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Image: Goods 4 Girls

This is a picture of girls learning how to use menstrual pads.  Maybe this topic embarrasses you, but imagine how embarrassed you would be if you were a young woman who had no access to any kind of menstrual protection at all. 

Imagine trying to go to school or work without such protection. For girls and young women in many parts of the world, their lives virtually come to a halt for up to a week every month.  In some places, the lack of proper sanitation for girls means that school ends for them completely once they enter puberty. 

Proctor and Gamble has a program to provide girls with disposable products, and you may have seen some of their ads.  Proceeds from selected purchases help fund this program.

There is an even better solution than Proctor and Gamble’s, however.  Disposable sanitary products don’t last, and they also cause significant environmental problems where disposal facilities are inadequate.  Goods 4 Girls is a non-profit organization that has stepped in to fill the gap.  Since most of these girls are using rags now, having a reusable, washable pad that is more sophisticated (with a waterproof barrier) may be enough to allow them to participate in school and other activities.   Goods 4 Girls accepts cash donations  or or donations of reusable pads, which donors can either purchase or sew themselves — patterns are provided. 

For more information, please visit http://www.goods4girls.org/

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Related Post:
Wednesday for (almost) women: Locks of Love

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.

Creative Commons image by Luna Park

Except for a few very good friends, I am currently ignoring online career advice columnists.  It’s not that their advice is bad.  The real problem with such advice, or any advice for that matter, is that it so often fails in the particulars. 

If I had parented my children strictly according to other people’s advice,  they would be sociopaths and I would be institutionalized by now.  Human relationships just don’t work that way. 

It’s not that I don’t seek advice. I have read lots of parenting books, and with one child entering her teens and another becoming a young adult, I’ve just gone out and bought several more; nevertheless, I don’t ever assume there is anyone out there with more expertise about my particular child than I have myself.  And the same goes with my current job search.

Bloggers, and advice-giving bloggers, walk an especially dangerous road.  We can pontificate for as long as we like without interuption, without editors, and more often than not without even getting much feedback. 

We can get a little weird. 

And every so often, I also get a tiny bit cranky, and find myself reminding HR bloggers, much to their great misfortune, that the employer is only one half of the job search equation, even though the employer’s perspective is virtually always presented as if it were the only one with any legitimacy.  Though employers are, of course, the people with the power to hire,  I submit that the actual power ratio of the employer/employee equation is considerably more complicated than that.  Employment is, by definition, a two-party system.  While it’s fine to keep harping on the one hundred and forty seven rules employees must follow in order to be fabulous, the quality of a company depends just as much on the fabulousness of the employERS.  

Management guru Peter Drucker insists that personnel decisions are the most important ones a company can make.  A clumsy recruiter’s own failure to be fabulous will be reflected in the quality of candidate he hires, either because he may not make the best choices, or because he may not attract the best candidates in the first place.  And that sort of failure is far from minor.  It is, instead, a systemic failure that shall effect (or infect) the quality of the entire company.

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Related posts:
Un-Fabulous Employers: Asking for Too Much Upfront (Next post in this series)
Blind Box Ads: Bad-Ass, or just Bad? (final post in this series)

Last year, it was a terrific party.  The fireflies came out after we’d done picking berries, and we ate and talked and sat around until we filled the country farm house and sun porch and spilled out into the yard where we sat on creaking lawn chairs.  Kids shot off fireworks while the adults sampled jars of genuine Southern moonshine, the origins of which our host couldn’t actually reveal, for legal reasons…

We missed it last night.

It’s complicated.   The Husband got stuck at a long meeting - yes, on Sunday.  The Son needed to have some staples taken out of his head, also on a Sunday, and subsequently discovered that the Minute Clinic model is, perhaps, misnamed.  The Daughter was very mad to miss the blackberry-picking part, even though last year she got two ticks in the process. 

The Mother just pulled out some pork chops, warmed up the grill, and sighed.

Even though her mother is very maddening, I’m very glad that my daughter is willing to load the dishwasher anyway.

I have received three job rejection letters in two weeks.  However,  I met an author at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival who has already received thirty-six rejection letters for one of his manuscripts, and he cheerfully plans to go for an even one hundred. 

I have some catching up to do.

My amazing brother faithfully reads this blog, and has been very helpful with some of the technical problems I run into from time to time. 

He also periodically sends this English major a quick note when I’ve misspelled something.  Thank you, *dearest* brother. ;0)  

Since I also now have completed my most recent set of interviews, and was not offered that particular job, I can now go ahead and post a response to this post about handling rejection by friend Peggy of the Career Encouragement Blog.  

Stay tuned.. 

I had something else planned for today’s post, but am writing this instead.

This morning I received a long letter from a friend, also copied to several others in her circle, telling about her family’s struggles with their adopted child, now entering his teenage years. The family fostered him as an infant, and how we cheered when his adoption finally went through! He’s a dear and charming young fellow, but it turns out that their family life together has not been so charming.

On and on she wrote. She has worked so hard to reach the heart of this child. She and her husband have just taken out an enormous home equity loan and have committed themselves to an effort to save their son… perhaps literally.

She didn’t know it, but I sent out a letter quite a bit like my friend’s about a year ago, so I  wrote back, immediately.  Thank you for sharing. How brave you are. You are afraid you are a bad parent, but in fact your love for your son is showing so much that it drives me to my knees.

I thought of my heart-friend Kathy. I told my friend about her. I shared with her the contents of my own letter, and how Kathy had responded to it so lovingly, and that we’ve been exchanging long emails, almost daily, ever since. But not just Kathy. I told my friend that really, our family’s relationships with every single recipient of that letter has changed and expanded because of it. I hoped she would be similarly blessed.

I thought of Kathy a few days ago, too, when I stood with another friend in my kitchen as she told me a terribly wounding thing her mother had told her. I cupped her face in both of my hands, turning her face to mine.  NO. Those words are NOT SO. Those were poisonous words, and I am so sorry you had to hear them.

Her eyes welled up.  No one has said that to me yet. You are the first one.

Oh, love. No matter how old we are. No matter how much we love the ones we love, no matter how many reasons and explanations we can give. Those breaks and illnesses and barbs that come at us from within our own families, from within the safety zone, how they do hurt and frighten us.

What can we do for hurting friends? We can do what Kathy did for me, and that is truthfully to remind them of their own strength, but most of all, to tell them that they are lovable — and loved.

My dear friend is a GRANDMOTHER, and if that isn’t an excuse to play with Polyvore.com, I don’t know what is.  

Isn’t she a beauty?

Also, my son has a summer job, unlike most of his peers. According to a recent report in wide release today, summer unemployment among 16-19 yr olds is expected to be higher than it has been in over half a century: only 33.5 percent of older teens had a job during the first three months of the year, the lowest rate recorded since 1948. 

For the record: yes, he got his job by networking.  Is there any other way?

Following our disappointing venture to Local Cupcake Shop No. 1 earlier in the week, my 12 yr. old daughter and I decided to pursue Deb’s suggestion and check out Local Cupcake Shop No. 2 today.  Here’s my daughter’s verdict, eagerly rendered in rapid, time-lapse fashion as she also wields the camera:

(Translation: YUM.)

I had a tiny bite, and admit it was better than the other place, at least.  But I’m just never going to be a cupcake fan.  In fact, I think we all just need to face the fact that

Says Ms. Manifesto, who has been reading my blog again.  And on a final note:

Indeed.  Now give me back my camera, kid.

man·i·fes·to [man-uh-fes-toh] –noun, plural -toes. a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization

My daughter is a master of the form.  Her bedroom door has, for years, been a constantly- changing canvas of proclamations, notices, lists, edicts and declarations:

Ten Utterly Useless Things to Do (including) Making Pyjamas Out of Duct Tape.

Why I Should Not Have To Change the Cat Litter.

Lost: Deadly Bull Spider including How to Catch Him.

Warning: Contents Under Pressure.

I Should be Able To Go to Dollywood I Am Not A Slave.

She makes me immensely proud.

A couple of months ago, I found a website that contains nothing but manifestos: ChangeThis.com, an online newsletter whose aim is “to disrupt the media pattern with powerful, rational arguments from leading thinkers.” ChangeThis uploads several new manifestos a month, written by very well-known authors and business gurus as well as more obscure ones. Recent top-pick-topics appearing on ChangeThis include:

• The Invisible Badge: Moving Past Conspicuous Consumption
• PR 2.0: A Communicator’s Manifesto
• Escaping Corporate America: Changing Your Career Can Change Your Life
• Seinfeld on Marketing: 7 Marketing Lessons from the Cast of the Show About Nothing
• The Upside of a Downturn Business Improvisation: The Diving Catch of the Corporate World

He’s just graduated from high school, and all of us are learning a new drill.  It’s hard not to feel like the world’s Number 1 Hypocrite when telling him that “I don’t really see myself working in a grocery store” is not an acceptable excuse for an unemployed 18-yr-old.

It only works when you are an unemployed 45-yr-old. 

After all.  I was cleaning vomit out of restaurant toilets when I was 18.  Which, as my son dourly pointed out this evening, CLEARly made the entire world a better place for all future generations. 

I really will have to go to court, because it turns out that a conviction for speeding in a school zone can be as bad for your driving record as causing an accident in which someone is killed.  Even at best, it is worse than driving without a license — and I can see why, really, being a mom after all. 

In fact, in a sort of show of solidarity with the whole “keep our kids safe” idea, I’d intended just to find out what the fee was, pay it quietly, and move on.  However, it turns out that paying the fine amounts to a legal admission of guilt, which carries some pretty serious consequences, both for our insurance and even potentially for my employability.  And I honestly don’t think I am guilty.  Even the traffic court lady I spoke to today told me it’s better to go to court than pay,  so that clinches it.  I’ll no doubt blubber like an idiot, however. 

Poop.  It’s like when your first dishwasher explodes, and then your second dishwasher explodes, and then you have to go out and buy a third one, and pay for someone to install it, when what you really wanted to do with that money was finally buy nice new countertops instead.   I mean, you know?!?