Almostgotit.com

“Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps”    Emo Phillips

Frankly, I’m in an (almost) funk.  I met with two great guys at our favorite diner this a.m. to talk about some paying projects we have coming down the pike.  That’s good news, too.  But I also may just have lost one of my clients (for whom I was writing copy about one of the most boring subjects you can imagine – I mean, if you were going to pick a subject that was so quintessentially boring that you could make a great joke about it?  This one would be it.)

Nevertheless, it was honest work and paid well. I like the client too (as I generally do), and fervently believe in their right to assertively market a solid and necessary product.  Moreover, it truly is an interesting challenge to help people in such obvious need of a “make-over.”  Also, I’m learning a great deal. 

It’s really sweet to be (almost) employed.  That’s about how I would describe things at the moment, given I’ve only been (almost) freelancing for a couple of months now, and have only made enough money doing it to buy a new laptop (which was, first and foremost, NOT a Dell.  Dells are great, but they are also standard-issue at The Institution Which Shall Not be Named.  So of course I had to buy something else!)

Some have asked if I’d keep writing this blog.  Is it fraudulent to write about being unemployed when, technically, I’m not?  But then again, I would feel equally fraudulent  claiming I know everything there is to know about being an employed person now. 

Besides.  I have yet to write about my various inquiries and explorations of going back to school.   About all the post-stay-at-home-mom career issues that I’ve been obsessed with for the past few years.  About how even after you’ve taken all the personality type indicator tests that exist over the course of your ever-lengthening life – and even taught some of the WORKSHOPS for God’s sake – it’s still possible to have no idea what to do next.

Or how incredibly complicated life can become sometimes, especially whenever one is tempted to get smug, so that all of the normally-healthy, normally-obvious “things to do next” are neither.  Oh well.  As Whoopi Goldberg quipped,  ‘normal’ is just a setting on the washing machine.

I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.

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Related Posts:
Success!
In Defense of Thoughts

Still thinking about Marilee Jones.  A lot.  I’ve been reading lots of good commentary on the situation (some of the best to which I’ve posted links, right column) 

Our world, most especially the academic part of it, is still astonished at (and extremely resistant to) the idea that anyone can be so good at something without a degree.  Even in cases when they can produce two pages of (verifiable) publications and achievements. 

We can huff and puff all we want to about how a degree is a useful standardized measure of dependability or capability.  Or whatever.  We may even be right, most of the time.   But all our noise flies out the window when we have an exception right in front of us, proof in hand, and we turn the other way.  That is the point at which our myth is exposed.  We don’t care about the “dependability and capability” after all – our true fealty is to the degree!

Most of human chauvinism, of course, is based on self-interest, e.g.:  I worked hard on my own degree, and I need it to mean something.  I don’t WANT people without degrees to be as qualified as I am.  (Personally? I also permanently damaged my career in order to hand-raise my children, and thus don’t WANT the children of working parents to be as wonderful and well-adjusted as mine are!)  

Life is about exceptions, though.  And ah, confession is good for the soul. 

I don’t know Marilee Jones personally of course, but any accusation that she was a greedy “opportunist”  I dismiss out of hand.  We all are all of us that, and in this country it’s considered a virtue.

However, I do agree with other commentators that much depends upon whether she is a pathological liar.  I strongly suspect she is not.  I believe, instead, that much of the great good that she has contributed came from an interior acknowledgement of her own mistake.  As penance for it, even.  I think she has been truly sorry for much of the last 28 years. 

I also think it is absolutely wrong, even in the slightest degree, to look backwards now and recast her whole working history in light of this new information (that she had no degree.  And that she lied.)  To do so is fraudulent on our part, and only exposes our own grave disingenuity and chauvinism:

“She didn’t have a degree, so turns out she doesn’t know what she is talking about.”

“She lied, so therefore can say nothing to us at all about how to tell the truth.”

Garbage.

One of the things Marilee wrote about (and yes, we’re on first name basis now) was the importance of integrity.  In a book she co-authored last fall, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond,  she writes:

Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners.  But just remember that ‘what goes around come around,’ meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out.

This is what I tell my kids, too.  But reading those words now makes me ache.  Just listen to her confession, her fear, even her contrition.  Thing is?  People who cheat quite often do get away with it, and people who don’t cheat quite often get shafted.  Sometimes, unfortunately, ‘virtue has to be its own reward.’  And often a pretty damned shabby one, at that.

Moreover, it’s just cheap for those who “have” to admonish those who “haven’t” for being greedy and ungrateful.

I’ve been hanging around the academy for over 20 years now.  Guys, academics do really ugly things, all of the time.  (as humans do in general, I imagine.)  They plagarize.  Have terrible, exploitative affairs. Torpedo the careers of each other’s Ph.D students out of sheer spite. 

And yes, quite often, they lie. 

According to the New York Times article on the subject of Marilee Jones’ “resignation”, Phillip L. Clay, M.I.T.’s chancellor declared:

There are some mistakes people can make for which ‘I’m sorry’ can be accepted, but this is one of those matters where the lack of integrity is sufficient all by itself.  This is a very sad situation for her and for the institution. We have obviously placed a lot of trust in her.

(The aptly-academic Latin to respond with here would be ”res ipsa loquitur“)

Dr. Clay is probably correct that there is no conceivable way that MIT or any other university could re-absorb Marilee Jones back into its ranks, but “integrity” has very little to do with it.  Jones is now a public embarrassment to them and worse, an irreducible iconoclast.   (as in, literally: “a breaker or destroyer of images, esp. those set up for religious veneration. a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition.”)

She’s gotta go. 

In a fair world, though?  Half the rest of ‘em would go with her.

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Related Posts: 
MIT really blew it
Marilee Jones joke
How to (Almost) get Marilee
Coming Out: I’m a closet academical

For days now, I’ve been reflecting on something that appeared in one of Penelope Trunk’s recent columns. 

It seems that Trunk spoke to success coach Jim Fannin, who told her “that research has shown that wildly successful people have 1,000 fewer thoughts a day than others, which allows the successful people to have exceptional focus on their goals.”

Well now.  That certainly provides some real food for… well, something in which I’ve been overindulging, apparently.  But I can’t help myself.  You see:  I really LIKE having thoughts.

I was relieved to find out I’m not the only career-minded person who has this strange proclivity.  Maureen Rogers  wrote, in her own marvelous comment at the end of Trunk’s column:

I’m with AlmostGotIt. I LIKE having thoughts, too. After thinking about it, I’ve come to the realization that those of us who are introspective; who really, truly, like to think about things; who are highly analytical are probably just not all that cut out to be risk-taking entrepreneurs. To succeed in an entrepreneurial endeavor, you need to have supreme conviction - and thinkers tend to spend perhaps too much time evaluating risk, playing “what-if”, etc.. A better job for us: chief of staff, advisor to the throne, internal consultant….

“Advisor to the throne.”  I definitely pick that one.   (You know: for now, I mean.)

But perhaps the problem here is that I don’t have the right qualifications to have thoughts.  This possibility has been brought up before. 

At The Institution Which Shall Not Be Named (to pick an example at wild random) there is only a very small allotment allowed for thinkers, and these slots are all taken by highly-trained Thinkologists.   Many of those who have gone through the entire formation process of Thinkology are surprisingly intelligent, diversity-promoting, even iconoclastic thinkers.  However, their thoughts still must be chosen from the approved intelligent,-diversity-promoting,-even-iconoclastic LIST.

Which, needless to say, is entirely unavailable to inflammatory non-thinkologists such as myself.

I decided that Jim Fannin might be onto something.

So I visited his website.  I was glad to find that he has an online quiz,  which of course I took immediately to see if I “[Don’t] Think Like A Champion.”   Here is what I found out:

The results indicate your S.C.O.R.E. Level is dangerously low. You are not in the game. If this score persists either change your goal or approach it in a completely different way. You are on the wrong path.

Wow, this is bad. 

Fortunately, Fannin has a number of products which could help put me back IN the game. Unfortunately, unlike many of his other clients, I don’t have a professional baseballer’s salary to pay for any of them.

But perhaps I can offer him some small repayment-in-kind, at least.  Bob Sutton, a professor at the prestigious Harvard Business School, has developed another little online quiz which, I humbly submit, may be just the thing.

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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)

A few weeks ago the Washington Post convinced Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, to play unannounced in a Washington subway station. Bell played for nearly an hour on his $3.5 million Stradivarius. More than a thousand people passed him by, with only one man stopping to listen — for three minutes, total.  Interestingly, every single child who passed DID try to stop, but in every case was hurried along by a harried and embarrassed adult. 

Altogether, a little over thirty-two dollars was dropped into the violin case of one of the world’s greatest musicians. 

(Thanks for sharing, Chris!)

Well…It took almost exactly a year, but guess who is now officially billable at approximately 9 (That’s N-I-N-E) times her previous hourly wage as paid by The Institution Which Shall Not Be Named? And guess who is also a little horrified, given all the existential stuff that’s been going on around my house lately, by how much it even MATTERS?  (But. You know what? It DOES.)

I may even forgive my previous employer for dismantling half my portfolio (by taking down the website I’d built for them, one which was getting national attention – the whole unpleasant email discussion about which was then forwarded to me by the webmaster) (A few days before I found out I’d also not been invited to my own retirement party.) (On my birthday.)  (Just as the professional theatre I’d applied to was finally rejecting me after several sets of interviews.) (And not long after someone, who should have known better,  helpfully told me that my previous employer and board all found me “inflammatory”)

(Oh, my God, the woe…..) 

It’s still hardly any hours.  It’s still not a salary.  It may not be what I want to do with the rest of my life.  

But I will so definitely TAKE IT!  Here, have a cigar.  And guess what?  You’re next!

(and, um, that “inflammatory” thing? That’s just me, with my lighter.  And the fattest cigar you’ve ever seen.  Flaming.)

Someone gave me an interesting employment suggestion today, and I must confess I had a bit of what I now call “a Target Moment”  Target is, of course, a cleaner, more uptown version of Walmart.  It’s the place where you always find everything you sort-of-need plus 54% more (it’s amazing, what happens to your bright red shopping cart in that place).  It’s also the place I’ve ended up more than once when I had a vague feeling I badly needed SOMETHING, and hoped Target would help me figure out what that was.  (Target’s marketing strategy is based heavily on existential crises, I think.)

Once, though, I’d not changed out of my gardening clothes before dashing off for something I sort-of-needed at Target.  I drove into the crowded parking lot and suddenly froze inside of my car.  Everything had gone all surface-y and intimidating.  All those people striding so purposely to and from their cars (87% of them SUV’s), efficiently bundling children and bulging bags of things back and forth.  Wearing all their clean, soccer mom outfits. Everyone seemed to know exactly who they were, what they wanted, and what the plan was, in general. What had any of this to do with me?  I wondered, a little stricken. 

Tada! A Target Moment.

Everyone has her own little issues.  I doubt this one is at all unusual, even.  The other night, at a little supper club I belong to, our host for the evening admitted that when we first started our club, she’d been very worried about what to wear to it.  She didn’t know us very well then, and we were only 14% real to each other at that point, so her head made up all sorts of intimidating stories about us.  But on this night, we wore anything from jeans to the formal outfit one of us had worn earlier to her daughter’s prom party.  None of us gave 2% of a rip, either. 

Target Moments are what we have when we forget that everyone else is the same as us, scared to death much of the time and desperately wanting to be loved.  Remembering this is even better than thinking of the audience sitting in their underwear.  Generally speaking, no one really has it together any more than we do, and we’re all just bumbling along best we can.  This includes 100% of those well-dressed, efficient-looking EMPLOYED people, including those who might possibly consider hiring us.

A relative of mine who is a successful physician, while still in school, formulated the “Shmuck Theorem,” which I find very helpful when a Target Moment sneaks up and threatens to derail me from being my most successful self.  It’s very simple:  “If the other schmucks can do it, so can I.”  Amen to that, baby!

The hardest things you’ll ever have to contend with are your own interior critics: They are powerful and noisy, not to mention irrepressible. Anne Lamott calls them her “vinegar-faced ladies;” a friend of mine (who, I should add, NEVER swears) calls them the “FCC”, or “Fucking Critical Committee.” Julia Cameron calls her inner critic “Nigel.” My mother’s voices, when she contemplates putting her paintings in a community exhibit, tell her she’s “showing off.”

My beloved step-aunt-in-law (yes, I really have one of those) calls them her “thugs on a bus.”

You know them perfectly well, don’t you? We all do, these voices that tell us we’re not good enough: the ones that demand, especially if we are women, that we “sit down and shut up.”

I think they are deadly, too, spoken by a thing or things that might even be in league with those immortal terrors that Madeleine L’Engel calls the Echthroi: the shrieking naughts (as in zeroes, or nothings): black holes who want to unname and X the entire cosmos. I call them my “Toad People.”

Most times I try something brave and new (and always when I’m writing,) no matter how freely my hand is moving or how well the work is going, they are always there, cursing in my ears, banging dissonant cymbals in the background, picketing with rude and obscene signs in front of my desk. They perch on the end of my pen and jeer at me. They poke their bony figures in my eyes and jab them at my words even as I’m forming them on the page. “Bad, bad, BAD!” they screech.

While these characters have always been there, recently they’ve been particularly raucous. I think I’ve been making them nervous, carrying on despite their scolding as I never have before. My toad people are well-established after years of residency – apparently, they even have a dental plan and an 80-year mortgage. They seem perfectly confident that they can weather whatever current flight I’m taking, and I must admit I find their confidence deeply disturbing. They have very strong, hairy arms, and seem to believe that if they keep pulling on me hard enough and long enough, I’ll eventually come crashing back down. I worry, sometimes, that they be right!

But then again, here I am, still showing up at the page and still writing. And here is my friend, still looking for a job. There’s my friend recovering from divorce who’s just been accepted as a Ph.D candidate; there’s my mother who’s going to show her paintings anyway. We are all so afraid, and we are all so beautiful. Look at us, though, take a really good look, because here we are. We will not be “X’d”. We keep showing up… not only because it is our God-given right, but because showing up is our God-given obligation.

So: suck a lemon, vinegar ladies. Go jump in a dirty old lake, Nigel. **Note to all toads:** this meeting is adjourned.

Addendum: When I wrote this, I had no idea I had been scooped. Sort of. But it’s an interesting thought that perhaps we’ve both somehow intuited the same archetype: http://www.locksley.com/humor/toad.htm