Day: January 2, 2014

The Importance of the Surname

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I am and always have been unmarried. While I don’t plan to get married any time soon, I cannot begin to imagine changing my surname just because I got married. I have given this a lot of thought over the years, never really confronted with the reality of having to choose one path or the other. The controversy of it (as if there should be a controversy around something so simple, so tied to one’s own choice about personal identity) came to mind today when I read about Air Canada’s recent kerfuffle about refusing to allow spouses to transfer tickets to each other if they had different surnames. (Referred to on Twitter as #SurnameGate.)

This might be a new issue in North America, but having spent a good portion of my life in Iceland with Icelanders, whose naming conventions dictate that people take their father’s first name plus a –son or –dottir suffix as their “surnames”. When a typically quite mixed Icelandic family travels together, there can be a lot of questions asked because everyone in the family has a different last name.

Aside from the world’s different naming conventions (lots of countries do it differently; Iceland is just the most obvious, near-and-dear-to-me example), the idea of personal identity comes to mind. While it has been historically common and expected that women in much of North America change their names when engaging in matrimonial activities, feminism and women’s liberation put a small dent in that. The hyphenated surname also has grown in popularity. I even know a few couples who decided to choose whole new names, unrelated to either of them, to start their new lives together. Non-traditional options aside, apparently, most Americans still choose to take their spouses surname; most Americans seem to feel it should be legally required to enforce marital name changes?!

I met a funny, personable American woman in the Keflavik airport in the late autumn of 2013 who told me that she decided to keep her maiden name not just because she had worked hard to get her PhD just before her father died but because it was a part of her identity. Getting her doctorate was the only time in her life that she saw her father cry. He commented, “It’s just too bad that the only doctor to ever have our family name won’t have it much longer.” She realized she wanted to keep the name – to honor her father, her family, herself. It echoes the same kinds of feelings I have always had about my name. I never loved the surname I was born with, but the longer I live, the more I do, the more accomplishments I rack up, the more pieces of official ID I collect, the more I am cemented in this identity. It has absolutely nothing to do with some future spouse’s identity or name. (Some argue that it has nothing to do with one’s father either – but it has more to do with one’s parentage than it does some random person you fell in love with – but that too is a matter of perception, choice, how you live your life and want to be identified.)

Leaving aside the personal attachments and bureaucratic and legal issues attached to having a name, where the issue becomes even more contentious is where a person is actually prevented from doing something because they have made the choice not to toe the name-changing line. One friend was not able to do anything with bills or bank accounts because her name was not the same as her husband’s. When she explained to the customer service agent that she did not have to change her name, the agent seemed surprised that one has a choice.

And in Air Canada’s case, although they had a clearly stated policy in place that addressed this issue, the customer service issue went viral because of social media and one man’s determination. When he was prevented from transferring a ticket to his wife, he elevated the issue to become one that transcends a customer service faux pas and becomes something bigger. As the man stated in his exchange, ““You can see how this institutionalizes a lower quality of service to women who kept their maiden names, though, yes?””

The Apple Crisp of Guilt and Grief: No Do-Overs

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I was going to make some apple crisp – being in a foreign kitchen (still), I don’t have a lot of tools or ingredients at my disposal. But apple crisp is about the easiest thing a person can make. A non-baker with a few apples, a knife, some butter and oatmeal and a bit of cinnamon and sugar has just about all he or she needs to get a crisp on. (Not unlike “we’re just two adults getting a stew on!”)

But then, someone ate the apples before I could get to the paring and spicing and throwing it all into one pan for the simple delight of apple crisp*. His loss.

Unrelated, as tangents are, referring to someone eating the apples reminds me, unfortunately, of poet William Carlos Williams and one of his most famous works, “This Is Just to Say” – on the surface, it’s about his having eaten the plums someone else was saving for him/herself. Seems more like a casual apology for infidelity and irresistible forbidden fruit. It betrays not one hint of guilt – even reveling in its duplicitous possibilities. But who knows? These things are subjective.

I have already cited William Carlos Williams and his chickens and wheelbarrows once – given our high school dislike for the guy and his work, I never would have imagined citing him at all. Yet here I am. Then I have a newfound appreciation for things that my 16-year-old mind did not fully absorb, feel or trust.

One poet feels no guilt about whatever he does, while another person feels guilt for eating an M&M or an extra helping of macaroni and cheese. One man cheats on his wife and feels nothing but feels guilty for quitting his job without telling the same wife he is otherwise deceiving. Guilt is strange, though – bubbling up like the full spectrum of emotions that we sometimes don’t even imagine we are capable of feeling. For example, I think a lot about how useless jealousy is, and while I don’t believe in it and rarely feel it – and criticize the frenzy of its violence in others – I can sometimes feel what a cruel wind-up toy jealousy is. It pokes at me sometimes but not for the same reasons it pokes others, perhaps.

A close friend who has been in my life for many years wrote to me to wish me a happy new year and shared the news that her husband passed away just before Christmas. One of her greatest takeaways from the experience of this loss was that there are no do-overs. Like a lot of people I have known, her marriage was not necessarily happy, so she had longed for freedom. But once her husband was gone – unexpectedly – she experienced a tremendous amount of guilt intertwined in her grief about not being able to do over all the negative thoughts and words she had expressed over the years. We don’t know, as I have said again and again in the last year, when we will have our last conversation with someone.

I tried to advise her not to be too hard on herself. When people die, we often reflect and are seized by guilt that is enveloped by the haze of grief that clouds the daily reality of our dealings. Daily life engenders and embodies all the resentment, negativity, selfishness, pain, hidden hurts, agendas that make it almost impossible not to succumb to some part of the… grind of daily life. All of those feelings remain intact and valid even when the other person passes on. Forgetting the validity of that will not be a true reflection of the lesson learned. There is, as I told her, another side to the “there are no do-overs” coin. A life’s bitter negativity can be reflected upon, but that same life’s guilt cannot guide it. The immediacy of not having do-overs is that it allows for honesty. These sudden losses can eventually lead to an opportunity for emotional recalibration and a place of balance.

In the aftermath, though, it is not surprise that guilt is inextricably wound up with the grief. As my friend sagely wrote, which squeezed my heart and choked me up, “I have waited for this moment for years, not understanding that with freedom comes the knowledge that it is built upon someone’s demise.”

*And for anyone keeping track or feeling a hankering for apple crisp, here’s the basic recipe I would have used:

Here’s what I would have done:

Apple crisp recipe

Apple filling:
1 kilogram of Granny Smith apples (about 6), peeled, cored, and sliced how you prefer
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Streusel/Crust:
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup uncooked oats
1/3 cup flour
4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces; use a small bit to grease the baking dish.
Preheat the oven to 350°F/175°C. Lightly coat an 8-by-8-inch baking dish with butter.
Mix the apples, sugar, cinnamon in a large bowl and toss to coat. Place the apple mixture in the dish and set aside.
Use the same bowl and mix together the brown sugar, oats, flour until evenly combined. Blend in the butter with your fingertips until small clumps form (two minutes). Sprinkle the topping evenly over the apples and bake until the streusel is crispy and the apples are tender, about one hour. Let cool on a rack at least 30 minutes before serving.

The Changing Workscape: The Problem of Presenteeism & Baking Bounty

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I often joke about the “always-on” nature of the American professional. The work ethic is baked into the American psyche to the point that most Americans have trouble going on vacation without checking their email (what little vacation Americans get). It is not always so much that an American cannot stop working as it is that Americans feel less stress and enjoy the vacation more if they track what is going on in their absence, even if they don’t take action on anything during the vacation.

The Nordic work ethic, on the other hand, is just about the polar opposite. Vacation is serious and no interruption will be tolerated. In most cases. At least this is how it has been in most of my Scandinavian work experiences. While I will never be able to turn off the American worker bee inside me, I support the sentiment of separating work from vacation and time off, and thus am surprised and not pleased when I encounter Nordic corporate exception.

In managerial roles, people need to lead by example. I have of late encountered a lot of people who are taking work home, proudly announcing that they are up late at night answering emails and get up early to get two or three hours (!) of quiet time to work before they actually come to the office. The problem with this is not so much that managers are working at all hours, which is their prerogative, but that they are placing these kinds of expectations on others. I would call this a problem of “presenteeism”. You can be too present. Being present and working at all hours of day and night – and showing everyone that you are working – a manager is creating an environment that makes his/her entire team feel as though he is not doing enough if s/he is not working as much as the manager is, especially when this workaholic enthusiasm is overflowing. Nothing wrong with doing your job and loving it- but maybe some of the sending emails in the middle of the night could be curtailed.

Personally, I find this more troublesome when a workplace is particularly inflexible otherwise. With the way the workplace is changing, I would expect something different.

I have spent almost 15 years freelancing and working remotely. As the new century dawned and I took up residence in a new country, I had to adapt to a lot of new things – and part of that was finding a professional niche for myself. It also seemed like the dawn of a new era that would enable remote/virtual work, particularly in fields like mine (content development, writing, editing). To varying degrees, things have been moving in that direction, depending on the industry I worked in. Obviously the home office let me be the ever-present, never-present workaholic. That is, I have been available to work 24/7 without ever being present in an office. I have always been a happy American-style worker, and my home office is the most productive environment for me. As my regular, full-time jobs took the direction of allowing me to work primarily from home, I have realized that this is the only way for me to work.

The trick now will be to find the place that acknowledges my home as my office and will let me turn up in a real office on occasion, car loaded with hundreds and hundreds of cookies.

Send me a sign/leads – and cookies can be yours. Seriously – give me a lead, and I will give you cookies.