@ Home in the World

Into the Unknown

When we last left our heroine, she was about to start her dream job, and it seemed that finally, finally, everything was falling into place. 

But, as in many stories, sometimes the dream is merely a device to keep the plot moving, and a weak one, at that. In the end, both protagonist and reader are left with, not much of anything, really. At best, a lesson learned; often one about appreciating what you have. Ironically, and supremely, dissatisfying. 

That's where I find myself at the end of 2012. I have had my dream job for all of three months, and next month will probably be my last. I don't want to go too deeply into it, but suffice it to say that new management wants to bring in her own people and I am not one of them. I am a contractor and I had hoped to be asked to stay, but it will probably not happen. The dream is ending and I am struggling not to wake up. 

I know all of this seems overly dramatic. It's just a job, after all. But if you were to look through years and years of my journals, they are mostly focused on the same thing - the need for a job that I love, for work that is meaningful and challenging. I have always believed in the notion of "life's work" but I have never found it. This is the closest I've ever come - something that I love pouring energy into, something that I am very, very good at, something I had hoped to do since finishing my Master's degree in 1999. It has taken over ten years for me to get this job, largely because I am not of academia. Few schools have so much as called me for an interview over the years. The one that did, over five years ago, offered me a job that I really wanted but couldn't take because the salary would not cover the cost of commuting and daycare. 

All of that doesn't even take into account the friends I've made even in this short period of time. This hasn't happened to me at work in years. Had I been there longer a few of these friendships might be lifelong. With only four months together, it's not likely. That saddens me greatly. The small kindnesses of friends during all this uncertainty have brought me to tears at times. How could people be so good and the situation be so painful all at once? 

So I go into 2013 with so much unknown. Will I get to keep this job? Will I find another one anything like it? Could I go back to corporate training now that I've finally gotten to do what I really wanted to? What's next for me?

I've spent much of this week looking for another job, and there are a few prospects. There will be more I'm not really worried about finding a job, recruiters have continued to contact me throughout my stint here. I'm worried about settling for a job. I've been doing what I do too damn long for that. 

One other thing - my husband got me an iPad for Christmas. When I'm done with this post, I'm going to set it up. The first thing that I will download is some kind of GRE study guide. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet, but I am going to go back to school. I've wanted to for years and years. Four years shy of 50, I can't wait any longer for the right time. 

Once upon a time 13 was my "lucky" number. For 2013, I"m going to need all the luck I can get. 

Happy New Year, friends. 

Thank you for everything!

 

Can I have a few minutes to work on my BLOG?

Sheesh!

I returned from BlogHer with the best of intentions and a huge ToDo list. I haven't gotten very far.

When I returned to work, I found out that the budget on my project was running thin -- so my time with them would be ending in two weeks. I had to then scramble to both finish what I had promised them and look for a new job.

I've also been trying to get the boys ready for school which starts next week. I hadn't gotten anything in terms of new clothes or school supplies, so I've been doing that in between interviews.

The good news is that, this time around, the job search has been much more productive than the one I undertook last winter. I was interviewing even before I left the project, which gave me hope, and within the last 48 hours, I applied, interviewed and accepted a dream job I thought I had no hope of getting. After 10 years of trying, I have finally gotten a job at a University. I accepted the offer this afternoon. I still can't believe it!

I will start the day after Labor Day, which means I will get a little bit of a break to get some paperwork in order and a couple of projects around the house, and oh, try to figure out what I am doing with this blog!

I am at BlogHer

I am at BlogHer in NYC this week, getting excited and re-energized about writing and blogging.

 

My family is with me and they are enjoying being in NYC for the first time. Piper is herding the kids through the crowds.

I so appreciate the dedicated time to just focus on where my writing is going. I'm finding that my approach to BlogHer is a lot more serious this time. I feel a lot more focused and realistic about what I need to learn and do. I'm not as overwhelmed and exhausted as I was last year. Being in the same time zone and not having a cold probably helps, but it's only been a few hours and I have had several interesting conversations (still not an extrovert, but getting better at talking with strangers). The hug from Goon Squad Sarah though, made my morning. Nice people are awesome!

I am really trying to commit to this space again even if it is going to be less and less about parenting.

I've gotten some positive feedback for my ideas around Artifactual and hope to have people contributing so I can really build it into something.

If you landed here because we met in NYC, please leave a comment so we can reconnect online.

(Mis)Adventures in Social Media

Hi, I'm back. I feel like I fell off a cliff there for a while. I hate that. I get going in a particular direction and it's all good, but then I drive into a rotary and can't decide which exit to take.

So while mentally traveling around in small circles for the last week or so, I've been puttering around on various social media outlets trying to set up connections for Artifactual. It's been slow going. I tried to create a page for it on Facebook, but when I try to link the blog to it, it only wants to post to my personal page. As I struggle to keep the last vestiges of my semi-anonymous blogging life away from my family, I do NOT want them to make that connection. I still can't get it to work. The only option I can see is setting up a separate account for Artifactual, but apparently Facebook frowns on that sort of thing. I think I may have to share posts to Artifactual's FB page by hand. I also cannot figure out how to get a FB badge from the Artifactual FB page to put on the actual blog. I can get one from my personal page, but that defeats the purpose. What a pain!

Google Plus. Okay. I'm on it. Now what? I have "Circled" my SIL and one of my husband's cousins, both of whom have reciprocated. I've also added a handful of bloggers who don't know me well and have no idea I've linked to them. And while I love the idea of the hangout feature, I don't yet know enough people on Google Plus to have one. The functionality is fabulous enough that while the rest of Google Plus will probably never catch up to Facebook and Twitter and will eventually wither away, the hangout will thrive, as it is both useful and fun.

Muppet break! Frustrations notwithstanding, this ad makes me smile every time:

 

And while I have never been a huge fan of either Queen or David Bowie, I have loved this song since the first time I heard it back in High School. It never gets old.

Moving on...

So maybe you've heard of the next big thing - Pinterest? I've been avoiding it because what I saw of it early on looked like an endless Anthropologie catalog.  Just what I don't need when I'm not working. But hearing about how fast it grew and its usefulness as a content sharing site, I thought it might be useful for Artifactual once it gets off the ground and decided to get lost in try it. 

As kids my sister and I used to sit around leafing through my mother's stacks of ridiculously priced catalogs and claiming numerous items for our future houses and closets with no concept of how to actually pay for them.  Pinterest is exactly that impulse with some organization and quirky captioning. It is a lovely time suck. As someone who does not do a whole lot of shopping (though my husband might beg to differ), I just had no idea there were so many things in the world. Of course there are annoyances, like the repetition of images that multiple people have repinned, and the overwhelming desire to delete things you don't want to look at (not possible). The whole thing reminds me of the stuff we used to cut out of magazines and tape to our dorm walls in college; beautiful clothes, beautiful people, pithy sayings, and an overabundance of food. There are some truly stunning things to see at but in less than three days I was sick of the mustache as a design element. Stop, please.

As of this writing, I still haven't accumulated any followers. I'm Lisse13 on Pinterest. By the way if you haven't yet seen Pinterest, You Are Drunk, you should.

On Saturday, I did something really crazy and drove across the state to attend a PodCamp.  They have a version of this in Boston, but I just missed it. I got up earlier than I have for weeks and drove over two hours to Holyoke Community College. I wasn't sure whether I belonged there, but it was a very mixed group of professionals - marketers, audio engineers, videographers, photographers, and people who ran small businesses in need of better understanding the tools. I figured I was there to mostly learn, but I was surprised by how much I talked. As SoMe enthusiasts go, I'm still pretty much an amateur, but that even made it clear that there are many others who are interested in these tools with even less knowledge and more floundering. I came away from that event thinking of the many small businesses on the North Shore that could use an event like this...

Wheels aturnin'. Stay tuned.

What should you do with $50?

All the Black Friday hysteria, the frantic post-Black Friday counting of the numbers, and the speculation about the health of the economy/Christmas season has brought to mind something that's been bothering me since the recession began.

Commentators discussing our annual spending spree pointed to the higher-than-last-year numbers almost universally spoke of them being a good indicator of things to come and the importance of the retail sector to the overall recovery.

Here's where I get concerned. Although, much of the downturn had to do with the abuse of banks and investment firms playing while the cat (SEC and others) were looking away, a fair amount of the trouble can be atttributed to the ridiculous amount of credit card or mortgage debt people were carrying vs. the appalling lack of savings. That's why it seemed so wrong when President Bush asked people not give up their way of life, but to "go shopping." This encouragement of excess contributed to the extreme difficulty people found themselves in when the housing bubble collapsed. Because they had no savings, many of them had nothing to fall back on when they lost their jobs or got upside down in their mortagages.

Now, the savings rate is up; higher than it's been in decades. People are waiting to make big purchases and forgoing many smaller ones. But economists are talking about how much the economy relies on people, not just corporations, but average people, exercising buying power.

It just seems foolish to rely so heavily on people buying crap they don't need.

Especially when so much of that crap is not even made here in the USA.

What that means is that we are counting on Walmart and perhaps Macy's to make a dent in the unemployment picture. But what kinds of jobs are these? Not only do they pay poorly, but many of these businesses dependent on hourly labor seek to keep these jobs from straying into full-time, benefits earning territory. They might artificially lower the employment rate, but these are not growth producing jobs, either for the economy as a whole, or the people in them.

Thirty-one years ago, Jimmy Carter gave a speech discussing our way of life and the challenges we faced as a nation; economically, culturally, and spiritually. The country was in the midst of an energy crisis and a recession. In it, he implored Americans to face the reality of our situation and its implications.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

 He never actually used the word, but this became known as Carter's malaise speech, and he was castigated by Republicans and others who felt that Americans should never have to make sacrifices.

Unfortunately, our failure to pursue serious energy saving technologies has helped to put us right back in the same situation 30 years later. Refusal to do serious R&D into hybrid and alternative power technologies contributed to the near demise of GM and Chrysler, resulting in large bailouts and enormous job loss. George Bush's "ownership society" quickly turned to owership, with relief efforts that are either non-existent or badly botched, and with many banks still making money hand-over-fist, but not contibuting to the economy in the form of loans.

Yet here we are again, talking about consumerism as the key to economic recovery. This strikes me as irresponsible and dangerous. Buying crap we don't need is not going to lead us to investment in the kinds of things we do need, either as families, or as a nation.

What do we need that hasn't been invented yet?  A cure for cancer? Large-scale water purifying technology? More efficient vaccine or medication development? Better public transportation? Less polluting energy sources? Cleaner, less disease-prone aquaculture?

If you had $50 to invest in something meaningful with a host of other people what would it be?

P.S. If you leave a comment, don't be afraid to get a little silly, as long as it would truly be useful. Great inventions have sprung from impossible ideas.

Cross posted at Beyond the Blackboards.

A Whole Lotta Nothing

Or, where I've been for the past month or so.

The kids are in bed. My husband is upstairs fixing the dryer. I am sitting in the living room and the TV is OFF for the first time in just about as long as I can remember. I am largely caught up at work. I'm going to blog. So there!

I am taking Wednesday off to do things like color my hair, go to an eye appointment, bake my cranberry gingerbread, and get bagels to take to my mother's.

We will leave here Thursday morning for CT and we will stay at my mother's for two days. I wish I could say it will be relaxing.

I will probably not do any Black Friday shopping, but a lot depends on my desire to get out of the house. My mother lives near a bunch of outlets, and I always feel obligated to go when I am down there, but I'm increasingly realizing that I don't get very many gifts there, I tend only to buy stuff for myself.

I really don't need anything.

Each year has been increasingly difficult in terms of telling people what I want for Christmas. I really don't need anything, as I said, and what I want is stuff that is too expensive to be asking for.

I want an iPhone 4. Mine is version 2 and the apps my company makes for the iPhone don't even work on the old model that I have.

I want a dog. Sort of. I would like to have the kind of life that would let me spend lots of time with a dog. I could certainly use the exercise. I'm just not home enough to really enjoy a dog, and that kind of makes me sad.

I want a slow cooker. Again, sort of. I want to have the kind of family that would eat things from the slow cooker. As it is, my kids don't want to eat soup that didn't come out of a can. It makes me very sad.

I want a housekeeper. I have always hated house work, except laundry, which most people complain about, but I actually like.  I simply don't see dust, and it hardly seems worth my time to deal with it. I want someone to clean the bathrooms.

I want a massage therapist. I had one, and he was fabulous, but I stopped going when I got laid off, and I really don't have the time to go back. I'm not even sure he's still at the place he was because that place has changed names.

I want a vacation. A real one. I want to be able to take my kids and my husband on a plane or a train and go away for a week or more. I want to not have to think about work. I love my work, but it is all-consuming these days. I want to take Pumpkin to some of those cities he askes about nearly every day now.  "Is Toronto bigger than Sydney?" "New York bigger than San Francisco?" He's obsessed. He discovered Google Earth a couple of weeks ago, and it can be difficult dragging him away from the computer now. That child needs a passport.

I would like a new grill. Of course what I would really like is a proper outdoor kitchen. Unfortunately, the last time we paid a landscaper to do anything for us, it didn't work out so well. My husband is now building his own walkways outside - one bag of peastone at a time. It will look fine - when it's done - next spring.

I would like more time to write. How much does that cost?

And then it happened to me (a confession of sorts).

I happened to catch "Outsourced" last night. It's not a show I regularly watch, but I do stick around for it every once in a while. It's cute, but I worry about it relying heavily on Indian stereotypes. Last night's episode centered around sexual harrassment and the cultural differences around what constituted inappropriate behavior.

During the show, my husband and I had a discussion about those sexual harrassment training sesssions that they do in nearly every workplace, and how lame and annoying they were, and Jesus, didn't everyone know this stuff by now?

Well, they should.

Of course it wasn't that long ago that behavior considered inappropriate today was accepted as the way men were. And we're not talking back in the Mad Men era, either.

Anita Hill is back in the news after receiving a bizzare phone call from Clarence Thomas' wife Virgina, in which she asked for an apology for Anita's sexual harrassment accusations of nearly 20 years ago. Turns out Ginni may regret that phone call, because - well, I had never heard of Ginni Thomas and her Tea Partyesque activities - some of which benefit directly from her husband's position on the Citizens United case. I can't be the only one for whom this is news. How far can this red flag be raised?

People have their theories as to the "why" of the phone call. Many of them have to do with attention getting or politics. My own theory was that Ginni found or heard something that disturbed the denial she's been living in for 20 years. You know how some women know their husband is cheating, but the tell themselves they don't want to know? If Ginni was really unaware of her husband's bad behavior before, she's going to know now. Lillian MacEwan has some things to say about that era, and her stories appear to back up Anita Hill.

The Web chatter and news articles surrounding these events have made me realize how much my thinking has evolved in 20 years. And here's the confession part: 20 years ago I wasn't sure I believed Anita.

There were two main reasons for this. First, it really bothered me that I was expected to believe her because I was a woman. Second, I just couldn't believe anyone would actually do the unprofessional and immature stuff she was describing. And then, a year later, it happened to me.

My experience was more what we would now term "a hostile environment." The men in the group refused to continue using my maiden name once I got married. I overheard someone saying that anyone without a tie didn't have to be taken seriously, including the women. The guy who became my boss a month or so after I started began regaling me with stories of his sexual exploits with women from his gym. He compared and rated the physical attributes of our female coworkers.

Even though I knew he must be including me in his comparisons when I wasn't around, I don't recall ever objecting, though somehow the relationship got antagonistic quickly.  I was smarter than he was, and I probably didn't hide well enough the fact that I thought so. He was around my height and I took to wearing very high heels on the days that we had to present together so that I would be taller than he was. It was my only form of revenge. But in the grand scheme of things, he wasn't my only problem. A month or so before the end of my time there, someone forwarded me an email that mentioned my breasts in both a positive and negative light. It was part of a game that the sales team was playing and they were making the "welcoming" gesture of including me in it.

I'm no prude, but I am extremely shy about my body. I am, to put it politely, a little top heavy, and very sensitive about it. My rule about hanging around with guys is that they can say just about anything to me, but I do not want to hear that they are saying things about me. I can't take it. I won't take it. The unfortunate scene that I made that day put an end to the game - or at least my inclusion in it. I lasted there no more than six months. I certainly had grounds for a lawsuit, but all I wanted to do was leave.

Thankfully, I haven't had that kind of experience since.  Looking back on it now, it's hard to believe that people ever thought that kind of behavior was ever acceptable, and it's hard to believe that was almost 20 years ago. Anita Hill may not have been successful in keeping Clarence Thomas from being confirmed, but she has changed a lot of other women's lives for the better. Men's too, even if they don't always realize it.  Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done on that front.

My old boss -- is now a VP.

At the same company.

I'm not sure he'd have made it anywhere else.

I hope they have good sexual harrassment training.

How can I re-use this?

I'm reading a paper on engagement in eLearning. Scintillating, I know. Look no further for the answer to why I haven't been blogging much lately.

The paper describes a project that simulates schizophrenic hallucinations in Second Life. I should probably have more empathy about this, but what is going through my mind is:

A) Clever, but slightly creepy.

B) How could I possibly apply this example to my real work?

C) Looks a little Picasso-ish.

D) Thank god I never did drugs.

 

Too tired to blog, and related rants

So, I'm reeling from the news that my beloved Women's Colony has decided to shut down. I was under the impression that they were testing the waters of expansion, but apparently Mrs. G. and her colleagues decided that it was all a bit too much.

Today came the announcement that the Silicon Valley Moms Blog is also ceasing operation. I haven't heard why, or figured out if that also means that local affiliates across the country are also ending, but that's at least two in as many days.

I wasn't a big reader of SVMoms, or any of its sister sites, but The Women's Colony was a daily check-in for me. I will miss it terribly. I appreciated the company of women who were older (can I say that?) and had seen more than a thing or two with children, husbands, and extended family. I loved the Confessional, though I rarely had the need to use it. Their decision has put my quandary in a lot sharper focus.

I don't want to shut this space down, and I don't yet plan to. However, my job, something I can't really blog much about, is consuming not only my time, but my brain space.

But you know, the lack of blogging is really only a symptom.

Piper and I had a long talk last week about the vast number of things that we were not attending to while we were working. We must make a list of things to tackle, and we haven't even done that yet. Much of it deals with getting Pumpkin some additional help, but then there is a lot of paperwork stuff we have needed to chase down, but have let go for far longer than we should. Pumpkin needs to be in a theraputic camp, but when I finally got around to looking into it, the application deadline had long passed.

We need to get a shed for the backyard, but we have needed to do that for ten years. We have a very bad habit of just living with stuff, and it's causing us to miss out on a lot these days.

We need to go on vacation. We desperately need to take our children on a trip this summer, but chances are, we won't do that either. It's too hard, and we can't seem to make a decision about where to go. We will spend our weekends trying to catch up with housework, yard work, and work work, before we know it, it will be the end of August and school will be starting.

There's a half a dozen things I want to blog about, even more when you count the other blog I was trying to launch that focuses on Education and Learning. There's so many good topics on that front; The Texas Textbook Massacre, the push for charter schools, the national standards proposal and whether they measure up to what we already have in Massachusetts, and the whole social media in learning thing, going on in the adult learning world.

I can't seem to do it. I get upstairs into the office that I created for exactly that purpose, I get two or three lines on the screen and I can't get any farther. My writing has always been slow, I agonize over every word, but it's more than that.

I'm freekin' tired.

It's 5:30 PM. I'm writing this at my desk at work before I leave, because even if I get it all written in my head on the drive home, it will never get on the screen. I will stare a mostly blank screen for hours and second guess myself. Before I know it, it will be midnight, leaving six hours before I have to get up and go to work. And that's before I've put that last load of laundry in, gotten my clothes out for the next day and gotten ready for bed.

Vicious cycle.

Here's the thing. I'm finally at a place where I have the full life I always wanted. But I feel like I am seeing that life rather than really experiencing it, because we don't have our shit together. I've always been easily distracted (except when I was reading), but the full schedule and the lack of sleep are really making things worse. I used to be able to keep details in my head, but I can't do that either. I've gotten some extra little tasks to manage at work, but since they aren't really related to projects, I'm afraid I'll forget all about them. No "system" has ever worked for me. I have never, in my whole life, been able to stick to a routine. Whether that's self-discipline or ADD, or some combination of the two, I'll probably never know.

But somehow I need to get a handle on this so I don't lose it all.  Because I have finally gotten to the point where I can say I'm a good writer. I have a good life, and a good job, and a great family, but I have no idea how long I can hang on to all of it.

And now for some good news

My contract position is going permanent!

I'm thrilled. And not just because of the relative security, but because I truly like where I am. I like the people I work with, we have a good team and we have lots of great opportunity ahead. I have somewhere I really want to be for the forseeable future. And I have the stability I need to attend to some of the other matters in my life.

Tonight was the night of the school art show, one of my favorite nights of the year.  One of the other mothers stopped me and was full of praise for Tigger's behavior at this other "empty bowl" event where the boy scouts and girl scouts paint ceramic bowls that are sold at a later event to feed the hungry. She said he was "so polite!"  That was so nice to hear.

Well, all right. It's been a good day.

Do you watch the Housewives of the OC?

Can I get a Vicki?

Woooohoooo!