Almostgotit.com

Dale Carnegie is my flavor of the week.  The Universe dropped him into my lap a couple days ago when my daughter and I were rummaging through the “free bin” at our favorite used book store, where I found his How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job – a perfectly good copy that was rejected by the consignment counter for no apparent reason. 

I do love serendipity so very much, when it happens!

Carnegie suggests we should always start by asking what’s right rather than what’s wrong.   Nevertheless (serendipity being one of your stranger animals) this week also brought me a good column by Mike Gunderloy called What’s wrong with web work?   While it’s already very difficult for any working person with a family to find the right balance, Gunderloy and subsequent commentors (me included!) discuss several problems which are particular to free-lancing and working at home.   Food for thought, indeed. 

Another blog I’ve been enjoying is “The Anti 9-5 Guide: Career advice for women who think outside the cube“  which is published in my home town (Seattle) and sort of makes me wish I could go back and live there just to participate in author Michelle Goodman’s world.  Even if I can’t,  the practical (if slightly anarchical) tone is perfect even as Goodman wisely avoids any temptation to jump into the Mommy Wars.  The “profiles” feature (of Goodman’s “fellow 9-5 expats”) is especially wonderful.

Don’t know yet if these are my peeps, but the journey’s kind of fun. 

What would you do if you had no fear? 
Living your dreams
while quakin’ in your boots

By Diane Conway,
with foreword by Anne Lamott

One of the things I’d do is be the first to comment on Powell Books’ website on a book I hadn’t even actually read yet. (they give random prizes for first-persons-to-comment, and ever since I won Door Prize #3 that one time, I’ve grown a bit cocky.)

I keep googling this book. I’ve been wanting to buy it for about a year now but keep running out of book money (I’m a little bad).  But look: it’s got about the world’s best title. And it has a foreword by Anne Lamott, how cool and irresistible is that? Because that’s enough reason to buy the book right there. And another reason is because I wish I had written it. Do you think I could use the same title, and get Anne Lamott to write my foreword, too?

I did submit a review for Powell’s, and even rated the book. I give it a “4,” not because it’s not worth a full “5″ but because giving it a 5 at this point may have been getting a little ahead of myself.  I would have edged up to a 4.5 had Powell Books given that option, but it didn’t.  

Maybe you could read this book yourself and then you can give it a five on Powell Books, and that would pull the average up to where it belongs.   Or have you read it already?  If you have, please let us know what you thought of it!

Here is what the publisher says about the book (which appears on the product page on both Powell Books and Amazon)

For this book, author Diane Conway approached a police officer, a waitress, a politician, a lawyer, a cab driver, and many others, and asked them each the same question: “What would you do if you had no fear?” The results, chronicled in this book, were both surprising and enlightening. Her respondents told her their secrets, their long-hidden dreams, and their fears. Their dreams included quitting mind-numbing jobs, applying to medical school, buying tickets to South America, finding true love, quitting drinking, or having an affair. The distance between dreaming and doing, according to Conway, is surprisingly short. In What Would You Do If You Had No Fear? her fresh voice and “Studs Terkel in drag persona” challenge readers to stop, open their hearts, and truly live. Included are self-tests, quizzes, growth exercises, and inspiring quotes for realizing one’s fear-free potential.

The author, calling herself our “slightly neurotic, frequently shaky guide” (channelling Lamott for sure) adds on Amazon that

When I saw the profound effect [asking this question] had on people, I started asking people everywhere I went. I had to overcome the fear that people would think that I’m: a) delusional or b) trying to pick them up for kinky sex.

Now doesn’t that sound like a fun read? 

While I own my own comp copies of PhotoShop and Dreamweaver (if I said any more, I’d have to kill you), I’m ashamed to say that thus far I’ve only used them minimally for my web work. 

I am, at heart, a luddite and compost maker, preferring the Zen of Making Use Of Simple Things.  Nourishing a garden with re-purposed organic material (= old dead stuff) is a beautifully redemptive thing, and works better than chemicals anyway; I can strip code and manipulate photos with great facility using only the default “notepad” and “paint” features that come with every PC.  Moreover, I take a sort of perverse pride in doing so. 

But after a certain point, deliberate ignorance is just stupid.

The web is a great resource and I’m trying to use it as intelligently as I can.  Web Worker Daily publishes several good articles every day,  from practical advice on best practices, personal development and time management for the freelancer to esoterica only an obsessive-compulsive techy could love. 

I’ve also (finally) built and am populating a solid feed reader so I can better skim through the latest and best material in my field every day.   

Some of this professional development work is fun.  Some of it isn’t…  Feed readers, for instance, should be a lot more user-friendly than they are, but I am surprised and gratified to find that, even among my web-savvy friends, I’m not alone in finding myself put off or even daunted by many of these “necessary” technologies. 

In the end, there’s no substitute for a good book.  So today, I’m going to go buy a book about using PhotoShop.   Digital storage media becomes obsolete every few years, and can be wiped out by system or human error; books are always fully compatible with human eyes and last hundreds of years. 

Plus, you can read them in the bathtub. 

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Related posts:
In defense of thoughts
Copyright violation & blogs: a tricky subject
Book tour cancelled: taking my Damitol instead

Bloggers.  Can’t live with them, can’t shoot them.  (Warning: grumpy post)

If a blog isn’t about the latest browser plug-in, it’s about Paris Hilton (did you know they just let her out of jail?  Something medical, apparently.)  If a blog’s not about either of these things, it’s about someone’s damn book tour.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to be going on a book tour.  But if that time ever comes in my life, would someone please remind me not to be so breezily “as-if” about it, e.g.,  as if everyone else reading my blog is either a fellow book-tour-er or else a no-life, craven fan?  How about a little humility and gratitude?  I mean, allowing for the fact that blogging is already such an exhibitionist and self-indulgent exercise.

Here’s what we need:

New Medications for Women, Bloggers, Women Bloggers, and Paris Hilton

The Food and Drug Administration has just announced the following drugs have been released for trial in the US. These new medications are available only by prescription.

• D A M I T O L
  Take 2 and the rest of the world can go to hell for up to 8 hours.
• ST. M O M ‘ S W O R T
  Plant extract that treats mom’s depression by rendering preschoolers unconscious for up to six hours.
• E M P T Y N E S T R O G E N
  Highly effective suppository that eliminates melancholy by enhancing the memory of how awful they were as teenagers and how you couldn’t wait till they moved out.
• P E P T O B I M B O
  Liquid silicone for single women. Two full cups swallowed before an evening out increases breast size, decreases intelligence, and improves flirting.
• D U M E R O L
  When taken with Peptobimbo, can cause dangerously low I.Q. causing enjoyment of country western music.
• F L I P I T O R
  Increases life expectancy of commuters by controlling road rage and the urge to flip off other drivers.
• M E N I C I L L I N
  Potent antiboyotic for older women. Increases resistance to such lines as, “You make me want to be a better person … can we get naked now?”
• B U Y A G R A
  Injectable stimulant taken prior to shopping. Increases potency and duration of spending spree.
• Extra Strength B U Y-O N E-A L
  When combined with Buyagra, can cause an indiscriminate buying frenzy so severe the victim may even come home with a Donnie Osmond CD or a book by Dr. Laura.
• J A C K A S S P I R I N
  Relieves headache caused by a man who can’t remember your birthday, anniversary or phone number.
• A N T I-T A L K S I D E N T A
  spray carried in a purse or wallet to be used on anyone too eager to share their life stories with total strangers.
• S E X C E D R I N
  More effective than Excedrin in treating the, “Not now, dear, I have a headache,” syndrome.
• R A G A M E T
  When administered to a husband, provides the same irritation as ragging on him all weekend, saving the wife the time and trouble of doing it herself.

– Derived from something I saw posted on a coffee shop bulletin board this morning.  With my newfound determination to respect  copyrights, here’s a source but very much doubt it’s the original one — see also here and here)

We have a wonderful used-book store in our city, which until recently was within walking distance of our house.  One of our favorite pastimes was to rummage through the “free bins” parked outside the store. 

We found many treasures in it:  a whole entire set of encyclopedias, for instance, missing only “volume 11.”  Thousands of Martha Stewart magazines, back when she even still dared put her face on every cover.  Tattered books in Italian, or about calculus, with which to impress one’s older brother.  And once, an ancient copy of Atlantic Monthly, in which I found an essay by Marilynne Robinson about courage and the petty coercion of society that conspires against it.  It was gorgeous.

It drove me crazy to misplace it, which I inevitably did, almost immediately.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, in a fit of extravagance, I ordered several books from Amazon.com (to get the “free shipping,” of course) and among them I chose one by Marilynne Robinson called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.  I’d seen the list of contents and knew my essay wasn’t in it.

But tonight, after an exhausting day I started leafing through the book.  And there, at the very end, the final essay in the collection, I found it.  Really!  I don’t know how it got there, but it feels like a gift.  This is what it’s called:

“The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.”

Which (my usually good memory not-withstanding) apparently appeared in the August 2004 issue of Harper’s Monthly, not in the Atlantic, and here, moreover, is a quote:

Courage seems to me to be dependent on cultural definition.  By this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true.  I mean also, and more importantly, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it.  Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself.  Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave.  It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission.  We also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves – prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one.  This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression.  But it is.

. . .

It is sad to consider how much first-rate courage must be devoted in this world to struggling out of the toils of sheer pettiness.  The Saudi women who first drove automobiles risked and suffered penalties, overcame inhibitions, and shattered norms, heroic in their defiance of an absurd convention. We have our own Rosa Parks.  That such great courage should have been required to challenge such petty barriers is a demonstration of the power of social consensus.  How many minor coercions are required to sustain similar customs and usages?  How aware are any of us, absent direct challenge, of how we also deal in trivial coercion?

Click here to read The Tyranny of Petty Coercion article

I’m very excited about my friend Emily Anderson’s new blog, The Rocky Road of Love and Other Great Recipes which officially launches today.  Emily is the author of All-American Comfort Food, and writes for television and the Web and is on the staff of Paris Notes.  It should be clear, then, that Emily herself is far too busy to do any of the actual writing on the blog she produces.  Today’s recipe, for instance, was submitted by Samantha, whose own story of Great Food and Tempestuous Love will unfold in weekly episodes also appearing on the blog.  Tune in now!

I have a dear friend who lives too far away, but pops in and out of my life once or twice a year, usually by email.  She just sent me a lovely Billy Collins poem in honor of Mother’s Day.  It’s called “The Lanyard,” and is part of his latest collection, The Trouble with Poetry.  Here’s just part of it:

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
 
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

You can see the text of the whole poem here on NPR   (and listen to an NPR interview with Billy Collins as a bonus!)

Do you have any other Mother’s Day poems to share?  Please leave a comment with a link so we can share it/them together this weekend. 

And speaking of Billy Collins:  here’s an animated video-version of his delightful poem, Forgetfulness (click here)

Even better is this gorgeous, gorgeous video of Billy Collins poem, On Turning Ten (click here)

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Related posts:
The Baby: A Mother’s Day Poem 
Happy (snort!) Mother’s Day (A video.  A muffin.  A cat’s butt…)

Many years ago, a very tall man and I went on our first date.  After watching East of Eden in the campus auditorium, we went back to my dorm room, made popcorn, and talked. 

One of the things my new friend mentioned was an article he’d just read in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Size of Thoughts,” by Nicholson Baker.  It begins like this:

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one’s hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

Really large thoughts.  That’s what we talked about, and then he went home, and I couldn’t get to sleep that night because something huge had just happened, I could tell. 

Two years later, I married him.

A few years after that, with our children, I had cause to revisit an old friend, the illustrious Dr. Seuss.  Who wrote, of course  “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”

Sometimes, I channel Seuss, like this:

Maybe it matters, though,
Matters a lot.
Whether we don’t, or we do
have a thought.
It might make you rich -
But then it might not.
It might make no difference
or might make a lot.
It might be the kind
that gets in the way,
but it also might lead to
your future, that day.
            * * *

Mr. Baker makes the best point of all about the importance of thoughts, though, so my final words must be his:

Would it be possible to list those features that, taken together, confer upon a thought a lofty magnificence? What makes them so very large? My idle corollary hope is that perhaps a systematic and rigorous codification, on the model of Hammurabi’s or Napoleon’s, might make large thoughts available cheap, and in bulk, to the general public, thereby salvaging the 19th-century dream of a liberal democracy.

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Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)

Maybe Jim Fannin is just being hyperbolic when he suggests that switching our brains to “off” is the only way we can succeed (”wildly”) at business.

If so, then I suppose the next thing to do is to decide how damaging “thought” really is, not just to those trying to start their own businesses, but to the rest of us (almost) working stiffs, as well. 

Of course it is bad to obsess over non-essentials; cogitate over unchangable things in our past; or worry about things over which we have no control.

But is “thought” itself really such a barrier to action, 99.99% of the time, as Fannin suggests?  After all, in the previous century, Sigmund Freud wrote that “thought is action in rehearsal.” And a few hundred years before Freud was born, Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus  opined that “thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.”    Mr. Paracelsus was considered inflammatory in his own time, too.  He tended to reject the traditional theories of his learned colleagues, and preferred to write in everyday German instead of in snooty Latin like the rest of them.   

I like this guy.

Annie Besant, the 19th century  women’s rights activist,  writer and orator believed “thought creates character.”  Her priest told her that she had read too many books.  And suggested she shut up.

Fortunately, she ignored him. 

A few years later, James Allen wrote the classic self-help book, As a Man Thinketh, which you can download here for free.  Allen believed that “right thoughts and right efforts will inevitably bring about right results,” and  “you are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”  

Some credit James Allen’s book with making many other men into millionaires.

Henry Ford said that “thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it,” and Henry Ford didn’t do half badly at either starting a business or making a living, did he? 

Therefore, I submit that going on a “thought diet” is not the best way to assure a succesful career.  But even if it is the best way, I’m not going to do it. 

It was another old dead guy, Montaigne, who wrote: “The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts: and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.”

————
Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)

The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?
by Leslie Bennetts
Publisher: Voice  (April 3, 2007)

From Booklist:
Many well-educated American women are giving up the struggle to balance career and motherhood and making the “willfully retrograde choice” of relying on men to support them and their children, Bennetts maintains. Financial dependency can jeopardize women’s futures and those of their children, she warns. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of women as well as sociologists, economists, legal scholars, and other experts, Bennetts lays out the dangers of giving up careers. She looks at how new divorce laws have altered alimony, reducing the likelihood of a lifetime guarantee of support for stay-at-home mothers after divorce. She details the impact of a loss of income on medical and retirement benefits and weighs it against lifelong financial needs. Bennetts encourages women to consider a “fifteen-year paradigm,” viewing their lives beyond the years of motherhood and asking themselves what they want from life when their children are grown and gone. Allowing women to tell their own stories of economic abandonment, Bennetts presents a cautionary tale for women pondering giving up economic independence.  (Vanessa Bush)

Ordinarily, I have no interest in participating in “The Mommy Wars.”  I think women (working at home or not) need all the support we can get, and therefore it is particularly tragic when those who should be the greatest of allies feel the need to turn on each other, instead.

This book, however, has been brought to my attention several times lately, and the things I’ve read about it seem particularly compelling as I reflect on my own current situation and that of several other women I know.  Current alimony laws are, indeed, atrocious (a perversion, no doubt, of the feminist idea that women should now find such patronization unnecessary); women who stay home with children are demonstrably much less able (ever) to catch up financially; and in today’s society, anyone who isn’t heeding the dual American gods of “I am what I do” and “I am what I am paid,” will almost certainly take a major psychological hit somewhere down the line. 

But I also think that this apparently insurmountable conflict of interest between mothers and children need not be as dire as pure statistics (and this book) might make it seem.  For instance, two members of my own family are stay-at-home fathers at the moment (though keeping hands on their respective careers as they do it.)  I also know (because I’ve done it) that it is possible to live well on much less money than the status quo would generally have us believe.  And finally, current statistics indicate that most Americans now will work at more than one career in their lives, starting over at least once,  whether or not they’ve had children in-between. 

So maybe the real story here is about something else, e.g., the mystery of why, in 21st century America, there still are so many women who still are falling down so many holes (?)