Changing jobs

So many people I know both here and in the USA are switching jobs or would like to. It’s not easy these days to get a new job in either country; there are usually hundreds of applicants for one position and the interview rate is abysmally low. Perhaps five people get called in to an interview out of fifty applicants; ten percent in other words. It may sound like a high percentage, but if you’re not one of the lucky five people, it doesn’t matter. I am so happy for the few people I know who have just found out that they will be starting new jobs and will be leaving my workplace. They deserve their new positions after years spent working hard and getting nowhere fast. Because my workplace does not really reward hard work and professional competence; it rewards other things—political savvy and a broad belief in the power of administrators and a balanced budget (a pipe dream). So again, if you’re not one of the lucky few who ‘makes’ it based on these characteristics, you don’t make it. I would need to write a book to explain why this is so; suffice it to say that if you are a doctor or a nurse or an administrator you are worth something to the hospital. If you are a scientific researcher, you are worth less these days simply because budgets have to be balanced and there is no direct ‘product’ from your work that can be measured in the same way as the hospital can measure the number of patients admitted, treated and released. The hospital wants numbers; scientists know that research takes time and that the results of research will be published eventually, but they have no control over how fast that process occurs. It can sometimes take two years to publish an article. This is not good for the bottom line of an accounting sheet. Why does it take so long? Because you can get an article rejected the first time around, also the second time around, and then perhaps it will be published on the third try. It can thus take up to one year to get an article accepted by a journal and another six months to a year before it is actually in print. Effective? No. Frustrating? Yes. Because the administrators want evidence of ‘production’ and it doesn’t go fast enough for them. We are not considered productive in the same way as a doctor or nurse would be. We are therefore expendable, and if it wasn’t for the fact that scientists working in the public sector are organized in this country, we would be the first to go, of that I have no doubt.

I know there is no such thing as the perfect job. But I know too that there are better workplaces than the one I work in; workplaces that are focused on their employees’ wellbeing, that want them to thrive and to succeed. Why is this important? Because these workplaces know that a happy motivated employee will do a good job for his or her workplace. It’s only to do the math. None of this is very complicated to figure out, and I’m surprised that more workplaces haven’t figured it out. I wish my workplace would figure it out. But I know they won’t and it’s time to just stop talking about it. I’m done, as one of my friends in New York often says. And she means it. I mean it too.

I know people in the USA who have been without a job for several years now. They have applied for food stamps in order to buy food and they ask family and friends for financial help. I know it’s not easy there to find a job or to keep it. I don’t know though if this is just the corporate world, or if this is true for the public sector as well. I don’t know how it is these days generally in the USA anymore where workplaces are concerned; I’ve been away from the country too long. I just know how it is here in Norway. A recent article stated that over fifty-five percent of workers want to retire when they are sixty-two years old. I am one of them. The article focused on the fact that most of these people are in for a shock when they find out how little their monthly pensions will actually be, and that they will find it difficult to live. I am taking steps to prepare myself for this eventuality. One of them is to sock away as much money each month as possible to make early retirement possible. Other possibilities include acknowledging that one may end up working part-time—two or three days a week. So many people tell me that I will be bored or that I will miss full-time work if I retire early. I already know that I won’t. I am looking forward to changing my life (and would love to change it now), to having time to do volunteer work, to read, to do consulting work, to write, and so many other things. I won’t be bored. Retirement could not be more boring than being stuck in a job where one is invisible, unused and unappreciated. Apparently fifty-five percent of all workers agree on one thing—by sixty-two they will have had enough of their workplaces. The problem of course is what they’re (we’re) all going to do with our newfound free time. As I said, I am making plans already. If plan A doesn’t work there will be plan B, and so forth. I am planning for retirement the way I never planned my career or my retirement investments when I was younger. But it’s never too late to start. And who knows, maybe I will be one of the lucky ones that ends my work life in a job that is fulfilling and that makes me happy--the way I felt ten to fifteen years ago about my job. Nothing beats that feeling of loving your work. But time changes things and the ways things are done, and you cannot hang onto the past or dwell there. It’s just to accept how the present is and plan from there.

Changing the world

It sometimes seems to me as though the apocalypse is coming, in one form or another, and perhaps it is best not to know how it will occur—earthquake, tsunami, meteor hitting the earth, droughts, fires, floods—there could be many different scenarios. It didn’t help to hear today that the nuclear crisis in Fukushima Japan has been upgraded to Chernobyl status. I wonder how much more Japan can take. How much is too much before a country collapses? I look at what we are doing to our planet in addition to the natural disasters that occur, courtesy of Mother Nature, and we don’t need to add our man-made disasters to the natural ones. I need only think of the chlorine poisoning of the Akerselva River to remind me that carelessness abounds and that many disasters are man-made, and that animal life suffers at our hands. The world has witnessed recent oil spills and the tragic loss of animal and fish life. We really need to start re-thinking our priorities. I think there is so much that is topsy-turvy in the world, average ordinary people know it, and they know or sense that some monumental change is coming, because this unlimited greed and consumption and utter indifference to anything other than a huge paycheck cannot continue. God knows what that will be--perhaps a huge worldwide revolution against greed and inhumanity and lack of concern for the planet, or a return to a simpler way of life, more agrarian, less industrialized, less money-oriented, and less competitive. I’d be all for it.

It’s hard not to feel drained by the way we are living our lives now, and very tiring to hear that nothing can change because this is ‘just the way the world is’—full of greed, competition, unscrupulousness, lack of empathy (for people and for animals), carelessness, indifference, and hatred. I know there are good average ordinary people in the world, because I know a lot of them and I am one myself. But the people in power are the ones who worry me. The Wall Street moguls are the ones who worry me. And why I ask do we need Wall Street? Really, why do we? Why can’t we start by dismantling Wall Street? I applaud Michael Moore in his recent film Capitalism: A Love Story, for trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Wall Street denizens at the end of the film. Of course you laugh or smile when you see him do that, but you know too that he is serious, even though he is making a point. There is no real work done on Wall Street from the standpoint of actually producing viable products. And when did it become cool to buy warrants and derivatives in the hope that a company will do poorly so that you can earn money on the possibility of its failure? I just don’t get the world these days. Literally everything has to do with money, all business and political decisions seem to be guided solely by the prospect of making money. It’s boring. It’s become a non-creative world that is slowly sinking into a quagmire. And perhaps the best thing is to let it sink so that it can be replaced by a better world—one in which people in power care about the planet and the lands they live in, one in which money isn’t the be-all and the end-all of everything .

Feeling useful

It’s been a while since I’ve done as much physical work as I did today and during the past two weeks. Our dining room renovations are finished for the most part (there are still some small jobs to do), so much of the physical work today involved hours of cleaning and vacuuming—floors, walls, furniture, books—anywhere where the fine white sand and dust from all the sanding and construction work had settled. As far as I can see, it seems to have settled everywhere! But today was amazingly effective, as was this past week. I have to emphasize that the efficiency is at home, not at work. That’s because I can plan the work at home as I like, no one is standing over me assessing my productivity and efficiency except me. I’m my own slave driver. I don’t need others to do that job. But the wonderful efficiency I experience at home is in stark contrast to the inefficiency I experience at present on a daily basis at work. How is it possible, is what I’m always asking myself? I’m still waiting for my budget problems to be corrected (going on two years now); I informed my superiors that my budgets were incorrect and they sent the message further and the mistake is still not corrected. I am having problems with one email account and don’t know who to talk to about having it fixed. I need to order supplies but the person who normally does that is on sick leave and has been for a while. The other day I went to make a telephone call out of Norway (work-related) and was interrupted by the operator who promptly told me that I needed permission from the accounting department and my superiors to make international calls. This was new to me and since I’m not sure who to talk to, it’s easier not to make any calls. The hospital is apparently in dire straits these days—no money---so they’re adopting desperate measures to reduce spending. All hiring has been stopped. It will be interesting though to see if the hospital will continue to hire administrators. It seems we cannot have too many of them and we cannot live without them. Here’s a joke (of my own creation)—how many administrators does it take to order, purchase and screw in a light bulb? At least six if not more—one has to look at the work order, another has to approve it, another has to order the bulb, another has to send the invoice to the accounting department, another has to pay the bill, and another has to file the paid invoice. And of course I forgot—the delivery department also has to get involved in order to deliver the bulb, and then someone has to install it.

I really enjoyed working hard and efficiently today. I felt useful—to my home, to myself, to my marriage, to my life and to my future. That is what I thrive on—feeling useful, feeling that the work I do is useful. Seeing the results, seeing the clean and organized home, seeing the finished renovations, the painted walls, the sanded and lacquered floors. 

I could start a consulting business to organize people’s homes. I think I would be good at it. I like the work—sorting through papers and files, categorizing things, seeing the neat results (literally). Hours pass in this way and it’s pleasant, at least to me. I know that a lot of people hate to clean and organize. But we grew up with the Catholic philosophy—“cleanliness is next to godliness”—it was talked about in school. Makes sense to me. It doesn’t mean that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder or that I have to clean on a daily basis. It’s enough to get the major stuff done and out of the way, and that can be a couple of times a year at most if it involves sorting and organizing. Getting things accomplished in this way clears the mental path for other projects on the waiting list. I hate procrastination above most things, and I knew too many procrastinators in my earlier years. It’s just to ignore them and keep on. I hope my work life goes back to being efficient. It was so efficient and streamlined for many years; then came the mergers and the efficiency and productivity got shot to hell. I hope the tide turns and we go back to a daily work life that makes sense and that makes me feel useful again. 

On civility and respect

I was talking to one of my friends the other day, and our conversation veered into the area of civility and respect for others. She was bemoaning the lack of respect that she deals with on an often daily basis in her job as grammar school teacher. The fact of the matter is that children don’t respect teachers nor are they instructed at home to do so. Her feeling is often that some parents have ‘abandoned ship’ by not involving themselves in their children’s education. I listen to her frustration and understand that it must be very difficult to teach when you do not have the attention and respect of your class. This is not to say that all her pupils are like this, but those who are disrespectful make it difficult for the rest of the class, as always. I remember this from my own grammar school days, seething because one or two boys disrupted the class and the teacher ended up punishing the entire class for the sins of a few. But generally, the disrespect and the lack of manners that we are witnessing at present are slowly destroying the fabric of society. We need respect and civility in order to deal with each other on a daily basis. When these disappear, I think I will move to the hills, far away from everyone, and live as a hermit.

Oslo is now trying to do something about the lack of manners that abound on public transportation. There have been several newspaper articles recently describing how younger people are not offering their seats on buses or trams to older people or to pregnant women for example during rush hour, and discussions and debates abound on television about how to deal with the problem. In my book, it’s a simple answer. Just do it. Just open your mouth and offer your seat to an older person or an obviously pregnant woman. For every person who says no thanks, there are two who will say thank you and take you up on your offer. It costs nothing to try offering your seat. It is better than never offering it at all. Have we become such a passive society that we ignore what is going on around us? Are we so tuned out listening to our music or reading our newspapers that we cannot see what is going on around us? Have we become thoughtless people? There are other problems as well. There is no such thing as ‘cueing up’ in Norway, at least not from what I can see in Oslo. Lines that form are suddenly ‘ignored’ by a few people who decide that they need to be first. It is infuriating to witness this, because none of the Norwegians get angry either when this happens (except me, the American and the New Yorker). I just think back to the time when there was a public transportation strike in New York City during the early 1980s; lines stretched around the block to take the private buses that transported folk to and from the different boroughs, and you could easily wait in line for an hour to board a bus. If you had tried to cut in line before someone else, you would have had your head handed to you. New Yorkers believe in lines and they will (loudly) defend their place in line and prevent another from unfairly cutting in line before them. That’s just how it is and I for one think it’s correct to comment someone else’s rude behavior if they try to cut in line. It may lead to arguments, but hey, that’s better than standing by passively letting the rudeness and disrespect occur.

A new and particularly disrespectful trend among some people (especially the younger people but also some middle-aged as well) is to double or triple book an evening—in other words, to say yes to two or three invitations and then to choose the best or what they consider to be the coolest event to attend. I am just surmising that this is the case because I have no other explanation for the behavior. I have now witnessed (and experienced personally) this several times.  On one occasion, I invited several people to a small dinner party, and all of them said they could come. The day before the dinner, I sent out a little reminder email and wished everyone welcome. Immediately afterward, I received an email from one person telling me she could not make it because of last minute work deadlines. Had I not emailed her, she would not have showed up and would not have informed me at all. I would have called her wondering where she was and she would have waited until then to tell me. I cannot rule out that she had made other plans that were more important to her. On the evening in question, another person almost didn’t come because her thirty year old son was returning home from traveling and she ‘suddenly’ had to pick him up at the airport. As it was, she showed up late but at least she showed up. But those of us who were present at the dinner wondered why he couldn’t just have taken a taxi home when he knew his mother had made other plans. But it was her fault anyway for not standing up for herself and saying that she had other plans. And so it goes. On a recent job outing (dinner out at a restaurant), ten people had agreed to meet for dinner and all of them expressed enthusiasm about getting together, even up until three days before we were all to meet. Exactly three days before the dinner, four people canceled: two had made other plans and were completely open about this (!); one said it would probably be difficult for her to make it without giving any specific reason; and one was genuinely sick. A table had been booked for ten people, and six people showed up. I can only wonder how conferences and seminars can plan anything, especially if food is ordered for participants. You could order food for two hundred people who say they will attend a seminar, and one hundred people show up. As I recall now, that has also happened in recent years, and the participants ended up taking the leftover food home. But the arrangers still had to pay for it. It’s completely rude and disrespectful to behave this way, but it has become much more common now than before. I never remember people behaving this way before. I have another example from last autumn—also work-related. A tour of Oslo’s haunted old buildings had been planned and ten people said they would join. A guide was booked (that ten people would have paid for). Only three people showed up. The tour was fun and very interesting, but even the guide seemed a bit taken aback and wondered where the other seven people were. This is just plain wrong--bad behavior, rude behavior. The seven people who did not show up knew that they were leaving the eventual cost over to three people. Disrespectful. As it was, the bill was paid by our institute and did not come out of our pockets, simply because one of the bosses also thought as I did, that this behavior was irresponsible. I am commenting on this type of behavior because it seems as though this is where society is heading. We ‘commit’, but only half-heartedly. We don’t show up and we don’t feel bad (none of the ‘cancellers’ in question felt badly about their behavior). We cannot count on the word of another. And that is something to worry about. If this type of behavior had just happened once, I would be inclined to let it go as a one-time thing. But unfortunately it is becoming all too prevalent. People need to speak up, to say ‘this is rude’, ‘I don’t like this behavior’ and so forth. Having manners and respect for others is part of what it means to be a responsible adult, and children need to be taught these as well. But they cannot learn the correct way to behave from adults when the adults themselves don’t know how to behave.

A short update about the Akerselva River

I attended a scientific seminar this morning having to do with how to restore life to a dead river, specifically the Akerselva River in this instance. It was called ’Kan kunnskap hjelpe Akerselva’, which translated to English literally means ’Can knowledge help the Akerselva’. It was sponsored by The Ministry of the Environment http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/md.html?id=668. It was a well-attended seminar, which was heartening. The Minister of the Environment and International Development, Erik Solheim, opened the seminar and meant that after several weeks of sorrow and mourning for the river that died, it was time to work together to bring the river back to life. And that was why his department had decided to tap the knowledge of those who know rivers—scientists who have spent their entire careers studying them, gathering data on what happens when pollution and chemical spills destroy river life. There were five speakers, who also participated in a question and answer session with the audience afterward. Their individual talks were good and quite informative, and I must say that I gained a lot of new information as well as some new ways of looking at rivers. One of the speakers reminded us that we have to look at rivers from a three-dimensional perspective and that was useful information. It made me understand that the Akerselva River will come back stronger than ever. I left the seminar somewhat optimistic. Despite the massive death of fish and river bottom life, there was some encouraging news. Some of the salmon eggs that had been buried deeper down in the gravel at the river’s bottom had actually survived the chlorine spill. That was good news and a good way to start a new week.   

Musings about change and depression

Nearly a year has gone by since I began writing this blog. I began writing it to help me deal with the many changes that were occurring in my workplace, among other things. The changes themselves would have been difficult enough to deal with in my home country (USA), but the fact that they happened here in Norway made them even tougher. That is because it has been nearly impossible to ‘crack the code’ in terms of understanding how my workplace functions, what leaders want (or don’t want), how to get ahead, how to ‘get around’ some of the ancient rules that govern it, and so forth. It has made me feel somewhat better to know that many Norwegians in my workplace haven’t been able to make sense of the changes either. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. Because unless you’ve lived in another country for a number of years, you have no idea of what can happen to you and your sense of judgment in a different culture. No matter what happens, you will always question yourself and your sense of judgment first when things don’t go as planned. Did I interpret this wrong, was I to blame, did I misunderstand the other person or the conclusions from a meeting, and so on. I have spent many years trying to fit in ‘career-wise’, trying to understand the Scandinavian corporate/business/academic mentality, doing my best, giving my all, in the quest to do a great job and to succeed as a research scientist. It has not been easy. It would not have been easy anywhere else either, but it was doubly hard here to succeed in any way because of the extra effort that had to go into trying to figure out the system. I have not been fortunate enough to have had mentors or sponsors. My husband has been a wonderful support system but he has also had difficulties of his own trying to figure out his workplace (we now work for the same hospital conglomerate, just in different locations of the city).

During the past year I have written a lot about my work life in an attempt to understand what happened to my workplace and by extension, to me and my colleagues during that time. The past three to four years have been transition years involving a lot of reorganization and restructuring associated with a huge merger of four major city hospitals, and when the dust settled, it was time to start the process over again since the powers that be who organized the first restructuring were not satisfied. And so it goes. I’ve written about colleagues who have had difficulty adjusting to all the changes; I’ve written about my own struggles adjusting to so many changes. Not all the changes have affected us directly, but even if they have not, they affect workplace morale generally, because budgets have been cut, the quality of patient care is always being questioned, research grant support has been reduced, and there is a lot of talk about the good old days when there was more money available and less bureaucracy and administration. But there is no point in talking about the old days. They are gone. There is much more bureaucratic control now, and a hierarchy of leadership that did not exist before. Is it a better system? Only time will tell. If it works out, it will be because employees made a concerted effort to make it work. There is no guarantee that it will work out, however, and that is the big gamble. The politicians who decided on this huge merger can be voted out, and the new ones who come in can in principle decide to reverse some of what has happened if they don’t like what they see. Plus there is always something new on the horizon, some new social trend or policy that can be implemented so that the legacies of different politicians will be ensured. In the meantime, huge social experiments go unremarked. I wonder if there are sociologists studying the effects of huge mergers on employees. I am waiting for the data from those studies. But so far, I haven’t heard of any such studies.  

 

Massive changes can make workers unhappy and even depressed, especially when they do not really understand what is happening around them. To be fair, despite considerable effort to keep employees informed, it is nearly impossible for a workplace to prepare them for all eventualities. But what employees want to know is not how fantastic everything is going to be once the dust settles; they want to know how the changes are going to affect them personally. They need reassurance that their jobs are not in danger. They need to hear that they are more than just chess pawns who can be pushed around on the chess board, plucked up from one area of the board and set down on another. They want to hear that they are doing a good job; they want to know that their projects can proceed as usual; they want some normalcy and stability in a highly unstable situation. There are always employees who thrive on continual change. The majority of employees thrive on stability, and that has to be recognized and accepted by workplace leaders. You cannot demand loyalty and obedience from your employees while telling them that their jobs might be in danger. You cannot tell them to ‘get out’ if they don’t like what is happening around them. This was essentially the message from one of my workplace leaders in a lecture she gave prior to a Christmas party (of all things) several years ago. Some people may have liked her style. I found it unappealing and rather tactless, because she was stating the obvious and didn’t need to. It’s aggressive and unnecessarily so. It’s not how you win friends and influence people. A better approach might have been to have said that there will be changes and that some of them may be difficult, but that we are a team and that if we all pull together, we can get through the changes and perhaps come out stronger. But she is a pawn herself in a long line of pawns that have to spout the company line. I doubt she felt comfortable spouting the rhetoric. If I am representative of the average worker, all I can say at this point in time is that the vagueness and ambiguity that existed prior to the merger have gotten larger, not smaller. It is not possible to get an overview, no matter how hard one tries. I find it difficult in any case. Do I need the overview? I don’t know. I’ve been told that I do, that it’s important to understand the workplace and management structure. Some people I know wonder who their bosses are, because in some cases, people now have three or more bosses—some who have administrative responsibility for employees, some who have the professional responsibility. But when employees ask who their new boss is, they don’t get an answer. So is it any wonder that employees get depressed?

Depression, according to the psychiatrist and author Rollo May, is the “inability to construct a future”. For some reason this definition resonated with me. I responded to it viscerally and intuitively. Why? Because it felt true. When you are depressed, you are stuck. You don’t know which way to turn, because you don’t have a clue about the future. You cannot envision your future nor can you see how to go about building or creating it. In order to create anything, you must be able to visualize it first. With depression you lose the ability to visualize the future. You are stuck in the now. All your creative and mental energy goes into figuring out the ‘now’.  It’s as though a fog settles over your head, blocking your forward view. You are forced to stop driving and to sit on the side of the road. You become passive, waiting for instructions or a road map for how to proceed further. Your energy flow gets blocked. Or you may drive around the same area over and over, stopping at the same stop sign, and not getting any further, because you have lost your sense of direction. Depression may not be a bad thing if you manage to deal with it eventually, if you get frustrated enough with being stuck. It is harmful when you give up and give in and those approaches become a permanent way of dealing with the trials that life deals out.

The Chinese talk about chi (qi), the energy flow in a person, as being an important aspect of a person’s health and life situation. It makes sense to me. If that energy flow is blocked, it will affect the health and energy level of a person. Again, I respond to this intuitively; it just makes sense. The blockage must be dealt with in order for the energy to flow. The goal is harmony for the mind and body. Sometimes it is enough just to read an inspirational text; the blockage may dissipate once the mind understands the situation in a new way. That is the beauty and the power of the written word. In other situations, a good film or conversation may achieve the same thing. The important thing is to free the energy. 

A great song by Steely Dan

I heard this song this morning, one of my all-time favorites--Deacon Blues--a phenomenal song by Steely Dan. The lyrics are pure poetry. As someone who writes poetry, I take my hat off and acknowledge ‘best in class’. “I crawl like a viper through these suburban streets; Make love to these women, languid and bittersweet.” And the end of the song—“I cried when I wrote this song, sue me if I play too long; This brother is free, I'll be what I want to be”. And finally, "I want a name when I lose". You can just imagine them writing and living the song—taking their experiences and weaving them into a song that perfectly captures what they’ve experienced. Wonderfully inspired and nothing I could write here could do these lyrics justice—they’re perfect (at least to me), as is the rest of the song. It’s interesting to read about the different sources of inspiration for Steely Dan on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacon_Blues).

I grew up listening to Steely Dan’s music, but never got a chance to see them in concert before the year 2000, when they played at the Oslo Spektrum concert arena. And what a terrific concert that was. Their music has aged well, considering that the song Deacon Blues is from the 1977 album Aja. Listening to their music was not just a trip down memory lane. Their music and lyrics are as relevant now as they were when they first appeared. You can find the song on YouTube, as always. Here is one link to the song:

Deacon Blues

This is the day
Of the expanding man
That shape is my shade
There where I used to stand
It seems like only yesterday
I gazed through the glass
At ramblers
Wild gamblers
That's all in the past

You call me a fool
You say it's a crazy scheme
This one's for real
I already bought the dream
So useless to ask me why
Throw a kiss and say goodbye
I'll make it this time
I'm ready to cross that fine line

CHORUS:
I'll learn to work the saxophone
I'll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whisky all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

My back to the wall
A victim of laughing chance
This is for me
The essence of true romance
Sharing the things we know and love
With those of my kind
Libations
Sensations
That stagger the mind

I crawl like a viper
Through these suburban streets
Make love to these women
Languid and bittersweet
I'll rise when the sun goes down
Cover every game in town
A world of my own
I'll make it my home sweet home

CHORUS

This is the night
Of the expanding the man
I take one last drag
As I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be

CHORUS

A useful website--Views and News from Norway

http://www.newsinenglish.no/

A very interesting little website--Norwegian news stories translated to English, for those of you who might want to read what is going on in this country.

Progress report

I don’t know what I would do without all the faceless bureaucrats and administrators to keep me in line at work. They’re just unknown names to me--anonymous. They send out their numerous emails and reminder emails to look at the first emails and all I can think of is—thank God someone is watching over me. What would I do without them? They remind me to fill out this or that progress report, to download this or that form, and I wonder how I survived and managed ten years ago without all this ‘follow-up’. I guess some of it is good and even necessary. But the amount of email I get now is incredible—too much in other words—and the amount of regular post has dwindled to nothing. I check the regular mailbox I have at work and it is nearly always empty. I wonder how the post office survives these days. I wonder how come postal workers are not being laid off in record numbers. The same is true for home mail; I get very little mail and I miss it. I used to like opening the mailbox and seeing cards and letters from friends and family, as well as the occasional advertisements and catalogs. It was something to look forward to. I guess it’s cheaper for clothing stores and electronics stores to send emails with attachments, but I don’t see the savings passed on to us, the customers. I’m waiting for that day.

But back to my emails. Today was one of those Mondays that started well. I decided to focus on my work—on a lecture that I am preparing. I was actually gaining momentum and getting into it, when suddenly I remembered the email from last Thursday, reminding me to fill out and send in a progress report having to do with how I have spent the twelve thousand dollars in grant support for consumables that was awarded me in December 2010. This is how the grant application process proceeded last year. I wrote the grant in May, sent it to the granting agency in June and it came back with a reply in December. The money was transferred to my hospital account in January 2011. The granting agency wants to know how I have spent twelve thousand dollars in the space of two to three months. I have stretched this amount of money to last up to one year many times before, because it’s not often one gets grant support of any kind. So it’s highly unlikely that I would have used it up already. So I wrote this on my progress report. I was honest. I wrote that my work was dependent upon this particular sum of money and that since it was just made available to me in January of this year, that I have not had a chance to spend it, which is true, because I have been busy planning and designing the experiments that will require purchase of specific reagents to complete them. So I found it almost amusing that they wanted me to report on my progress already. I would have thought it sufficient to ask how I was doing in August or September. Then I might have been able to tell them that my experiments were going well or that they were going to hell. One or the other. Additionally, ordering necessary items has become a lengthy process, so that it is also unlikely that I could have ordered everything I needed in the space of a couple of months. So this is my progress report anno 2011.

I have to wonder what happens to all the progress reports. Who keeps track of them, and who reads them? Do they get stapled to your file and get perused by the grant reviewers who will look at all the new grant applications this year? Will they appreciate my honesty, or will they think I’m playing a game with them? I’m not. Honesty is not a game. Political correctness is, and I’m not very good at it. So let the chips fall where they may. At least I got my progress report in on time. I hope that counts in my favor. Now I’m trying to remember how many other progress reports I have to fill out before I can get back to what I really am paid to do—work. 

Dissing others

I was recently out to dinner with a group of people (men and women) and was keenly aware of the different dynamics present at the table. In several instances it was almost as though one person knew that she could rile up another person simply by talking in a particular tone—call it condescending. Of course this got the other person riled up, and this other person is the type of person who responds angrily to perceived slights or insults. But from my perspective, they weren’t just perceived slights or insults—they were real. The woman was hacking away at this other person, under the guise of being an all-knowing and caring woman. She knew best, and she was being condescending. That doesn’t do much for me and it simply shows me that she doesn’t care about this other person at all. You don’t publicly humiliate another person as a pattern of behavior; yet I have seen a lot of this type of behavior at social gatherings. “You did what? Are you nuts? What’s wrong with you? God you must be crazy! I would never have done that. I never do such things.” Those sorts of comments, the type that are guaranteed to make the recipient feel small. You also have the other types of people, the ones who constantly criticize you or tell you that your way of thinking is wrong without making any attempt at all to understand where you are coming from. “No, you’re wrong. No, that’s not true. No, that’s not right.” I call it dissing. These people have their own agenda and their agenda is the correct agenda. In both cases, there is no acknowledgment of or respect for the other person’s situation or life, no acknowledgment that perhaps the other person has suffered or is struggling. These patterns of behavior are self-promoting and they come from a deep-seated lack of self confidence. If you have to make other people feel small in social situations in order to get attention and make yourself appear as though you’re the best thing ever, then it’s you and not the other person who has the real problem, in my humble opinion. And after this particular gathering, I thought of how much I would have rather spent the evening alone reading a good book instead of wasting time watching other people compete to be the center of attention over a dinner table.

I used to think that the best response to an insult or personal injury was to ’fight back’ in the best way one knew how—a snappy retort, an aggressive verbal response, or a real argument. It was important to defend yourself so that you didn’t appear ‘weak’. To be sure, these are fitting responses in some situations, especially when you feel threatened and the threat is real, e.g. someone really does want to hurt you or take his or her anger or rage out on you. But as I get older, I see that to respond with anger to a situation that makes you feel hurt and angry only adds fuel to the fire. Anger begets anger. The smarter approach is to smile and do nothing at all. If this response does nothing else, it will confuse those who are trying to hurt you. It may even make them angrier because they know that their behavior hasn’t gotten to you.  So this response is not a guaranteed method for defusing the situation. You may end up triggering the other party to harass you even more to try to drag you into a real argument. I have tried this a few times recently and I have to say that it’s much better than wearing your heart on your sleeve so that the world around you sees when you’ve been wounded. I am discovering that I want to move away from angry responses toward something different—wisdom, harmony, balance, peace. I don’t want to let anyone push me off my center; that’s happened often enough earlier in my life. There are some people who find your weak points, and when they do they exploit them if they want you to behave in a certain way. This has happened to me and others I know in work-related situations, but also in personal relationships. It’s easy to hone in on another’s weakness and exploit it if you decide to. But why would you want to if you really care about another person? If you have to go for the jugular each time there is the potential for an argument with another person, then you don’t really care about that person. Or if you always have to be right, or promote yourself at the expense of another, then you don’t really care about the other person at all. I am learning to identify liars, and there are quite a few of them in this life.

So perhaps the best thing when faced with such people is to smile, let go of the insult, and wish them well. After all, they have real problems of their own. But letting go of the insult and the hurt is the tricky part. How fast can a person learn to do that? That is the question and also the key to a more balanced harmonious life. If you give other people the power to control you by holding onto your hurt, you lose, because you use up an incredible amount of energy trying to deal with and retaliate against these people. And they are simply not worth the time or the energy involved.

Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

My first thought when I heard the news that Elizabeth Taylor had died was of my mother. She really liked her a lot as an actress and I know the news would have saddened her. We would have talked about her and about all the films that we liked that she had made. My thoughts go back to my teenage years, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were an item, a huge item. If he bought her a big diamond ring, it was news. How much the ring cost was a major news story. If they argued, it was news. If they remarried after divorcing, it was news. My impression of her when I was young was that she was bigger than life, way bigger than life. She was a Movie Star, and I don’t think we will see the likes of her again. For lots of reasons, but perhaps the major one being that there is no one actress today that can match her talent, beauty, and goddess-quality, or her ability to maintain an aura of mystery about her. She had a bit of the Jackie-O mystery, but of course it must be said that she could have mystery in an era where even though people were desperate for news about her, there was still a chance to have a little mystery about you. That is almost not possible today. The news media have dissected my generation of actors, actresses and celebrities to the point where we know what kind of toothpaste they use. They have celebrity status but they are not gods or goddesses, at least not to me.

Elizabeth Taylor was stunning to look at, no matter what her age. She had gorgeous violet eyes and a perfect face, at any and all angles. I never tired of looking at her when she was in films. She was a beautiful child who turned into a beautiful woman. I admired her outer beauty the way I might a perfect thing of beauty--objectively, like I might admire a beautiful landscape, a painting, or a sculpture. Her beauty was sculpted--it defined her. If someone asked me for an example of a truly (outwardly) beautiful woman, I would have held her up as the example.

I have watched many of her films several times when they show up on TCM. The one I always come back to is BUtterfield 8. She poured herself into the role of the high-class call-girl and model who wants to change her life and it earned her an Oscar. I read somewhere that she did not want to make this film but that she was the consummate professional who did her best even though she didn’t want to do the film. I love this film and I’m not completely sure why. The storyline is trashy, the morality questionable, the ending predictable. But it was a vehicle for her acting—it allowed her to be so many things and she did them all well in that film. She rose above the film. The relationship with her mother in the film was touching, real, and even heartbreaking, for all of the things that remained unsaid between them. I have watched it numerous times and I always find something new in it each time—more nuances in her speech, new gestures, frowns, sadness, regret, desperation, and acceptance. Her face reflected them all and it made me wonder if this role reflected her own life in some way—that she wanted to get away from her existence as Movie Star and change her life. But she had to have realized how difficult that would be, hence the painful acceptance of life as it was. The other film I like is The Sandpiper, another morally-ambiguous film about a bohemian woman and single mother who falls in love with the married minister who runs the school her son attends. All sorts of heart-wrenching drama and tortured decisions ensue. You know how it will likely end. Nevertheless, you enjoy the ride on the way. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a good movie, a well-acted soap opera. It makes you want to get to know the characters. It made me want to get to know the long-suffering wife in this film (played by Eva Marie Saint) as well as in BUtterfield 8 (played by Dina Merrill). But these films weren’t about long-suffering wives. I cannot remember any film where Elizabeth Taylor played a passive long-suffering wife; in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof she was anything but passive despite being married to a man (Paul Newman in a great role) who ignored her, ditto for X, Y and Zee (another trashy film that just draws you in when you are watching it). In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she gave as good as she got in one of the scariest onscreen portrayals ever of a dysfunctional marriage. She was not a woman who hung around waiting to be told what to do or waiting to be loved by a man, or so it seemed at least onscreen. I don’t know how she really lived her life off-screen, but the fact that she remarried Richard Burton after they divorced tells me that she had difficulty letting go of him and he of her. No matter. She will live on in her films and be remembered as the ‘last of an era’ in Hollywood when divas and goddesses reigned. 

Home renovations

We’ve all been there—home renovations—never-ending home renovations. You start on one room, and by the time that room is done, you see that it puts all the other rooms to shame. So then it’s time to start on the others too. One at a time, of course, or should I say unfortunately. Because one at a time means we’re looking at years of renovations ahead of us. That’s how it’s been for us since 2005; one bathroom underwent renovations in 2005, two bathrooms at the same time in 2007 (a re-renovation of the one done in 2005 was included), our kitchen in 2008, and the guest room and entrance hallway in 2009. When we renovated the first bathroom in 2005, it took several months because the electrically-warmed floor under the ceramic tiles had to be laid carefully and tested, and so on. And then came the decisions about what kind of shower to install, what sink looked best, and what types of tiles should be used for flooring and for the walls. The design part of it was fun, but I’m glad we didn’t have to do the work ourselves. As our luck would have it, our co-op decided that it would undertake a large bathroom renovation project in 2007 that started in January, and this meant that the newly-renovated bathroom was to be newly-renovated again in order to conform to co-op standards (standard design). Luckily for us, the bathroom renovations in our building (there are ten buildings in all) started in April so that our daily trip down to the provisional bathroom in the basement of our building was not an exercise in freezing to death on the way down and up again. Other co-op residents were not so lucky, especially those who lost their bathroom to renovations in mid-December. But it was no fun to lose two bathrooms at the same time, because we also lost our kitchen privileges since all water to the apartment was shut off. Most people in our building moved out to live with friends or family during the four to six weeks it took for the bathrooms to be finished, because all bathrooms in one apartment building were renovated at the same time because new water pipes had to be installed from basement to attic. We stayed put and roughed it—using the bathroom in the basement, getting water to cook and wash dishes from the faucet in the building’s hallway, and cooking on an electric hot plate or going out to eat. Every now and then I would go to my gym and train and shower there. On the plus side, we got to know all the workers, who took over all floors of the apartment building as they worked with their tools and materials, boom box radio blaring out rap and disco music as they worked.

We are now re-doing our dining room, and have removed several layers of wallpaper from the walls (some of which are brick) and all floor and ceiling moldings. We have help with most of the prep work from the same guys who helped us with previous renovations. So the walls have been stripped bare, the ceiling also, there is spackling of cracks and crevices, wall-papering, painting, gluing, you name it. I forget from one project to another just how much work is involved when you first start to work on a room and aim to do it thoroughly and correctly. There is dust everywhere, a fine white grit that wears its way into all wooden surfaces. We are eating dust, breathing dust, dusting dust, vacuuming dust. And if we ‘dust’ it all away it just settles again somewhere else. I keep telling myself that it’s worth it because the end result will look nice, but with each renovation project, I am ever more determined to never undertake another one. And in truth, we really only have one more room, our living room, and that doesn’t look too bad these days. I’ll live with it. I want my life back, I want all the different pieces of furniture returned to their rightful places, I don’t want to see layers of dust everywhere, and I don’t want to clean anymore. Mostly I don’t want to clean anymore.

Advice about writing from Cory Doctorow

An interesting article about how not to get distracted while writing by the writer Cory Doctorow. I tend to agree more with him than with Jonathan Franzen, if for no other reason than Cory's life seems to be more like my own, filled with interruptions and distractions at work (while I am doing my scientific writing) and filled with daily-life things when I am at home. I do as he does--I find at least a half hour each day to write--in most cases a blog post, but sometimes a poem or the beginning of an essay or a story. His philosophy of writing one page a day works for me. But he is remarkably productive as a full-time writer. I am just writing in my free hours outside of my regular job and manage one blog post per day or every other day. I wonder what it would be like to be a writer full-time. I'm betting there'd be lots of deadlines and that the occurrence of writer's block might hit more often than one would like. Writer's block has happened to me a few times this past year and it's not pleasant. It feels like everything has dried up and that there aren't any more ideas and that there never will be. Of course this is not true, but it feels that way when you are experiencing it. The best thing to do is to just relax and do something else--take a walk, read a book, watch a good movie, have a good conversation. In this way, your mind gets stimulated again and then it's possible to be in touch with some new ideas. There has to be inspiration. If you write, you cannot live in a vacuum, cannot seal yourself off from the rest of the world all the time. But it helps to have some alone time when you are actually writing and need quiet time. But some of my better poems have been written on subways, trains and buses, in the midst of throngs of people and lots of noise, because I was watching the life outside the windows go whizzing by and it triggered a thought which then triggered another thought. And so it goes......

Here is the link to Cory Doctorow's article:
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html

Enjoy.

Saying goodbye to our Bimmer

I recently wrote a post about buying a used car but wanting a new car. Well, that time has now come. Our used car (from 1993) died this past week. Our wonderful comfortable 4-door automatic BMW that we bought in 2004--our Bimmer. BMWs are referred to as Bimmers, Beemers and Beamers. But according to Google, Bimmer is the correct term for BMW vehicles with 4 wheels (cars) while Beemer and Beamer are used for BMW vehicles with less than 4 wheels (e.g. motorcycles). What happened to our car is that the oil pan ruptured severely and in addition to a myriad of other repairs that had to be done (in order to pass the EU control) that would have cost us a fortune, we opted to sell it to a friend who has the equipment, time, space and patience to repair the car at leisure. We got some money for it so it worked out fine. But it was sad to say goodbye. It’s been such a great car and it’s taken us through Europe, to Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria and The Czech Republic. I’ll miss it. I had a special attachment to this car, maybe because it needed so few repairs in all the time we owned it. We’re going to buy a new (used) car but I doubt it will be as nice as this one was.  

Blind trust

We went to see the play Enron last weekend at Folketeateret and found it to be quite good. It had a lot to say about the complexities and vagaries of the human condition and the destruction of trust, as well as about our capacity for blind trust—in our workplaces, workplace leaders, friends and colleagues. Not only did workplace leaders assume that those who worked for them were behaving ethically and correctly, more importantly, employees also trusted their bosses with their hard-earned pension money. We know the outcome—money lost forever, pensions gone, lying, cheating, criminal behavior, and finally, prison for those who were responsible for this huge fiasco. I left the theater with mixed feelings about what had happened and what I had seen, but mostly with feelings of sadness. I found it so hard to believe that the company Enron could have done this to its employees. I also found it hard to believe that bosses could shut their eyes to what they knew was criminal behavior on the part of their employees. Why did they do this? And why did employees generally have so much trust in their company? And if I look a bit further, Bernie Madoff comes to mind. How did he manage to swindle hard-working intelligent people out of their life savings? Didn’t any of them have suspicions and strange gut feelings about his ‘winning streak’? Do we really all believe in ‘money for nothing’? Is there such a thing as a ‘free ride’? On the way out of the theater, an elderly Norwegian woman started to talk to me, and when she found out I was American, she was very interested in my opinion about the play. She was adamant about how Norwegian companies and the government were just as corrupt as American companies and the American government. I wondered about this—how easy it was for her to say this—and I wondered if she was just saying it to make me feel better about American corporate culture. But she wasn’t. She had clear meanings about what was going on in Norway, and she made me realize that we take a lot for granted, especially when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dig deeper to look under the surface—to see what is really going on. Why don’t we dig deeper more often?

I bring this up after a conversation with a good friend about trust. Her issues regarding trust are not workplace-related, but she pointed out something that is general to all situations that arise when trust gets broken. What precede the breakdown are often laziness and a failure to pay attention on our parts. She admitted that this was the case for her situation. When I look back at my own life, to my own personal situations where trust got broken, I have to admit it was the same for me. Either that or I wanted to ignore what was really going on, probably because I did not want to deal with the particular situation at that particular time. But I know now that postponing such things only leads to huge explosions and life-changing occurrences. And you cannot go backward after them. You cannot return to naiveté, however much you’d like to. Defenses get stripped away, delusions get smashed, illusions also, and finally dreams. Dreams that your life was going to be this or that way, dreams that you’d live happily ever after with a spouse, dreams that you’d be wealthy or successful, dreams that you’d be friends forever with certain people or even with your own family. It turned out that life had other plans. The vagaries of life and of the behavior of those we let into our life, change our lives. They affect our dreams. And ultimately they change our ways of looking at trust.

Some of my friendships go back a long way, back to my childhood or teenage years. My closest women friends are my oldest friends. I also count some of the women I met early in my work life as very close friends. I love them in a way I could never adequately explain. I just ‘know’ that they have been there, are there, and will always be there for me, and I for them. I trust them with my heart, because they’ve earned my trust, and I’ve earned theirs. We had so much time together when we were young that we were able to talk deeply and intimately about the things that mattered to us, but it was done in a very natural way. We met for coffee and cake at a favorite diner, we went away on short vacations during the summer, we went to rock clubs and concerts, or simply went shopping and then out to eat. It didn’t have to be dramatic, the things we did. We lived normal lives, were there for each other when crises hit, knew each other’s families and friends, got to know each other’s neighborhoods, and eventually got to know each other’s spouses and families. There is something immensely comforting about that as I grow older. Whenever life gets tough, I think about my friends and I know I will be ok once I’ve had a chance to chat with them. This doesn’t diminish the relationship I have with my husband. He hasn’t known me as long as my closest women friends have. It’s a different kind of relationship, even though friendship is involved. It’s not possible to completely explain what marriage means, but it involves an intimate bond of trust between two people. He is another type of support system for me, and sometimes his responses to my personal crises are quite different than how my women friends would respond. It’s healthy to experience this—a well-rounded response. But I could never imagine my life without my women friends. My life would be much poorer without them. So I don’t understand those who give up their friends or who downplay the importance of their friendships once they get married. The bond of trust in marriage can be broken, and it is more often broken compared to friendships. Spouses are not predictable. Love is not predictable. Romantic love dies and often causes chaos when it does. It is the latter, the loss of romantic love, that is perhaps the most common personal crisis that happens to many people. All of us have been through it, married or not. We trust another with our heart, and that other person breaks our heart. It seems as though our heart will never mend, but it does, just not in the way we often think. Afterward, we wonder why we trusted that person or what we saw in that person. We question our judgment—why did we trust that person when he or she really was unreliable, irresponsible, untrustworthy, lazy, flirtatious, unfaithful, or a myriad of other things. The answer is that we could not know the future, and that we made the decision to trust based on our feelings and rational thoughts at the moment we made the decision. Maybe we were too young when we made the decision. But we made the decision to take the leap into an unknown future. We do that as well when we choose to have children. We cannot know how their lives will turn out. We cannot know if the world as we know it will still be there for them. We cannot protect them from the future. We have only the ‘now’. So we trust (blindly) that things will work out for the best, and for the most part, they do. But the ‘best’ can be defined in many ways. And we are always honing that definition. Despite the crises that hit us at times, we come through them and life goes on. But it is when the crises of trust hit that we are shaken, hurt, blindsided, angry, bewildered and despairing. Could we have seen them coming? Did we see them coming and choose to ignore the signals? How much could we have done to prevent them? A lot of the anger we feel is toward ourselves—why didn’t we pay more attention, why didn’t we confront more, challenge more, share more? It is often said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Is becoming indifferent to a loved one or friend the beginning of the end of trust? When you no longer care to share yourself with a spouse or with a friend, or even with your children, you isolate yourself and pride can take root. Then we don’t always see what we should have seen, because we don’t ‘care’ anymore. But deep down maybe we still do.

All I know is that I have experienced losses of trust both personally and in my workplace during the past thirty years. They have been tough situations to navigate through. I don’t know if I did the best job with either one of them, but I emerged intact, if slightly the worse for wear. I would have preferred not to have experienced them, but they taught me valuable lessons. My eyes were opened. And they’ve stayed open. I don’t trust blindly anymore, at least not when faced with new people and new situations. I prefer to think of myself as healthily skeptical. I hope so, anyway. Christ said that we should be ‘ever vigilant’. I think I understand what that means now. We cannot be lazy. We cannot let others control us; we should not give others the capacity to own us completely, to destroy us, through their behavior and through our blind trust in them. It is true what has been said before, trust has to be earned. And it must continue to be earned, day in and day out. It cannot be taken for granted, and that is true for personal as well as workplace situations.