nice guys finish last
this is a post from someone i know online, who did the right thing, and could use some help as a result.
"So, my company has hit a slow period (due to declining gas prices. We make fireplaces, so lower gas prices mean more gas heating.) and we had to lay off a bunch of people.
Well, it came down to a choice between me and a guy who was hired on the same day. So they looked to production numbers. I happen to produce more by a good 60 percent. Of course, I also happen to be 17 years younger.
But the company didn't care, and so decided on laying him off.
Except for the fact he's got 3 kids and a wife to support, and barely makes rent, food, and his children's needs.
I'm young, I can recover. So I told them to lay me off instead, and if they wouldn't then I'd just quit so they wouldn't have to lay him off.
So here I am, jobless scum of the earth, because I had the moral fiber to make a sacrifice on behalf of someone else.
Sure, people would say that the look on his face when he realized I sacrificed my job for his was worth it all... But I'm not quite that mushy. It was the right thing to do.
Of course, now I have no job. I guess I can't take the right thing to the bank.
Anyway, if anyone in the Seattle area happens to know of a job, I'm presently looking. I've had jobs all over, and work my bollocks off no matter where I'm working, or what I'm doing.
I've worked construction, metalworking, sales, customer relations, and am ex-Army. Most importantly, I pride myself (and not egotistically so) on being able to learn to do anything. I just work that hard at it."
i hate seeing someone do the right thing, and end up poorer for it. (yes, yes, i know he's spiritually rich.) if anyone knows of anything in the seattle area, please let me know, and i'll pass it on to him. please feel free to distribute as you see fit.
don't just do something, stand there!
thinking about the article on torrid i read this morning got me thinking about how that store offers itself as a solution to a problem… a problem which lies mainly in the customers' minds.
"The function of advertising became the production of discontent in human beings. One of the sub-texts in all advertising is you're not OK, you're not OK the way you are, things are bad, you need help, you need salvation. And in that sense advertising is designed to generate endless self criticism, to generate all sorts of anxieties, all sorts of doubts, and then to offer the entire world of consumer goods as salvation. That's where salvation rests, anything and everything that you can buy."
that's from one of my professors, barney mcgrane. another thing he used to say regularly: "That's one of advertisement’s most brilliant accomplishments, to get us to believe that we're not affected by advertising." it's so seductive, the material world.
i miss barney. i spent i don't know how many semesters with him, either in one of his classes, or being a TA for one of his classes. i was the copy editor for his book, The Un-TV and the 10MPH Car: Experiments in Personal Freedom & Everyday Life. the book was a collection of the experiments done in one of his sociology classes, and students' reactions to them. the "un-tv" experiment has been posted to the internet, if you're curious. i highly recommend it (and the rest of the book). to give you an idea of what a typical class with barney was like, here's the reading list from one of his classes:
SOC 320 - Sociology of Death Required Texts:
1. Bernard McGrane - The Un-TV and the 10 MPH Car
2. Inge Bell - This Book Is Not Required (Revised Edition)
3. Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilich
4. Simone de Beauvoir - A Very Easy Death
5. John James and Russell Friedman - The Grief Recovery Handbook (Revised Edition)
6. Mitch Alben - Tuesdays with Morrie
7. Philippe Aries - Western Attitudes Towards Death
8. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross - On Death and Dying
9. Ernest Becker - The Denial of Death
10. Stephen Levine - Who Dies
11. Raymond Moody - Life After Life
12. Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
13. Sogyal Rinpoche - The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying
14. Reader: "Bardo" [Library Reserve]Recommended Texts:
1. Philippe Aries - The Hour of Our Death
2. Michel Foucault - Madness and Civilization
3. Norbert Elias - The Loneliness of Dying
4. R. Kastenbaum - Death, Society and Human Experience: Is There Life After Death
5. Jacques Choron - Death and Western Thought
6. Richard Selzer - Mortal Lessons
7. Audrey Gordon - They Need to Know, How to Teach Children About Death
8. Philip Kapleau - The Wheel of Death
9. Da Free John - Easy Death
10. Trungpa and Freemantle - The Tibetan Book of the Dead
11. Herman Feifel - The Meaning of Death
12. Edwin Schneidman - Voices of Death
13. George Bataille - Death and Sensuality
14. Colin Wilson - Afterlife
15. Avery Weisman - The Coping Capacity
16. Joel Whitton - Life Between Life
17. Stephen Levine - Healing Into Life and Death
18. John Robbins - Diet for a New America
19. P. Sargent, I. Watson - Afterlives
20. Marie-Louise von Franz - On Dreams and Death
21. Robert Bosnak - A Little Course in Dreams
yep, you read it right -- 14 required texts, 21 recommended (and that "recommended" was really more like 'required' if you wanted to get the most out of the class). for a semester-long course. and we're not even getting into the papers, assignments, or experiments. how i can read so much text so quickly should be pretty apparent. even though his classes were extremely demanding and challenging, i enjoyed them, and barney's teaching style immensely. he is a warm, kind, insightful person. you would never guess that he's a friend of robert pirsig* or a student of chögyam trungpa rinpoche. barney once brought pema chödrön to come talk with his students, when i was a freshman. meeting her was so very cool. i'd never met a buddhist nun before, and i watched her field mundane questions about why she had shaved her head just as gracefully as she answered questions about bodhichitta and steadfastness. the next week, he'd have us calling up funeral homes to find out just how much it would cost to die in this culture. the week after that, it'd be breaking into our dorm rooms to learn enw ways of thinking about space. it's funny how applicable barney's work is to the feri study i'm doing now. i should tell him about it; i think he'd be interested and amused. and his advice would probably be the same as it always was: "see what you can see." *barney showed my one of my essays to pirsig. his reaction: "she's either brilliant, or insane. or both." i've still got that essay with pirsig's comments on it, somewhere in my filing cabinet.
doing things
came home early today, because this sinus headache was not stopping, and i still wasn't able to get much done at work. spent the afternoon sleeping and watching the very last of DS9, which has made me a little sad. my favorite star trek ever, and now i have seen all the episodes. sigh.
s. called this afternoon, wanting the number of j.' insurance company that i'd already given him months ago. s., being severely dyslexic, can't just flip through a phone book and hope he recognizes the name of the company, so i cut him some slack on this one. however, now that i think about it, it strikes me that once again, nearly every time someone has called me recently, it's because they want something from me. they either want to vent, want me to do something for them, want me to drive them somewhere, want me to listen to them, or need my help doing something.
i'm really not happy about that. back in late december/early january, i hit my breaking point with people hitting me up for things and not reciprocating. it dwindled for a while, and now it's creeping back up. i don't know if it's just that the people who i can count on to reciprocate, or genuinely like just spending time with me without it being about me doing something for them, are all so busy at the moment that they have to carefully schedule trips to the bathroom, or are out of town. that might be it. but apart from april and j., i can't remember the last time someone called me up and said, 'hey, let's hang out,' and that was the only thing on their agenda. (if you've been wondering why j. is still in my life, we're looking at one of the top reasons, right here. he IS a good friend to me.) i've had plenty of people call and ask to hang out, but i find out after a while that what they really meant was 'let's hang out, so you can listen to me vent/help me solve my problem/do something for me.' this is making me rapidly not want to hang out with any of those people.
many of the problems i'm being asked to help with all center around design or art or color. while j. is probably the source of 50% of these questions, he also pays me, either through his company for large jobs, or in single-malt scotch for small ones. so, i really don't mind the questions from him, because there's a key thing here: he respects that i am a professional, and he pays me something for my time. now, none of the other people asking are asking me to do a *job* for free. they're asking relatively small things, like helping them decide which carpet to buy while we're out shopping, or what i think of the paint they picked for their room, or car colors, or... well, you get the idea. while i don't feel right charging friends for my opinion on something that only takes a few minutes of my day, it's adding up. if these were clients, i'd have NO problem asking to be compensated. but with my friends, i have problems. part of the issue, i think, is that design is not yet seen as a *real* skill. if i were an attorney, they wouldn't expect me to do it for free. but yet, choosing a color should be, to these folks. hell, not like i want buckets of money from my friends for minor color decisions, but how about a 69-cent burrito from del taco or a cup of coffee as a token of appreciation?
or, the other category of problems is the therapy category. since i sent out my rather annoyed letter a couple of months ago to the worst offenders, that has decreased, but it, too, is beginning to ratchet back up.
this all makes me wonder: am i really not worth spending time with on my own unless i'm doing something for someone? the idea that i might not be bothers me a lot. am i that uncomfortable for people to just *be* around? i can't make my friends that uncomfortable -- otherwise, i wouldn't have them unloading their deepest secrets on me. so what gives? why is it so tough for so many people to call up and invite me over for dinner? or coffee? i'm a good conversationalist. i'm willing to drive places to hang out. i have social skills (tact... not so much, though). i don't think i smell. when i call people and ask them to do things, they usually say yes, but i'm beginning to feel like i have to prod people to spend time with me.
and being one of the few single people in a social circle of couples, well... it's awkward. i often feel like i'm a fifth wheel. now, it's not like i can't spend time alone -- i can. but i've learned that *too* much time alone is bad for me, and is a major trigger for depression. 3 days of not speaking to anyone but my dog, or 4 days of only going to work and coming home, or an entire weekend alone... Not Good. not good, not because i need someone in my life romantically, but i need to know someone gives a damn about whether or not i'm okay, if i'm still alive -- that sort of thing. a roommate seemed like a great solution last year, but 1-not jeff, and 2-i discovered my house is just not set up to live with someone i'm not sleeping with. my rent is impossibly cheap for the area, and i have a dog, so moving is not an option unless i come into a LOT of money.
so, i feel a little stuck. when i DO see people, they're usually hitting me up for something, so if i hang out with them, i'm drained; the people who give me something back are busy; and if i make more than one phone call a week asking someone to hang out, i feel like i'm being needy and clingy and not independent.
i'm going to make myself dinner and think about how to fix this.
leadership & tattoos
i was browsing the air force's website this morning, reading through transcripts of speeches on leadership. i'd been rereading some of my email exchanges with some of the queen's guard officers on leadership, and was looking for something that would coalesce my attitude toward leadership and officers. i looked, and looked, but didn't find what i was looking for, so i jumped over to the Civil Air Patrol's website.
some of you know i spent a number of years in civil air patrol, the civilian auxiliary of the air force. it is to the air force as jrotc is to the army. coming from a military family, there was a lot of pressure to go into the service, especially since it looked unlikely that any of the boys in my generation (my brother and my cousin) were going to enlist. although female, i was the oldest, so... i cut a deal with my grandfather, who is a retired lt. colonel in the air force, that i would give civil air patrol a try for X years, and if i didn't like it, at the end of the agreed-upon timeframe, i would quit.
i learned many valuable things in CAP: how to speak in public, how to find downed aircraft, basic first aid, how to teach people, how to command, how to carry myself, how to give drill instructions; how to rely on myself, how to lead people, how to excel. those were the positive things i learned. there were also a few negative ones: i learned i'd have to be twice as good as a man to be considered half as good; that because i was female and therefore not able to blend in, i didn't have the luxury of screwing up; and that the military lifestyle was entirely too seductive for me. oh, i got promoted fairly quickly; i held positions unusual for girls to hold (first sergeant and then sergeant major); and i had fought hard to win respect in not just my squadron (94) but in my group (15). but it wasn't for me. so when my time drew to a close, i resigned, and my grandfather, true to his word, let me go without arguing with me and without a fight.
years later, when i moved out on my own well and truly, i got a tattoo to mark the beginning of this new phase of my life. i had wanted a celtic knot of a trefoil leaf, but because i was too squeamish to look while the needle was in my flesh, the artist filled it in, and it became a propeller. i looked, and i liked it... but i didn't like it; it wasn't what i had wanted. so i had the artist fit a design i drew of a triskele, around the propeller. it ended up being huger than i'd wanted -- i originally wanted something i could fit under a watch. but i liked it, and it was mine.
i don't think of the tattoo much unless someone asks me about it. but this morning, when i was on the CAP site, i looked at the <a href="http://www.capnhq.gov/nhq/cp/Webseal.gif" target="_new">seal of the CAP,</a> an image which i have looked at hundreds of times when flipping through manuals, letters, and other paperwork; an image i've stared at while standing at parade rest for countless hours during one CAP function or another. go take a look at it. notice anything?
yep. that damn propeller.