The Other Blog

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

--Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There 

1872 

I am a terrible correspondant.  I don't journal (having two grandparents, a mom, 4 aunties, 3 uncles, 4 cousins, an older brother & sister that have converging living arrangements kinda ruins it for you early on).  I infrequently facebook (it's a verb now).  And I am a luddite when it comes to the rest of social media and its etiquette (or lack thereof).

But, I do eat.  Every day as a matter of fact, three times at least, sometimes, 6 times a day.  And because I am frugal, and want to be self sufficient and healthy, I cook.  And occasionally, I write about it.  Every once in a while, I'll remember to take myself out of the moment of consumption and I take a picture.  Usually there are already several bites missing, but who cares?

So without further ado, I introduce my other blog.  Real Food, Real Phở.  I--I'm sorry you had to find out about it this way.  It's not you.  It's me.  Can we still be friends?  Maybe meet for drinks and rediscover our connection.  Do you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain?

This explains it better than I could... http://www.workingmomsbreak.com/2012/01/31/advice-you-will-never-hear-from-a-career-counselor/

resume

I've lead an eclectic, esoteric, mercurial journey through life and as I reach my reflective midlife, sometimes I wish my life-resume showed a little more... direction. Meandering is just another way of not planning.

And then sometimes, I look over everything I've experienced in my late-blooming adulthood--speed reading teacher, mariachi band, poetess, martial artist, self-defense instructor, youth organizer, crafter/artisan, ballroom dancer, teacher sometime write of poetry and prosery, procrastinator, anthropologist (all the former while being in a doctoral program and being a terrible student, obviously), CBO researcher/info activist, trainer, facilitator, interviewer, popular educator, screenwriter & production designer, midwifery student, doula, gala planner, blogger, itinerant CSA heritage pork dealer, homesteader, priestess, bellydancer, mother ( I actually became a goddess but folks have issue with honoring the sacred feminine...), working mother, finance director, communicator, campaign researcher, union elected, negotiator--and I have enjoyed the journey, friends gained and the myriad life lessons earned, even those steeped in sorrow and inscribed in ink.

While I'll always wish I made more of the opportunities (should have traveled more, should have found a new Wing Chun dojo), I'll never wish that I made less.

Is it just the third decade that thinned out my creativity or is it birthing myself as mother? Working mother is another way of being absent for the hours that matter most to my daughter.

As I prepare to embark on a sabbatical, I anticipate the prospect of being without boundaries and a safe job to define myself and my time.  I am trepidatious.  I want to make the best of this breathing period. I want to find my calling, pursue my dreams and passion. I want to be a mother whose absences do not define the week.

Home

The decision to walkaway from our house & O-town feels an awful lot like the decision to quit grad school. Agonizing, emotionally fraught, tangled feelings about our substantial time/financial investment and an unhealthy, unsustainable situation. Scariest choices I've made and the most freeing. In six months, I will pay off my grad student loans; 8 years to finally shrug that off.

Despite the tens of thousands of dollars that we've put into our property, we'll be relieving ourselves of a debt that would have hung over us until we retired. It feels like for the last few years, we've been treading water while it just kept rising. And now we've stopped treading and realized we could just stand up and stop drowning.

We'll be renters again and that requires an emotional/mental adjustment, but to be free of the cumbersome "joys" of home ownership is liberating. In two years, we could buy again, if we wanted.

It helps of course that my neighbor, former trusted boss, elder is buying our property fulfilling her family's dream of building a community retreat center founded on principles of compassion, justice and aspiration. It was not all for naught. We are contributing to a higher and better purpose...

We move out this weekend, to the burbs (though more diverse than burbs outside the Bay), to the edge of wildland, sienna hills. The opposite end from our urban existence. I look forward to being in a quiet place where my ears don't prick up with every loud bang, trying to decipher whether those were gunshots, and which street they must be coming from, was it a semi-automatic? Was anyone hurt?

A place where we can take long walks in the glimmering dusk, where my peripheral vision can ease up a little, where i have to fend off wildlife trying to survive not life gone wild trying to survive. Where my child can can play without being within arms reach. Where i can bike again, maybe even bike with my kid and not have my heart in my throat. A place wheere i can hear the wind, where the constant shushing roar in the ambience isn't the hum of traffic, but the rhythm of nature. I am perhaps idealizing and romanticizing. The burbs have no culture that cannot be conveniently sited in a mini mall with a Starbucks and Panera on the corners. An actress I like said, the suburbs are where bad things happen. She perhaps was overdramatizing, but I know as sleepy as O-town was, where we are headed is even more domestic and somnabulent.

I shall probably be the only mom in the PTA with tatts *and* a Masters degree. I shall try not to be a snob or an outcast. I've been plagued by a secret dread that something will happen before we leave. Something tragic. I know it is only anxiety and superstition. And i know that one of the neighborhood drug dealers was caught violating parole and is back in the clink, but still, i am tense. Reading the news everyday with its pornography of trauma doesn't help.

I've been looking forward to the fresh start, release of burden so much that I've almost forgotten about the important things I'm leaving behind as well, many of my friends. These last 5 years we've been so wrapped in our Household concerns that we've sometimes forgotten to appreciate our community. I've made efforts in these last few weeks to make time for my friends though the housing search and then move prep made it hard. And i promise to myself to make time to see them still. At least once a week, twice a month, i will try to stay later in oakland and hang out with a friend.

Where in the world is

Facebook has no soul, only soundbites. It is one's stream of consciousness distilled into a pithy fleeting haiku constrained by the disappointing affect of propriety to one's audience. Facebook is observation.

I long for engagement and connection. I long for soul.

I dreamed a dream

I dreamed a dream in times gone by
When hope was high and life worth living..

Dreams lie below one's subconscious, guiding our desires, crafting our motivation. Did I know it? When did someone else's dream become mine own? When did I, the critic, the cynic, the optimist, become a believer? This American Dream. With its promise of home ownership as civic duty and self. When did a home have to be a house?

Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung no wine untasted

Yes, the euphoria that preceded the fall, the mythic illusion sold to us. Starter homes were for trading up. Soothed by the emotional hook, the lie, the "natural" cost of living in the Golden State. Naive.

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame

We gambled. Double down on black in a game where we knew only what we knew. "The only rule you may be told is this one." We didn't know the rules. Nor the flawed rules behind the rules. Nor the avarice behind the rulers of the rules.

Securitized and resecuritized to secure profit.

And so we pay the price. Our dream teetered on the unsustainable fact that house prices should be sky high, in the red, not by red line, but by greed line, to line the pockets of the usurious. To hope for breaking even means hoping that housing becomes unaffordable again. Who would hope for such a heartless thing?

I had a dream my life would be
So diff'rent from this hell I'm living
So diff'rent now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed

--lyrics by Andrew Lloyd Weber

In losing our security, we found... freedom.

Checkmate, Mama

After watching the movie Black Swan, I don't do the "If you don't do XYZ, I will throw it away" consequences anymore. And also because 2 weeks ago, my daughter called me out on the bluff. She didn't want to clean up her kitchen toys and so I gave the usual consequence that I would throw them away. And she said OKAY! and then helped me to put them in the recycle bin that I pulled out in my attempt to escalate. Finally I tried saying I would give the toys to her baby cousin K8 (archnemisis) and she said OKAY.

Checkmate, momma.

Fortunately the next day, I asked her to make me something to eat and when she had no toys to do so, I reminded her that we were giving it all to K8 and of course she flipped out. So after age 3, don't say "I will throw it away" unless you mean it mean it.

war on germs

I think the reason that the debate on vaccines is so heated on this is because it's an intensely personal parenting decision that is also intensely political. My take on all this is philosophical. The dominant metaphor and paradigm for larger Western society is warfare. The medical industrial complex is steeped in that framework, treating disease and bacteria as enemy combatants, and valuing profit over evidence-based protocols. So that's the context in which the billion dollar vaccination industry was developed.

When we look at the mortality rate associated with any given disease, let's say polio, we'll see that the mortality rate was dropping with the advent of industrialization and better sanitation--prior to the introduction of a polio vaccine. The early polio vaccines were "live" and many people who were vaccinated contracted polio from the vaccine itself before they recalled it. Most pro-vaccine lit only looks at the period immediately after vaccines were introduced as "proof" that they work. Without that larger historical context, yes, it's easy to attribute the salvation of the human race to vaccines.

Even with the recent pertussis outbreak, if you look at the population dying, it's typically very poor children, and in Cali, undocumented Latino immigrant children, who are more likely to have poor nutrition and poor health. Yet rather than address the underlying factors of poverty and anti-immigrant health policies, the DPH is telling the general population to vaccinate.

Let's look at Gardasil as another example--this vaccine for females which supposedly prevents genital warts, an STD, which can lead to cervical cancer. This was fasttracked onto the market and is the controversial subject of mandatory vaccination laws. It's been around a few years now and the deaths or sterilization or other vaccine injury of young girls is only beginning to make the FDA take a second look. What is manifestly clear to me, is that vaccines are a massive human guinea pig experiment funded and fueled by the pharmaceutical industry.

Anyways, I recommend Aviva Jill Romm's Vaccinations book over Dr. Sears. She is a midwife, herbalist and now MD. She actually explains the fine print of what are the benefits, risks & adverse reactions to vaccinations (i.e. what your doctor is supposed to tell you) AND how the disease manifests and it's risks so that one can make a truly informed decision. It's the only book I found to discuss the disease itself.

Final tangent (sorry there's no returns in here): It's only very recently that it's become profitable to understand the immune system and commodify non-invasive healing modalities (i.e. indigenous or traditional healing systems). Hence the sudden commercialization of probiotics as the "friendly" bacteria after decades of vilifying bacteria and creating the self-perpetuated problem of "super-bacteria" which are immune to antibiotics. From a holistic standpoint, the human body exists because of bacteria; we live in symbiosis with bacteria and it's not until our body is out of balance that the bacteria become harmful. In that context, we need to re-evaluate the supremacy of Western medicine and its paradigm over all other traditional modalities.

And as parents, we have to weigh and balance all those personal, political, social, financial factors and make the best decisions for our families. (As a side note, in true service of humanity, India patented their traditional system of healing under Creative Commons license to prevent the continued theft of "intellectual property/patent" by pharmeceutical corporations.)

neow

yesterday I did something I haven't done voluntarily in over a decade. While VL napped, I went to the drugstore, got supplies, locked myself in the bathroom, and enacted the profession of my people--I painted my nails. And for the first time in my life, I like it. It's not the color per se (I wanted a dove gray but settled for gunmetal. and the violet on my toes is almost black, not plum) nor the nail polish (the smell still nauseates me) nor is it perfect having instantly ruined them trying to button up a jumper & onesie on a wiggly toddler. I still prefer my nails short and plain. And yet, I like them.

It is the ritual I spose, the ritual of carving out a space for myself that is completely selfish and indulges my vanity all for $7. And every time I see my busy hands doing busy things, my 'tips gladly remind me that I'm still me.

It is not quite a room of one's own, but it is enough. for now.

inward facing dog

weo, i did it, am doing it. i am examining myself and why i've been on such a short fuse--banging cupboard doors and drawers with disproportionate growling irateness (ok, so it still sounds relatively tame but the physical toll, the cellular attrition of such "restraint" is smothering the vitality out of me).

it could be the stress of having 4 jobs at two workplaces and fulltime workload expectations. it could be mine own hot temperment, unresolved grief, and emotional childhood wounds in desperate need of healing. it could be the chafing demands of balancing infinite-love-motherhood with 30+ years of self-centered Self ("i just need mother-fracking 15 minutes" when minutes become hours and whole days pass by). it could be the strain of a relationship deferred to all of the above. and it is all of the above. no duh, but causality is only slightly less ... interesting than the effects, the symptoms of a deteriorating inner life and a dusty social life.

so, i've enacted a 21st millenial cliche. i started doing yoga. downward facing dog has transformed my Life; i refer to my instructor as my guru; i wear OM jewelry, tribal yoga tatts and organic fair trade tibetan hemp parachute pants; my house now has a fountain & shrine dedicated to an eclectic pantheon of hindu and buddhist goddesses; and most importantly, i greet all people with prayer hands and a hushed "namaste" to socially mark my profound spiritual conversion.

ok, mostly a lie. i'm not a smug, middle class white born -again-yogini searching for the meaning of life in the consumption of other people's culture. i have a small soul and a petty mind and i couldn't resist mocking the Smuggles.

i do do yoga though, restorative yoga. it helps me to stretch out muscles rigid with a lifetime of tension, the gimpy arthritic limbs, and the habititude of pain. i am not transformed but then i don't expect instant gratification. it is enough that for one hour, once a week, i can breathe and quiet the riot of a bazillion synapses.

and, i sat down T and admitted the festering emotions--the rage, resentment, almost hatred, and then scariest of all, the nothing, that i sometimes felt. towards him. my bestest friend. the toll that homeownership, marriage, mourning, and now, parenting have taken on my half of the relationship over the last ten plus years.

(to be continued..)

nanny diary

doing some blog housekeeping. this is an OLD POST FROM JULY that i never finished since i went back to work right after.

now that we have officially joined the ranks of the middle class by being upwardly mobile, swapping refugee blue collars for white collars, and buying a house with an mortgage which is about 50% of our income and operating on consumer debt, we are further entrenching ourselves in middle class culture by looking for a nanny since we can't afford for me to forgo a salary to stay home with the baby. not that i'm sure that's what i would want to do anyways. (side rant: people are wierd about claiming class especially amongst the socially conscious spectrum of born-into-the-middle-class who tend to idealize/glamourize poverty. call a spade a spade. me & grew up on welfare & food stamps and we don't aspire to go back to poverty. i'm just L from the block, i used to have a little and now i have a little more. i have two college degrees, a socially responsible invested retirement fund, and life insurance; i have some privilege. it's not entitlement nor is it bootstraps nor is it a silver spoon. it is however cultural and social capital that i choose to be honest & forthright about. so if you have someone who is not blood-related that takes care of your child for 20+ hours a week every week, she is not a "babysitter" nor a "caretaker" nor a "childcare provider", she is your nanny. you are an employer. you might not be The Man, but you are a Boss. deal with it.)

with our idealism and our roots and our small budget, we decided to hire a vinamese nanny. we placed an ad in the local weekly at the beginning of june to run for 4 weeks. our ideal was to have the nanny start the first week of july on trial since i was going back the second week of july at parttime. we had decided that having the nanny at our house was best since we have cloth diapers and all the gear here already.

we've interviewed around a dozen give or take. i have concluded that vinamese people are insane. okay, not insane, just not... acculturated to professional jobseeking protocol. the number one assumption being "One looks for a job if one is able to work."

the first nanny we hired co Huyen had 20 years of experience and had just retired after caring for a set of american twin girls for a pair of Berkeley doctors for 8 years. after a year of missing them and being bored, she decided to work for a vinamese family for a much lower payscale. after i expressed my desire to hire her, she regretfully informed us that her other employer (of the twins) whose 3rd baby she watched 1-2 days a week wouldn't let her quit and offered her an additional day instead. being emotionally tied to the twin girls, she couldn't quit.

so we went with our second choice, co Thu. she had 8 years experience and had a minor hand disability but we worked out an arrangement of how to compensate for that since VL almost exclusively uses the potty to poo. after coming over to her house a few blocks away from us, she regretfully informed us that her younger brother didn't want her to work because she was disabled and he provided for her so that she wouldnt have to work.

out of frustration i hired nanny #3 di 3 (her birth order name) or di Helen. she was in her 60s, a source of some concern for us since our girl is thick, but this is the friday before our trial week. she started on the 1st. being older and from an older model of childcare, she was responsive to the baby's cries, but wasn't interested in playing with her so much, much less let her stick her toys in her mouth and she refused to go on walks with the baby; it was either too cold or too sunny. granted van lang wasn't taking the expressed breastmilk in the bottle and so therefore wasn't napping very long due to hunger, and i have been known to get bored playing with baby, but by day 2, when she thought i wasn't looking, di ba would read the newspaper while VL lay somewhat disgruntled on the couch next to her. and when i pointed out that VL was making irritable and frustrated sounds, the nany told me she was training her to not need to be held (or presumably played with). trung and i deliberated over whether to let her go. and decided to give her one more day. on day 3, di 3 shows up and announces that she is moving to antioch the next day (july 4th) and is quitting. whatever.

so we have placed another ad in the vinamese paper. we've gotten some calls and i was most interested in a call from what turns out to be my next door neighbor co Thanh a women in her early-40s. she used to own a HK-style dim sum restaurant and it went under so now she stays home watching her grandson. she thought she'd try earning some extra income. she came over and was very sweet with the baby and wanted to work from her house since she still is watching her grandson. i made an appointment to come over and see her house. weo, as it turns out, her son, the baby's thuggish father who is playing world of warcraft in the middle of the workday, doesn't want her to do childcare for another baby because she wouldn't be able to be mobile and get out of the house if need be. so she regretfully turned down the job (which i didnt offer to her yet).

postscript: after all those false starts, we found a great nanny!

n-squared home training

so i recently sent out our family groundrules for VL to my immediate family since we have our set of values that may or may not be shared and the holidays (prime gift giving season) are approaching. our primary value is protecting our daughter from materialism/commodification and toxins. nothing controversial, no comment on religion or politics, no judgement on other families' rules.

the reactions i got were kinda funny. my ma sez "Sorry dear, your daughter will be so sad with no funs for the first 5 year in her life." which i think is hilarious because like my ma's own childhood in rural VN did not have any of the things we ban from our house and i'm sure she had funs (weo after doing her chores that is). and she herself pointed out to me that all the food she grew up on was organic because pesticides (and agent orange and napalm) hadn't been introduced yet. and for the first five years of his life and the first three years of my sis' in central VN, my siblings played with family, household objects and objects in nature with little detrimental impact on their imaginations or body burden unlike the toys & material objects of today's modern household.

my step dad who would be chief offender on all counts (especially candy, red dye and princess stuff) said nothing. he doesn't ever check his email except for once a year when he has me un-close his email account or set up a new email for him when i come visit for the holidays. to be fair, he also generously gives us lots of cash to buy clothes and savings bonds for school and helps us with travel money too.

my bro who might be potentially a giver of the battery-operated, plastic kind (like Whack-A-Mole which would be so cool if they made a wood version) didn't respond either. it's cool. as an uncle, i fully expect him to pass along his gourmand predilections to the child with full appreciation for the ways he's introduced me to good food all my life (first caviar, first truffles, first crab cakes, first clam dip, first sake bombers, first gourmet meals, first fine champagne... and the list goes on.).

my sis who gives very thoughtful and wonderfully handcrafted gifts sez "It's truly more blessed to give than receive." sure, at the same time, i guess i'm more pragmatic when it comes to gifts, why waste other people's money on things i don't want or we don't allow? we didn't register for wedding gifts, we went the traditional route (and by this i mean vinamese tradition) and got cash gifts which paid for the reception; for the baby registry i asked people to get stuff used from craigslist and asked for cloth diapering supplies mostly and most folks gave cash with which we were very grateful to purchase all the stuff we needed, some new, alot of it used. registries themselves are wishlists of things you want, which practice i find eminently practical, but it's only socially acceptable to have registries on major social rites of passage rather than events like holidays & birthdays. and sometimes, people buy you things off registry anyways which can result in something delightful that you wouldn't have bought for yourself (like a digital labeller! awesome!) and sometimes results in something that makes you go huh? (like the talking Stewie doll. you do realize one, i'm like in my 30s and don't collect dolls from animated TV shows. and two, i didn't have a TV for most of the nineties & 00s, right bro? i didn't even ever watch the family guy or the simpsons.)

i don't care for the social ballet of receiving gifts with one hand with genuine appreciation for the gift giver's intention of course, and some white lie nicety about using it, and passing it behind my back and with the other hand returning or recycling it.

my ma frequently gives me new & used clothes, shoes & avon products (she's an avon lady) and while i love her care & thoughtfulness, i always have to return them to her because it doesn't fit (i have a very different body type from my ma--i take after my paternal grandmother--and a different style sensibility because i'm in my 30s, not my 50s nor what she projects 30s ought dress like [um, ma, i don't go clubbing anymore and certainly not while i was pregnant. weo, only once and it was really just a bar and it was really no fun hanging out with smoking, emeryville quasi-hipsters at Kitty's, and anyways, i don't wear sheer blue leopard print chiffon because no one needs to see my big belly, navel & stretch marks. but then, in her 30s ma was a clubbin' disco queen and i have the photos to prove it!] and she thinks i'm bigger than i am or my feet are smaller than they are.) and i'm allergic to the cheap synthetic toxic chemicals in avon products. for some years i took the gifts and re-distributed them to friends, but nowadays, i don't have room in my luggage nor space in my house nor time to do that. so i thank you ma, and i can't use this because... happily, my ma isn't neurotic (in that way at least) and doesn't take it personal.

of course, our choices are political and spiritual in essence especially because what we want for our daughter and how we choose to go about getting there runs counter to dominant popular culture (and unfortunately what constitutes popular culture is corporate marketing). my cousins have nicknamed the baby "Moonbeam" for a reason. shrug. we love each other; we don't have to love each other's parenting choices. (and funnily enough i had considered naming the baby Moon something in vinamese Nga or Nguyet, but the english transliteration would really butcher the cadence of it. and we ended up choosing a historical name rather than a poetic one.) so this is how we do it in the n2 household:

• no princess stuff
• all natural materials like cotton, wool or wood are preferred
• no plastic toys, no battery-operated toys. toys should be educational or stimulate the imagination
• no corporate logos on the clothes (example: anything that has Disney on it, Tommy, Polo, Old Navy, etc). she's a baby not an advertising billboard
• no commercialized product tie-ins. no Disney, no Pixar, no Hello Kitty/Sanrio or TV cartoon characters like Dora or Sponge Bob. no hypersexualized toys like trampy Barbie or hooker Bratz dolls.
  
• no TV until she is 5 yo
• gently used, second-hand & hand-me-downs in good condition are great. what's important is the sentiment and utility, not the cost
• no princess stuff
• no dairy (this means no butter or milk or ice cream), no candy or artificial dyes in food (especially red)
• homemade is lovely too
• oh, and no princess stuff.

postscript: actually, it is socially acceptable to have "wishlists" so we started one for VL on alternativegiftregistry.org.

red elephant

calling out the (red) elephant in the room.

i was beginning to feel like i was the only one that remembers that white suffragettes successfully campaigned to get the vote to maintain white supremacy after black men were enfranchised.

Belle Kearney, “The South and Woman Suffrage,” Woman’s Journal, 4 April 1903

"The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy . . .The South is slow to grasp the great fact that the enfranchisement of women would settle the race question in politics. The civilization of the North is threatened by the influx of foreigners with their imported customs; by the greed of monopolistic wealth, and the unrest among the working classes; by the strength of the liquor traffic, and by encroachments upon religious belief. Some day the North will be compelled to look to the South for redemption from these evils, on account of the purity of its Anglo-Saxon blood, the simplicity of its social and economic structure, the great advance in prohibitory law, and the maintenance of the sanctity of its faith, which has been kept inviolate. Just as surely as the North will be forced to turn to the South for the nation’s salvation, just so surely will the South be compelled to look to its Anglo-Saxon women as the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African. . . ."

one hundred years later, the narrative doesn't sound much different.

co-workers say the darndest things!

i try not to blog about work because in general, i like my workplace and i like my co-workers. and being friendly means that some of them may read my blog. so i keep it to friendly.

that said, i work in a small office with 7 other people, mostly women. we share a kitchenette. like many offices and collective spaces, kitchen sharing is a fraught issue dependent on collective and individual responsibility. in an office of just eight people, it is immediately obvious when someone slacks on their dishwashing duties. and in an office of just 8, it is not that hard to narrow down the likely dirty dish culprits using deductive logic, inductive reasoning, or just plain common sense.

now, to be fair, everyone flakes every once in a while. eat then run to a meeting or to meet a deadline. however, it's the consistent flakers that have created an unfair situation for the rest of us. we're talking fly infestation here. flies don't discriminate between thems who wash dishes and thems who don't; they come callin' to everybody. flies drowned in my coffee. flies in the dead in the honey. flies around your face. flies when you're trying to have lunch. and we work above a chinese restaurant, so i leave to your imagination the potential for future, larger vermin.

now the rest of us are fairly aggravated, disgusted by the flies, and too busy to track the dish-offenders on a semi-daily basis. and though we all kind of have a sense of who the most consistent, most persistent offenders are (um, there are only 8 it's not that hard to figure out especially when the sink is always clean when certain folks are on vacation or out of the office), as polite well-socialized professionals, we like to give them the benefit of the doubt and really, who wants to be their parole officer checking in with them constantly? so we resort to general emails.

weo, the two people in question either don't check email because they are too busy to read generally directed emails much less wash their own dishes or because they don't think it applies to them since dirty dishes are clearly their blindspot. i'm not sure which, but the end result is the same. the dirty dishes accumulate and fester vermin, communicable diseases, bacteria, and the unsavory remainders of their leftovers which they also could not be bothered to scrape into the trash before dumping their dish in the sink/bucket for days on end.

so email reminders weren't working. then came the notes. which also did not work because the amount of dishes in the sink actually *increased* immediately after the notes were posted. go figure. granted this is all passive-aggressive ways of dealing, but if you don't have evidence of guilt, how can you go and question the two most likely suspects without them feeling "targeted" (standard defensive response)?

so as the general office manager-type person (along with my other two job descriptions), i pleaded via email for people to take responsibility and not to force it to a staff level discussion through their lack of action. to no avail. yup. it was an agenda item on the full staff meeting. yes, it took 15 minutes of precious time (overage time mind you b/c our staff meetings are always overly packed and have unrealistic time frames) to discuss. and yes, it was absolutely ludicrous.

now, i tried to forgo my usual tough love, frank style of approach (which obviously wasn't working) in favor of a diplomatic, facilitative, coaching approach because making people feel bad is not the best way to change their behavior--"okay everyone, there's a problem and how can we go about changing the situation for the positive? what do folks need?" i was able to maintain that for about halfway through the discussion until the sheer audacity of response brought about my natural attitude and my "i ain't yo mama. i don't want to be anybody's mama. do your dishes" tirade held in check only by my neighbor on the left who does do his own dishes rightly laughing at the irony of my mama-hood statement which reminded me i was trying to be more diplomatic. "i don't want to be mama for anyone at work" i amended.

okay, reality check though. why is it that the two people who most consistently do NOT do their own dishes (and who are btw self-proclaimed, obsessive neat freaks) had the most to say on the matter? and why is it that their "helpful" proposals on the matter involved everyone else on staff who already do their own dishes taking on responsibility for those who do NOT do their own dishes? heaven preserve me from folks who deflect their own personal responsibility/culpability to the group.

so the one leave-the-dishes-in-a-bucket staff member (because somehow leaving it in a bucket of stagnant water for several days makes it okay) who shall remain nameless suggested that everyone sign a pledge of good behavior (she called it "self-determination" and it included sundry organizational practice topics such as email subject headings and server file management in addition to cleaning up after oneself) ; the pledge could then be laminated and displayed prominently on the wall and then used as the basis for evaluation/self-evaluation. ... really?! i mean, reaaaally? let me get this straight, so you are not in the habit of washing your own dishes in a timely manner, and you want the rest of the organization who does wash their own dishes in a timely manner to sign a pledge that you will author with everyone's input of course, a pledge that everyone will do their own dishes, and this is a matter of organizational culture that will take four weeks to go through an organization-held proposal process, rather than this being your own personal responsibility from the minute you use a dish?! riiiiiiiiight. i wash my own dishes. i don't need to sign no fucking pledge to wash my own dishes. and really a "Drug-Free Zone" sign or "motivational" posters just tells me that there's some shady business up in the hood and is that really the message we want to convey to outsiders?

th'other leave-the-dishes-and-trash-on-the-table staff member who also shall remain nameless acknowledged, to her credit, that she was one of the messier ones, that signing a piece of paper wasn't going to change her behavior, and that the passive aggressive notes/emails weren't going to make her do her dishes either. she also noted that the larger organizational pattern of indirect confrontation was unhealthy dynamic. then she asked that everyone else be responsible for directly reminding her to do her dishes as i had done when her kid left his in the sink for 2 days. this is when i started to diatribe a little. "that only works when i know it's your dishes. if i don't know whose dishes it is, why does it become my responsibility to come around to each person and ask, are those your dishes? no? okay, are those *your* dishes? no? okay are those *your* dishes? yes? wash your dishes." then came the "i ain't yo mama" bit already mentioned above.

within the fifteen wasted overage minutes, a couple of other people who actually wash their own dishes had suggestions for those who do not, about how to create a proactive checking habit at the end of the day or change one's mental paradigm around washing one's own dishes as a part of lunchtime. very concrete, very individual responsibility-focused. why do i get the feeling that the ones who needed it, didn't get it? mine own suggestion was if you don't got the time to wash, leave it at your desk. it may be an OSHA violation but at least you have to deal with your mess instead of putting it on everyone else to deal with your mess. so we left it at the suggestions and a check in on progress (roll-the-eyes) at the next staff meeting.

if i wasn't so aggravated, had more presence of mind and was trying a little less to be a diplomatic facilitator against my nature, i would have pointed out the irony & contradiction that thems that do not wash their own dishes wanted everyone else to be responsible for thems washing their own damn dishes.

i bear no ill will and yet, sometimes the ridiculousness of the situation is like a bunion. you can ignore it, but it will get worse and there it is cramping your toes. really, there's an easier way. and sometimes, in blogs one can say things that aren't quite um, professional shall we say, in staff meetings. Like the rest of my mentally censored diatribe "this ain't about organizational culture. this ain't about organizational dynamics. it ain't about everybody else who already do their dishes. this is about individual responsibility. this is about you. are you a grown-ass woman? wash your own fucking dishes. period."

dear co-worker if you happen to be reading this, yeah, i'm clowning you. if the shoe fits...

bottomline: wash your own dishes.

sigh, just 17 more days til i go on maternity leave...

profundity

there are two valuable lessons i have learned over the decades upon entering the real contradictory grown-up world that requires one to wear non-wrinkled clothing and simultaneously textiles that encourage wrinkles. so i thought i would share them for your enlightenment.

1. Don't iron naked.

2. Don't iron clothes while you are wearing them.

there are other rules doubtless like "don't iron on the $1.99/sf cheap carpeting" (it melts). but these above are far more significant.

and if you do ever happen to ignore those rules, Traumeel homeopathic cream will heal without blistering.

irony is the new black

Fatworld is a new web game in which hyper-anime characters court morbid obesity. for fun.

There are some calorie-free class politics including the surfeit of subsidized, processed foods and a lack of parks/gyms in poor neighborhoods in this virtual world of convenience stores and high calorie meals. it's nutritious for your brain! or not. this takes the gamer god-complex--which omnipotent obsession the reverend doctor Andrew Greeley already explored in the novel God Game in 1986 back when BASIC was the o/s, computer screens were camo black & green and the cursor was called "Turtle," Logo anybody?*--to a whole new american level discourse writ in code the decadent bipolar ethos of excess consumption (bulimic impulse, tract homes) and of protestant ethic of ascetic control (anorexic impulse, martha stewart).**

There is a Choose-Your-Own-Moral™ in here somewhere. i mean i spose i could go on a rant about processed foods, toxic chemicals for consumption and morbidity. but eh, its sunny outside so if people want to put cheetos, big macs, cokes devoid of any nutrition and chock full of preservatives and poison in their body and choose slow cellular death, weo, shrug. i have better things to do. ironic, right?

*the last time i programmed it was a pythagorean theorem program on a floppy that single-handedly delivered me from an 'F' in Geometry class.
**i completely forget the anthropologist lady (Orbach?) who wrote an insightful article about the dual ethos of capitalism and its cultural manifestation in eating disorders. She predicted/called out how anorexia is more socially acceptable even admirable as manifestation of personal control than bulimia which reads as a lack of control, based on the Durkheimian treatise of the Protestant Ethic of Capitalism which fundamentally undergirds american society.

of innocence and dogshit: A Parable

when i was a kid, i would jackrabbit and cavort everywhere with sheer innocence and delight in life. out of the car. across the yard. on the sidewalk. on the playground. y'know, human kid places.

in time, as i segued to adolescence, i began to notice a pattern and a certain mmm je ne sais quoi, shall we say, capricious humor from the Heavens Above. because it seemed everywhere i would jackrabbit and cavort with innocence and delight, my waterbuffalo-ish peds would land squarely in a pile of DogShit. now this may be cosmic retribution for our childish games inflicted on the string of dogs we had that all seemed to mysteriously disappear. but that is another scooby story for another day.

now DogCrap, as it is well known, is nigh impossible to remove from the treads of one's shoes. wiping the soles of one's sneakers on grass or concrete does not suffice and point of fact only serves to streak the shit and work it in deeper. grinding your shoe soles in a puddle while hoping you don't backsplash any sludge on yourself is equally ineffective.

while the labyrinthine tread of your shoes is great for say running on asphalt and skidmarking wood floors, it is the cu chi tunnels for doggy doo. the festering substance is well and good squished up in the intricate crevices requiring a toothpick or some such to diligently furrow it out while freaking out about having to be millimeters away from bane fecal matter expurgated from the anus of a foul omnivorous slavering beastie, gagging from the offensive malodorous goo, and wretchedly indignant from the whole experience and now everyone's looking at my feet and knows i wear pro-wings. if the free lunch pass hadnt already given it away. damn. entire psychotherapy sessions could be based on such a thing.

while divested of my innocent delight and seeking preventative measures, i prevailed upon myself to develop my own defensive strategy which entailed diligent observance of where i set foot since the sneaks had to last til my next growth spurt. this preoccupation-from-necessity of mine in time became a subconscious habit of mine like a virus software unobtrusively scanning one's hardware for imminent threat. having this in the startup files of my operating system efficiently diverted me (and my companions) from further crapulent contamination. and the fortuitous incidental side effect of shit-radar is finding wadded up money in random places where some foolish wallet-luddite had creased their hip pocket just so like manna falling from heaven into my deprived little hands thus rectifying adolescent cosmic imbalance.

ah, but a lifetime of looking out for shit is just that. a lifetime of seeing shit. i literally see (and avoid) shit everywhere i go, because dogs, being dogs, shit everywhere their cussed owners let them. ("walking the dog" really just means befouling someone else's yard/public space. a selfish transference of responsibility. it is the American Way.) i oftimes don't notice the wildflowers or breathtaking horizon because i'm holding my breath scrupulously avoiding the fetid mound despoiling the earth (because when you smell something you are actually ingesting particulate molecules of that substance. shudder.) and simultaneously derailing my companion from meeting that fate with a luchador-worthy fullbody check. and if its not Feces, then it's its nasty cousin Vomit or Gum or anything Undesirable to get on One's Sole.

so here we come to the Moral of the Parable:

• if you look for Shit, inevitably, you will find it.

• concurrently, if you traipse about Life Unaware, you will step in Shit and defile yourself.

• penultimately, Shit Happens.

• and lastly, i'm a great person to walk with when you have Shiny New Kicks.

Choose-Your-Own-Moral (CYOM)™. multiple contradictory truths coexisting simultaneously. thus spake feralnative.

weo, this aint jonathan livingston seagull's blog.

shrimpy says "truuue story."