Anti-Depressant

I’ve been laying low for the past few months. Between trying to manage my on-again-off-again back pain and associated mood swings, re-learning the Art of War applications for my workplace, and coping with various-and-sundry children’s crises and syndromes, I just haven’t felt much like socializing. And so when my son’s out-of-town soccer tournament fell on the same weekend as this year’s Disney reunion, it seemed like a good opportunity for me to bow out gracefully. But my husband had other plans: “You’re going to the reunion,” he said with end-of-discussion finality. So he and The Athlete went to the tournament without me.

I left The Actor and The Four-Legged Creature at home with a babysitter, painted on a smile, dug my sunny disposition out of moth-balls, and drove to the reunion, mentally citing countless misgivings about attending. But stepping onto the patio was like crossing a threshold from fog into sunlight. Within an instant I was embraced with hugs, warm smiles, and melodious laughter. Here were people who represent some of my most cherished memories of times gone by. Here were people who knew me then and who know me now and to whom I remain timelessly connected. Here were people who live life with unflinching passion. Here were people who never fail to lead me to lightness.

We talked and laughed, reminisced and commiserated, and I could feel myself exhale. In just a few short hours they revived and recharged me with their collective generosity and wisdom, just as my husband predicted they would. The creativity, imagination, vision, and strength that filled the room were the perfect remedy for my ailing spirit. I never cease to feel humbled in the presence of this wonderfully talented group. I am profoundly grateful to call them my friends.

Maximum Medical Improvement

Yesterday I was released from my back doctor’s care. I have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand I am thrilled that I have recovered enough that I no longer need regular follow-up care, that we know how to manage my flare-ups, that I know to avoid most situations that will encourage a flare-up, and that I am in very little pain. To look at me, you would never know that 8½ months ago I couldn't walk unassisted or stand longer than 40 seconds. I am back to working out—sans running—and am back in shape.

On the other hand, being released from care means that my doctor thinks I have reached MMI—maximum medical improvement—and that there is nothing more he can do for me. That means my sciatica likely will not resolve completely; I will forever require a sit/stand station at work. I will probably never again be able to sit through a movie. I won’t have leisurely conversations with friends over meals. I won’t be able to jump for joy watching Noah’s soccer games and the front-row-center seats at Ben’s performances will be filled by someone other than me.

My vacation, leisure, and recreation activities will be selected and modified based on how long I must remain seated and how much strain my back can withstand. Travel plans will hinge on finding transportation with seats that fully recline.

I’m not as mobile as I once was. It’s harder for me to bend down and I can’t lift or carry heavy items. So housekeeping and cleaning is more of a chore than it was before and I get physically tired much, much faster nowadays. I can’t lie on my right side or sit upright on a couch, so I can no longer cuddle with the boys on either side of me while we watch TV. I think that’s the worst part—that it has dramatically changed the way I physically interact with my kids. I find it so soothing to have them physically close to me. And now my ability to accomplish that is severely limited.

Yeah, I know I’m being whiny and that many people have it far worse than I; I know many friends who had the same injury and have not recovered nearly as well as I have. And yet I know others with the same injury—or worse—who recovered fully and have returned to their very active lifestyles. Every body and every situation is different, of course, but I really was expecting that I would be one of the luckiest ones.

Knowledge as Weapon

http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/

Reading this article, it occurred to me that one of the reasons I am so unhappy in my job is that nearly everyone is averse to learning from anyone else. It’s a frustrating phenomenon, particularly since I work for a public education agency.

Case in point: Last week I went to a workshop with several other co-workers. Back at the office one of those co-workers asked me my impression of the session. I told her I thought it was useful information and I could see how I’ll need to be able to use the information in the future. Her response was that even though her job doesn’t require in-depth knowledge in this field, she already knew most everything presented in the workshop but was pleased to have gone for the 10 minutes of new information that she did glean.

Are you kidding me?

In a workshop that is peripherally related to her job, was it really the case that she already knew everything except 10 minutes of information? Did she mean to tell me that she knew more about this topic than the people our organization pays to do the job that this workshop was about? And if so, why isn’t she the one doing that job? It’s not enough that she thought she knew everything there was to know about the topic before she went to the workshop—she then had to then articulate that knowledge to me upon her return to the office? Aside making this colleague look like an elitist with a superiority complex, what productive goal could this action have served?

But it’s not just this person—it’s everyone in the organization. They are all impervious to learning from others. None of them leave our guest speaker series having gleaned anything applicable from the speakers. The employees complain that our guest speakers are lousy, unprepared, and do not speak on relevant topics. These speakers are carefully vetted, selected, and prepared and they are experts in their fields. Okay, let’s just say for argument’s sake that the employees are correct and the speakers suck. Shouldn’t they be able to find something worthwhile from the presentation? As educators, we expect students to learn a lesson from nearly every conversation and instructional module. Shouldn’t these same educators be creatively engaged enough to be able to find at least one nugget from a 60-minute talk?

This resistance to education is rampant. Managers refuse to attend mandatory trainings unless executives personally tell them to do so. Employees talk over each other during meetings to offer insights that are often completely unrelated and inapplicable. People talk. A lot. But no one listens, and hardly anyone learns.

I long for a place where employees want to learn from each other. For a place where people don’t walk into an educational session intending to teach the course while attending as participants. I long for a place where people do not protect their own knowledge for fear that sharing information makes them less valuable to the organization. And I long for a place where managers don’t use their own knowledge as a weapon against others.

Facebook Latest Victim of Wall Street ADHD

More from Kevin Drum:
 
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/08/facebook-latest-victim-wall-street-adhd
 
Not that I care much about Facebook's future or keeping Zuckerman at the reigns, but this money quote sums up precisely how I feel about all corporate shareholders:
 

Did this "siphon extra profit for the company"? Sure. But contrary to the febrile expectations of Wall Street executives who think the world guarantees them a quick profit every time they lift their eyebrows, that's what an IPO is for: to raise money for the company, not to give a guaranteed pop to early buyers. Zuckerberg would have been negligent not to squeeze every penny he could from the IPO.
 
As for the current slide in the stock: boo hoo. Early investors made a mistake. (Maybe.) That's their problem. They knew perfectly well that buying into Facebook was a risk, and they knew perfectly well that there was a chance the stock would drop when lockup periods expire. That's a risk with every IPO.

Honestly, I just cannot get my panties in a knot over private investors who expect to never loose on an investment risk, and who expect their profits to increase year after year.  While the middle class watches their costs of living increase without raising salaries to match, these folks are screaming because their stocks are earning only 3% rather than the 12% to which they have grown accustomed?!  Cue the violins...

When will we ever learn?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map

Ideological Womanizing

By Richard Cohen, published in the Washington Post July 31, 2012 My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor — and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army’s dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party. It was in rebuttal to the Jacks of this world that Barack Obama earlier this month updated John Donne’s “No man is an island” by knocking the idea that individual success is always the product of individual qualities, such as industriousness: “Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.” This observation, so obvious you’d think it didn’t have to be stated, was then followed by what became a gotcha sound bite: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” The entire GOP, including its claque in the press, pounced. You would have thought Obama had just belittled self-discipline and other virtues and quoted from “Das Kapital” or, even worse, a ditty by Pete Seeger. To his critics, Obama’s version of It Takes a Village was further proof of his commie creds, possibly Islamic as well. Mitt Romney found the line totally — and I mean like totally — “disconcerting.” As to the charge that Obama was being quoted out of context, Romney declared that “the context is worse than the quote.” OMG! Of course, the president has nothing but truth and history on his side. Every schoolchild in my neck of the woods learned that the Erie Canal, which made New York truly the Empire State, was government-funded — $7 million appropriated at the insistence of Gov. DeWitt Clinton. The railroads did not come from nowhere and neither did the ports or the highway system. Government played a role. Government has always played a role. If it just got out of the way, the mindless mantra of the tea party’s heavy thinkers, we would all be in deep trouble. Across the mighty ocean, the Economist magazine has taken note of this debate over the role of government and pronounced it healthy in principle but pathetic in execution. Both the right and the left have trivialized this important issue, but conservatives have gone from simplistic formulas to bravely idiotic ones. “American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self,” the magazine says. “Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right’s hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking. George W. Bush presided over a huge growth in government.” The Economist, a right-of-center publication, has it nailed. Romney’s embrace of tea-party thinking is just ideological womanizing. (He won’t call in the morning.) While in Israel, he mentioned that one of the books that influenced his thinking on foreign affairs is “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. (Senor is one of Romney’s important foreign policy advisers.) It is a good book, mentioned favorably by me in a recent column, and it accounts for why little Israel has become such a high-tech giant. As always, there is no single answer. Large-scale immigration (mostly from Russia) contributed, and certainly the conversion from an essentially socialist economy to a capitalist one has made a huge difference. But so has the government — in particular, the army with its own culture of innovation and intellectually elite units devoted to high-tech training and warfare. Graduates of these programs, having satisfied their military obligation, populate Israel’s high-tech sector — and, to Israel’s chagrin, America’s as well. Israel is the start-up nation because the government helped start it up. As the Economist notes, this is not a trivial debate. The refusal of the contemporary Republican Party to acknowledge a role for government is linked to an illogical determination never to raise taxes. Obama may be too liberal for some, but the alternative that Romney offers by parroting the conservative GOP line is simply not credible. Prosperity may not always take a village, but it sure doesn’t take the village idiot.

way to prove your foreign policy prowess, Mitt!

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/yesterdays-romney-gaffe-was-real-not-fabricated

Best in Class...

Best in Class

Guns Don't Kill People...

http://mydd.com/2012/7/21/guns-dont-kill-peo?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mydd+%28MyDD%29&utm_content=Bloglines Guns Don't Kill People by Charles Lemos, Sat Jul 21, 2012 at 03:33:02 AM EDT James Holmes, the detained shooter in our latest national mass murder tradegy, bought four guns from various retailers over the last two months. Holmes bought his first Glock pistol in Aurora, Colorado, on May 22nd. Six days later, he picked up a Remington shotgun in Denver. About two weeks later, he bought a .223 caliber Smith & Wesson rifle in Thornton, Colorado, and then a second Glock in Denver on July 6th — 13 days before the shooting. A high-volume drum magazine was attached to the rifle, making that rifle an assault weapon and allowing him to fire 50 to 60 rounds in under sixty seconds. Led by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) on September 13 1994 and signed into law by President Clinton the very same day. But the law expired on September 13, 2004. Despite numerous attempts by Senator Feinstein and others in the Democratic leadership, attempts to renew the AWB have all failed because of Republican opposition. Guns don't kill people, Republican policies do

Canada for President!

As an answer to Iowa's GOP caucus results, the best candidate finally enters the race:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrhA0sEkuaM&feature=youtu.be&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1

Perhaps the best analysis I've read...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/video/2011/nov/16/99-v-1-occupy-data-animation?INTCMP=SRCH

You could say the same thing about Paterno...

http://msn.foxsports.com/collegefootball/story/mike-mcqueary-what-angers-most-is-they-see-themselves-when-they-consider-his-actions-in-penn-state-sex-abuse-scandal-111711

Serial Monogamy

Some of you know about our house in Iowa. We've had it on the market since May, but there have been no offers. So we decided to take it off the market and rent it out, again. Posted an ad on Craigslist and got a huge amount of interest. One family that is relocating to the area seems like the perfect match for us. They sent a relocation specialist to look at the house. Pictures were taken, questions were asked, phone calls were made.

Earlier today I called the wife to tell her we've accepted her family's application and would be thrilled if she and her family would rent our house. She was happy, no doubt about it. But she wanted to talk it over with her husband, see a few more pictures from the relocation specialist, and "sleep on it." And given that they'd be taking a lease out on a house sight unseen, I really can't blame them.

I told her that we think they'd love our neighborhood and the neighbors. Our families have a lot in common and so it would be comforting to know that our property would be in good hands. And those of you who have followed our "Great Adventures in Out-Of-State Land Ownership" know that we are great landlords. I told her that we were going to keep our ad open, that the house will be scheduled to show again Wednesday night, but that we'd cancel it as soon as we got a signed lease from them. All in the interest of transparency. And she seemed totally fine with all of this. I found our entire set of interactions (email, text, and phone) to be refreshingly honest. It felt like the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

So tonight I got home and noticed that our Craigslist ad was off the front page. I festered over it for a while, and then, worried that we'd lose this family and not have any traffic at the next showing, renewed the listing.

And now, I feel like we totally cheated on the potential renters. Even though I told her we would continue playing the field. Even though there is no expectation of monogamy, I am totally freaked out that the family will wake up in the morning with the intention of renting our house but that she will go to Craigslist anyway, see the renewed ad, think we decided not to rent to her, and call me to break up with us.

I can't go back and delete the second ad, because that would remove the original one, and if they don't take the house I won't have time to repost a new ad before the showing tomorrow night. What I really need is a good cover story; one of those "it's not how things appear" alibis that always seem to work in the movies and Law and Order episodes. Got any suggestions?

Only in Iowa

Oh, those Iowa business professionals!  Always so innovative!

http://blogs.findlaw.com/free_enterprise/2011/10/10-if-you-guess-who-will-be-fired-next.html

Explain it to me like I'm a 4-year old...

"It's because most of their income comes from capital gains,"
 
From the war over "fixing the tax system" comes the argument that the super-wealthy's low tax obligations is because their money comes from capital gains rather than actual labor.  Interesting.  Because when people complain that public sector employees deserve higher taxes, it's because they aren't working hard enough.   But when people want to protect the wealth earned by gazillionaires, it's because they haven't been working at all.
 
Maybe Kevin Drum can explain it better...

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/lies-damn-lies-and-average-tax-rates
 
Or, maybe not.

I've been making this argument for years!

I'm so glad journalists are finally catching on:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-am-a-job-creator-who-creates-no-jobs/2011/09/20/gIQAhpgGjK_story.html

Twins!

I was finally feeling better. Josh and I drove to work together that morning and we stopped to get donuts to share with my office in celebration of my one-year anniversary at work. Truth be told, we were both feeling a little giddy over the excitement we expected to stir in my office. I shuffled through my papers, just to make sure everything was there. We second-guessed our plans, wondering if we should wait until the weekend when we were to fly back to Washington D.C. for the Jewish New Year, so that our family would be the first to know. But we were bursting with joy and couldn’t wait any longer; we decided to share our news first with the people who had become our Midwest family.

We parked in the A lot by Gilchrist Hall just as Iowa Public Radio started to run down the top news stories. It was 8:05 Central Time and the announcer made a brief mention of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York. Josh looked at me incredulously. I rolled my eyes, shook my head at the vision of some yutz and his Cessna collapsing down the side of the building ala Wile E. Coyote and thought to myself, “I bet that wasn’t part of his flight plan.”

We thought nothing of it.

When we got to my office, I walked to the conference room, opened the donut box and tacked the ultrasound to the wall. Josh stopped by my colleagues’ desks to say “hi” as he often did, reminded them that today was my one-year anniversary, and encouraged them to grab a donut. No one thought it was strange that he lingered in my office that day; he often hung around for a few minutes before he went to his own office across campus.

Sandy was first, and a moment later we heard a gasp and then “Robin!!” She came charging into my office and cried, “Twins!” and embraced us both. Within moments the rest of the office can streaming in, and Josh and I told and retold our story: how long we had struggled, how we resigned ourselves to ART, how the test the night before the doctor’s appointment made it all unnecessary, how we knew before the doctors that there would be two, and how I had spent the last five weeks praying to the porcelain god. We laughed, celebrated, and mingled, and after about 15 minutes the party started to break-up. Josh left for his own office and we all set down to work.

It was about 10 minutes later when Judy walked back in. “Robin, turn on the radio.” She said quietly. I turned to look at her. Her face had gone deathly white, and the cheerful smile she wore moments before had vanished.

“Turn on the radio.” It was all she could say, and I knew something was very, very wrong.

I went back to the computer, got online and listened to the instant stream of details. Images of horror flashed across the screen. I took it all in but none of it made sense. Pictures. Words. Yelling. Running. Flames. Smoke. Screams. Chaos. My head spun but I instinctively went searching for more news. But every damn site was just cycling through the same details of the two towers’ collapse and the same dreadful images of terrorized masses.

My stomach turned. I saw an online clip of someone leaping to his death from one of the Towers, and my heart stopped beating.

Finally, there was news of The Pentagon and an airplane crash in Pennsylvania. The world stopped breathing.

It would be a few days before all the events would come into focus. The death toll continued to climb and the devastation mounted. Media coverage was angry and the masses were incensed. New details gushed from various outlets daily and added to the collective rage and fury.

But I was a Zombie. I went through the motions at work and at home but my head was filled with fear for the world into which my children would be born. I was entering my second trimester, known as the “honeymoon phase” because my pregnant body should have adjusted to the additional blood volume and surging hormones. But instead of release, my stomach continued to clench and heave. I could feel the lights of optimism and humanity slipping from all of us.

I worried that the human race would never breathe again. And I cried that my twins would never know the world in which they were conceived.

Two horses

received from a friend:

 

Two Horses  Author Unknown Just up the road from my home is a field, with two horses in it. From a distance, each horse looks like any other horse. But if you stop your car, or are walking by, you will notice something quite amazing.... Looking into the eyes of one horse will disclose that he is blind. His owner has chosen not to have him put down, but has made a good home for him. This alone is amazing.  If you stand nearby and listen, you will hear the sound of a bell.  Looking around for the source of the sound, you will see that it comes from the smaller horse in the field. Attached to the horse's halter is a small bell. It lets the blind friend know where the other horse is, so he can follow. As you stand and watch these two friends, you'll see that the horse with the bell is always checking on the blind horse, and that the blind horse will listen for the bell and then slowly walk to where the other horse is, trusting that he will not be led astray. When the horse with the bell returns to the shelter of the barn each evening, it stops occasionally and looks back, Making sure that the blind friend isn't too far behind to hear the bell. Like the owners of these two horses, our mates don't throw us away just because we are not perfect or because we have problems or challenges. They watch over us and even bring others into our lives To help us when we are in need.. Sometimes we are the blind horse being guided by the little ringing bell of those who are placed in our lives. Other times we are the guide horse, helping others to find their way.... Good friends are like that... You may not always see them, but you know they are always there.. * Please listen for my bell and I'll listen for yours, and remember... Be kinder than necessary- Everyone you meet is fighting Some kind of battle. Live simply, Love generously, Care deeply, Speak kindly.......                                          FOR WE WALK BY FAITH AND NOT BY SIGHT

 

 

Character

The huge growth of our community theater program this year brought in a great deal of new and older talent. The result was that Ben, who previously had featured roles in every performance, had been cast in smaller roles and didn’t get as much stage time as he expected.

Though I certainly sympathized with him, I also saw this year as an opportunity for Ben to learn how to share the stage gracefully with others. As he watched his close friends be cast in more featured roles, I hoped Ben would become gracious with his own loss in the face of someone else’s success. If his passion for acting and performance is to grow, then he will need to find a way to embrace rejection and failure. He will have to learn to separate himself from his acting, to love his friends for their achievements in spite of himself. In short, he would need to grow some character.

Amazingly, Ben never uttered a word of disappointment. He was thrilled to sing his only solo as a member of the band in Grease. He memorized his few lines as the Constable in Fiddler on the Roof and labored over the many different approaches he could take delivering them. Throughout the year I was on the lookout for any cue of leaked discontent or frustration, but there were none. He happily chattered away about what happened during rehearsal. He sang in the shower, in the car, at the table. He practiced choreography alone in his room. He talked about the show and his friends. He was resilient and he was happy.

I was certain that the summer performance would have thwarted all that. When Ben refused to tell me the part he got, I knew we’d have a problem. After some cajoling, he finally told me: while his closest friends had all been given lead roles, Ben, once again, would be in approximately four scenes. Tears welled-up in his eyes. He expressed his disappointment that night, and I braced myself and Josh for the return of “Crabby Ben,” the child who lives with us when there are no plays to rehearse. But the frustrated actor never appeared. Ben went to work being the best damn Mayor that Whoville had ever seen.

Last week was the summer performance. After the show a group of mothers congratulated each other on our children’s fabulous work. One of them told me how much she admired Ben. “Did you know,” she began, “that when Joey was sick that entire week, Ben stood in for him?”

I didn’t know. I wasn't surprised, but I suddenly understood. His friend had been out sick for an entire week with a virus and very high fever. Ben, who has a habit of learning everyone’s lines, songs, and blocking, had seized the rehearsal spotlight. I joked with the mom, “that must have been just what he needed to feed his craving.”

The mom replied, “well sure, all the kids know each other’s parts. But how Ben handled the senior center practice performance was amazing.”

My brow furrowed in confusion and she could tell I had no idea what happened during the field trip. Then she explained: “Joey was still sick and Ben knew that Joey would be devastated if anyone stood in for him. Ben knew that part inside out, but he refused to perform it in front of an audience in deference to Joey.”

A lump grew in my throat; I fought to suppress my tears. In an instant I realized the magnitude of Ben’s sacrifice, his unwavering loyalty and his quiet humility. I guess I was too late with all that character building stuff. Ben had done it without me.