samba, sun, and feng shui

I'm sitting here in the kitchen with Stan Getz playing and the A/C going strong. I'm putting together a dish for tonight's movie potluck at Jean's house — we're going to watch Venus. Tomorrow I'm headed to Virginia with my boyfriend for a visit with his family. The trip is kind of last minute, and a happy reflection on the fact that I no longer need to sacrifice half of my accrued vacation hours for a spontaneous little road trip.

Yesterday was my last day of work at the Very Large Multinational Corporation, and I'm very glad to have that chapter behind me. Four of us on my team were leaving our jobs on the same day, the results of the restructuring process. We all went out to lunch, told some funny work stories, and turned in our badges to HR. I don't think any of us wrung our hands or shed any tears yesterday.

The photo above depicts my desk at the VLMC. My office was in a dark little cave, a room with bad ventilation and not much natural light. I'm glad to leave that space behind and to spend more time in my tiny little apartment, which I have always loved.

I've been unemployed for 24 hours! No regrets so far.

Okay, there is one final mystery lingering in my mind about the VLMC, and then I'll stop talking about it, I swear:

My co-worker Wendy had been with the Corporation for 8 years. She started her career as a Level 2 associate, then worked up to Level 3 Manager, and then, in February, was promoted to Level 4 Director. Wendy was terrific in this role, and was getting lots of kudos from her supervisors. She was a great employee because she knew how to play the game and speak the language of the Corporation convincingly. At the same time, she remained a real person, and not some sort of corporate robot who spoke only in acronyms. She enjoyed her work and brought real credibility to her role.

Anyhow, as she was going through the restructuring process with the rest of us, Wendy was told that she was going to be demoted from Level 4 back to Level 3. Then she was told that the VLMC was going to hire a new Level 4 Director, and that Wendy would be reporting to that person in the future.

Why would this happen? This news just stunned me. I must emphasize that Wendy was the perfect fit for her role at Level 4. She was incredibly smart, accomplished, and energetic. Does this just mean that someone at Level 5 had it in for her?

At any rate, the issue is moot. Wendy told the VLMC to go jump in a lake (I am paraphrasing a bit). She was one of the four employees who left the Corporation yesterday. When I heard that she was resigning, I went to her and threw my arms around her in a terribly unprofessional bear hug, because it was so nice to know that the bad guys were not going to get her. As of yesterday, Wendy had already interviewed a couple of times with a terrific company and was well on her way to a better job.

It feels funny to be in this place right now. At the kitchen table, with a Stan Getz samba coming through the speakers, fresh laundry tumbling in the dryer down the hall. I'm an unemployed, divorced 33-year-old woman with a big swirl of ideas in my head, a handful of half-baked ambitions and no real clout in the job market. Yet I couldn't be happier with my choices and where I am.

I have already started looking for other work — I don't intend to just be a hippie for the next ten years. But I feel enormously satisfied with the places my decisions have taken me. I plan to take the next few weeks off to soak in that feeling, swim around in it for a while. I ordered a copy of the book Sacred Space. Feng shui is kind of corny and passé these days, I suppose, but I still love the concept. When the book arrives I'm going to do some space-clearing rituals here at home, reset the energy for the next passage of life.

These small moments seem to be my happiest ones. Singing, loafing, cooking, cleaning up, sweeping, reading, shooting photos. None of them are mountaintop moments. But those are the moments when I experience a profound peace with who I am and who I am becoming.

Sayonara to the Money Factory

Well, it looks like my tenure at the Money Factory (also known as the Very Large Multinational Corporation or "VLMC") will be drawing to a tortured close at the end of the month. I've had eighteen months of blissful stability, plenty of money, amazing health benefits, meaningless work projects, an endlessly agitated bullshit sensor, and the knowledge that the gig wouldn't, shouldn't and couldn't last.

The decision to leave became much clearer and easier for me last week when the VLMC let go one of my good work friends in part of a massive re-organization. Before Andy was let go, I didn't fully realize that he was sort of a lifeline to me in the office. Without him around, work quickly shifted from tolerable to fairly unbearable.

The silver lining in this situation is that I am timing my exit during the same re-org that swept Andy out the door. Most of the people left behind in my department are getting "re-matched" to a new position, but since I'm choosing not to accept the new position, I'll get a nice severance package that will help keep me going through the summer. It will also help me pay off the new Canon D20 and the fantastic new lens I just bought. (I can't figure out if the timing of that major new camera purchase is amazingly terrible, or eerily good. I'm choosing to believe the latter. Now I'll have time to enjoy using the darned thing.)

After my last day of work, I'll burn some work materials in Lalah's fire pit. I plan to make a little ritual out of it. Seems like an appropriate use for those 250 business cards I never distributed. I hope to never see my name printed next to that company's logo again.

I am really not sure what comes after this, but I feel very positive about closing the books on this chapter. The lesson I learned at the VLMC is that it's not enough to just make good money and benefits. There must be something more. Some little seed that opens up new possibilities. Some opportunity for growth, or even some interesting relationship with a co-worker that provides a beam of light in the middle of the day. I'll probably never have an Amazingly Meaningful Job, the kind of job where I save babies from burning buildings or distribute protease inhibitors to AIDS-infected Africans, but I need to do more with myself than clock in every day to a job that leaves me half asleep. I suddenly find myself reminded of the words of Jesus, when he talked about how worthless it was to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. As far as I know, Jesus never worked a day in an office, but clearly he understood how crappy it feels when part of you goes dead inside, and how much better off you are when you fight back against that death. And this thought is oddly comforting.

Goal-setting

Somehow over the past few years, I've fallen out of the habit of regular goal-setting. Other friends have merrily plotted magnificent courses for themselves, saving money, paying off debts, improving their fitness and cleaning up their unfinished business. And I've just been sitting here on the couch eating tortilla chips and thanking God that I'm not one of those crazy goal-setting maniacs who's always pushing herself to improve. Because, you know, self-improvement is hard work. It's kind of a drag sometimes.

I mean, who needs goals? I've got serenity, and a bag of tortilla chips, and a remote control. Sweeeet.

So I've been drifting along, aimlessly bumping into jobs, friends, activities that happened to float my way. Did yesterday mark my 100,000th tortilla chip on the couch? Maybe it did, because I suddenly realized that I'm getting really tired of being so utterly rudderless.

At work we've been going through an excruciating cycle of "self-development and coaching." This cycle apparently comes up once a year, and sweet mother Mary, it is torture. You have to request written feedback from others who judge how well they think you're doing in the area of Change Agility™ or Communicating Impactfully™ or Building Meaningful Relationships.™ It feels awful, asking a co-worker to wax eloquent about how skillful I am at Change Agility. I would rather ask them to personally throw away my used dental floss.

I thought I was done with all of this, but then yesterday my Superboss came in and provided some On-the-Spot Coaching™ about this one final bit of development I need to take care of. It is a massive Self-Evaluation Form™ where I have to write a long, reflective essay about how I've done with my own work objectives over the past year. I have to write entire paragraphs about my skills in Sharing Knowledge Openly™ and Communicating Impactfully™.

"I usually spend four or five hours putting mine together," Superboss said. "It's good to spend some time on it, because it ends up getting put into in your permanent file."

I nodded thoughtfully and made a good Listening Attentively™ face, absorbing all the details about this massive crap-fest I cannot seem to extricate myself from. As soon as she left, I took out my journal and wrote an angry screed which contained so many swear words that I am too embarrassed to quote it here. The bottom line is that I am getting back into personal goal-setting, and the first goal to permanently eject myself from this company in the next year so that I never have to go through one of these ridiculous self-assessment cycles again. Change Agility that, Superboss.

Yes, I know I'm pretty much repeating myself a lot here lately. But this is where I go to process reality and concoct new plans. So bear with me.

(Deep breath.)

Yesterday I ran across this quote from Theodore Roosevelt. I keep reading it again and again:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man [or woman] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs; who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

First, I wish this guy was still president.

Second, I love that final phrase: "those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." I know that when he wrote this, Roosevelt was probably talking about courageous soldiers who went into battle to give their lives for the cause of freedom, but from where I'm standing, I feel like that phrase is a good characterization of my attitude towards work over the past few years. All the upper-management shakeups at the office over the past few weeks have helped me clarify with unshakable certainty that sitting on the couch eating tortilla chips is not enough anymore.

Lessons from the Past Three Weeks

About three weeks ago, I started doing a boot camp workout in the mornings. It's a six-week course, with four sessions a week. The workouts start at 6 am and last for an hour.

The past three weeks have involved lots of getting up early, sweating, Advil, and pain (I developed a fairly impressive case of shin splints early on – thank goodness it seems to be abating now).

I wanted to enroll because it sounded like a good way to get off my keister and do something with myself. If you work at a desk all day, like I do, there's probably a pretty big disconnect between the physical universe "out there" and all the little problems running around like drunk squirrels in your brain all day long. The disconnect was starting to make me a little crazy, and I wanted to push back against it.

Three weeks into it, I think it's one of the best things I've ever done.

I was ready for a change, and this boot camp is a change. It has forced me to make some real lifestyle adjustments – getting into bed by 10 pm, eating differently. It has also paid off in some satisfying ways, some of which I'm just now starting to witness.

Here are some of the lessons I've started to learn over the past three weeks.

• Doing physical stuff can actually be pretty fun, if for no other reason than the massive wave of good feeling you get when you're done. I love getting to my office in the morning knowing that I've already done something really good for myself.
• The drill sergeant is king. Having somebody tell me what to do when I get to the gym is invaluable. It's a vast improvement over my previous gym pattern of walking around aimlessly for a while, doing some random some sit-ups, taking a casual stroll on the treadmill, and calling it a day.
• The endorphin rush is a wonderful high. Maybe the people honking and cursing at traffic in the morning are the ones who skipped their workout!
• The food angle is probably even more important than the exercise. I have started to eat way, way less junk food now that I've begun to recognize how hard I have to work to burn all that crap off. Also, I want my body to run like a well-oiled machine. I can see now that Chips Ahoy and chocolate milk is not quality fuel.
• You are capable of a lot more than you realize. That is probably the biggest lesson I have begun to learn. I hope to explore this one some more during the second half of boot camp.

The exercise is all old-school stuff. There is no fancy equipment. We do sprints, squats, jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, lunges and suicides. We also play freeze tag on Fridays, when the coach feels like cutting us a bit of a break.

For me, there have been no Rocky-style victories. It's all been hard. This morning we were challenged to do some fairly ridiculous exercises, and I felt so weak that I almost started crying in the middle of it. Then I seriously contemplated getting my keys and leaving early (behold, The Power of the Crushed Spirit!).

And I am one of the worst people in the whole boot camp. I'm usually the last to cross the finish line during sprints, and I do things badly on a regular basis.

But I still keep doing it badly, and I figure that doing it badly while trying to improve beats the heck out of not doing it at all.

Mostly I've just learned that if I want to address the disconnect from the body and from the physical universe, no one is going to do it for me. I can think about it all day and wind up more frustrated than before. I am in charge of making the changes that I want to see in my life.

I just booked a massage for the last weekend of March, when boot camp ends. It will be a small personal reward for completing the workouts. The next boot camp season begins the first week in April. I think I'm going to sign up.

too many choices

If you were shopping for shampoo this morning at the Edgewood Shopping District® Kroger, I apologize, because I stalled out this morning in front of the hair care section, and stayed there for fifteen minutes, and probably prevented you from accessing any of the stuff you wanted.

I was there to get some hair spray. The hair spray I was looking for was was not some elaborate, exotic French hair spray from the research laboratories of Vidal Sassoon. I basically wanted some cheap, generic, no-frills hair spray that would keep my luscious locks from blowing away in the strong winds we've had here lately.

And it took me fifteen minutes to find it. I found Dove Advanced Care Sheer Moisture Replenishing Mist™. I found Superstar Queen for a Day Thickening Spray™. I found L'Oreal Full Of It Upright Volumizing Foam Spray™. I looked and looked and looked and there was nothing that just said, "Just Some Basic Hair Spray That Will Basically Help Your Hair Not Look Like A Bird's Nest When You Go Outside At Lunch."

After fifteen minutes, I found it. Very bottom row, down by my shoes (of course!). White Rain Extra Hold™. Pre-tax price: $1.03. I claimed it and resumed my shopping.

Unfortunately I had to pick up some toothpaste next. Don't even get me started on the toothpaste issue!

Yes, this is a silly, shallow rant. I know But I have reached the end of my enthusiasm for the endless cycle of product improvement. I'm all up for helpful options, but at some point, it becomes irritating. Does anyone understand or appreciate the difference between Colgate Luminous Crystal Clean Mint and Colgate Total Clean Mint Paste? (Colgate's product line is so complicated that they devote a whole page of their website to helping consumers choose a toothpaste. My inquiry for the Colgate marketing team: Is this truly helpful or useful to anyone?)

Attention marketers: My dollars and my loyalty are up for grabs. They will go to a brand that streamlines their offerings and simplifies my choices.