Surviving the Workday

Ethical Consuming: Neat things from Etsy that support independent artists.

Fun: Dip Your Chip Only Once this Superbowl Sunday. And, come Monday, engage in a little freak out.

News: Legislators consider the people in Watts (but only if they are considering buying an SUV), and, speaking of taking advantage of the poor for political gain, apparently the Iraq war is now staffed by Latin America. Lovely. We were ticked off by some of the extraordinarily stupid rhetoric of second wave feminism. And helicopter parents help out their college kids. And the kids like it. Speaking of kids, talk to your kids about the workplace, including workplace safety and their rights. And, finally, companies in Japan consider divorce a reason for time-off. Makes sense to me.

Notes: The Worst Things to Say at Work (some of which seem perfectly reasonable to us). And negotiating with drunks when you’re a vintner. And we attempted to categorize Generation X and their experiences in the workplace.

Spirituality: The Mid-Life Crisis. It’s real.

I began a post on how to create rules for a small workshop or retreat based on a comment that Shelby made, but my post has stalled for a week or so. 

It seems to me that if you decide that you want to meet in a small workshop or retreat, you might want to spend the first hour discussing and deciding upon rules. The primary challenges that I’ve found are that rules can easily be too general, too numerous, or too complicated to keep track of. They can also be a laundry list of things not to do. None of these seems helpful. And, of course, you don’t want to spend hours and hours developing rules rather than actually workshopping.  

So I’d like to open it up in comments to ways that you’ve found to develop rules for group work in workshops or retreats or even larger conferences. What has worked? What has not? Have you ever shown up with a draft of rules to work from rather than starting from scratch?

Resources

Establishing Ground Rules for Groups

A while ago, ChaliceChick wrote about the mid-life crises, wondering if they really existed, if they happened to women as well as men. Her thinking was prompted by an article about narcissism justified by mid-life crises.

But (drum roll, please) it’s real! It’s real! Yes, Middle Aged Misery Spans the Globe. It’s apparently a real phenomenon. Data from two million people from 80 countries demonstrated that there is a dramatic dip in happiness and life satisfaction around mid-life. The low point for women is age 40 and for men is age 50.

“Some people suffer more than others, but in our data the average effect is large,’’ said Dr. Oswald [one of the researchers]. “It happens to men and women, to single and married people, to rich and poor, and to those with and without children. Nobody knows why we see this consistency.”

Despair in midlife comes on slowly, but the good news is that it doesn’t last.

“It looks from the data like something happens deep inside humans,’’ Dr. Oswald said. “Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit, then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old. Perhaps realizing that such feelings are completely normal in midlife might even help individuals survive this phase better.”

So while a dip in happiness and satisfaction isn’t synonymous with a mid-life crisis, this is evidence that there definitely something seemingly unpleasant going on in middle age across cultures that isn’t necessarily related to sex, class, marital status, or child status. So that feeling? It’s not just in your head. It’s in the head of millions of other people too. What a relief. And keep exercising until you hit the other side.

I’ve divided the Spirituality at Work Roundups into categories by theme. This is a round up on daily struggles and survival at work.

Losing Weight at Work Bringing Home the Bacon, Keeping Off the Weight tells the weight loss struggles of three individuals in the workplaces with a lot of food and sedentary tasks.

Communal Living What chores would Jesus do? documents the difficulty of attempting to be Jesus-like in a communal home with adults, children, and dirty dishes.

Freelance Musicians Freeway Philharmonic is a documentary that follows the lives of seven Bay Area freelance classical musicians. You can see the trailer here, and sympathize with the musicians. That looks like a hard day.

Flex Time for Lawyers Ever so slowly, law firms are allowing for more flexible use of hours, including reducing the number that must be billed for, and using alternative plans for time.

English-Only at Work  Apparently there are some businesses that don’t allow people to speak Spanish. I’m guessing these businesses are not in Southern California. Yep, it’s the Salvation Army in Framingham, Massachusetts, which fired two clothing sorters for speaking Spanish. I can’t come up with any comment other than Dumbass Salvation Army—that’s illegal unless it’s for safety reasons and it seems to go against your own Christian doctrine.

This is just about the oddest diet I have ever heard of (and I will put something in parentheses here in order to avoid that dangling participle.) It is by grace you have been saved, so ask Jesus if you’re allowed to eat before saying grace:

Gwen Shamblin, a former dietician turned weight-loss guru, founded the Weigh Down Workshop on a simple premise in 1986: Let God tell you when you’re hungry and when to stop eating.

But as it turns out, letting God tell you when to eat isn’t exactly the safest idea in the world:

A woman in California said she developed bulimia after participating in the Weigh Down Workshop and said she knew lots of others who had developed severe eating disorders as well, fearing that if they gained weight it could somehow affect their ability to go to heaven.

My idea of heaven being a giant bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips, a pile of bacon, and some brie, I don’t think I want to go to this heaven they keep mentioning.

I love the idea of a bicycling paradise where cars aren’t allowed and bicyclists are safe. I don’t live in that world. And knowing someone who was killed on a bicycle by a drunk motorist makes me hesitant to suggest this vision to anyone as ideal. But this is a stunning example of ignorance and hatred. Melissa Arrington killed a bicyclist while she was drunk in her car. And then she laughed about it with a friend expressing homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-bicyclist, anti-environment sentiments.

During the conversation, the man told Arrington that an acquaintance believed she should get a medal and a parade because she had “taken out” a “tree hugger, a bicyclist, a Frenchman and a gay guy all in one shot.”

Arrington laughed. When the man said he knew it was a terrible thing to say, she responded, “No, it’s not.”

Pretty sure there’s a circle in hell with her name on it. At least the judge seemed to agree.

Via Treehugger

Just in case you want to nominate me for any particular posts for cultural commentary anecdotes at the UU Blog awards, I’ve skimmed through the last year’s writing and picked out some favorites:

In Cultivating Religious Skin, I recount an experience with zealotry at a spa while naked for a facial (Why? Explain the nakedness.) Enter the Extractor. Aee!

In This is Not About Starr King, I tell the story of how I said, “That sucks!” in reference to a financial aid package at a seminary while considering UU ministry and was told I was being homophobic. I did not point out that anyone can suck, but probably should have. Instead, a decade or so later, I consulted the OED and made my point (Yes, much like George Costanza with the shrimp joke, I cannot let it go.)

Free Samples in which I stop doing work for free. Except, of course, on this blog. And volunteer work. And other stuff. But I stop doing paid work for free! It was an important step.

Southwest Doesn’t Like Breasts and Policing Women’s Attire were written during that weird period of time in the summer of 2007 when Southwest flight attendants kicked women off of planes for being scantily clad. Clearly they had never been to Abercrombie & Fitch.

The Sexualized Workplace describes the nature of a specific type of harassment that seems popular at the liberal darling, American Apparel. I hate them. I’m a hater.

And then there were the Job Titles series of posts on titles, tasks, and authority: Editor, Artist, Teacher, Doctors, Lawyers, and Minsters, oh my! I thought those were pretty good. Thorough, at least.

And the No China Diet: General Thoughts, Motivation, Overcoming Objections, Where Does Your Food Come From?, What Trader Joe’s Says, Food, Reading Labels on Food. That’s probably enough for anyone of my China tirade.

You can nominate them on the UU Awards. You don’t need to be a UU as far as I know. Ms. Kitty said so. And you don’t have to nominate me. I said so.

Sunday I flew back from our poetry workshop and was reading O Magazine (at this point in the narrative, a small devilish voice is heard in my head that says, “Oh really? And what other bourgeosie things were you doing? Pilates? Eating organic dark chocolate? Planning a trip to William Sonoma? It’s not a very nice voice). And I came across Oprah’s interview with Pema Chodron. Chodron is famous for speaking about tonglen breathing, which is just about the only technique I’ve ever used that seems to manage pain of all sorts. The problem is that it’s so painful to use that I often simply forget about it. Like in the dentist’s chair. Or after a miscarriage (or during, for that matter). Or when dealing with capricious clients. 

Here’s an excerpt that struck me as particularly helpful:  

 Pema: Of what it feels like, which is always—feels really bad, and it’s usually in the throat or the heart or the solar plexus. And it feels like a tightening. If you can stay with that feeling and breathe very deeply in and very deeply out, and say to yourself, millions of people all over the world share this kind of fear, discomfort what—I don’t even have to call it anything—they share this not wanting things to be this way. And it’s my link with humanity. And why—and it gives birth to a chain reaction which causes people to strike out and hurt other people or self-destruct. In other words, not staying with the feeling cuts you off from your compassion for others, your empathy for others, and also from the largeness of your own heart and mind.

I’ve had that tightness in my chest on and off for a few months. It’s worse with some of the stress of recent work, but it’s more or less always there. I had understood it as anxiety and pain in the unpredictable and unwanted circumstances. But I drew a great deal of affirmation from Chodron’s words in that I can be with the pain, in the sense of be here now, and don’t need to chase it away and move on to a happy place with bunnies, babies, and tulips.

Read the whole interview.

Here is the best photo ever of a Santa networking group, the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas. Heard of them? The membership requirements are simply working as Santa and having a real beard.

The group meets yearly for lunch to reminisce about the Christmas season as well as plan their moves for the next year. Members approach being Santa from a variety of angles, including, my favorite angle for work, ministry:

Patrick Cunningham, 53, a United Methodist minister from Tucson, said he played Santa at churches to help spread the spirit of God.

“I actually see being Santa as a ministry,” he said. “It’s a way of touching people with love.”

I’m always interested in this question, because it’s my general experience that just about all people think they are middle class in the United States. Poor people. Rich people. And middle class people. In fact, in college, I noticed how apparently other students thought they were middle class even though their parents were frequently executives with second homes. “But it’s not a big second home! It’s just a cottage!”

So just to get one thing out of the way: middle class income is somewhere between 25 and 100K depending who you ask. I think mathematically speaking, it’s closer to a range of 45-95K but that depends how you define “middle” (You probably recall the median v. average issue from middle grades math. It’s related to that). So we have one large rangish and then we have people often indicating that they’re considered middle class with incomes up to 200K, which has no mathematical relationship to middleclassness, but everything to do with how they perceive their reality.

Why are we so confused about what it means to be middle class? Partially because 50K buys a lot less or more in certain parts of the country than others, especially in terms of housing. Partially because whether or not you perceive yourself as middle class depends less on what you earn than on what your neighbors earn. Here’s an experiment from Why People Believe Weird Things About Money:

Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.

Most people choose the first option. Seriously. It seems very important that we earn more than others and/or perceive that we are slightly (or greatly) better off. You could say that your neighbor’s paycheck is as important as your own in terms of how you perceive your class status. That’s how we get families with incomes of 200K describing themselves as middle class. For their neighborhoods, they may be in the middle.

Resources

Middle Class Barely Treads Water

Do you suffer from middle class envy?

Who or what is middle class?

A review of Mark Ames’s book Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion suggests that there are so many school and workplace shootings because of the nature of corporate culture:

“Rather than looking outside of the office world for an explanation,” Ames writes of workplace shootings, “why not consider the changes within America’s corporate culture itself?” Because it results in the death of innocents, a massacre by a heretofore unknown entity obscures what causes it. Difficulty identifying exactly who was targeted masks the motive. But Ames chronicles case after case of a worker who’s singled out for scut work and judged by separate standards. Wilting under the pressure, he invites further abuse, before ultimately erupting in a random shooting.Except, Ames maintains, there’s nothing random about it. Besides hunting down a hated supervisor or executive, the killer also mows down co-workers. Why? Because he seeks to destroy the company as an entity. This is the stuff of which uprisings are made.In fact, Ames devotes part two of Going Postal to building the case that today’s workplace shootings are akin to slave rebellions. At the time, outbreaks like Nat Turner’s were viewed as inchoate and devoid of political context by a public blissfully unaware that the victims of slavery might have a problem with the institution.

Wow.

We’ve talked about gift giving the workplace quite a bit with making a culturally-specific gift, giving Christmas gifts to people at work who are Jewish, and giving gifts to the boss. All of these posts raised some substantial issues of what it means to give a gift.

A friendly reader sent an account of a workplace “gift” she was given this year from the company. It was a small symbol of the company, a collectible, which other employees are now selling on ebay because few people seem to want the gift.

Workplace gifts often have a symbolic role to play. They are not things that you want; they are items that your employer thinks are important.

Workplace gifts can also be more personal. I had a boss give me a silver bracelet when she returned from Mexico (she gave another female co-worker a bracelet, and a male co-worker a knife….we wanted the knife and to know how she got through security). Choosing a personal gift is much more difficult because you have to either know the worker better or be comfortable with general stereotypes for giving (women like jewelry; men like weapons).

It has always seemed to me that the best gifts were those that clearly communicated that you, the giver, had listened and paid attention to habits and likes of the receiver and were trying to give them a little bit of pleasure: chocolate, a gift card for coffee, a nice notebook (clearly these are my own objects of pleasure, your own may vary). But I’m inclined to think that that sort of gift doesn’t work in many workplaces where symbols are what matters.

Thoughts? Favorite gifts at work? Most loathesome?

People are spending millions on things that don’t really exist. Can it really be consumerism if nothing is consumed?: Reality-check or rip-off?

It also raises issues that came up in a  Ms. Theologian question about the nature of giving. I assume that most gifts benefit both the giver and receiver even if they are virtual gifts.

Soul Bytes are provocative sayings with follow-up questions that can be displayed in your office on an index card or, if you’re like me, read on-line. They are made by Spirituality at Work and are a nice way to pause and reflect.

Here is the most recent one:

Learning is holy, an indispensable form of purification as well as ennoblement. Rabbi Abraham Heschel

• What have you learned lately?
• What new experiences could you plan for your life this year?
• Do you encourage those around you to continue to learn and grow?

  Starting here, what do you want to remember?
  How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
  What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
  sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
  than the breathing respect that you carry
  wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
  for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
  new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
  all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
  reading or hearing this, keep it for life ~

What can anyone give you greater than now,
  starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

- William Stafford

Via Heart Happy

It’s not Friday, but there is a seasonal affective disorder quiz here. I can’t get it to work at the moment, possibly because the NYT linked to it.

More importantly, New research on seasonal affective disorder suggests that the timing of light exposure may be key (early morning is best). I’m going out to get my dose of sun (or sun through clouds as it seems today).

I huddled under the covers this morning waiting for the sun to rise (or for the house to warm) and determined two things while huddled: 1. This is the darkest week of the year. 2. Part of the trouble getting up in the morning is that once I get up, everything gets a little bit worse for a moment: the floor is cold, washing my face, brushing my teeth, and changing clothes makes me cold, and later, hiking the dog when it’s 30 degrees makes me cold. None of this is particularly nurturing or soothing even though it’s necessary, and in the case of the hike, healthy.  

Here’s a few self-soothing tips for work adapted from the resources below:

• Organize one small section of your workspace so it pleases you.
• Buy a flower or display a plant that makes you happy.
• Use a favorite lotion that has a good smell.
• Carry herbs in your pocket that have a nice smell (lavender, sage, mint).
• Make a cup of really good tea.

Any other ideas for self-soothing?

Resources

Self-soothing tips

Self-nurturing tips

Nova Scotia businesses get spiritual involves at least four of the problematic issues when discussing spirituality in the workplace:

1. It is wildly unclear what “spiritual” and “spirituality” mean in the article to the point where my editorial self would like to mark up the article by circling every instance and scrawl, “meaning?” in the margin. “Spirituality” seems linked at times to personal development (and perhaps synonymous with it), but this isn’t necessarily what other folks mean when they discuss “spirituality.” One member of the “old guard” refers to spirituality as “hocus-pocus” at the end of the article, and by that point, I’m inclined to agree.

2. Spirituality in the workplace is seen as important only as it improves productivity, and hopefully, you know how bizarre I think productivity discussions are given that it is extremely hard to measure individual productivity. Not impossible, but extremely difficult, and often not done on an individual level.

3. Unattributed statistics are featured, “While it is no secret that healthy workers are happy workers, recent statistics suggest that the incorporation of spiritual practices in the workplace can grow bottom-line results by up to 40%.”  Really? Source?

4. “Spiritual” practices of CEOs are featured as if they trickle down to impact the daily lives of the rest of the workers in the company. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any evidence for trickle down spirituality though CEOs love to talk about it as if it does. That doesn’t mean that CEOs pursuing “spirituality” isn’t important. It just means that I’m not convinced that it impacts workers (positively or not).

It’s not that this article is any worse than most articles on spirituality. It’s just that it embodies all the problem children of spirituality in the workplace in one short piece. And thus ends my morning snark.

Ethical Consuming: We were a bit too occupied with our feet today: searching for shoes and later looking at vegan shoes. And before that we were preoccupied with toys involving dogs.

Fun: Some of our fun involved a dog too: Surviving a Coyote. But our weekly fun involved books, and they are not dogs in any sense: A Book Quiz.

News: The Writers Strike is not halfway as depressing as the Graveyard Shift Linked to Cancer. That depressed everyone.

Notes: “Unproductive” Writing Time  (the very notion of which annoys us), The Economics of Touch (paid touch also seems to annoy us, particularly around the bikini line), and, for the record, how the rich indulge also annoyed us. It seems most of the week after Thanksgiving was spent annoyed.

Religion: Christmas Posts of Yore was not particularly commented on though an enormous number of people looked at homemade Christmas Trees. Meanwhile, Churches taking a pro-gay marriage stance by not marrying the straights led to some lively comments.

Spirituality: Apparently some people suffer from leisure guilt (which means they feel forced to be productive at all times).  These are not the people buying second homes in Livingston, Montana. That’s a different crowd entirely.

How many hours of leisure time do you have each week?

Seriously. Count them. Count the weekend, count down-time at night, but do not count sleep time.

I came up with 12. Not so good. I’d be average if I had 20.

A recent poll suggests that we have fewer hours of leisure time (20 hours) than we did in the 1970s (27) hours. And why is this? Is it the 24/7 hour expectations at work? Our own obsessiveness?

Raymond Folen, an Argosy University psychologist suggests that, “Some people may avoid — or at the very least intensely dislike — vacation, because taking the time off makes them feel bad or worthless,” Mr. Folen said. “Often, these individuals were raised by parents who instilled in them the notion that a good child is a productive child.”

I find that fascinating. I don’t think that’s my problem, but I’m willing to entertain the notion.

On a side note, dining out is a favorite leisure activity as is entertaining at home, reading, and barbecuing.