Surviving the Workday

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, there’s an interesting piece about moms and work called The Motherhood Experiment. As you probably have read, there is a trend for women in industrialized countries are having less children than they used to. The United States escapes dthis phenomenon of dwindling birth rates because of recent immigrant families who tend to have larger families. But stay here long enough, and the birth rate will dwindle (it’s now at replacement levels):

While scholars blame several phenomena, including greater access to birth
control, later marriage and a drop in what one researcher calls “hopefulness
about the future,” many researchers agree that at least part of the problem is
due to the particular burdens women face in the work force. If becoming a mother
requires a woman to take a huge financial and professional hit, the thinking
goes, she will be far less likely do it.

Indeed.

Via Feministing

I wasn’t invited to her birthday party this year after this interaction:

Friend: I’ll let you know about Disneyland.

Ms. Theologian: What about Disneyland?

Friend: When we’re going for my birthday. *

Ms. Theologian: Oh.

Friend: What?

Ms. Theologian: Well, friend, I really like you, I love you, in fact, having been friends for thirty years, but boy do I hate Disneyland.

Friend: Oh. I don’t like Disney, but I do like the rides.

Ms. Theologian: Oh.

*(I won’t get into the equally bizarre development within the upper middle class of bithday parties that involve destination spending. That is, someone wants to have a birthday party, but it happens to be in….Lake Tahoe, and you’re expected to go for the weekend and share the expense of a ski home rental. It’s like the weddings in Hawaii between Christmas and New York. I’m happy for you. But I can’t spend several thousand dollars to express that happiness.)

Steve Lopez has joined the anti-Disney bandwagon so at least while I stay home (not at Disneyland) I can read his column. Before I get to his critique, let me say this. My issues with Disney are mostly around the idea of intellectual property. Disney notoriously takes stories that are in the public domain, meaning a story that has been told for hundreds of years, (think of Snow white, Pocahontas, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), makes a movie about said myth, and then it owns the myth and protects the myth to its death with extremely high priced lawyers so that the myth is no longer in the public domain. For example, does Disney own Snow White? Of course not. But if you ask Disney, they think they invented the story.

Perhaps you’re thinking that’s no big deal, but it’s why you won’t see Snow White on a birthday cake, T-shirt, or mug unless it’s been licensed by Disney. Every year, there’s copyright violation crackdown in downtown LA on the vendors who sell Disney character pinatas. The point of the public domain, the ethical point here, is that stories and myths are in our cultural consciousness, and I would argue that corporate ownership of this material is a very dangerous thing.

Steve Lopez writes this week in Disney fairy tale isn’t for everyone on how many of the employees at Disney can’t afford housing nearby Disney’s location in Anaheim. Well, that’s not too much of a surprise. I can’t afford to live in many parts of LA either, particularly the parts in which I’d be employed. But Disney apparently is doing everything in its power to squash a development that would let 15% of the units go to the low-income folks working at Disney. Apparently letting anyone who works at Disney actually live near Disney would set a dangerous precedent. It might not look like the happiest fucking place on earth.

It should be clear by now from my other movie reviews that I will take any movie and relate it to spirituality and the workplace. With that in mind, let’s begin.

Miami Vice. I’ve probably seen every episode of the TV show twice, so the theme and plot have been drilled into my head. Here’s the plot of every episode (and of the movie): Crockett and Tubbs are cocky detectives in Miami. They go undercover. Breasts. They fall in love. Ass. Someone dies (often many someones). They use their boats.

But here’s the spirituality and the workplace issue: compartmentalization. Episode after episode, and throughout the movie, we see how Crockett and Tubbs can’t really compartmentalize their work. They try to keep their personal relationships separate from their work relationships, but it just doesn’t work. Their love lives involve their work lives; their friendships often involve the people they are investigating. Compartmentalization doesn’t work, but that doesn’t stop them from trying.

Dead Man. A job offer brings a man by the name of William Blake to the American West. But not William Blake, the poet. Well, maybe not. It’s not entirely clear. In any case, Blake arrives too late in a mining town, the job offer has been rescinded and his job given to someone else. And thus begins his journey (You should have heard that in a very Joseph Campbell-like voice). The journey is one of deconstruction, where everything he believes is important is taken away until he floats out to sea and dies. In all honesty, this is one of the best films I’ve ever seen in my life. It is shot in black and white; it’s laden with symbols and is complex and dramatic and wrenching.

Here’s the key spirituality and the workplace issue: Don’t play with guns. Kidding. If you saw the movie, you might snicker because you could not possible have seen more guns in a movie. Actually, this is a fabulous example of how one failed opportunity can lead to the discovery of the wildness inside yourself and outside yourself.

Box of Moon Light. Al Fountain is a tightass electrical engineer who drives his employees crazy. Then one day he plucks a white hair from his head and the world starts to move backwards. Not all at once, just occasionally. This little time warp leads to him bumming around the woods in half a trailer owned by The Kid and swimming naked and doing some drugs. He has a right good time.

Here’s the key spirituality and workplace issue: Box of Moon Light is all about doing the opposite of your daily routine, no matter how upsetting it is initially, and no matter how pleasurable it ends up being…it’s about being able to go back to your routine too.

This concludes my weeks worth of Netflix rentals. Adieu.

The UU Blog Carnival topic was authority, a topic of particular interest to Unitarian Universalists, who do not necessarily obey conventional sources of authority (The Church, The Bible, Dad).

My own sense is that I almost never got authority from outside myself (not as a teacher, editor, seminarian, and now as a consultant). I basically had to seize the authority for myself. I suppose that’s why I took the title Ms. Theologian, which I think is frankly a little ridiculous, but give me both feminist and theological authority, which my ordinary name does not.

Another Working Mom writes about authority, relating a survey of parenting techniques to Unitarian Universalists. An excerpt:

The religion I chose, Unitarian Universalism, if put to the same measure, would likely rate high on affection but not very high on control. Without the “authority” of Scripture, of creed, of dogma, we UUs are left to our own devices. Or are we? I look around at the other folks at my church, and at other UU churches, and I don’t see a bunch of self-indulgent, spoiled, impulsive people (although there are a few…but they don’t usually stay very long). On the contrary, I see people engaged in their community, working for justice, reaching out, trying to make the world a little better.

Jess wrote about the authority of ministers from the perspective of a spouse observing her partner’s authority, as well as observing the authority that she herself is granted. An excerpt:

In Coffee Hour after my husband has given a service, there are a couple of distinct camps that people who talk to me tend to fall into. One is the “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” type, characterized by questions like, “Wow, he must have been up late last night writing that one…” or “You must be his biggest critic/inspiration, right?” These folks see me as the one with the inside “scoop” on the humanity of the minister, thinking they’ll get the inside story.

UU Soul wrote on the problems with authority. She begins in high school, with a classic example. An excerpt:

By the time, I was a senior in high school my rebellion had taken shape in a war of the wills with my homeroom teacher, Mr. Wright. Ah, yes. I remember him well. I showed up late every day. And every day he gave me detention. I was never going to give him the satisfaction of winning. And neither was he. It was a quiet pact.

Earthbound Spirit gives us a poem about authority and ministers, and how authority is developed. An excerpt:

Claiming My Authority

They said:
“You need
To claim your own authority,
To live into your ministry,
To be a ministerial presence.”

To which I said,
“Huh? What is this authority?”

If more posts come in on authority, I will update this main post.

I was reading Mark Pritchard’s post, Saving Daylight, on Too Beautiful about having to get up ungodly early for a phone meeting on the West Coast with folks on the East Coast who were unaware that it was so early in the morning that stars were still visible.

I used to telecommute from California for an office in Boston, and I used to get phone calls at approximately 4:15 a.m. PST, which is the time one of my supervisors arrived at work in EST. He was checking on me. Now the first couple of times, I answered the phone, because I thought that it might be an emergency. But no, oh no, the content of the call was about some writing about fractions that I did that was unacceptable.

And so the phones moved from the bedroom, from the kitchen, and from the living room to the office. So now there are three phones in approximately 100 square feet in my office. Just in case.

My supervisors in Boston weren’t the only ones with a sense of authority in their own time zone. On a regular basis, I still get work calls at really bizarre times, such as 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning to discuss chapter structure.

It seems the UU Carnival needs posts on authority, so I will mention this: Eastern Standard Time is standard only to those on the East Coast of the United States. It’s not standard for the country, nor the world, but for some reason people think it is.

One of the things I like about being self-employed is that I have far fewer meetings during the day. Like some of you, I’ve had jobs in which my entire day seemed to be taken up by meetings, including lunch hour. So I wasn’t surprised to see meetings make you stupid from Ghost Girl in which we find out that cognitive list-making powers are dulled in groups and individual brilliance isn’t valued. My gut sense is that meeting-centric workplaces can be led by lonely people who want company. When their sense of loneliness and alienation get too much, they call a meeting. And sometimes their sense of loneliness and alienation is constant, so there are constant meetings to appease it.

I’m sure that doesn’t explain the phenomenon in its entirety, but would you like to have a meeting to discuss it further? Just kidding.