The pungent possibility of periwinkle

I want a box of new Crayola 64s with the sharpener built into the back of the box.  Before I use them, I'll stare at them awhile.  I'll just sit there and breathe in their magical waxy smell, all pungent with possibility.  I'll pick out my favorite colors like periwinkle and magenta and cornflower and spring green and ... red.

I want a Trapper Keeper to keep all my folders and loose-leaf papers in, because I vow this will be the year I stay neat and organized.

I want a crisp new white uniform blouse, one that doesn't bear the faint shadows of last year's mustard stains down the front.

I want some #2 pencils with an extra Pink Pearl eraser because I always wear out the stupid little erasers on the ends of the pencils from all my math mistakes.

I want some new elastics and yarn ties for my hair.

I want some knee socks that won't fall down.

I want a good report card.

"Hope is a good thing"

In the movie Shawshank Redemption, the character Andy Dufresne said:  "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."

One of my friends got a job today, after holding her head and hopes high for more than a year.  She never gave up, even when she felt like it.  She kept going, kept doing what she needed to do.  Now she'll pack up that cardboard box again, and this time walk INTO a brand new place of employment.  

Hope is a good thing, but so is good old perseverance.  Congratulations for tunneling your way out, KC.

Slivers

I love slivered almonds.

I love slivers of sunlight streaking through gray storm clouds at a summer sunset, like slivers of God.

I love the slivers of chocolate and mint in those little Fannie May candies with the green sliver sandwiched neatly in the middle.   When I was a kid, I would pull them apart ever so carefully and eat each piece individually.

I love slivers of truth in Freudian slips.

I love slivers of epiphanies as they hit you while you are pumping up the volume on a much-needed workout.

I love slivers of kisses in public and giggling that people will think we're too old to be acting this way.

I love slivers of breezes that fill the sails and make them luff and laugh with promise.

I love slivers of hope and revelation that dawn with the new day just when you think the night is closing in.

I love slivers. 

Rescue

When you think about conquering new mountaintops, and rescuing the remainder of your productive years, you don’t always have to set out for Mt. Everest. Sometimes you should start with the hill in your own backyard.

My saving grace lately has been channeling whatever creative energy I have into writing for one of my passions: a horse rescue.

I took over their good old-fashioned print newsletter for their non-computer-savvy supporters. I manage their Facebook page (a 37% increase in fans and activity over the past month, plus a surge in donations and a couple of potential adopters). I plan to do some stories for horse publications and press releases on upcoming fundraisers. If I charged them for this, I could make it my full-time gig.

But what fun. I think I’m getting more out of it than they are. I’m learning about how to use social media: (Squidoo… never even heard of it a week ago) …. and how to translate Facebook fans into donating members and get them to spread the word. I know who my demographic is (women between the ages of 35-44), how to appeal to their emotions, what time they log on, what posts generate response and activity, and that the more pictures of pretty horses, the better.

More importantly I’m also learning how the rescue operates; the gargantuan commitment it requires; the financial challenges; how horses and owners are matched up for the benefit of both; how the huge animals can be felled overnight by tiny microbes; and how people rally around the support of an animal sometimes more readily than they will for fellow humans. (That’s probably the topic of another blog someday, or a research project for my son, the future shrink.)

Winston Churchill said, “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”

So perhaps, in the act of rescuing, we are in fact, rescued.

Downhill

My blog is not about bashing a company I've worked for for 20 years.

My blog is about what it's like to survive the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression.  It's about the pain of that experience ... about the hard-working people who were victims ... about their stories of transformation and recovery ... and about my own desire to recreate myself and my career as I approach the mid-century mark in my life.  I'm certainly not the first to want to do something new and different, and I certainly won't be the last.  Maybe I'll do it, and maybe I won't, but if the only thing I can do is write about  it -- then that's what I'm going to do.

Just because I have felt restrained and restricted in a corporate environment doesn't mean I hate the corporation.  There has never been one day in the past 20+ years that I haven't been grateful for my employment and grateful for the opportunities I have been given.  I was able to raise a child by myself, remain independent, work with (and for) incredible people, challenge myself, and challenge -- some say irritate -- others.

The stories I tell and the opinions I express can be lifted out of context and dropped easily into virtually any other field or any other employer.  Those who read my blog have said:  "this sounds like my world" -- and their world is far removed from my own.

Yesterday's blog entry was a cautionary tale.  After the pain so many have experienced, there was a momentary delight in seeing the powerful drop from positions on high like enemy aircraft shot from the sky.  But karma is real, folks, and the tragedy of this collapse is far from over:  there is more pain to come, and the laws of physics and economic reality operate in tandem:  it all rolls downhill.

Shake-up

There’s been another major shake-up at the Big Company.

This time, it wasn’t the peons who walked out the doors carrying their cardboard boxes – it was a goodly number of Big Shots.

Big Shot shake-ups happen at other companies all the time. Not as often as the peons would like, but they happen.

But not here. It’s not the corporate culture. Oh, every once in awhile, they’ll pick one off under the guise of an early retirement -- but not this many, not all at once. The Biggest Shot of all sent a clear message: "I’m not going to let this place go to hell any more, and I’m not afraid to clean house, and I’m starting with you."

Wow. That’s actually … refreshing … like a cold drink on a hot day. On behalf of all my colleagues who walked out the door last year with only their cardboard boxes and their dignity, I applaud it.

The only casualty in the mix was someone who actually seemed like a pretty good guy. The peons liked him, anyway. People could talk to him and he actually listened to their ideas – he even took some of mine a few times. He wasn’t so full of himself that he believed he had all the answers. But that probably ended up being his downfall: he didn’t shake things up in his own house fast enough to suit the Bigger Shots. And for that, I feel a real pang of dismay for the guy. I liked him.

My sympathy is short-lived, however, when I picture the weight of the Golden Parachute strapped to his back as he walks out the door with his own cardboard boxes. I just hope it’s worth all the personal sacrifices he had to make to get to the rank of Big Shot to begin with, because you can be sure – he made them.

Ah, that’s today. The undercurrent of downstream implication will swell to the surface soon enough, and the glory of divine retribution, sweet on our lips momentarily, will inevitably turn sour.

I bought a lemon shake-up at a sandwich cart one time, and the guy was in the middle of shaking it up, when the lid flew off and it exploded in every direction, soaking him and me and other people waiting in line.

Innocent lemons were hurt.

Shake-ups are funny like that sometimes.

Missing the obvious because we're too wrapped up in trying to look smart

As I have done for most of my career, I am trying to help people tell a complicated story that (they hope) will justify their existence.

It's not working out very well.

Because to be an effective explicator, one needs actual substance to explicate.  Oh, I can spin things 'round and 'round for a good long time, but eventually the spin cycle has to end. You either wear out the workings of your washing machine, or you realize you never had any laundry in the washer to begin with.

When this happens, and it happens often, I spend a lot of time beating myself up.  "I just don't get it.  I'm not smart enough to understand this.  Why doesn't this make sense, why isn't it connecting in my brain, what is wrong with me?"  I actually get depressed.  I live in fear every day that they will figure out I'm a moron and fire me.  (They haven't -- yet -- in 20 years, but it's still my fear.)

Then the light bulb comes on and I realize it's not me at all.   Maybe I'm not very smart, being just a has-been liberal arts major from several decades past, but I'm not a complete moron.   CEOs have listened to me.  PhDs have listened to me.  Hell, teenagers have listened to me.  The obvious hits me squarely in the face, always a little too late:  everybody is so wrapped up in fear and in justifying their existence, we ourselves are spinning 'round and 'round, going nowhere.

Sometimes I sit back in wonder and awe at the amount of money they pay us to spin nothing; to build nothing; to create nothing.  I watch myself and others complicate things to the point of sheer agony, because the more complicated this stuff seems, the smarter we seem. 

I participate in the dance because I have bills to pay, and people to take care of.  Many of the others are doing the same thing; but I think far too many come to believe the empty words I help them spin. 

My grandfather could point to a building he laid the brick for and say, "I built that courthouse." 

He wasn't a rich man, but he knew what he did.  It was obvious to him.
(And the courthouse is still there, 96 years later.)