What to wear for today’s auspicious events? Badass Red, of course.

I wanted to bring red-somethings to everyone else at Weight Watchers, too, but had to settle for the only red rose (a totally tacky fake one, too) that they had at the gas station, and I gave that one to my dear friend (another writer!) who graciously agreed to come to WW WITH me.

The rolls of fat that have been accumulating around my keyboard were enough to motivate me to go to WW today, but I can’t say I was looking forward to it.

I pretty much expected it would feel like going to the dentist… you know, where it hurts and also makes you feel really, really guilty, e.g., … and why haven’t you been FLOSSING??!

Instead of guilty, I almost felt like I’d had a massage. Freal! The leader who once helped me lose boo coo poundage was still there, and she is 100% encouraging and — BONUS! — also wickedly funny.

Rather than feeling beat up for having fallen off the wagon, I left the room feeling deeply confirmed that it is *good* to love and take care of myself — not because I’m a BAD GIRL when I don’t, but because I’m already so marvelous (!!!) that I DESERVE IT!

You know what I did then? I went to the mall and bought my marvelous self a NEW TOP.

Very few of us will do the right thing, economically, unless we have to do it.

Doing the right thing because we have to do it still can be a positive experience.

Both Republicans (situationally) and Democrats (legislatively) believe in forcing people to do the right thing.

Republicans and Democrats take turns being right — and catastrophically wrong.

Maybe there are few definitive solutions at all.

Maybe there are more solutions than we can imagine.

Maybe most of us are getting poorer.

Maybe that doesn’t matter as much as we think it does.

Maybe we can’t make money doing the things that we love.

Maybe that will break our hearts.

Or maybe that will force us to discover how to love what we do, instead.

Maybe we’ll do everything right and still  fail.

Maybe we’ll make one mistake after another and turn out just fine.

Maybe life eventually will confound us all.

Every millionaire I’ve met has a longer list of failures than successes.  If you’re always winning, then you aren’t competing against people better than you.  And that means you never get better.

- Farragut’s Mike West, who with his wife Tiffany recently donated $1 million to UT’s College of Business Administration (Bearden/Cedar Bluff Shopper-News, 9/15/2008)

This letter belongs to Kevin Burg , whose grandmother received it in 1938.  (click here to see it even better)  Kevin notes that despite Disney’s declaration that women aren’t to do any creative work, his grandmother eventually became an animator during WWII when women had to step up “For the War Effort.” 

To be fair, it probably wasn’t entirely sexist, in 1938, to deny women any but the most menial, low-paying jobs.  During the Great Depression, many Americans felt that only men were entitled to jobs, the logic being that men had families to support.  That logic was a little thin, of course, as many women also were supporting families, some of which included their unemployed husbands.  

Don’t you love the stationery?  So perfect to send to all the “girls” looking for jobs.  I wonder what kind of stationery the real adults received?  (and we could do all kinds of things with the witch lurking in the corner, too — hey look, it’s HR Wench’s dopellganger!)

(DRUM ROLL PLEASE) And now for the REAL hall of fame!

Many thanks to all the others who have celebrated rejection with me this week, both here and on your own blogs: (please let me know if I’ve left you out… I’m still chasing down the “pings!)

Mikael, Mikael the Mime) (who has magical bodily functions)
James, James Viscosi’s Scribblings (yes, there’s plenty enough rejection to go around)
Deb, A Little Tea or Something (for understanding what I mean)
Peggy, Career Encouragement Blog (who is going to be the best PhD ever)
Alison, Ask a Manager (one of the blogosphere’s best writers)
Truevyne, The TrueVyne (braver than most people know)
Cassandra, Ophelia Blooming (collage-maker extraordinaire)
Karen, Working Girl (there’s NO place like home!)
Rachel at The Drawing Lady  (PLEASE: What’s a Jerwood?)
Ann, Thomas Trails and Tales (hurray for you!  Only 99 more rejections to join our super-duper hall of fame!)
Linda, The Girl with the Curl (who just GOT a job, but can still remember what it is like…)
Michelle, Philadelphia Stories and Michelle Wittle’s Web log (Inspiring, she is)
Dave, Dare to Dream (The only licensed advice-giver in the bunch)
Bill, not poetry blog (for this collage of rejection letters!)
Jackson, Blue Mosaic Me (who actually LIKED his most recent rejection letter.)

As well as for my blogless-but-wonderful fellow rejectees Kathy, David, Tom R., Felicia, Keith, Pam S., Mini-Betsy, Marisa and Laura E

Should you take rejection personally?  Good Lord, of course you should. You are a person, after all.

What else are you going to do, take it like a llama?

(1) Resiliance is not a moral virtue.

The amount of resilience you have is more like a hair color: It’s something you’re born with, unless you change it with chemicals.

Don’t listen when people tell you to get over it, move on, and let go. What the hell do they know? Feel what you feel. Discontent and anger are not defects, they are human. They are also very powerful tools for change, if you use them right.

(2) Success is not a moral virtue either

Success often is more like the lottery. Some people win the first time they buy a ticket, and try to convince the rest of us that winning only happens to people who believe in themselves with their whole entire hearts; other people win the lottery after buying 100 tickets, and then spend their lives urging the rest of us to keep on buying lottery tickets until it works for us, too.

The only logical conclusion to this line of thought is that people are starving in Africa  because they deserve it.  We need to stop equating vocational (and economical) success with personal virtue.

(3) … Nor does success  inevitably follow upon hard work or persistence

We also need to stop telling people that hard work and persistence will inevitably lead to vocational success. Hard work may increase the mathematical odds of success, sure, but there are no guarantees.

How unfortunate it is that we keep insisting that success comes from good character and hard work.  The American mobility myth is astonishingly persistent, despite many recent (and bipartisan) studies that debunk it.

The good news? You can stop beating yourself up, now. Being unsuccessful is not a character flaw, and there is nothing wrong with you.  Nor is there anything wrong with embracing your own experience for what it is, and moving through and past it your own way, too.   I’m sorry I can’t tell you how to succeed, nor even guarantee that you will. But on behalf of the rest of the world, please let me say: we need you just the way you are.

—————
Update:  Yesterday our local paper posted excerpts of my entry about the Knoxville shooting in several places on their website.  For a few hours it was Google City around here.  Therefore, I’d already written today’s entry when I was pinged by this article about anger, written by a licensed therapist, who took my point and ran with it quite beautifully.  So now you have it from a real expert!

1. There is nothing wrong with you. Weaknesses are important clues to your strengths.
2. You find success when you find the right fit. You need to match your unique characteristics to situations that reward those qualities.
3. Your weaknesses make you different. They make you a freak and it’s good to be a freak.

So says David Rendall in his online manifesto, The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness.    

How do I love this man? Let me count the ways.

Here is a picture of my youngest, complete with snazzy blue fingernails and a cute new hair cut.  I love having a daughter, and she is teaching me many new things.

Both my daughter and I have been blessed with lots of hair, which gives us fits sometimes but which we generally take for granted.  Imagine how hard it would be, especially for a young girl or woman, not to have any hair?

Locks of Love is a non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to children under the age of 18 who have lost their hair, most of them because of a condition called alopecia areata, which has no known cause or cure.  My 12-year-old daughter has just donated her own hair, and you can, too.  Here’s how.

I had a good lunch today with a bunch of martial arts and marketing people, with whom I have remarkably little in common.  Our state has just legalized a certain activity, and these people are poised to get in on the ground floor and make some money out of it.    I have no idea why they invited me along, except that I know a couple of them and we like each other.  Nor did I really have anything to contribute to the animated conversation, except to cheer them on.  

You know that comic, “Rose is Rose,” in which the mother, Rose, has a punked-out alter-ego named Vicki who wears a leather mini and rides a motorbike?  Who craves rattle-snake chili and sports a tattoo?

That was me today. Vicki the Biker Chick.

Karen over at Working Girl had another good post about networking this week, and gives some really good advice, including this:  anyone can network, anywhere.   She also makes the very good point that job-hunting should be fun.  Well, she actually makes that point in today’s post,  but it’s true.  Job searching is damn hard work, and it’s very easy to become bitter, grim, and warlike about it. 

The problem is that most employers aren’t really looking for bitter, grim, and warlike people. 

Even more importantly, that isn’t any way to live, period.  After all, life is what happens when you’re waiting around for the next thing to happen.  Life is what happens while you’re still looking for a job.

Get out there and network.  Not because it’s good for your job prospects (though it is) but because it’s good for you.  So put down those sad old cupcakes , gas up that Harley, and go out and get yourself some fun!

——–
Related Posts:

Chapter Two-ing
We are Always Networking
Why Cupcakes?

Proof that there’s a job out there for everyone. Happy Weekend to You!

You may need to watch this one TWICE.

Video Copyright Ted.com: republished here under Creative Commons Licensing

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

(If video is loading too slowly, you may link to it directly by clicking here. )