Surviving the Workday

I’ve just found Wildlife Direct, which hosts blogs for rangers protecting the wildlife in Africa. You might read Gorilla Protection and possibly say a prayer of thanks that, in all likelihood, when you describe what you do every day, it does not include the word “marauding,” except perhaps in jest.

There are roughly 700 Mountain Gorrillas left on earth, and two were killed and eaten as food by a rebel militia as rather disturbing forensic remains suggests. As you can read on Gorilla Protection, these particular gorillas were unfortunately accustomed to tourist groups and trusted human beings.

This is an excellent example of how blogging has provided a platform for those in isolated locations to communicate with more of the world and receive emotional (and financial) support for extremely difficult work.

Via Get Outdoors via National Geographic

Today’s Daily Om, Your Comfort Zone, focuses on creating a retreat for yourself, a “soft place to land” (I’m pretty sure that’s a Dr. Philism). This is a place where you can relax, and have a mini-retreat to focus on yourself.

Your Comfort Zone suggests using a mantra in your retreat space: I can breath here. I can relax here. I know I am safe here.

Does anyone have a space for retreat at work or at home?

Speaking of commuting, there’s a cool business in LA, which I’ve written about before, which will take your car and fit it for biodiesel (or sell you one already fitted for biodiesel). It’s called Lovecraft and now it is expanding to ten more cities.

I first became aware of biodiesel fuel about ten years ago while researching the Veggie Van for work. It’s awesome to see something that was considered fringy is now become much more mainstream.

Read more about using biodiesel fuels and read the testimonials.

Via Treehugger

Mmm…

Beer. Green beer. But not the kind you see on Saint Patrick’s day. (Note: Art is misleading as I could not find green beer without a leprechaun).

The kind that’s made in a green building with no-flush urinals, recycled countertops, and blue-jean insulation. The kind of beer brewed in a place where employees bicycle to work and leftover supplies are used as cattle feed.

This beer and this brewery are the dream of Josh Brewer and his wife, Alexia Chianis, who are finalists in a contest What Brew Are You? to give them seed money to construct a green brewery in Beaufort.

Via Treehugger

It’s blogging for choice day, and I’ve sort of forgotten or at least repressed the desire to blog about the thirty-fourth anniversary of Roe v. Wade in favor of unicorns and commuting.

In any case, I’d like you to know that I’m pro-choice and I think this directly relates to spirituality at work. Although my beliefs about the right to control my own reproductive functions are intuitively chosen and life-long, more recently I’ve been thinking that the fact that women are impoverished all over the world and that women bear children are two facts that are inextricably intertwined.

Many other women have written for pro-choice day including Feministing, Angry Black Bitch, Dana at Campus Progress, Blog Her, Shakespeare’s Sister, Pandagon, Feminist Law Professors, Reclusive Leftist, The Countess, My Left Nutmeg, Mamacita, Culture Kitchen, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Feministe, and Majikthise.

Someday, I will tell you the story of when Jim and I saw a unicorn. Until that day, I leave you with unicorns at the office by R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties via Boing Boing

One of the great environmental stressors in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, is the morning and evening commute to work. Here in Los Angeles, it’s the worst in the nation and involves thought-provoking bottlenecks . (And by “thought-provoking” I don’t mean that I’m engaged in philosophical thoughts, but fantasies about turning the car into a helicopter).

Commuting isn’t necessarily well-studied scientifically, but there is research to suggest that the longer the commute, the less able commuters are to complete a simple task upon arrival—not an ideal set up for arriving at work.

Theologically, I think that commuting in cars alienates us from one another, though it provides a sense of more control than commuting by train or bus. Carpooling has long been suggested as an alternative, though it relies on living and working in tandem.

There are ways to cope.

1. praying before (and after, I’d suggest) the drive. Note that praying during the commute isn’t necessarily something I’d encourage. At least not deep mindful prayer.

2. Deep breathing during the drive seems to help. Not so deep that you are totally relaxed, but deep enough that you are breathing regularly (since one way many of us deal with anxiety is by hardly breathing at all).

3. Changing your commuting times might help, but the commutes in our neck of the woods start at 4:30 a.m. with all of the neighbors gone by 5:15 a.m. It’s hard to get too much earlier. You might as well just stay at work the night before.

4. Not commuting at all is ideal, but not available to many of us.

5. Make a suggestion to those who can help. I’m highly in favor of this one, although it seems that Jaime de la Vega, LA’s transportation chief, wasn’t listening last week. We’ll try this week.

Steve Lopez’s column about de la Vega driving a Hummer (yes, that would be the chief of transportation for LA driving a Hummer to work—nice modeling of appropriate behavior!) has provoked irritation and anger as well as constructive suggestions for bus routes, metro routes, and my favorite, “My solution? I moved to Oregon.”

Let’s just say there’s more than one person with that idea.

More Tips to Minimize Commuting Stress

How often do you do something altruistic at work? Frequently, I hope. I’ve written about altruism before in The Importance of Altruism, almost exactly a year ago. Definitions of altruism vary, but it is a moral code to help others, anyone from a coworker struggling with the copy machine to a client whose computer crashed with your files.

New research in Are you a giver? suggests that altruistic activity originates in specific area of the brain (part of the parietal lobe, the posterior superior temporal cortex), and that people’s own reports of their altruistic activity roughly correlate to their behavior (so that we can accurately judge how altruistic we are). The lead researcher, Scott Huettel, at Duke says:

It is hardly the case that all altruistic acts come from people who are religiously faithful; there are undoubtedly many altruistic atheists. And, a religious explanation would have considerable difficulty explaining why some animals help others of their species at significant cost or danger to themselves.

It seems like altruism would be ideal in the workplace, where people of different religious and non-religious backgrounds come together to work for the common good. You’ll also recall from my post last year on The Importance of Altruism that social insects behave altruistically to the extent that sterile members care entirely for the queen and produce no offspring of their own.

Now I’m not suggesting we stop reproducing in favor of helping the queen (or king). But I am wondering if more altruism at work might make the workplace a happier, more satisfying place to spend the day. I’m not alone in this goal. Altruists International works to re-establish altruism as a viable social norm, perhaps not using the social insect model, but the idea of helping others as a social norm.

Do you have stories of altruism at work in which someone did something selfless?

I’m going to start a Sunday review of the previous week’s postings.

This week, we learned that whether your opinion matters at work and whether you have a best friend at work make a difference in terms of whether you like your job.

We examined several admirable businesses. The Pay as You Go model is used at the Same Cafe and the One World Cafe. And the cottage business of Someday Gardens shows us that we can all work toward betterment of the world, even if we have to keep our day jobs. Then there’s jobs Americans won’t do.

We learned how to recycle expired condoms and dry pens at How Can I Recycle This? I shared my questionable color sense in office furniture here. And we learned about 10 tips to Green Your Work and that I have a penchant for mechanical pens.

And, importantly, to cope with the workday, we learned some quick ways to pray during the workday and drew some inspiration from Shiva as he dances on the dwarf of ignorance.

Let’s not forget the UU Blog awards and all of the nominees. Thank you for reading and nominating me. I appreciate it.

As you may know, I’m uncomfortable with large displays of religion in the workplace. You don’t see me endorsing Santa at Office Christmas Parties or Group Prayer before Meetings.

Jewelry, on the other hand, is usually smaller, more personal, and seemingly negotiable at work, which makes this an interesting development:

A woman who wore a Wiccan cross to work is suing Starbucks for retaliation after she refused to remove the Wiccan cross she wore. Coworkers, including the manager, wore Christian crosses.

I know that some conservative Christians are sensitive about crosses and believe that anything other than a traditional cross is satanic (trust me, google this, and you’ll find more than you wanted to know).

But it’s discriminatory for one kind of cross (the Christian kind) to be okay, and another kind (the Wiccan kind) to be against the rules. I’d want a look at the employee handbook to see what guidelines they have. It may be that all crosses are not allowed.

Religious Tolerance, a fine website on religious traditions and their struggles, has an excellent introduction to Wicca and discussions the mainstream confusion between Wicca and Satanism. A summary? Since the middle ages, wicca has been linked to satanism due to what can be called propaganda. But truthfully, Wicca doesn’t recognize Satan or even an all evil deity.

Hmph. This is making me want to dig my huge jade Greek cross out of my jewelry box and go get a mocha….

Read Wiccan Ex-Barista Sues Starbucks.

I found these Green Guides on Treehugger for lots of different topics, one of which focuses on greening your work.

Since we both work at home, we have a bit more control over what and how we green. Here’s the quick run down on our situation.

1. More work, less energy We’re working on turning everything off when not in use. The laser printer is a particular challenge, and I’m resisting buying something extra just to turn it off. It does sleep though.

2. Digitize Several clients that I have only use digitial files, so this is easy enough unless the editor in me feels compelled to work with a hard copy (many editors do).

3. Don’t be a paper pusher I’ve stopped printing just about everything (see above for the exceptional compulsion).

4. Green your commute After years of terrible commuting, we have none, and let’s just say this leads to prayers of thanks and praise.

5. Green sleeves I haven’t bought work clothes in a while since I found out about my beloved Ann Taylor and sweat shops, but I do shop in thrift stores, at least for myself sometimes.

6. Work from home Yup. Done.

7. Use green materials We should definitely do more of this. Part of the problem is my love affair with a mechanical pencil that isn’t refillable, but writes oh so smoothly.

8. Redesign the workspace We’re working on this. We have lots of plants and natural light. My office chair came from a dumpster at Harvard and the rest of the office furniture is from Ikea or a thrift store. We don’t seem to use a lot of chemicals (because we don’t seem to do a lot of cleaning).

9. Lunchtime We eat a lot of leftovers, so no plastic plates or driving for food.

10. Get others in on the act I’m trying….

Read complete tips here at Greening Your Work and other Greening Guides.

Also, I’m building a recyling commentary in teh side column. Stay tuned.

Read Elizabeth’s post Femminista della casa: Women Empowered for insight on women, developing nations, poverty, and empowerment.

Labels can be playful, like this rooster on an orange and grapefruit box. You probably didn’t think that you got a box of roosters if you bought this product. You were probably expecting citrus.

But labels can be also be misleading. When Wal-Mart announced it was stocking organic foods, it seemed like a good thing. Except that they are now mislabeling non-organic foods are organic, according to Cornucopia, an advocacy group that promotes sustainable farming. So if I bought something labeled organic at Wal-Mart, it might not be. Or it might.

Not fair Wal-Mart. Organic means without pesticides. Organic means that it was grown in accordance to standards. Not fair at all.

Via the Accidental Hedonist

Emmalee Bauer, 25, of Iowa kept a journal on her computer at work at Sheraton in order to chronicle her boredom and attempts to pass the time:

I am going to sit right here and play Elf Bowling or some other nonsense. Once lunch is over, I will come right back to writing to piddle away the rest of the afternoon. … I have almost 100 pages here! I wonder how long that’s going to take to print?

Now I’ve never played elf bowling, but it’s no surprise to me that Bauer was fired. Her journal was used at the unemployment hearing to deny her unemployment.

Would anyone like to suggest some lessons we could learn from this story? Here are the obvious and practical ones.

1. Don’t keep personal things on your work computer.

2. If you’re going to waste time at work, don’t take pleasure in it, which seems to have been the part that convinced the judge she wasn’t eligible for for unemployment.

I think there’s also room for a lesson that’s a bit broader. When we have jobs that we find meaningless, we tend to get into trouble. So here’s another lesson:

3. Try and find meaning in your work. Challenge yourself.

Via Gawker

The first time I remember daydreaming I was five waiting for my father to bring me a donut and milk from the university commons at UCSB. I stared out in space, considering the arrival of the donut (Would it be stale? Would it be chocolate? Would I be able to drink my milk slowly so I had enough to last until the end of the donut?) When I came to, I realized that some university students were laughing at me because I was staring at them totally lost in space.

Yes, according to new research, daydreaming is the default state of the brain (and possibly the state of a brain in anticipation of a donut). It’s the state we enter when we do routine tasks. Exactly why daydreaming exists, biologically, isn’t as clear:

The research team speculates that when engaged in a mundane task, mind wandering allows people to remain properly aroused. Alternatively, they say, daydreams could be a conduit for uniting experiences from a person’s past or present to their future. Or, the brain may just have evolved the ability to handle more than one function at once.

Arousal? Uniting experiences? Multitasking? In any case, daydreaming serves a purpose. Make sure you tell folks when you’re caught staring in space.

Read Escape from the Insipid for more on the function of daydreaming.

I first heard about slaughterhouse work conditions from the leader of my church youth group. He had worked in a meat packing plant in Chicago. He had some scary stories, mostly the travails of pigs becoming pork.

And then I read about the work conditions for the human animals (not to mention the non-human animals) in Fast Food Nation.

Working in a slaughterhouse is one of those jobs that many Americans simply won’t do. The work is too horrible. But there are other jobs–white collar jobs–such as nursing and programming that Americans are increasingly hesitant to do as well.

Why? Here’s one opinion from Dirty Work:

Americans haven’t grown too wealthy and snooty for the kind of work that gets your hands dirty, or for nursing, or for computer programming. Rather, the people who have the skills to enter those fields also have opportunities and skills to enter other fields. And so they have to decide whether the rewards—monetary and psychological—of the opportunity before them are worth it. It’s not so much that Americans aren’t willing to pick fruit and become computer programmers. Rather, they aren’t willing to do those jobs for the prevailing wages and benefits.

Explore jobs Americans won’t do in The Unwilling Americans and Dirty Work: What are the jobs Americans won’t do?

It’s time for the third annual UU Blog Awards. Originally I felt a bit squeamish about posting this as it feels like a contest, but honestly, this is a great way to find out about liberal religious writing online (also check out uupdates or uublogsearch for UU blogs)

You can nominate my blog or others here.

I sort of thought I would suggest my own brilliant posts to nominate, but then some sort of shame took over, and I could only remember my post on the man who sat across from me at the airport and insisted I take his balloon animal.

In any case, here are the current nominees.

I’m working at a big flat table, similar to the one on the right in size, and I’m thinking that rather than purchasing it from Ikea, I probably could have made it from recycled signs.

For some reason, ever since I saw a sculpture of Shiva dancing on the dwarf of ignorance at LACMA (Asian and Southeast Asian art, third floor, Ahmanson building), I get the urge to strike this pose throughout the day.

I think it’s the idea that you have to destroy something in order to create something else that I find so compelling. It also reminds me of one of my favorite books, I Know This Much Is True (Oprah’s Book Club)in which the main character, Dominick, essentially learns the same lesson: destruction and creation are intertwined.

Read further analysis of the original Lord of the Dance.