So I was talking to a friend this morning about how both of us wanted to apply for various things and didn’t have the time to actually print the application and fill it out. This struck both of us as incredibly lame of us.*

I found some helpful tips on Kathy Paauw’s website. She specializes in organizing & productivity as a life coach.

Also, 20 Ways to Stop and Smell the Roses is a lovely pdf with some tips (including how to take five vacations a day–of course, they’re on the short side) and some advertisements.

*Note that the phrase incredibly lame was in fact used during the conversation though we realize it is circa 1980. No, I do not own leg warmers.

I’ve been listening to the world mourn Steve Irwin for being a great conservationist and sort of rolling my eyes (to myself, mostly, sometimes to Jim). It’s not that I wish him dead. I don’t. But, now, finally, someone said what I wish I could have articulated:

What Irwin never seemed to understand was that animals need space. The one lesson any conservationist must labour to drive home is that habitat loss is the principal cause of species loss. There was no habitat, no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Irwin hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and amazement to the skies. There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle. Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress.

Thank you Germaine Greer. Don’t touch the animals.

Excerpted from That sort of self-delusion is what it takes to be a real Aussie Larkin.

I’ve been reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s blog and came across a post by R. William Holland, author of Are there any good jobs left? Holland’s observations confirmed what I found in my own research and interviews: we are experiencing a fundamental shift in the perception of work. Here’s what he has to say:

I wrote Are There any Good Jobs Left? after speaking directly with will over 1,000 people who were looking for work or doing career planning. I also had access to the experiences of many thousands of others through my colleagues and other career management professionals throughout the world. I am convinced that we are in the midst of a significant employment paradigm shift with global implications. While it is most apparent in the United States, its tentacles will continue to expand throughout the industrialized world.

The beta test for this comes from you, the reader. I would predict that well over 90 percent of you have either lost your job or know of someone who has. Another test is in the conversations we have with strangers we meet. When these conversations gets around to what either of you do for a living, it is fairly common for people to acknowledge, “Right now I am between jobs.” It is surprising that so many people share this experience. That it is now the subject of polite conversation is absolutely startling.

Read the rest here.

Check out Barbara’s books here.

Check out R. William’s books here.

When I lived at my parents’ house (aka childhood), I would borrow my father’s office supplies on a regular basis: pens, stapler, tape, ruler, that sort of thing. And I wouldn’t always return said supply immediately, mostly because I liked having office supplies in my own room.

(Note: I never actually purchased my own office supplies, which I could have with my allowance. No, no, instead we treated my father’s stapler as if it cost roughly 10K, and the masking tape another 10K, out of my league entirely).

Every once in a while, my father would look for his stapler and it wouldn’t be there and he’d have to track it down, and this really really really really annoyed him. I wouldn’t say he was mad, because he hardly gets mad at anyone liberal, but he was quite annoyed.

So, this morning when I went to my desk to try and wrap Jim’s birthday gift (Happy Birthday!), and I couldn’t find my tape or my good scissors and had to wrap a small gift with packing tape hacked away with the crappy scissors, I was really really really really annoyed.

I also realize that perhaps what some people could use as birthday gifts might in fact be: scissors, tape, rulers, and pens.

I would have posted this at the beginning of the day, but I just saw it now. Granny at Is America Burning mentioned Karrie’s post about Take Back Your Time Day (which is today).

The best question to come out of everything I read is:

“What’s the economy for, anyway?”

In other words, is it to raise the GNP or to produce happy healthy families (and by family I mean family in the broadest sense)?

Take Back Your Time calls for:

Guaranteeing paid leave for all parents for the birth or adoption of a child. Today, only 40% of Americans are able to take advantage of the 12 weeks of unpaid leave provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993.

Guaranteeing at least one week of paid sick leave for all workers. Many Americans work while sick, lowering productivity and endangering other workers.

Guaranteeing at least three weeks of paid annual vacation leave for all workers. Studies show that 28% of all female employees and 37% of women earning less than $40,000 a year receive no paid vacation at all.

Placing a limit on the amount of compulsory overtime work that an employer can impose, with our goal being to give employees the right to accept or refuse overtime work.

Making Election Day a holiday, with the understanding that Americans need time for civic and political participation

Making it easier for Americans to choose part-time work. Hourly wage parity and protection of promotions and pro-rated benefits for part-time workers.

Read Take Back Your Time’s Press Release.

fill an entire article in the New York Times.

Of particular interest is the beginning of the article:

a mom in the corporate headquarters for Starbucks has a nice little room, a recliner, curtain, and a magazine to accompany her breast feeding

an employee at a Starbucks has the customers’ bathroom and her breaktime

That I knew.

A class sytem exists when it comes to just about everything in the workplace.

But here’s what I didn’t know:

Wealthier women can spend their way out of work-versus-pumping dilemmas, overnighting milk home from business trips and buying $300 pumps that extract milk quickly, along with gizmos that allow them, in what seems like a parody of maternal multitasking, to pump while driving to and from work.

On the Job, Nursing Mothers Find a Two-Class System

So I haven’t left the house in three days. I also haven’t really exercised, except for some limited time on the rowing machine until I decided that was pointless.

The Daily Om has some thoughts about staying at home to relax.

Throughout our lives, most of us are led to believe that relaxation is best pursued outside of the home. As a result, we spend months anticipating weeklong vacations, seldom fully appreciating the leisure time we are blessed with on a more regular basis. It is possible, however, to reexperience the same utterly relaxed state you slip into while on holiday within your home’s walls. The feelings of serenity you enjoy during a vacation are a product of your outlook rather than your locale.

I wrote some hints for enjoying your own home.

1. Turn off the phone The ringer on the phone has been turned off since Wednesday when I was screamed at. And, frankly, this seems ideal to me anyway. I don’t like jumping when the phone rings.

2. Drink party beverages We’ve been drinking Italian blood orange soda. It tastes a lot better than it sounds.

3. Wear your pajamas Enough said.

4. Close the curtains so you don’t have to look at the neighbors Again, enough said. Sometimes I’d just rather not see them. And I’m sure it’s mutual.

5. Do whatever you enjoy I’ve read three books in three days. I’m awesome. So are Robert Boswell, Antonya Nelson, and Sigrid Nunez.

Read Relaxing at Home from the Daily Om and the discussion of it (with more personal experience and who doesn’t love personal experience).

We’ve all had bad bosses. Barbara Ehrenreich write of the advent of Bossism and suggests alternatives in Oh, those bad bosses:

But, you may be wondering, how would anything get eone without bosses and Bossism? Well, a surprising amount gets done that way all the time, as I saw in my Nickel and Dimed jobs. If the restaurant gets swamped or the nursing home residents start tossing their food around, don’t count on a manager to tell you what to do — if, indeed, there is a manager within hailing distance. In crisis situations, I again and again saw low-paid workers organize themselves, more or less spontaneously, everyone pitching in and helping each other, with no one playing the role of “boss.” As for any real boss on the scene, the best he or she could do in a crisis was to pitch in — or get out of the way.

What I was witnessing was workplace democracy in action, or, more fancily put, what French sociologists call autogestion or workers’ self-determination. It may sound exotic, but it’s not just an attribute of the rare anarchist collective. In fact, it’s a notion revered in contemporary corporate culture as the team.

Fascinating, huh? An alternative to a hierarchy with bosses. I suppose that’s how I work now, more as a team with various clients, with everyone pitching in to help. I do have people who could fire me, but then again, I could fire them.

Here’s Barbara’s Blog and her analysis of class in Miami Vice. Fascinating.

Changing 6,600 regular light bulbs in dorms to compact fluorescent bulbs at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, resulted in 81,000 kWH less consumption of electricity, and 751,000 kg of C02 that didn’t go into the atmosphere.

Pretty impressive. And how hard was it me for not title this post, “A Bright Idea”? It was really hard. Let me tell you. Damn hard.

What kind of lightbulbs do you use?

Sustainability at the University of Guelph

Today, like every other day,
we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

–Rumi

from World Prayers

I just returned from my local Mail Boxes, etc. where I photocopied dozens of pages of illustrations of things to do with water, collated, scrawled notes to researchers, and FedExed a rather large box back to the publisher of edited manuscript.

That project is done.

I hope.

One of the challenges with freelancing is that even after I’ve finished my work, invoiced, and been paid, the phone is likely to ring three months down the road with a question. And, frankly, it takes all my brain power to figure out which client has passed what I’ve done to whom in order to answer the question. Usually I have to call someone back.

So, heading into the fall, I am attempting to lighten my workload because the past couple of months have been simply insane. I worked every weekend and something like 80 hours a week, maybe more, it’s hard to tell when you work all the time. On the other hand, I paid for some rather large expenses. But it’s time to stop.

Any number of times, Jim has said, What are you doing? You work all the time. You don’t pray, you don’t meditate, you don’t do any of the stuff you used to do.

He’s mostly right, of course. My priorities had shifted temporarily.

I was just thinking of how I wasn’t allowed to recycle batteries at one place of business and ended up just taking them home to recycle them later (Note: Was that stealing? Hmmm…)

Batteries contain mercury and other creepy heavy metals. You do not want them in the landfill where they break down, and leach into the water supply.

In any case, here’s a short list of ways to talk to your boss about eco-friendly work practices (most of the list adapted from the Treehugger article)

Talk about “innovations”;
Be specific about which practice you would like to change;
Focus on the bottom line (money) and how much better your bottom line will be if you go green;
Do your research so that you can present a number of alternatives, including the cost;
Keep your message positive; (no guilt)
Use fair-trade chocolate (A last resort, but perhaps the best resort).

Link from Treehugger

At first I laughed at The Lord Is My Shepherd audiovisual devotional. There’s chanting, breathy narration, and some strange visual images. But I’ve listened to it a lot, and now I’m beginning to listen to it daily.

How cynical are you?

Oh, who is surprised? Apparently I’m not cynical at all. I suppose suspecting the quiz is flawed would be cynical, no?