Just Kidding.

But I’m interested in

a. healthy eating
b. turning off the TV
c. carpooling
d. exercising

so why would I be so hesitant to embrace a program by Wal-Mart to encourage all four of those ideas?

a. It’s Wal-Mart
b. whose primary motivation is to make employees more productive
c. and to cut health insurance costs.

Oh, right. That’s why. I have a small problem with process, which allow Wal-Mart into the personal lives of its employees (most of whom earn under 20K a year, which doesn’t feel like enough to let an employer in) and I do have a big problem with the motivation, which seems entirely self-serving despite the initial outlay of cash to fund the initiative. Still, the end results for employee health might make it worth it. You can read At Wal-Mart Lessons of Self-Help in the NYT for more information.

I do like the idea of being reborn very much. Anne Lamott does too. Listen here.

For many years I thought I had a weird psychosomatic illness that caused intense cramps after eating. I saw doctors and had many tests done. I saw therapists and tried many stress-decreasing activities.

Nothing seemed to make me feel better, and the pain was so intense that it affected my coursework, and later, my teaching and editorial work. It wasn’t until a coworker told me about her daughter’s lactose intolerance that it occured to me that perhaps that was my problem. I stopped eating dairy products; the pain went away.

So I saw a doctor in Watertown, Massachusetts, a place with a high percentage of Greek people, and sure enough, I was lactose intolerant (LI), something that wasn’t diagnosed at places without Greeks, and frankly, people of color. I did feel like perhaps someone could have told me sooner. (I also felt that perhaps if the Dairy Industry hadn’t had such a huge lobbying force that dairy products would not be considered healthful by the Department of Agriculture, but that’s a different story.)

Lactose intolerance (LI) affects 30 to 50 million folks in the United States, many of whom don’t know that they have it. Basically, anyone who has ancestry that is not Northern European is vulnerable. And the degree to which you are LI varies. I can eat yogurt, for example, and cheddar cheese, but not other products with more lactose. If you’re severely LI, you’ll unfortunately find that lactose is in just about everything that is processed (bread, candy, salad dressings, etc) and even things that are labeled non-dairy. Like that non-dairy drink at Jamba Juice.

Learn more about lactose intolerance.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received a record number of complaints in 2006.

Of the 4901 complaints filed, the most common complaints were of unlawful demotions, firings, or not being hired in the first place.

Read more facts about pregnancy discrimination from the EEOC. Your rights as a pregnant woman are protected under an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Via Feminist Daily News

Some people are wildlife caretakers and take photographs of urban wildlife during downtime. And some people are marine biologists and try to live underwater to two weeks growing algae for food and oxygen, and using a stationary bike to generate electricity.

And I thought it was a big deal to stop reading for a week.

Want Ads—Employment Opportunities

Looking through the paper
There’s sure a lot of jobs
I don’t want.

-Robert Garrison in Going for Coffee: Poems on the Job

I saw Life and Debt last night, a documentary about how the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. have instituted a form of financial slavery in Jamaica, including establishing the Jamaica Free Zones, where clothes are made in sweatshops by U.S. manufacturers for $30/week (and the clothes bear the “Made in the USA” label). It reminded me of Gwen Hauser’s poem, Where Things Come From.

Where Things Come From

working at
the canadadry plant
cleaning out
cigarette cases
kleenex etc.
from the crates
for pop
(we even found a make-up compact)
i have dreams
of putting notes in bottles:
“Help
i’m being held
a prisoner in
a canada dry factory”

maybe if
we all
did this
people would realize
where things come from.

–Gwen Hauser in Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job (blogger doesn’t seem to want to let me align the lines as she did. Argh)

One hot day on the Westside of Los Angeles, Jim and I happened to be with a family friend, who spends the majority of her downtime shopping at the Gap and J. Crew. This particular day, she decided to broaden the sources of endorphins. In fact, she proclaimed quite loudly on the street, “I want a Jamba Juice!”

Now, we were both struck by how absurd this was because we have our own juicer and wouldn’t pay someone $7 to juice an orange. But also because her tone was so….certain that a Jamba Juice contained well-being. And it wasn’t just juice that she wanted; it was Jamba Juice.

“I want a Jamba Juice!” has now become a catch phrase in our household when we wish to express a seemingly superficial wish out loud. For example, I’m swamped with work, most of it returned to me for additional edits, the dog has tide-pool breath, the porch seems like it’s going to collapse, hey, is that a black widow on my leg?…I want a Jamba Juice!

That’s all I have for a jamba juice riff. But I do see that there is dairy in Jamba Juice’s non-dairy items. I speak as someone who is lactose intolerant. Gross.

There’s a legend that worklife tends to drain the creativity from us, but often I’ve found that’s the opposite. I’m often struck by the interesting ways in which people use their day jobs, which they enjoy, as creative launching pads for their art.

The Urban Pantheist is an animal caretaker at a wildlife sanctuary outside of Boston. In 2006, he logged a species a day of urban wildlife as photographs in the Boston area.

Right now he is taking a picture at 3 p.m. EST each day, and that provides the content for his blog.

In the Light of Reverence is a documentary that explores spaces sacred to American Indians and the conflicts that arise with shared space. For example, Devils Tower in Wyoming is sacred to the Lakota, and used all year as a place of worship, particularly during the solstice in June. However, rock climbers want to climb all year and have sued the Forest Service, which discourages climbing during June, in order to protect their “right to climb.” The rock climbers claim climbing to be a religious experience similar in significance and depth to the Lakota practices.

If only there were one conflict over land use in the west. The Colorado Plateau in the Southwest contains sacred spaces to the Hopi, only some of which are on reservation land and so have been bulldozed by private landowners. One of my favorite quotes here is the landowner who talks about how he can’t “see” the sacred space (I went out there and looked. Where is it? Is it here? Is it over there? What part of this mountain is sacred?!?). So he sells the mountain to a mine, which bulldozes it for gravel for the interstate.

And Mount Shasta has a sacred spring for the Wintu, but it seems to attract everyone from hikers and their dogs to ski resort prospecting to Wannabes, who don’t seem to understand that smoking pot and running around naked might be offensive to the Wintu in their sacred space. I suppose it would be okay to do that in the Four Square Church down the street….

The Giant Buddhas is a documentary that explores the destruction of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001. You’ll remember the public outrage with this demolition of the Buddhas (shown pre-demolition to the left).

The Giant Buddhas explores the same territory as In the Light of Reverence: a dominant culture systematically destroys religious spaces of less visible cultures. It’s a form of subjugation, and, I think, not only exploitation of resources, and humiliation of people. What a pity.

Image of Devils Tower via Colin Faulkingham and image of Buddhas of Bamyan via Wikipedia

When I go out to lunch with my parents, they bring their own reading material. If I point out to them that I’m not that boring to actually talk to, they may leave their books at home. Or not. I can shame my mother, but not my father. And I won’t mention how many books their house has, but when I tried to talk to them about safety and earthquakes, my mother said that being crushed by books wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

So I come from a serious reading family, though my brother claims to have survived Harvard without reading one book. (Clearly reading can be a recessive trait.) I have my parents habits for reading, which I had always regarded as a good thing. But Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way describes how when you overread, each work is a tranquilizer that lulls you into not doing your own work. So last week I didn’t read at all, with the exception of two blogs, which I sort of instinctively clicked to, and the room service menu for the Hilton in Sacremento, which I read as though it was some sort of holy prayer. Here’s a list of other things I did while Not Reading:

Baked a timbale.
Cooked a lot.
Sat on the porch and listened to the birds.
Watered the garden.
Wrote some poems.
Trimmed the cacti.
Talked to my husband. Listened.
Went to the art museum.
Went to a concert.
Hung out with a friend.

Listened to approximately 300 Powerpoint slides.
Talked to other small publishers about challenges, vacations, and drinking.
Ran into my old bosses.
Contemplated a gin and tonic. Contemplated wine. Contemplated whiskey.
Showered a lot.
Yoga.
Wrote.
Watched the Weather Channel on hotel TV.