. 
   

#FinancialPlanning with the attorney: Financial worry is soul-crushing. I recently read a report on the effects of poverty sapping nearly an entire standard deviation from a person's intelligence, and I can completely believe that. The mental peace that will come from financial clarity is huge. I have until July 31 to wrap this up, and am hoping that it will be done much sooner than that. It's only waiting on me at this point, so pester me for updates.

Equal Opportunity Employment

When women enter the modern day workforce, especially in the white collar world, we are held to the same expectations as men, which is to say that we are expected to uphold and conform to the cornerstones of masculinity identified by Brannon and David in 1976:

1. No Sissy Stuff: Never do anything that even remotely hints of femininity. “Real” men always steer clear of any behavior or characteristic associated with women.
2. Be a Big Wheel: Masculinity is measured by success, power, and the admiration of others. Consequently, men need wealth, renown, and prestige to be identified as “real” men.
3. Be a Sturdy Oak: Manliness requires rationality, toughness, and self-reliance. A man must remain calm in any situation, show no emotion, and admit no weakness.
4. Give ‘em Hell: Men must exude an aura of daring and aggression, must be willing to take risks and “go for it” even when reason and fear suggest otherwise.

Women are, in short, to actively work to deny themselves and their needs and to deliver a persona that is actively not a woman. Men and women alike are held to this corner office expectation that laundry, homework, grocery shopping, little league games, dinner, teacher conferences, all get done by some invisible magic staff, working diligently in the background and on the sidelines while the real, important work of furthering the corporate bottom line is accomplished.

Our corporations have defaulted on the contract made at the dawn of the twentieth century: the contract to take the best years of a the white, middle class, family man’s life and turn his hard work and dedication of twenty years into a secure existence for himself and his family, up to and including retirement. This contract was poison from the outset, demanding the years during which children would be born and grow into young adults, the community ties that would be fostered, the companionship that results from partnership over time. White, middle class men gave up friendship, family and community in order to secure the future and survival of the family unit through white-collar careers. When women entered the halls of corporations, the deal remained largely unchanged, though by the Seventies, employers were looking to get out of the pension and benefits trap. Aided as they were in the Eighties by a favorable economic environment, employers swapped pensions for private, optional stock plans, and swapped benefits for private insurance plans. At the time of implementation, these changes were lauded at the time as great accomplishments for America.

This sense of corporate career over all is pervasive and has been internalized so deeply that career women in twenty-first century United States’ corporate culture actively brag about how little maternity leave they take, to the point that Time featured a story of Marissa Meyer’s two week absence to have a baby, as if she were going on holiday and not bringing a tender life into the world at great effort; it’s not called labor without reason.

While we are certainly doing women a disservice with this corporate culture, the disservice is one borrowed from the men’s code, one upon which the patriarchy is founded, and one which, at the core of it all, must be dismantled for real change to take place. As long as we define the best-paid and highest-status jobs as one which deny our right to be people first, and people in families and communities, we cannot hope to have real, lasting, meaningful change for any of our citizens, men and women alike.

---

Robert Brannon & Deborah S. David, The Forty Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role, (Random House: 1976).

Freaks, Geeks, and Feminism

About the time I was getting really vocal about the whole need to update modern American society with some coming-of-age rituals that mattered for those of us raised by Sesame Street and Star Wars, Iron john and Fire in the Belly were vaulting onto the stage, completely taking up the conversation about rituals and the powers of ancient rites and how they mattered and were needed again. I felt stymied, and a coworker steered me to Camille Paglia, whose essays seemed more to be saying that she was a better man than men were, and that wasn’t the message I wanted at all. Feeling as though no one was listening, I stopped talking about coming of age rituals and set about faking that I was a grown up.

Still reeling from the internalized pressure of the Enjoli commercial view of adult womanhood and ideal femininity, I was adrift in a society that seemed to be wanting to make me conform to the man code, all while denying that I was, in fact, a woman. Given that I wasn’t very certain what being a woman meant, only that I knew that I didn’t want to be like my mother or her sister, that I wanted an academic reality and not a life defined by how many children lived in my home or what sort of things I purchased, I felt out of touch with men and women alike: I was a nerd, and a social sciences nerd at that; we are rare. To be a woman social science nerd is to achieve a status shared by unicorns, leftover mashed potatoes, and other things that I have heard of but never seen.

I went from library science to computer science, and my love of analyzing how people interacted with and retrieved stored information continued to set me out at the fringed: I wasn’t a programmer, not because I couldn’t code (I could, often better and more efficiently than my co-workers who were almost always men), but because I was one of the few who “got it” when it came to being able to think of the user at all. And get it, I did: I became known as a usability expert, a guru of deciphering and restoring spaghetti code, the Nancy Drew (never the Sherlock, we might point out) of figuring out where the bug is and how to extract or repair it without wrecking everything else in the program. But still, the voiceless young adult wanted the ceremony that said “You have arrived. You are one of us. You belong.”

The information world is a fickle, judgemental, capricious and ultimately masculine one. If you need an example, watch the date in the opening sequences of the movie Social Network.  The whole movie does a pretty good job of showing how Mark Zuckerberg made a fortune out of a juvenile and cruel information-based character assassination of a woman who told him she didn’t want to date him anymore, but watching those few frames is example enough of how entitled privilege behaves when it feels threatened and has access to anonymity -- there are no consequences for Mark Zuckerberg’s bad, callous, mean spirited behavior. In fact, he’s a multibillionaire because of it.

But these men know little of people and less of friendship, companionship, actual community involvement beyond the screen. We need to increase the emotional literacy of us all, but especially of the geeks among us. For all that we like to believe they are logical and cold, they are not. Far from the Spock exterior they espouse, they are hurt, adrift, lost and wanting, deeply ashamed and frequently feeling alone in a hostile world, defenseless beyond hiding in the shadows. We in the feminist movement need to make a special effort to reach out to the socially awkward, men and women alike, and to the increasingly toxic profession that is more separate from the dominant culture now than ever before.

The world is no longer run by the “C students” Harry Truman told us about; now it is run by the C++ students, and they aren’t talking to the rest of us. We need to do better to include them, to make the rest of us real to them, to make them feel connected to people in the age of information. We need to invite them to the brick and mortar tables, away from the screens and the sharp hashtags and tag codes. We need to come together and make space for our feelings for all of us, even the geeks. Star Wars rituals, Wil Wheaton, whatever. Let’s include Gen X again.

Full employment and the new economy

A full-employment vision for the twenty-first century can and must look different from the full-employment realities of the postwar era. Nor is the call for full employment necessarily bound up with assumptions about the virtues of work and the vices of idleness.

At the end of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes surveyed the dire political-economic scene of the mid-1930s and summed it up in a single, incisive phrase: “The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”

Consider a snapshot of the situation young people face: the unemployment rate for workers under age 25 is 18.1 percent; unemployment for black people who have not graduated from high school is 82.5 percent; the people most likely to be shot by police are black 25–34-year-olds; the national student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion; and the only jobs lucrative enough to pay off college loans are in the financial industry that detonated our economy or Silicon Valley companies deregulating working-class industries.

The future doesn’t hold much hope either, with median household income declining 12.4 percent between 2000 and 2011. Having a family is simply harder to afford now. Meanwhile, each new year sets another low record for union density, meaning we have few levers for turning those income numbers around. Unlike most wealthy countries, the United States lacks universal childcare and maternity leave, so women are stuck with the same old debates over an impossible work-life balance.

This is an age when the power of the boss is so ascendant over the power of the worker that we can be shuffled around to match precisely the needs of capital. Department stores and retailers now use apps that will inform an employee midway through a workday if their services are no longer needed to match customer demand. About half of early-career hourly workers learn their schedule for the week less than one week in advance. A full day’s work, or a “steady” job, is a thing of the past. This is a chronically unstable way to operate in the world, picking up bits of knowledge work, service work, or manual labor as needed.

100 years ago: Profiles in greatness and courage

On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.

The Union of the United States of America

Last night I ran across a rant about people buying steak and lobster with food stamps. This was my response. [Apparently I vented my spleen on someone else's post, something I usually don't do. Apologies to Tree, and many thanks to her for bringing the whole situation to my attention, since I clearly needed to get this out of my system.]

Now, I have never been on food stamps, so some people will say I don't have a right to an opinion; that has never stopped me before, so feel free not to read on if you think I'm out of line.
Basically I would rather see them spend it on steak and lobster to celebrate than on junk food. Call me crazy, but wholesome food is a good thing for tax dollars to buy. In European countries, the real first world, families are given a stipend to help support young children; health care and education are free and available; daycare is subsidized. These are not perks or entitlements; this is a country that ensures the well-being of its citizens, which, if you think for a minute, is the Prime Directive of government. There is no excuse for belittling someone for paying for food. Other people need to sit down and shut up and reconsider why their noses are out of joint.
If I had my way, we would have thirty hour work weeks (including lunch, not excluding it) and six weeks of vacation for everyone. Infants would be subsidized at one-half the poverty level each year from birth until five (yes! Each and every one of them!). Minimum wage would be determined by the poverty rate, which would reflect the real cost of basic food and housing and gasoline, so that if you work a minimum wage job you can support a family [PovertyRate/1500=MinimuWage; it's not rocket science here]. Public schools and libraries would be palaces and teachers, librarians and police/emergency responders/military would be amongst the highest paid professions. Why? Because our citizens deserve to be through with worrying about bread and shoes and need to focus on learning, have time to be creative, and focus on being whole with themselves and their families.
Don't tell me we can't afford it. We spend more bickering with each other than other countries do on being decent. And this is The United States of America. We have every reason to expect to be able to hold our heads high as the wealthiest is the world.
If you think taxes are class warfare, you are absolutely right. Our founding fathers levied huge taxes on the wealthy, and plundered the hoard reflected in large estates with good reason - they were deliberately undermining the ability to create and maintain an aristocracy, for they knew first hand the evils it causes and brings. And most of them were not the poor huddled masses but were quite wealthy themselves. It was a matter of understanding that in this New World, no one would be hungry. No one. Not because of race, color, creed, or gender. Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton and Henry knew from the inside of the upper class the wrongs and dangers of allowing the very rich to sneer at the very poor, and there is only one way to ensure the basic necessities are not trampled: do away with the lower class altogether; dismantle extreme unearned wealth of inheritance; throw open the lanes of access to all that life has to offer; let the only dividing line amongst citizens be a matter of brains and hard work. Never would they have imagined the way we have mucked it all up. It is about what you do once your access is unfettered - a citizenry with no excuses would be an amazing sight to behold, a beacon to the rest of the world, and we are betraying their vision by impeding anyone from basic necessities.
Please feel free to send this to those who want to marginalize the citizens of the United States. I wonder why some people cry so loudly against taking care of our own.

Conference Board Employment Trends Index for September 2009

After a year and a half of declines, the Conference Board's Employment Trends index edged upward. The increase isn't much, only 0.3 percent from August, but after a steady decline since January 2008, even a small amount of positive is seen as good news. Hopefully the decline has been broken, but even if it is we have a tough road ahead on the jobs front: today's number is down 15.6 percent from a year ago, when the index had fallen for eight straight months.

Analysts at the Conference Board aren't sounding the victory cry just yet, either. "While the employment numbers reported by the government last Friday were certainly disappointing, The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ suggests that the trend of declining job losses will continue," said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. "But the road to recovery is definitely going to be bumpy and may last unusually long, given the depth of the recession we have experienced."
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