The "Lean In" Conversation

I am going to a conversation with the author of "Lean In", Sheryl Sandburg, in about 10 days and will have digested her book and have more thoughts for you in April.  Until then, read the article by the ex-CFO of Lehman Brothers with the pull-quote:

" Forget about balance.  I gave up everything for my career, and then I lost everything."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/is-there-life-after-work.html

Imagery and Evil

Gunman Kills Students and Staff In Connecticut Grade School

I know the conversation around this tragedy centers on horror, grief  and guns.

I am feeling emotions around all of that, but I also believe that violent and realistic video game/movie/YouTube imagery is a root issue to be dealt with.

(Too)Young children are exposed to and can be steeped in visual/sensory imagery at a developmental age which seems to have a far more sinister consequence than the plastic green army men that we may used create our "battles against our bullies" in our youth.


We chose to wait until our oldest (a son) was in 7th or 8th grade before we allowed him to purchase a gaming system and it could only be the Wii as it would be used by us as a family. Not an Xbox.

(We even had an informal pact with a family of 3 boys, who were in the same grades as N and A, that we were all holding-out against the norm of having Xbox etc in our homes until the kids were older)

Our son was only able to buy an Xbox, with his own money when he was mature enough, in our view, and the games he could purchase/play in our home were pre-approved by us.

I am not bragging about our approach-I am sharing it as I process on what just happened in CT and has happened in CO, OR, Virginia Tech, NIU etc. and reflect on how we elected to go against the tide of other families who brought violent and realistic imagery into their home, unsupervised, at an earlier age than we elected to.

America's freedoms in full display, of which I am a fierce defender.

The point is that this imagery is the "drug" or initial "weapon" and combined with the wrong immaturity, emotional pain, etc. can produce horrific consequences.

The root is not guns.

A man in China used a knife to slice kids at an elementary school two days ago.

Afghans use acid.

Asian Indian cultures use gasoline and a match.

African cultures severe a limb and so on and so on.

In the U.S., easily accessible imagery sparks the evil which flows through the action.

Too Many Guys in the Room

In last Sunday's NYTimes Article, entitled A Village Rape Shatters a Family, and India's Traditional Silence,  the author touches on something that I wrote in an earlier blog post and have brought up with the United Nations Girl Up Foundation:  rape is escalating in countries where the number of males, who are unemployed/drinking etc. outnumbers females significantly.  And, this gender imbalance is moving across the globe (hello, killing baby girls in China, anyone?).

Girlup.org is one place to start....start supporting and giving voice to those at the bottom of life (untouchables) and the top (Lara Logan, CBS reporter, dragged away from the 'joyous' celebration in Cairo and raped last year) and put our thoughts and dollars toward those who can and will both protect the women, educate and employ the men, figure out how to subvert centuries of cultural and religious norms that make it OK to rape and disfigure females around the globe.

Let's start NOW.

Steve Jobs' - Legacy In Our House

Since A is a graphic designer, we've been a Macintosh house for.....ever.  Even though I'm a Blackberry girl at heart - I curse my iPhone regularly and smile when N tells me that soon, soon Apple will come out with improvements that will make me love the iPhone.  I want buttons, but I also don't want to be the odd-man-out when something goes wrong and my whole family shakes their collective heads and say "you would be fine if you had an iPhone."

We are learning and relearning much about Steve Jobs.  He is one of those CEO's that I would both love and loath to work for.  Brilliant and mercurial.  

In 2005 he gave the following advice to the Stanford graduates:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.  Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.  Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.  And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.  They somehow already know what you truly want to become.  Everything else is secondary."

Amen.

Yackety Yack - You're Not Saying Jack!

I loved this essay -

Enough About Me. Now, About My Kids...

By JOE QUEENAN      SEPTEMBER 17, 2011 Wall Street Journal

I recently decided to stop going to social gatherings where I have to listen to people run their mouths. It isn't because I've stopped liking my neighbors and friends, and it isn't because I'm tired of people who feel a need to remind me how much they despise Sarah Palin, as if that were the planet's best-kept secret.

No, I can no longer stand listening to people tell me how great their kids are.

Deep inside, everybody wants to talk about what a sensitive, caring, wonderful human being he is. But this is impossible when you work for a law firm that cold-calls Colombian drug dealers to see if they need any extra legal representation, when you've publicly boasted about cheating on your taxes, when everyone knows you've had an affair with an underage roadie for a Flock of Seagulls tribute band, when you've moved into a gated community to avoid even having to breathe the same air as minorities. 

So instead, you tell people how jaw-droppingly great your children are. Britney is spending the summer working for Habitat for Humanity. So is Courtney. Dylan is in Burkina Faso, teaching local wretches how to make designer T-shirts out of organic mangoes. Aisha is interning at a company that designs noiseless, subterranean windmills. Yes, Kayla is getting a law degree, but only so she can help political prisoners from Darfur get green cards. And Caitlin and Skyler are spending junior year abroad participating in demonstrations against the governments in Athens, Damascus and Tehran, as course work for their degrees in Global Goodness Studies.

Wherever something truly wonderful is being done, these kids are at the epicenter of the action. They make the Little Sisters of the Poor look like thugs. 

The upwardly moral children of the bourgeoisie are obsequiously, uncompromisingly virtuous. They ride bikes everywhere. They never eat meat. They refuse to watch television. They eat with wooden chopsticks. They only read books by authors named Jonathan who live in Brooklyn. They themselves are named Jonathan and live in Brooklyn. That is because everyone who is good and just and whip-smart and special in this society lives in Brooklyn. If you had good children like mine, you would know that. Your children probably live somewhere horrid, like Toledo, Ohio. And they're probably named Susie or Fred.

 

As a mean-spirited, amoral crank who has labored mightily to raise reasonably insensitive kids, I find precociously virtuous children revolting. Luckily, I don't have any. I don't want my kids bailing out the faceless Trans-Caucasus masses or helping Jimmy Carter hammer nails in Detroit. I want them to be rich, so they can buy me a chalet in the Alps or at least cover my geriatric wisdom-teeth extractions. I grew up poor; I'm looking for payback.

But my dislike of the resplendently righteous springs from a deeper source. I was always taught that charity vaunteth not itself, that the purest form of philanthropy was the kind that avoided chest-thumping, Ben & Jerry's-style self-congratulation. If your kids were the most wonderful people ever to grace the planet, you (and they) should keep a lid on it. 

More than that, as an alumnus of the proletariat, I kind of miss the child loser. I long for the days when co-workers announced that one of their kids just got hired to be a tough for a dirty union or was pulling a double-nickel at Sing Sing.

I pine for the days when people lifted glasses of Asti Spumante to toast kicking their lazy kids out of the house. I look back fondly on the days when parents talked about skipping town without leaving a forwarding address, so that their freeloading progeny couldn't find them. I long for the days when people's kids weren't so ferociously, ostentatiously, implacably good. 

This is probably because I grew up in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, people don't raise nice kids. Their parents would disown them.

I Am Sick With Rage And Sorrow

From Reuters:  Girls Assualted by 'Soldiers' During Conflict.  Children as young as 8 have been sexually assaulted during the conflict between rebels trying to oust Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and forces loyal to him, a British charity (Save The Children) said.

I am weeping.

I am raging from the bottom of my heart.

 

What lies dormant in our DNA that makes men take out their rage and frustration on women and girls in the form of systematic rape?

It's happening in Libya.

  It's happening in the Congo and Haiti.

CBS reporter, Lara Logan, was grabbed off the street, in front of her camera crew in Egypt and assaulted last month.  Scores of other women in the Mideast are coming forward with their stories of rape by I'm-so-pissed-at-the-system-men.

W        T         F

What Happens If You Are Both The Turtle And The Hare?

If you look at my archives you will see that I went dark for a number of months.  I was very busy negotiating our local teacher's union contract and producing a big fashion show for one of my clients.  I wasn't inspired to write here, but even more puzzling, I was not interested in reading any of the blogs that I normally follow.  I was having trouble focusing on another business idea that I had.  Other than emailing and/or researching things on the internet, I wasn't even really online.

So I seriously began to wonder, because I am of a certain age, if I was starting to become more luddite and less Steve Jobs-like.    Would my tiny bit of Twittering and blogging really keep me plugged into social media, from a job hunting perspective?  Would my use of a 2nd generation smartphone hold me back in a significant way? Because Heather, the Queen of all Working Mother Bloggers was twittering and blogging from any Foursquared location she liked.

Oh, I haven't dropped the big one on you.

I am one of the 2 people on the planet, above the age of 13, that isn't gaga over Facebook.

In fact, one of the most popular phrases in my lexicon, is "F*ck Facebook!"

But....I couldn't help wonder if FB was fcking me (over) as it, and Twitter, are the Google and Amazon of this era of the Internet.  And, if I wasn't the doyenne of social media, who would hire me?  Heather has the social media world by the tail.  Why was I so much like Tippy when I'm usually the Roadrunner?

I was vexed.  Very vexed.

But then things turned around.  The contract was settled. The Guru is making progress.

And you are reading this now.