Just as I promised I would, today marks the first official occasion upon which Eeyore and I shall don our black aprons and present you with pensive prescriptions for such crestfallen comestibles as are commensurate with our shared and disconsolate dereliction. In a word: Food. Today’s featured recipe: “Sweet Sorrow Sourdough Chocolate Cake.”
Creative Commons photo by divinemisscopa
This delicious if doleful affair nearly always falls. Which is why, in my extended family, we refer to it as “chocolate goo cake.”
Perfectly sympathetic fare for the joylessly jobless.
Cream shortening and sugar; beat in eggs one at a time. Blend in the starter. Sift flour, measure, and sift again with other dry ingredients. Add to shortening mixture alternating with water and vanilla. Mix at low speed. Bake 350 degrees (for two 9” layers, bake 35 minutes; for one 9” square, bake 60 minutes)
Speaking of tubas and the like: check out this great website. One great product per day… and sometimes (like today) they even give stuff away for free! Don’t miss out, though, ’cause every offer expires at midnight.
Creative Commons photo by rossination
Girls can too play the tuba. Even skinny 11-year-old ones. And do you know what else? You can even play the tuba without a mouthpiece, because school band just started and we haven’t had a chance to buy one yet, but who could even stand to wait that long?
Of course, a tuba also takes up a lot of space in a person’s bedroom, which we hadn’t quite taken into account. Also, there is the small issue of travelling back and forth on a very crowded school bus. But there is this: one can make wonderfully effective noises that sound like gagging elephants and dying rottweilers, which TOTALLY scares the cat.
Plus? It will come in very handy for waking up an older brother on an early weekend morning.
One question remains, though: do you call a tuba player a “tubist,” or what?
I’ve always enjoyed Steven Covey and similar gurus for their no-nonsense approach to leadership, productivity and personal effectiveness.
Sometimes though, a little home-spun kitsch and fun are in order as well! I discovered the Sidetracked Home Executives many years before there really was a “web,” and I must say the self-described “slob sisters” seem to be aging well. Sister Pam even has started her own inspirational website, and it is hilarious!
The amazing Fly Lady is not to be missed either. I’ve seen many of her best ideas espoused by the most sophisticated organization experts, and I strongly suspect she has mentored more than a few of them. Don’t miss her “Eleven Commandments”
If Steven Covey and co. are like the Serious Uncles disseminating jewels of advice over glasses of sherry in the drawing room, Pam, Peggy and FlyLady are like the big-boned, wildly-dressed Grandmas in the kitchen who are always good for a cookie and a funny story. We need both kinds of mentors, I think.
The good news is that I filled two garbage cans and cleared out the piles in the dining room; the bad news is that the piles in my office are even bigger than ever. I’m beginning to suspect that maybe what Jesus really said was “The piles you will always have with you.”
I wonder if our biggest task in life might not be the “getting there” part at all; maybe we need to focus more on learning how to live better during the “in between” parts. After all, that’s where most of our life happens, anyway.
Here’s the exerpt from Anne Lamott’s wonderful book that I referred to in yesterday’s post:
E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.
So after I’ve completely exhausted myself thinking about the people I most resent in the world, and my more arresting financial problems, and, of course, the orthodontia, I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange. I also remember a story that I know I’ve told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
-Excerpt from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
By Anne Lamott
Do you have one of these? I have several, and they seem to get bigger every day. I can still remember when it was fun going out to get the mail… now, whenever I see a mail truck, I feel like screaming, “INCOMING!” and heading for the fall-out shelter.
Things have come to the point where these irreducible piles are giving me brain-rot. How can I do anything at all with the damn things lurking in the background all the time? It feels like I have hangnails, or some kind of terrible skin disease. They make me feel guilty and irresponsible. They’ve got to go!
There are lots of great ideas on how to get organized… and as a natural “messy,” every so often I just have to revisit them.
I’m afraid that my first impulse is always to head to Target or Pier One, giving in to my default conviction that surely the right collection of bins and baskets will solve the whole problem. The real problem, of course, is that my piles represent a series of delayed decisions, which in the aggregate quickly become too overwhelming to tackle at all.
So today, I am beginning at the beginning. Well, after checking my email and blogging, of course! My sword and shield of choice? A large trash can and an egg-timer.
Because even the most tedious task should be bearable in five minute increments. As writer Anne Lamott suggests, some things are best if you just take them bird by bird.
Now this one is just kooky: The Potter Puppets & the Mysterious Ticking Sound.
(this is the original: there are lots of almost-equally funny imitations now posted on YouTube!)
Um, anyone care to make a marketing or job-hunting analogy out of this one? 
Many thanks to all those who responded to my requests for your “back to school resolutions.” I just knew you had some!
“Marsquat,” who is both a very faithful reader (thank you, Marsquat!) and a recent, first-time mom, wrote:
I’ll have to think about it, ‘cause heaven knows I need some resolutions in my life — like “stop going to the people.com web site during Nathaniel’s naps” and “start being productive and getting my resume together” or “fix parts of the house that are falling apart.” I will enjoy reading more seasoned moms’ resolutions!
“Seasoned moms.” I love it! As if the rest of us necessarily do it any better.
Jenny, mother of two daughters, wrote that her resolutions were
to finally finish sewing the curtains for the basement play room (I’ve had the fabric for about 3 years!) Also, to attend yoga class 3 days a week and clear out the cabinets and closets.
I had to admit, I was impressed. But when I told her so, she quickly ‘fessed up: “Don’t be fooled! I have plenty of inspiration; just not a whole lot of follow-up.”
Ah, there’s the rub. This is my own ongoing struggle as well: how to find the time, energy, and motivation to do all the things I need and want to do. While I have nothing terribly wise or definitive to say on the subject, I have recently been inspired by a couple of articles from Web Worker Daily: Mike Gunderloy borrows a software developer’s trick and shows how “timeboxing” can be used to unlock a perfectionist mind-set so we can get things done; Writer and web technologist Anne Zelenka points us toward the novel idea of creating a not-to-do-list.
And then there’s my beautiful friend who lives and works out of her old farm house and who may finally be figuring it all out.
This year I resolve to spend my car time catching up on literary classics I’ve never read, beginning with Moby Dick then Call of the Wild. If my kids happen to get interested, great. If not, at least we aren’t fussing about whose music to play.
I am also planning to add an hour to my two nights a week, Mommy time, when I take a yoga class, when I’m planning to work on my poetry writing. If I have already muscled my way into the schedule twice a week, why not hang on a little longer?
Finally I am not going to take back my kids’ summer chores like I usually do when school starts. I am usually worried about them having time for homework, but this year, having them at two different schools will increase my commute time from one to two hours a day. They can do homework in the car and chores when they get home. If I can keep up with my usual chores on 5 hours less a week, that’s enough for me to have to keep up with.
As my kids get older, I’m taking better care of myself. It feels great: selfish and great.
That sure doesn’t sound selfish to me: just GREAT!
How about you? Whether or not you have children: what would you like to do to make your life and work more fruitful this coming season?
Ann Bares of Compensation Force has written several good pieces recently about the notion of comparable worth and the push for pay equity. This notion has been getting a lot of press lately in the wake of several new studies which show that women earn less than equally-qualified, equally-experienced men do, even before they begin to marry or have children.
The research shows that one reason women don’t earn as much is because they don’t ask for it. Therefore, the logical solution may seem to be the one many experts have concluded: that is, women need to be trained to be more assertive in order to overcome the disadvantage they have due to a difference in genetics and/or upbringing.
Not so, according to a new Harvard study. In a series of experiments, researchers discovered, over and over again, that men and women get different responses when they try to negotiate a higher salary. A reluctance to be assertive, therefore, may be an appropriate learned response, if being assertive — by simply asking for more — may actually hurt a woman’s career.
And those who penalize women the most for asking for more? Other women. To be fair, women tended to penalize both sexes more for attempting to negotiate. Apparently, as a sex, we’ve internalized our lessons only too well.
It is a dangerous over-simplification to focus exclusively on “fixing women” so that they learn to negotiate more like men; moreover, doing so only perpetuates the problem society has always had with stigmatizing female wage-earners.
Nor (inconveniently enough) is it quite right to place the full responsibility for fixing the problem on employers, either.
The problem that needs addressing most is the whole social environment in which the risks of negotiating are demonstrably higher for women. Some of the salary inequities may seem small, especially as many insist on placing full responsibility for those inequities — still — on the shoulders of the women concerned.
But we’ve already been there. We already hold women “responsible” for damaging their own careers by choosing to be the sole-caregivers for their children or elderly parents. Which they must do without paid leave. And without resorting to damaging their spouse-and-co-parent’s career as well. (the highest paid workers of all are married men… most of whom are also fathers. Interesting?)
As small as the real, “after-adjusting-for-female-foibles” salary inequities may be, even differences of a few percentage points over the lifetime of a person’s career can add up, literally, to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And that, in this USA of 2007, is simply not acceptable.
